The Bacchantes. Leon Daudet
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laboratory, sometimes politely sent away by the old and sharp-tongued housekeeper Marianne or the chauffeur Abrice, an intelligent and resourceful Jack-of-all-trades.
The waves of time! Ségétan envisaged them as combinations of long and short, sonorous and visual “vibrations” composing etheric figures or “entities,” which gravitated in accordance with unknown laws, returning like comets on fixed dates, determinable in advance. “Everything is full of souls and demons,” said the ancient philosopher. There were souls and demons of duration as well as space, and their detection and capture was merely an affair of ingenuity: an annex to, or, rather, a prolongation of, the discoveries of Branly and Marconi, adapted from the spatial to the temporal.
After much effort, exploration and experimentation, the indefatigable researcher had succeeded in collecting, in the vast plains of the Blaisois, with the aid of infinitely delicate apparatus, ensembles or groups of a singular nature, which surely did not belong to the present moment. To what were they related? Distinguishable therein, with regard to the sonorous, were clamors, appeals, gunshots and collapses, and with regard to the visual, the redness of conflagration. Their periodicity was biannual, it seemed, during thirty days of October and twenty of February. Imminent applications of complex calculation were glimpsed therein, for which the physicist requested the collaboration and assistance of Bénalep, who was more quantitatively advanced than him and who could represent diabetes as an equation.
The waves of time! The idea was so much in the air, it has to be said, that in Avenillon, as in Brancheville, a village two kilometers away, the farmers and the peasants were following current fashion in talking about it. It was thus that an old man from Brancheville, invited to listen to the mysterious sounds of battle between the two villages on one Autumn evening exclaimed, nodding his head: “That’ll be the affair in Châteaudun in October 1870, coming back like that to remind us of it.”
That was, for Ségétan, a flash of light. Châteaudun was twenty kilometers away from there, but he had long admitted a spatial deviation of temporal waves, due to the intersection and interference of the vibratory “entities” of whose existence he now conceived. Besides which, his apparatus gave him the same results, clearly auditory and vaguely visual, all the way to the gates of Châteaudun, as far as the small square that had been witness to the famous combat of Lipowski’s Franc-Tireurs.4 The zone of the phenomenon was approximately twenty kilometers long by one kilometer broad, during the fifteen times twenty-four hours when it was detectable in autumn and winter.
The waves of time! That was only the start. Immense perspectives opened up before the three friends, when they considered the subtle instrument—the Dyonisos—as big as a medium-sized pendulum-clock, thanks to which one could summon, on the invisible wings of time, some past event or other. One day, history would live again by virtue of the temporal waves, with its enchantments, its wars, its invasions, its revolutionary movements, its unexpected aspects, and the divine element that it contains, as earthquakes and eclipses do. The population of phantasmal deaths, such as the murder of Julius Caesar and the crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, would fall, visible, impalpable and noisy, among the living. What a haunting!
That morning, which was in June, bright and gilded, the scientist had the impression of advancing in great strides. He drank in light. He looked around him at the various stages of his discovery, fixed in infinitely delicate adjustments, in multiple depictions of the appearances, schematic and premature, of “entities” thus evoked.
Suddenly, there was a loud noise outside: a hard and abrupt impact, accompanied by heart-rending screams and cries for help. The chauffeur Abrice came in like a gust of wind. “Monsieur! It’s Père Calvat’s automobile, with has just crashed into a tree. He must have been killed immediately, but Madame Tullie is only bruised.”
Père Calvat—the farmer of Les Arges, the rich neighbor who kindly lent his fields and meadows to any experiment! Ségétan ran outside.
From a clutter of metal and body-work, which fortunately had not caught fire, peasants were taking out a corpse—that of the old man, whose chest had been staved in by the steering-wheel—and a terrified survivor, the beautiful Tullie. The scientist ordered that she should be taken, with all possible precaution, to his own bedroom at the Villa Dyonisos, where Marianne would undress her and help her into bed. At the same time, it was necessary to alert Bénalep, who was still a practicing physician.
The latter immediately showed his square, meditative face with the thick eyebrows, dominated by a dome-like forehead, his shirt with the flared collar, and his thickset body. Without wasting time in exclamations, he said: “Let’s get to it.”
They both went into the cool room, where the curtains were half-pulled and the shutters almost closed.
Tullie, who had just drunk a vulnerary potion, was lying down, semiconscious, her adorable and delicate face, pale and symmetrical, framed by her black hair on the white pillow. Bénalep observed her briefly and then pulled down the coverlet and lifted up the rustic chemise that Marianne had provided.
A body worthy of Courbet appeared, dazzling and charged with glory, from the points of the fine breasts to the slender arched feet. To her compact velvety flesh, reminiscent of silk and fresh fruit, the light added a rosy reflection. Blue veins ran over the tapering thighs and calves, Gallo-Roman in proportion, shaped for a little domestic labor and a great deal of love. The addition of breasts that were devoid of heaviness, cup-shaped and divergent, was in accord with the smooth roundness of her shoulders, and from the long spine to the fleshy buttocks there was a sprinkling of seeds of beauty. By way of injuries there was only one dark blue patch on her left arm and a more serious contusion on the hip on the same side.
“It would have been a pity…!” Bénalep murmured.
He made sure that no interior organ or limb had been seriously affected. He moved the arms and legs slowly, which drew a few moans from the goddess. He helped her to turn over.
Only then did she ask: “My husband…Guillaume?”
“He’s very seriously injured,” Bénalep replied.
“I want so much to see him.”
“Impossible, Madame. You must wait a while. We’ll do what has to be done.”
She uttered a profound sigh; the two men did not know whether she had understood—but her delicate and profound nature appeared in her bright aquamarine eyes and in the breath, at first contained and then liberated, of her anguish and pain.
Ségétan, thrown by such a spectacle into a veritable ecstasy, noticed that she had the most harmonious neck, swollen and bowed, slender and oblique ears, and a fleshy mouth, drawn back on one side over her delightful teeth. It is said that a slight physical fault is sometimes attractive to a veritable amateur, but the total absence of any physical fault is even more attractive.
For the first time since her death, the image of Lili had disappeared.
Such a sudden form of love is always shared equally. While the physicist calculated the delights of possessing that pure marvel one day, Tullie, for her part, was thinking: “Widow or not, I shall belong to that man.” That voluptuous thought, like a euphoric poison, inspired a kind of shame at such a moment.
“She needs at least a week in bed and complete rest,” said the worthy doctor, who then affected a certain cynicism. “Try to use the time profitably, my dear Romain.”
At that moment they were in the antechamber, and alone. “Dear Roman” did not think for a moment of denying it.
“I’ve exhausted the memory of Lili and my scientific lamp is growing dimmer. She’ll brighten it at a stroke. But where have you had the farmer’s body taken?”
“To his home at Les Arges. His son and his servants will make the funeral arrangements after the legal formalities. I warn you that Jean Calvat, the son from a previous marriage, is infatuated with his stepmother. He’s a village Don Juan, and also a brute, capable of anything. You’d do well to watch out for him.”
“Amorous…or