Claude Manceau: A Professional Scruple

(Georges-Frédéric Espitallier)

(1896)

 

 

When the accused was introduced into the assize court, the entire audience experienced an instinctive repulsion, so powerfully did his bestial expression and low-browed skull testify against him.

The crime for which he had to answer was not one of those that permitted pity. He had killed his mother by kicking her to death…or, at least, was accused of so doing—and his previous history was sufficient indication that he was capable of it.

Thus, the public prosecutor had a fine time developing the thunder of his eloquence in a speech as florid as it was melodramatic, in which virulent invective rubbed shoulders with elegiac prosopopeia.48 The mother—the victim—who was herself, I believe, nothing but a hardened criminal, was aureoled with all the virtues when the advocate general drew her portrait in a somber voice. It is the law of contrasts which demands that the victim is always sympathetic.

In brief it was a good bet that the accused, that scoundrel Jacques Féraut, was guilty; but, to tell the truth, there was nothing as yet to convince someone of his guilt but clues, words and moral indications—and the jurors felt their conviction hesitating,  in spite of the fiery quality of the speech.

The prosecution’s entire argument hinged on two points. The front of the shirt that Jacques had been wearing on the day of the crime was stained with blood, and the bloody imprint of a hand had been left on a door.

Was the blood on the shirt that of the victim? Was the print applied to the wood, like the murderer’s sinister signature, that of Jacques’ hand.

Everything was there; what point was there is quibbling? The expert was about to give his opinion.

The expert...

When the usher summoned the expert, all gazes turned anxiously toward the side-door. An abrupt silence fell; breath was held—and it was in the midst of that overheated atmosphere, under the crossfire of all those focused gazes, that Dr, Georges Chemin made his entrance into the court.

It was the first time that he had given expert testimony on behalf of the law, and he was very nervous about that debut. At an age when one has ordinarily only just escaped the university benches, the young doctor had already won a veritable scientific notoriety. He had understood that, in the present century, it is necessary to specialize, and had found in forensic medicine a broad path that promised resounding successes. The chemistry of poisons no longer had any secrets from him, and like Raspail,49 he could easily, if he were asked to do so, have extracted the arsenic from the wood of which the chair was made on which the president of the tribunal was majestically sat.

He was scrupulous too, and convinced…but this was his debut, and his emotion in the face of the apparatus of Justice and under the sentiment of his responsibility was, in truth, entirely comprehensible.

He collected himself swiftly and, wiping the lenses of his pince-nez, which were fogged, he approached the bar, bowed and waited.

The president immediately put him at his ease and asked him to explain to the jurors the results of his expertise. He began, therefore, in a sonorous voice, without looking at the accused.

Everything was, in any case, perfectly clear and precise.

With regard to the handprint, he calls attention to the fact that the hand an individual presents, in the disposition of its ridge-patterns, characteristics unique to its owner. A few bloodstains, formless and coagulated, would not suffice for that identification. They only serve to mark the place where the hand is applied, depositing an invisible layer of sweat, precisely striped with a network corresponding to the ridges. Is it not possible to place a tracing of that network in evidence? That is the whole question. Now, it is easy to make one, by drawing a paintbrush dipped in a clear solution of Indian ink over it; the ink slides over the greasy parts without sticking to them and, by contrast, tints the other parts.

That experiment, the expert has attempted; the image has appeared. It only remained to compare it with the hand of the accused. The proof leaves no doubt; we have the original of the image.

As regards the stains remarked on the linen, that is the infancy of the art, and, in spite of their slightness, their identification was easy; they were not rust, in spite of their appearance; they were blood, and they were the mammalian blood; they were human blood.

“Not true!” cried a hoarse voice. “They were chicken blood.”

The expert turned toward the accused, who had inflicted this self-interested lie upon him. Their gazes met, and Georges Chemin shivered at the wretch’s ferocious expression. Even so, he turned to the jury and coolly explained his reasoning.

The man’s gaze had, however, disturbed him. He was not afraid; it was more a residue of his initial timidity that the loud interruption had reawakened.

The advocate, moreover, had felt the crushing impact that the expert’s report had for his client, so he immediately opened fire on this delicate point.

“Oh!” he cried, “a human life is certainly a very small thing, since it is at the mercy of the first young man fresh out of college, provided that he introduces himself under the sacred aegis of science. One dies not hesitate to produce hazardous affirmations when one can shore them up on a few more-or-less well-understood theories and experiments more-or-less well-carried-out. Before the most troubling problems, the young scientists are not anxious, therefore, about the responsibility they are assuming, and when it suffices for them to lift a little finger to strike the head from the shoulders of the accused, they lift that little finger with a glad heart.”

The advocate went on for much longer, but out of all his harangue, Georges Chemin only heard the acrimonious words that were more-or-less directly aimed at him.

What! Was his conscience not in good order? Had he not sought the truth in good faith? Had he not explained the matter with all the sincerity of his heart, exactly as it had appeared to him? Was that not his duty, and had he not accomplished it rigorously?

The rest of the hearing went past, for him, as if in a dream, from which he only awoke when judgment was pronounced.

Jacques Féraut was sentenced to death; one could do no less for a parricide, and the verdict was welcomed in the audience by a murmur of approval. But it seemed to Georges Chemin that he was the one who had pronounced the sentence: a condemnation to death. He was the principal architect of it. If he had been less affirmative, if he had shown the slightest doubt, perhaps the accused would have been spared.

What if he were mistaken, as any human might be?

At that moment, he raised his eyes toward the dock where the accused was standing between two gendarmes, and encountered his furious gaze. It was not exactly the gaze of an innocent man, but one is so often mistaken about such things...

Georges Chemin was nailed to the spot, but the crowd drew him toward the exit. He allowed himself to be carried by the flow, his forehead creased; it is hard to tell oneself that one has just obtained one’s first death-sentence.

 

Examining magistrates, defenders and prosecutors become accustomed quite rapidly to the demands of their functions; they are there to put a case; they put the case. Georges Chemin was not accustomed to the demands of his, and anguish gripped him as he thought that a man was about to die because of him.

What if the man were innocent?

He was perhaps the only one to suppose for a single instant that the frightful rogue might be innocent, but by force of mulling over the affair and plucking the strings of his conscience, he had distorted the mechanism of his own common sense.

He wondered whether all his experiments might have been spoiled by error, whether he had taken sufficient precautions—whether he had ensured, in a word, that he had testified to an incontestable truth.

He had never felt such perplexity, such anxiety, and in his laboratory, in order to reassure his alarmed conscience, he repeated his control experiments. Alas, from ten identical operations, he did not obtain absolutely concordant results.

Where then, was the infallibility?

Fortunately the sentence of death had not been conclusive. The penalty could be commuted; it surely would be commuted. There was still hope.

Oh, if only he had been able to intercede personally for his victim! But no, that was impossible; would that not be to confess that he had doubts about the veracity of his own affirmations?

Under that constant and painful preoccupation, he lost sleep. In the rare moments when he dozed off, he was haunted by terrifying hallucinations. He thought he was watching the execution of the unfortunate Féraut.

At daybreak, in a bitter wind, the crowd surrounded the horrible guillotine. Féraut came down, unsteadily. He advanced toward the cold machine; then,, suddenly, a movement of the lever, a flash, a head rolling into the bran in the sinister basket.

And that head turned its eyes, darting a gaze of ferocious hatred at the unfortunate expert who had had it condemned, while its lips opened to murmur words that no one could hear.

That haunting became a veritable persecution for the unfortunate; he suffered fever, delirium, and ended up falling completely ill. He had but one obsession: to assure himself in a peremptory fashion of Féraut’s perfect guilt. That was the only means of fully reassuring his conscience.

Oh, if only the condemned man had made a confession! But he refused to do so energetically, perhaps hoping that, in the face of his protestations of innocence, they would be more likely to hesitate over his execution.

How, then, could his secret be extracted from him? He was about to die, and dead men do not speak…except in sentimental novels and melodramas.

How can a decapitated head be made to speak? Is it possible to relight a flame over which the breath of death has passed?

Everything that he knew about physiology returned to his memory; the ancient experiments were scarcely encouraging, and he imagined new ones.

He wanted to have a supreme conversation with the condemned man, at the moment when verity escapes with the soul; he would have it. Yes, he would go to claim the body of the executed man, in the sacred interests of science, and on that freshly-excised head he would attempt the craziest of experiments: he would try to restore it to life momentarily.

But is not death instantaneous? One sees, it is true, the bodies of animals agitating for a long time yet after beheading. Reflex movements, it is said, resulting from the excitation of nervous centers. Who knows?

And he demanded his books, which he read feverishly in his bed.

“What, then is the mechanism of death by decapitation?” said one of them. “How does a individual die, whose head has been abruptly removed, at a single stroke, by a trenchant instrument?”50

And the answer is that it produces simultaneously the phenomena of asphyxiation and inhibition. In an animal, it is the asphyxia that predominates. “The convulsive movements that it presents are the convulsions of asphyxia. The blood remaining in the head and the body can no longer be arterialized; then, the sanguine liquid flows rapidly away and leaves the tissues deprived of oxygen and overloaded with carbon dioxide. Those are all the conditions of asphyxia.”

But if the trenchant instrument attains the animal’s vital node—the spinal cord in humans: “Under the influence of the violent shock produced by the blade, and the energetic irritation of the nervous system, there is a suspension, an immediate abolition of the reflex power and automotive power of the nervous centers.” No excitation can cause them to react; there is no agony, nor movement, nor convulsions.

But that period of inhibition might only be transitory. If, while it lasts, the blood disappears completely, a return to activity will obviously be impossible; the centers will not reawaken. But if one succeeds in maintaining the sanguine liquid in the vessels until the end of the period of torpor, why should the motor centers not resume their activity? Why should the intelligence, momentarily obscured, not reappear? Why...

 

Georges Chemin was young and vigorous, and the strength of his constitution reckoned with his illness. He woke up one day in cheerful sunlight, very weak but free of fever. The sunlight was not sufficient, however, to make him cheerful; gradually, memory returned, and with it, anguishes that caused a feverish frisson to pass over his face.

He retained from his delirium that obsession to interrogate the executed man in a supreme experiment, if the law were to follow its course.

The appeal for mercy was rejected and the execution was imminent. Alas! How could a parricide be pardoned?

In spite of his still-considerable weakness, the young scientist made every effort to ascertain that the body would be surrendered to him after the execution, and without the simulated inhumation that had rendered all previous experiments futile.

At the same time, he made all the necessary arrangements in his laboratory, which was close to the square where the guillotine would be set up.

His favorite pupil asked in vain for the favor of assisted him in his task; by virtue of a eccentricity that might appear inexplicable, the scientist refused all collaboration. He wanted to be alone in confronting the mysteries of that sinister tête-à-tête, especially if some supreme confidence were to result from that macabre colloquy.

The night before the execution, he did not sleep at all. At three o’clock in the morning, in spite of the fever that was making him shiver, he was up and, enveloped in his large operating gown, was striding back and forth in his laboratory, preoccupied, and enervated by the wait.

Finally, a sudden ring of the doorbell made him jump.

When the door was precipitately opened, two men clad in black silently deposited a large basket on the tiled floor, then disappeared as they had come, like shadows.

In haste, Georges Chemin lifted the lid of the basket, and could not prevent himself from shivering at the sight of the bloody head. What! Was it not a simple item of anatomy?

He had to react; and besides, there was not a moment to lose. Everything was ready for the experiment. On the enameled stone table a bizarre apparatus was waiting; at the foot of the table, a poor little dog was sleeping peacefully, an unconscious victim for which death was lying in wait. The operator seized it, tied it up rapidly and plunged his scalpel into its neck, laying bare the arteries. It was a prestigious operation; no practitioner had ever employed greater dexterity and manual skill. Less than a minute had elapsed before the arteries of the unfortunate animal were pumping their blood through slender rubber tubes into the vessels laid bare by the severance of the head of the executed man.

The doctor had recovered his self-composure in the face of professional necessity, and, pressing a rubber bulb gently, extracted the blood of the one in order to replace it in the half-empty arteries of the other.

It was the solemn moment. The doctor, his eyes fixed on that pale face, followed the progress of his experiment. Gradually, a roseate tint brightened the cheeks. A fugitive gleam sprang from the pupils. Yes, perhaps it was the effect of the tension that had tautened his entire being, but the operator thought he saw those atonal pupils become animate, and launch once again that same hate-filled gaze that had blazed in the assize court.

A cold sweat ran down his temples; his breath caught in his throat, while before him, that face convulsed with a quiver of the eyelids, a rictus of the lips.

Breathless and distraught, Georges Chemin leaned toward the man whom he called is victim.

“Speak! Speak!” he cried. “Answer me? Can you understand me?”

It seemed to him that the eyelids lowered.

“I beg you, answer. Were you guilty?”

Was it an illusion? The head oscillated in the pieces of linen sustaining it. One might have thought that it was making a sign of negation, while all its muscles contracted in a frightful grimace.

“Oh, wretch that I am!” moaned the scientist. “He was innocent, and I’m the one who had him condemned!”

And he could not tear his eyes away from those bloodshot eyes, those lips grimacing an insult.

“Alas, alas! He’s alive again, and if I detach that tube, it’s over; I’ll be snatching away forever the shadow of life that I’ve returned to him. What am I saying? The dog’s exhausted. There it is, palpitating and quivering; its blood is no longer flowing. The spark, scarcely reanimated, is about to be extinguished. Féraut! Féraut! He can no longer hear me; hi eyelids are fluttering and closing. He’ll die this time, and it’s me who has killed him again. Murderer! Murderer! I’m nothing but a murderer! But I want him to live... I’ll prolong his existence. It shall not be said, while I live, that I will have let him die!”

Crazed, his eyes haggard, Georges Chemin rolls up his sleeve; on the arm he has laid bare, feverishly, he digs into the flesh, exposing the artery, and sticks the tube of the apparatus to it. And it is his blood, his own blood, that he injects into the stupid head of the murderer.

But as, his two hands being occupied in that task, he can no longer maintain it, that macabre head moves and seems to palpitate in ultimate convulsions. The eyes reopen; the mouth sniggers, mocking the madman who claims to be able to revive a head, a miserable head with no torso, arms, legs, entrails or heart!

 

The following day, the rumor ran around the town that the savant doctor Georges Chemin had committed suicide. He had been found lying on the floor, his arteries open, next to the operating table where the severed head lay.

Féraut was no longer sniggering.