Alphonse Brown: The Tell-Tale Insects

(1889)

 

 

I

 

To hell with science and scientists!

I know that it’s customary only to talk about the gentlemen in question with respectful deference and enthusiastic admiration, but I’m breaking with tradition and have no intention of hiding the hatred inspired in me by the pedantry, the conceit and the loquacity that drives them to display, without rhyme or reason, the “vast knowledge” that they’ve acquired. I curse the telephone, I curse steam power, I curse the telegraph, I curse physics and chemistry. Most of all, I curse entomology!

Yes, a scientist has ruined my life!

Oh, how gladly I would strangle him, how I would laugh at his frightful grimaces while my clenched fingers dig into his neck, hastening to asphyxiate him! I’ll never forgive him for the terrors to which I’ve been subjected, even if he throws himself at my feet and begs forgiveness in the name of his mother.

But what good does it do to get ahead of things and stray into considerations extraneous to the events that have brought me to the office of the examining magistrate? Let it suffice for me to affirm my antipathy toward scientists once more, before beginning my story.

For some years my business had been in jeopardy, and I had exercised every possible ingenuity to hide my true situation. With the tenacity of a gambler counting on a lucky break to recover his money, I hoped that misfortune would stop persecuting me, and that I would end up, by dint of the hard work and energy, method and thrift that I put into everything, redeeming my compromised situation. Alas, all my efforts remained sterile. Like a man stuck in a thick layer of mud, the more I struggled, the further I sank.

To be sure, poverty didn’t frighten me, and I knew that I had courage enough to struggle against adversity; but in addition to myself I had my life’s companion and my beloved daughter, our dear Hélène.

The merest sentiment of propriety prevents from speaking about my child with all the eulogies that her character and beauty merit. I won’t hide it; I was very proud when a friend said to me: “Hélène is a truly delightful young woman.”

Whenever we went out together, she leaning on my arm and amusing me with her chatter, jovial and serious at the same time, and me holding my head up like a triumphant Roman, I experienced a naïve impulse of pride on observing how many heads turned as we passed by, and how many eyes—especially those of young men—gave evidence of admiring surprise.

Having reached the age at which the heart speaks, Hélène and the nephew of my neighbor fell in love, and the entire town was soon occupied with their imminent marriage. Now, my neighbor was Juzans—the famous and illustrious Tiburce Juzans, laureate of the Institut, member of several Académies and scientific societies, President of the Phylloxera Commission, Vice-President of the départementale Entomological Society, etc.

Tiburce Juzans was—and still is—a perfect specimen of those legendary scientists with parchment-like faces, long graying hair, and a body lost in the folds of a heavy overcoat that had only a distant relationship with soap and the brush. That overcoat—or, rather, that immense frock-coat—was a poem that would have tempted many a naturalist. I’m astonished that Tiburce Juzans never had the idea of exploring the dusty masses and greasy lumps of his own garments. He would certainly have discovered a new world of the infinitely small there, and would have acquired an immortal glory by publishing the results of his research. The renown of Ehrenburg, Pouchet, Pasteur and Dujardin—all those, in fact, who have dedicated themselves to the study of infusoria, flagellates, bacteria and microbes—would have been effaced by comparison with his.

Without exactly being a bad person, Tiburce Juzans was subject to variations of mood that rendered him very taxing and difficult to tolerate. His nephew, Hector Tremont, was well aware of that. Fortunately, nature has created nothing without compensation. The grumpier and sulkier the former was when he emerged from his scientific hobby-horses, the gentler, kinder and nicer the latter became. I could not have wished for a more seductive and accomplished husband for my daughter.

Hector was the entomologist’s nephew. Orphaned in infancy, he had been taken in by Tiburce Juzans, who took on the role, in his regard, of a rich bachelor uncle. The nephew received a careful education, and got his teeth into the tree of science, but not very well; by way of compensation, he became an excellent architect. It is not permitted to everyone to go to Corinth—which is to say, to be that surly, prickly, irritable and disagreeable composite known as an intellectual, or a scientist.

One fine summer evening, I received a visit from Tiburce Juzans. Until then, the scientist and I had only had a neighborly relationship. Several times, he had asked me to let him go down into my cellar—a very spacious cellar that received daylight through a large air-vent opening on to the street. He wanted, he claimed, to collect a few insects of a particular species that he had noticed on the threshold of the air-vent, and which must be born, grow and multiply in the darkest corners of beneath a few scattered clods of earth. Naturally, I acceded to that request, which later...but let’s not anticipate.

I, triple idiot that I was, said to the scientist: “Don’t stint yourself, Monsieur Tiburce; explore the most secret corners of my cellar as much as you like. I’m certain that you won’t discover any treasure there.”

Treasure! Oh, the entomologist laughed at that, of course. The real treasure, for him, was the larvae, the insects he collected, which he placed carefully in little bottles, and catalogued with Latin or Greek names that were sometimes as long as an Alexandrine of the Decadent school.

To be frank, I must confess that I was expecting Tiburce Juzans’ visit. His nephew had told my wife and daughter to expect it, and as I knew its objective, I adopted the rather solemn attitude that befits a future father-in-law.

“My dear Monsieur,” my neighbor said to me, right away, “you presumably know what brings me here; there’s no need to beat around the bush to explain the purpose of my visit. My nephew is in love with your daughter, your daughter is in love with by nephew; I therefore ask you for the hand of Mademoiselle Hélène on Hector Tremont’s behalf.”

I lost myself in civilities and murmured the banalities customary in such cases to express how flattered we were, my wife and I, by the honor that was being doing to us.

After questions of sentiment, we broached those of financial interest, and although I am reputedly cunning, I let myself be rolled over—if I might be permitted that expressive terminology—like a conscript. Beneath his apparent straightforwardness, the scientist concealed a strong dose of finesse, and he bargained as well as the most cunning Norman. Then he appealed to my vanity, that eternal enemy of reason, and demonstrated to me by A + B that I was a very good businessman, enjoying a great deal of consideration and great credit, having a well-situated shop and numerous shares in my portfolio—that, in sum, I was a rich man and need not quibble over the figure of the dowry. In brief, I promised 50,000 francs in cash on the day the contract was signed.

Where was I going to find 50,000 francs? I’ve already said that everything was crumbling around me—and, I’m ashamed to write, in order to maintain my reputation, I gradually had recourse to expedients: expedients unworthy of every businessman concerned for his dignity and his honor. Under vain pretexts, I asked for extensions on my loans, and the renewal of obligations imposed on my funds; I postponed my payments. In a word, I tried to get blood out of stones. All my correspondents complained bitterly about my letters.

What could I do? What would become of me?

Meanwhile, I summoned up all my courage to maintain an impassive expression and not to give any indication of the torments I was undergoing. As my daughter’s marriage was not to be celebrated until the end of October, I was still hoping, like a shipwreck victim searching his surroundings for salvation in the form of a plank, that something unexpected might finally come to my aid and permit me to meet the obligation I had so casually taken on.

Between Tiburce Juzans and my family, a relationship was established imprinted with a certain cordiality; the scientist humanized himself to the extent of adopting me as a confidant and acquainting me with the papers that he addressed to the numerous scientific societies that pullulate on French soil. Imagine how interested I was in that! But to ensure my daughter’s happiness, I would gladly have been bored; I would have swallowed the entire sequence of xs and ys with which mathematicians enamel their reasoning, and I would have stuffed my brain with all the barbaric names that are the pride of classification in the natural sciences.

Entomology—there was nothing higher! For Tiburce Juzans, it was the queen of the sciences, the one that prepares the mind for the great conceptions of nature, for the study of pygmies and the infinitely tiny surprises human intelligence with its unexpected marvels, opening previously-unsuspected horizons thereto.

Entomology! (The torturer explained to me that the term is derived from the Greek entomos, insect, and logos, science.) Was not entomology the most curious part of zoology, which had made the names of Redi, Malpighi, Swammerdsam, Leeuwenhoek, Morian, Réaumur, de Geor, Geoffroy, Latreille, Dejean, de Serres, Blanchard, Léon Dufur, Strauss, Boisduval, Guérin-Meneville, Giard, Rendu and many others  that I’ve forgotten, illustrious?

I also learned that the word “insect” derives from the Latin insectus, which means “sectioned” or “divided,” by allusion to the rings or segments into which the animal’s body seemed to be divided. I learned, too, that the body is split into three parts: the head, the thorax and the abdomen; that the thorax has three sections itself, each having a pair of limbs beneath, and that these are called the prothorax, the mesothorax and the metathorax.

Good God, what names!

No matter; I retained a few scraps of that gibberish, and inserted them sententiously into the conversation when the opportunity presented itself. I didn’t talk much, though, remembering sternly that if speech is silver, silence is golden. Tiburce Juzans was radiant, though, and exultant; he rubbed his gnarled hands with childish satisfaction and declared that I had an admirable disposition for learning entomology.

“We’ll make something of you,” he told me, amiably. “Before they year is out I’ll be able to sponsor you with my colleagues and introduce you as an associate member of the local Entomological Society.”

I bowed respectfully.

Me, a member of a scientific society! Who would have thought it, when I had previously shown no other ambition than to keep my account-books up to date!

Oh, if Tiburce Juzans had divined the motives that drove me to listen to the rubbish he showered upon me, he would have sent me packing without the slightest hesitation!

I tried to profit from the scientist’s benevolent disposition to venture a few timid observations regarding the sum of the dowry, trying to demonstrate that, if money is the sinew of war, it is also the soul of commerce, and that capital invested in my experience, left in the business for a few more years, would bring in a better interest than a vulgar four or five percent—but Tiburce Juzans proved intractable. I had promised 50,000 francs in cash, and 50,000 francs was what I had to deliver, or nothing doing. That Trissotin, that Vadius,39 dared to compare me to a cockchafer “counting its change.” Isn’t that what children call the movement that the coleopteran makes when it draws air into its trachea before taking flight?

It was therefore necessary to resign myself to continuing, as in the past, to be an entomologist in spite of myself. Ought I to regret that time, which put my patience so severely to the proof? There is no need, after what I’ve written, to repeat once again my aversion to science and scientists, but I often had occasion to be surprised, even wonderstruck, by the structure, the behavior, the metamorphoses and the labor of insects, by that world in miniature which reflects, more than one might think, our own passions and our mores.

Are there not insects that live in republics or monarchies? Does one not see some of them building a metropolis, maintaining an army and a police force, exactly like civilized States? Do not oligarchies exist among them reminiscent of ancient patriarchy and Medieval feudalism?

Full of astonishment and admiration, I exclaimed with Linné: “Nature reveals the greatest marvels in the smallest objects.

And with Pliny: “In these beings, so tiny, which appear so trivial, what strength, what reason and what inextricable perfection there is!”

 

II

 

Enthusiasm dwindles rapidly when chagrins, disappointments and cares take the trouble to recall you to the sad realities of existence. To think that it was necessary for me to employ dissimulation and strength of character to hide my precarious situation is really quite incredible. I played the entomologist while sick at heart, and had to seem cheerful while my brain as seething and it seemed to me that my poor head might explode.

“But no one mistrusted me; no one suspected that ruination had come into my house and was slyly lying in wait for me. My colleagues always greeted me with the envious respect that characterizes competitors in the same town; advocates, solicitors and notaries—the whole series of men of law, who have such a profound respect for money—reserved their best handshakes for me, and the president of the commercial tribunal took off his hat to me before I did likewise.

In every existence, however, as Henri Murger wrote, there is a hitch—and my hitch was Aristide Croupart.

Oh, there was no way to deceive him! He saw clearly into my affairs, and I was obliged to buy his discretion with polite gestures—or, rather, abasements—that make me blush with shame when I think of them. I was fortunate when I was not constrained to add to my soft and honeyed words some gratification that the pedant pocketed with a knowing wink. Then again, I guessed, sensed by a sort of intuition that the wretch was an enemy all the more redoubtable because he assumed such humility and retracted his claws. As for me, I detested him, and hated him wholeheartedly. Why? I don’t know. Is one master of one’s sympathies and antipathies?  Love and hate, some philosopher observed, are brothers, like Cain and Abel.

Aristide Croupart belonged to the honorable corporation of bailiffs, and no mortal was ever better equipped to exercise that function, for in place of a heart he probably had a lump of granite, exceedingly dense, solid and hard. If the soul was ugly, the physical appearance had nothing very attractive. A face blotched by the abuse of libations, and adorned by a tubercular nose surmounted a heron-like neck and the limbs of a stork. To be sure, Aristide Croupart did not really belong to the genus of wading birds; malicious gossip claimed that he lived in a holy terror of water, and that, if he ingurgitated very little of it, he put no more on his luminous face. Add to all that an oblique and sly gaze, hesitant gestures, a strangled and shrill voice, and you will have a complete portrait of the individual.

And it was before that marionette that I deployed all the amiability that was within me, that I humiliated myself in order to gain a few days, sometimes only a few hours, when a payment was urgently due. He usually came to see me in the evening, in order to avoid, he said, his visits compromising my situation and my credit. And I dissolved in unctuousness: “Look, it’s Monsieur Croupart…what benign wind blows you here? Do me the honor, in a spirit of friendship, of accepting something...”

“With pleasure, my dear Monsieur; everyone knows that your cognac is the finest quality and that your cigars are excellent. To refuse your gracious invitation would be to commit a sacrilege.

And that uncouth lout gorged himself with a calculated slowness, serving himself with a revolting carelessness, emptying half a bottle and snorting like a seal as he blew out the smoke of my cigars. Then he gently let drop the most hypocritical and malevolent insinuations; it was out of pure friendship that he was taking the trouble to disturb himself in order to warn me that a protest for non-payment was imminent and that the bank was about to refuse my signature. I understood, and while the vile rogue twisted the knife in the wound, enjoying my abasement, I let the money fall into the outstretched hand.

One day, Tiburce Juzans and Hector Tremont caught me by surprise just as I was showing Aristide Croupart out, while showing him the most complete deference. The scientist dated an interrogative glance at me, but my aplomb and my casual manner dispelled from his mind the suspicions that seemed to have caught hold of him. I even permitted myself a few jokes. The bailiff smiled and bowed deeply, but I shall never forget the venomous glance he darted at me.

At any rate, entomology implanted itself increasingly in my house, spoiling my home somewhat, of which I was rather jealous. Fortunately, my daughter showed an even greater disposition toward that science than I did, and, either because she wanted to captivate the scientist or because she wanted to please her fiancé, she made quite rapid progress. Tiburce Juzans, moreover, was delighted to find such a docile pupil, and did not spare her either learned dissertations or revealing experiments.

“You imagine, then, Mademoiselle,” he said emphatically, “that the origin of insects is mysterious and that no one knows the secret of their birth? The ancients shared that error. For them, these little animals originated spontaneously from pollutions of the soil and the rotting flesh of corpses. The qualities, or rather the instincts, of the tiny creatures derived from the animal whose remains had given them birth.

“Aelian informs us that bees originating in the entrails of a lion are wild, reluctant to work and unmanageable; those born of sheep are idle and devoid of strength; while those which come from the flanks of a bull are valiant, laborious and obedient. Aristotle and Theophrastus fall into the same errors, and their observations always concluded with spontaneous generation. The Middle Ages discovered nothing.

“Finally, an Italian physician, Redi, suggested that the worms swarming in rotten meat, and which give birth to flies, come from eggs deposited by the females. There was a naturalist who took the trouble to observe scrupulously and who, at first glance, discovered one of the most important secrets of nature. Which proves, Mademoiselle, that a great deal of attention is necessary to explain, ad aperturam libri,40 the simplest situations.

Hélène approved, briefly formulated a few judicious reflections and never wearied of listening. Tiburce Juzans repeated Redi’s experiments for her benefit. He took pieces of meat, some raw and some cooked, and placed them in uncovered dishes. Soon, a frightful odor polluted the air of the poultry-yard where the dishes had been placed. Need one hide the fact that the olfactory nerve was disagreeably impressed? A fine business! Tiburce Juzans sniffed that tainted air with an acrid voluptuousness and paraded his long nose over the jars as if they contained the sweetest and most odorant flowers.

The flesh attracted an incalculable number of flies, whose egg-laying I had the courage to observe. Scarcely forty-eight hours had gone by when innumerable larvae were swarming, wriggling and nourishing themselves in a putrefaction that sickened me. They were maggots, that manna of the line-fisherman. The entomologist did not hesitate to introduce his fingers into the midst of that filthy vermin. Inevitably, he put a handful a handful of larvae into my hand and looked at them almost tenderly.

“Don’t you feel the warmth that those little creatures emit?” he said. “That observation was made a long time ago by fanatics of the fishhook.”

I did, indeed, experience a sensation of warmth, which astonished me, and which was explained to me by the prodigious activity of nutrition.

“Look,” he continued, “admire the strange marvels of these plump white worms, made up of eleven rings that stretch and shrink at the animal’s whim, when it withdraws the first three or four segments into one another like a telescope. Although they have no feet, they make quite rapid progress by means of a crawling motion, with the aid of two scaly hooks placed in front of the mouth. Those hooks also serve for alimentation; at rest they’re hidden in a sheath. These appendices inform us that we’re in the presence of gourmands—let’s see if that’s correct.”

Tiburce Juzans picked up a dish in while a hundred larvae were wriggling.

“Oh yes, my lads,” he exclaimed, “we’re not mistaken on your account. These worms have no sooner quit the egg than they start to eat. They half-bury themselves in the meat and work their jaws—pardon, their hooks, as if they were dining with Lucullus. They’re hearty eaters! They know the most succulent parts and respect the tendinous fibers. During that incessant meal, their body covers itself with a glutinous mucus that softens the flesh and speeds up its decomposition. The quantity of nourishment absorbed is enormous relative to their size, and yet they never excrete any solid wastes. Thus, their growth takes place with an astonishing rapidity, and it has been calculated that fly larvae grow within twenty-four hours to between a hundred and fifty and two hundred times their initial weight.

“In a few days they reach their full development, and then lose the formidable appetite that distinguished them. They take shelter in some dark place, usually in the ground, live in the state of pupas for a variable length of time, according to the season and the temperature, and finally become perfect insects. It’s after these curious metamorphoses that the myriads of flies are born that are seen everywhere in summer, principal among which are observed the house-fly, Musca domestica, the bluebottle, Calliphora vomitora, the greenbottle, Lucilia caesar, the flesh-fly, Sarcophaga vivipara, the dark green fly, Musca carnifex...”41

“All this is truly admirable,” I hastened to interject, to escape an interminable list, for the terrible entomologist had a prodigious memory.

“I know that,” he replied, peevishly, “but your approval shows that you’re still ignorant. Does one applaud an actor in the middle of a tirade or a tenor in the middle of a ballad? No, of course not! One waits until they have finished. Word of honor, shopkeepers and all money-handlers are only interested in the fluctuations of commodity prices and the share-certificates tucked away in their strong-boxes. I haven’t told you anything yet about the admirable structure of the fly, its compound eye composed of hundreds of facets, its feet that permit it to walk on the slipperiest surfaces, or its retractile trunk terminated by two striated lips—and you’re stopping me!

“Have I even told you that flies belong to the order of Diptera, the family of Arthericeres, the subfamily of Muscidae, divided into nine sections by Laterille and reduced to three by Macquart, which are the Creophiles, the Anthomyzids and the Acalypteres?”

The entomologist went on like that for a long time, and while telling us many times over that he was coming to a close, spared us no detail and no particularity, inflicting upon us the most complete monograph on the fly that could ever be heard. He also threatened to continue Redi’s experiments, or, rather the counter-proof of the repulsive generation that he had forced us to witness. Fortunately, he contented himself with explaining them to us.

“The Italian scientist,” he went on, “placed numerous pieces of meat in jars covered with transparent cloth, in order to prevent the flies from depositing their eggs. The air corrupted the flesh, but no larvae developed there. The female flies tried to pass their abdomens through the mesh of the fabric to lay their eggs, but their oft-repeated efforts were always in vain. Redi destroyed the then-current opinion that the corpses of humans and animals are eaten by worms, provided that one takes the precaution of burying them in the ground, even at a shallow depths.

I don’t know why that final observation struck me and obsessed me for some time. “What becomes of the cadavers then?” I asked.

“They putrefy, of course, and decompose under the action of chemical agents that the earth contains in great abundance…unless they’re embalmed or dried out in order to be transformed into mummies.”

“Is the decomposition slow or rapid?”

“That depends on the environment in which the cadaver is placed. Putrefaction is favored by a temperature of between twenty and thirty degrees, moderate humidity and, above all, by oxygen. Insensibly, the matter is subjected to a kind of fermentation, still poorly explained, collapses and dissolves, diminishes in volume by the evaporation of liquids and the emission of gases, among which are usually observed nitrogen, sulfur dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and ammoniac acetate. Afterwards, nothing remains but a fetid residue, a sort of compost mainly made up of miry alkaline salts, a greasy carbonaceous substance, a reddish oil and several phosphates.

“And whether it’s a matter of the king of creation, a humble donkey or a dead dog, it’s always the same. After a few years, if we assume that the skeleton is completely reduced to dust, it would be a very clever man who, taking a few pinches of the compost of a charnel-house between his fingers, could say whether it had been a man, or an animal. Even Hamlet had difficulty in recognizing the remains of poor Yorick.”

“Brrr!” I said, with simulated fear. “That’s the case with us!”

“And people are astonished,” the scientist continued, “that our system of inhumation gives rise to fevers, epidemics and choleras! Rather than bury corpses more deeply, I’d rather allow them to be devoured by larvae—for, as Macquart says, certain insects seem to be responsible for public health. Such is their activity, their fecundity and the rapid succession of their generations, that Linné was able to say, without overmuch hyperbole, that three flies can consume the cadaver of a horse as rapidly as a lion.”

“Putrefaction, inhumation, worms, cadavers!” I cried. “God, how cheerful entomology is!”

I thought that the scientists was about to hit me. He looked at me critically and chided me in this fashion:

“What is there on Earth that is cheerful, Monsieur Businessman? Is it commerce, where the robbers and the robbed, the exploiters and the exploited exercise their ingenuity in deceiving one another? Is it politics? Oh, puppets are numerous in that game, but undertakers are jovial fellows by comparison. I prefer my insects; they fulfill the missions that have been allocated to them down here with an admirable urgency and an absolute devotion…and without making speeches.”

The scientist withdrew, furiously, leaving me open-mouthed.

 

III

 

It would be overly fastidious to relate everything I learned about entomology, and all the patience I required to tolerate the lessons—or, rather, the scientific tirades—of Tiburce Juzans. I was even less disposed to listen to that eternal chatter because my situation did not improve, in spite of my efforts and continual hard work. The date fixed for the marriage of my daughter to Hector Tremont drew closer, and I didn’t have the first sou of the promised fifty thousand francs.

Imagine my anxieties!

In the meantime, my mother-in-law rendered her soul to God. The worthy woman never did me any greater service. Let no one suppose that I mean that final remark ironically. My mother-in-law, an exception to the rule, had loved her son-in-law. After having paid my tribute of regrets, I consoled myself somewhat by thinking that I would gain some time because our mourning would postpone the wedding—and time is money, as the wisdom of nations says, sententiously.

Winter arrived and brought its cortege of dark days, squalls and intense cold. My sadness increased, and my character, ordinarily tranquil and toilsome, underwent a disquieting change. I became finicky, fidgety and misanthropic; trivial things irritated me, and I could not bear the slightest contradiction. Even Aristide Croupart, whom I treated with so much reserve, suffered more than once the effects of my bad humor and was rudely abused. But the strange fellow folded up, yielded, flattened like a bug, allowing the storm to pass, and continued to exploit me shamelessly.

To his misfortune and mine, he arrived one evening in December. The temperature was harsh, the wind blowing in icy blasts, flurries of hail sometimes stinging the faces of the few passers-by that were still to be found in the streets.

My wife and daughter were not there. They had gone to spend a few days with my father-in-law, who lived in a nearby village. I was, therefore, alone, and my temporary isolation rendered me even more irascible. When the bailiff presented himself, I understood at a single glance that he was drunk, and I greeted him rather rudely.

“It’s you again, Croupart—tell me what you want, quickly; I don’t have time to listen to you.”

“Yes, it’s me, my dear Monsieur; one would think that you were addressing reproaches to me.”

“Enough idle chatter.”

“I’m not talkative—that’s the least of my faults. Anyway, you know full well that I only talk discreetly. Perhaps my language isn’t very flowery; nevertheless you’ll listen, if not with pleasure, at least with interest.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Come on, come on,” the triple cretin went on, “don’t be annoyed. We’ll chat calmly and politely, taking the nice glass of cognac that you’re going to offer me—there, on that table.”

With a commanding gesture, Croupart indicated that I should serve him. A blast of furious anger rose to my face, but I contained myself. Meanwhile, to create some diversion from the impressions I felt and to reanimate my fire, which was going out, I headed for the cellar in order to fetch a little wood. I grabbed the lamp that was lighting the room and went down. That was intended to show Master Croupart the door, but he didn’t seem to understand, and scarcely had I arrived in the cellar than I found him on my heels.

“Come on, Croupart,” I said, with concentrated fury, “what do you want? Are you going to leave me in peace—yes or no?”

“Damn it!” the drunkard replied. “You’re in a bad mood tonight. Is it the cold that’s having this effect?”

I made no reply, and lined up on the ground the three or four logs that I needed to aliment my fire.

“After all,” the clown went on, “I know I know full well how to loosen your tongue, my worthy Monsieur…and to soften you up. We need to put an end to the comedy you and I have been playing for such a long time. I’m tired of the way you treat me; it’s time the roles were reversed...”

I raised my head sharply, and looked Croupart full in the face, eye to eye, ready to hurl myself upon him to give him a good tongue-lashing if he said another word.

And I saw then a Croupart that I did not know: a sort of drunken Mephistopheles, sniggering at my expression, my anger, the insults ready to pour from my mouth. His pasty face, illuminated by the indecisive lamplight, took on a violet tint; a sardonic smile tightened his thin lips; his right hand was brandishing a sheaf of papers, in the middle of which I quickly made out the IOUs I had signed and the protests ready to be registered.

In a voice that I shall never forget, so acerbic and mordant was it, the bailiff read: “At the request of Messieurs les Regents of the Banque de France, represented by Monsieur the Governor of the aforementioned, the proceedings and diligences of Monsieur the Manager of the Brach at X..., there resident at the Bank premises or his chosen domicile, as relevant, we, Aristide Croupart, bailiff attached to the Civil Tribunal sitting at...”

I recognized the gibberish that characterizes all the more-or-less legal documents of our beautiful land of France, and I shouted violently: “Enough! I’ll pay...”

“With what, if you please?” the bailiff went on. “Have you come into an inheritance since yesterday? Have you found a treasure? This time, it’s really ruination, ruination without appeal… you’ll have to go bust!”

Bust! That’s the expression used in the world of business to announce inevitable bankruptcy. A frisson ran through my body, my eyelids swelled with blood, a frightful buzzing whistled in my ears, the veins in my neck and temples bulged: I thought that I was done for and that an attack of apoplexy was about to strike me down.

The prostration into which I was plunged, the mental agony I endured and the despair painted on my face seemed to encourage the bailiff in his evil work. He sniggered more loudly, and his voice took on a hateful tone that chilled me with fear.

“Don’t hope to soften me up,” he went on, “with your supplications and your promises. For you, I want poverty, shameful poverty. Oh, how I detest you, how I hate you! I’ve been lying in wait for you for a long time, and my day has finally come. No, no, you won’t escape me. I shall hold you panting beneath me, I whom you despise so much, and I shall laugh at your incessant chagrin, your poignant pain. Say an eternal adieu to everything that embellishes your existence. Be dishonored, ruined, withered, and let everyone turn away from your path just as you collapse, weak and desperate. Ah! You want to marry your Hélène to Hector Tremont! Personally, I don’t want that, and...”

Until then I had not moved, and swallowed the insults addressed to me, angrily, but when that vile individual pronounced my daughter’s name, there was an inexplicable reaction within me. Blinded by fury, I grabbed a log and landed two formidable blows on the bailiff’s head.

He fell without uttering a cry, a word or a sigh.

He was dead!

Some sensations are difficult to analyze, so far beyond human nature do they seem, and those I felt after the murder I had just committed were indefinable. My anger did not evaporate suddenly. I imagined that Croupart was simply unconscious, and that he was simulating death in order to frighten me.

“Cease this farce, Croupat,” I said. “Get up, return to your office…and let this be a lesson to you. It’s never with impunity that you insult an honest man. Get up, Croupart.”

The silence that followed my words, pronounced with a residue of bad temper, terrified me. I leaned over the bailiff; his eyes were closed and his mouth was deformed by a frightful rictus. Not a drop of blood was running. Death had probably been determined by a compression of the cerebral matter. Had I not struck him in the fashion that oxen are slaughtered?

Then I was afraid; I felt my hair stand on end and my heart beat as if to break out of my chest.

Picking up the lamp, I went back up the cellar stairs, stumbling, and sat down in the dining-room, for my legs would no longer support me. Then, without knowing exactly what I was doing, I went toward the street and, leaning on the doorpost, I breathed in lungfuls of the icy air agitated by the December wind.

As chance would have it, the clerk of the civil tribunal passed by at that moment. As he was walking precipitately, because of the cold, he did not notice my disturbance, and said: “You must be very warm, my dear friend; if you stand still outside your door for much longer, you’ll be found frozen stiff.”

“I’m going back in,” I replied, unconsciously.

And I went back to sit down by my fire, reflecting that, after all, those brief words exchanged with the clerk created a facile alibi for me to invoke if I were pursued. For—it’s necessary that my confession be complete—the first impressions that assailed me related to the consequences of my crime rather than the crime itself. I found a thousand reasons to excuse the fit of anger that had made me a murderer.

“Am I to blame?” I murmured, my head in my hands. “Had I any intention to kill Croupart? Why did he insult and excite me? Why did the wretch mingle my daughter’s name with the insolence that he was addressing to me?”

I continued for some time in that tone and I found a good many attenuations to mitigate my crime. I had no right to kill a man, but was the victim really worthy of pity? What was the unfortunate Croupart? A bailiff, a malevolent bailiff who rejoiced in the dread he inspired, the harm that he did. The most terrible stories were told about him; people whispered that he had martyrized his wife and had caused her death. No one held him in esteem. The court used him to inflict the most severe disciplinary penalties because of his drunkenness and habitual bad conduct.

These reflections brought a little calm to my mind. I rapidly realized that suspicion would never be directed against me, if I succeeded in making all traces of my crime disappear. In this extremely cold weather, it was probable that no one had seen Aristide Croupart come into my house, and if he had been seen, that was not sufficient reason for accusing me of killing him. It only remained, therefore, for me to get rid of the body—but that did not seem an easy thing to do.

I went back down to the cellar and locked the interior shutter of the air-vent. My lamp, well covered with a dark shade, only gave out a feeble light within a restricted perimeter; no one, therefore, would interrupt my funereal task.

Come on! Courage!

I ought to declare right away that the sight of the cadaver did not affect me as much as I would have supposed. My nerves, numbed by the succession of violent emotions to which I had been subjected in a short time, left me in a state of languor that muffled my senses.

I thought about digging a hole and burying Croupart in the darkest corner of the cellar, but a few minutes of profound meditation convinced me that it would be madness to employ that overly primitive means. If the slightest suspicion fell upon me, searches would be ordered and it would not take long for the cadaver to be discovered.

What means could be imagined, or invented, to get rid of that large cumbersome body? I thought about burning it, cutting it up, reducing it by the action of acids or quicklime, but, knowing that the slightest clues were sufficient for judges to reconstitute, in every detail, the most mysterious dramas, I always found objections to the execution of the projects I conceived.

Finally, a bright idea occurred to me. I remembered that the walls of the cellar resonated here and there when they were struck, as if there were an empty space. When I had been a child, my grandfather had often amused me by tapping on the wall and making me listen to the particular sound produced by any subterranean excavation. He affirmed that Satan himself responded to appeals that were addressed to him when I wasn’t good.

It’s claimed that everything in life is of use. That memory saved me. Without losing a minute, I knocked on the wall with a hammer, striking all the stones, listening anxiously to the noise produced by the resonance of my blows. Finally, near an alcove opposite the air-vent, I found what I was looking for. I knocked several times, and a dully sonorous vibration always replied to me. There was no more doubt; there was a void.

There were a few tools in the cellar for the maintenance of the small garden adjacent to my house. I seized a strong crowbar and carefully attacked the stones walling up the hollow. The structure was solid, although cracked could be seen in several places. In less than half an hour I loosened a few stones covering a surface area of about sixty square centimeters. I threw them to the ground and was finally able to penetrate a space partly heaped with rubble but large enough to contain several cadavers.

Armed with the lamp, I explored the excavation minutely, and discovered nothing unusual. Rapidly, I struck the plaster with a few blows of a pick-axe, in order to be able to place Croupart’s corpse conveniently.

Suddenly, I stopped, in amazement. My implement had broken one of those large earthenware pots in which French housekeepers keep their provisions of fat. A cascade of gold coins, sparkling and flamboyant, like glowing embers spilled on to the ground at my feet.

Believing that I was the victim of some fantastic hallucination, I rubbed my eyes; I seized handfuls of that gold, which had appeared to me in such unexpected circumstances, and stirred them with the joy of a miser counting his money.

Oh, how far from my thoughts my crime and Croupart’s body were at that moment! It was gold, beautiful gold: twenty-franc pieces bearing the effigy of Napoléon I, called the Great, and Louis XV, called the Beloved. A crazy satisfaction invaded my entire being, and I surely felt the exuberant joy that the Count of Monte Cristo—or, rather, Dantès—must have felt when he discovered the immense riches contained in the hiding-place indicated to him by the Abbé Faria.

I collected the gold and wrapped it in a piece of canvas. Was there any more of it? I plied the pick ardently, raked through the mass of rubble—reduced it to dust, one might say—but did not find any more.

Then I seized Croupart’s body and passed it through the opening that I had made in the wall. Whether because of the delight procured by the discovery of the body redoubled my strength, or because the nervous excitation to which I was subject freed me from the sensation of the law of gravity, that large body seemed to me to be exceedingly light. I shoved it into the little cellar, covered it with a little rubble, and immediately took measures to return the wall to its original condition. That took an hour. To reestablish the junctions, I mixed a little plaster and introduced it into the interstices with a trowel. In order to erase the evidence of recent work I smeared dust, pulverized earth and ash over the fresh plaster—anything that might give the masonry an appearance of decrepitude.

Satisfied with my work, I counted the treasure I had found so unexpectedly. My fortune amounted to fifty thousand francs. What luck! That was the promised dowry; it was the assurance of my daughter’s marriage.

I remembered then, vaguely, a story I had been told when I was very young. It was said that my great-grandfather, being a widower, had been conscripted by the imperial authorities, and that, before joining the army, he had made every effort to hide his liquid assets. The unfortunate man never returned home; a bullet had killed him at Waterloo. My grandfather and my father had not lent overmuch credence to small town gossip. It had required a fateful chain of circumstances to put me in possession of that family inheritance.