In 1890, in the papal reign of Leo XIII, the reputation of Dr X——, a specialist in rheumatic diseases, persuaded Anthime Armand-Dubois, freemason, to travel to Rome.
‘What?’ his brother-in-law, Julius de Baraglioul, exclaimed. ‘You’re going all the way to Rome to get your body looked after! I just hope that when you get there you’ll realise how much sicker your soul is!’
To which Armand-Dubois replied, in a theatrically sorrowful voice, ‘My poor dear friend, will you just look at my shoulders?’
Julius liked to oblige, and, despite his disapproval, looked up at his brother-in-law’s shoulders. They were racked by spasms, as though shaken by deep, irrepressible laughter, and it was undeniably poignant to see Anthime’s burly, half-crippled frame using up what was left of his physical strength in such a grotesque parody. Too bad! Both men had clearly made up their minds, and de Baraglioul’s eloquence was not going to change anything. Perhaps time would? The whispered counsel of holy places …
Looking profoundly discouraged, Julius said simply, ‘Anthime, you cause me great sorrow.’ The shoulders suddenly stopped jiggling, because Anthime was very fond of his brother-in-law. ‘I shall just have to hope that in three years’ time, when the pope has his jubilee, I shall come and find you improved in every way!’
At least Véronique would be accompanying her husband in an entirely different frame of mind. Every bit as devout as her sister Marguerite and Julius, she was looking forward to her extended stay in Rome as the fulfilment of one of her most cherished wishes. As one of those people who fill their flat, disappointed lives with countless small devotions, in her sterility she offered up to the Lord every attention that a baby would have demanded from her. Sadly she entertained almost no hope of leading her Anthime back to Him. She had known for a long time how much stubbornness that broad brow, knitted in perpetual denial, was capable of. Father Flons had warned her.
‘The most unswerving resolves, Madame,’ he had said to her, ‘are the worst. You must hope for nothing less than a miracle.’
She had even stopped letting it depress her. Within days of moving to Rome, husband and wife had, singly and separately, arranged their lives: Véronique around the household and her religious devotions, Anthime around his scientific research. And that was how they lived, side by side, disagreeing about everything, tolerating each other by turning their backs on one another. As a result, a kind of harmony reigned between them and an almost-happiness enveloped them, both finding in their toleration of the other’s faults an unobtrusive outlet for their virtue.
The apartment they had rented with an agency’s help offered, like most Italian accommodation, unforeseen advantages along with several remarkable drawbacks. Occupying the whole of the first floor of the Palazzo Forgetti, in Via in Lucina, it had an attractive terrace on which Véronique was instantly inspired to grow aspidistras, which were generally so unsuccessful in apartments in Paris, but in order to get to this terrace she had to go through the orangery that Anthime had immediately taken over as his laboratory. They therefore agreed that Anthime would allow his wife free passage at certain hours of the day.
As quietly as she could, Véronique would push open the door and tiptoe furtively through, staring at the floor like a lay sister hurrying past a wall daubed with obscene graffiti, as she refused point-blank to contemplate the far end of the room where Anthime’s enormous back, dwarfing an armchair against which he had leant his crutch, was hunched over heaven knows what evil experiment. Anthime pretended not to hear a thing. But as soon as his wife had walked back through the room he hoisted himself heavily out of his chair, dragged himself to the door and, full of spite, with his lips pressed tightly together, clack! he flipped the lock shut with an autocratic snap of his index finger.
It would soon be time for Beppo, his procurer, to come in by the other door and be given his instructions.
A boy of twelve or thirteen, dressed in rags and without parents or a fixed address, the urchin had come to Anthime’s notice a few days after his arrival in Rome. Outside the hotel in Via di Bocca di Leone where the Armand-Dubois had first stayed, he had found Beppo trying to attract the attention of passers-by with a grasshopper nestling under a few blades of grass in a small fishing basket. Anthime had given him ten lire for the insect, then, using the tiny amount of Italian at his command, somehow let the boy know that he would soon be needing some rats at the apartment in Via in Lucina to which he was moving the next day. And not just rats: every crawling, swimming, scurrying, flying thing was a candidate to be documented. He worked on live animals.
Beppo, a born procurer, would happily have stolen the eagle or the she-wolf off the Capitol for him. His new job, indulging his appetites for roaming and petty larceny, delighted him. He was paid ten lire a day, and for that he also helped with domestic tasks. Véronique at first took a dim view of him, but the moment she saw him cross himself as he passed the Madonna at the building’s north corner, she forgave him his rags and started to allow him to bring the water and coal, firewood and kindling through to the kitchen. She even let him carry her basket when he accompanied her to the market – that was on Tuesdays and Fridays, the days when Caroline, the maid they had brought with them from Paris, was too busy with the housework.
Beppo disliked Véronique but slavishly adored Anthime, who quickly allowed the boy to come up to his laboratory instead of painfully going down to the courtyard himself to take delivery of his victims. The laboratory could be reached directly via the terrace and a hidden staircase that led down to the courtyard. Surly and reclusive, Anthime felt his heart beat a little faster as he heard the light slap of bare feet on the tiles. He showed no sign: nothing was allowed to divert him from his work.
The boy did not knock on the glass-panelled door but pawed at it and then, as Anthime stayed hunched over his table without answering, took a few steps forward and piped in his clear voice a ‘Permesso?’ that filled the room with a sound like blue sky. His voice made you think of an angel – yet he was an executioner’s assistant. What new victim had he brought with him in the bag he put down carefully on the sacrificial slab? Anthime, too engrossed, often did not open the bag immediately, merely giving it a quick glance. As soon as he saw it move, he was satisfied. Rat, mouse, songbird, frog, they were all grist to this Moloch’s mill. Sometimes Beppo did not bring anything, but he came in anyway because he knew Armand-Dubois would be waiting for him even if he was empty-handed. And as the silent boy at the scientist’s side craned forward to witness some appalling experiment, I should like to reassure the reader that the said scientist experienced no false god’s glow of vanity at feeling the boy’s astonished gaze settle, in turn, full of horror on the animal and then full of admiration on himself.
In preparation for his assault on Homo sapiens itself, Anthime Armand-Dubois was developing a theory in which all animal activity could be reduced to ‘tropisms’. Tropisms! No sooner had the word been coined than no one talked about anything else. Whole swathes of psychologists acknowledged no higher power than tropisms. Tropisms! What sudden enlightenment burst forth from those syllables! Of course: animals were subject to exactly the same stimuli as the heliotrope whose flowers turn spontaneously towards the sun (a phenomenon easily reduced to a few simple laws of physics and thermochemistry). At last the cosmos was revealing a reassuring benevolence. A human being’s most unexpected behaviour could now be explained solely in terms of total obedience to the new law.
To achieve his ends – to extract from his helpless creatures the proof of their simplicity – Armand-Dubois had invented a complicated arrangement of boxes containing tunnels, trapdoors, mazes and compartments: in some of these there was food, in others nothing or some respiratory irritant, and they had doors of different colours and shapes. These diabolical contraptions were soon to become all the rage in Germany and, known as Vexierkasten1, would enable the new discipline of psychophysiology to take a further step towards unbelief. In order to target a particular sense, or a part of an animal’s brain, Armand-Dubois blinded some of them, deafened others, castrated, dissected, removed sections of grey matter and extracted this or that organ that you might have sworn was indispensable but which, for Anthime’s edification, the animal had to go without.
His Report on ‘Conditional Reflexes’ had recently electrified Uppsala University. Bitter discussions had raged, in which top scientists from all over the world had taken part. But new questions had started filling Anthime’s mind, and, leaving his colleagues to squabble, he was pursuing his investigations in new directions, ambitiously aiming to back God further and further into a corner.
Not content with accepting that all activity incurred a physical cost as a general principle, nor that an animal expended energy merely by the exertion of its muscles and senses, the question he strove to answer after each exercise was, how much? And so, as the ravaged creature attempted to recover, Anthime, instead of feeding it, weighed it. Any extra elements (such as feeding) would overcomplicate his experiments. Take for example this one: six rats – two blind, two one-eyed, two sighted – were kept without food, immobile, and weighed daily (the two sighted ones having their eyes strained continuously by a small mechanical mill). Having starved them for five days, what would their respective weight loss be? Each day at midday, Anthime Armand-Dubois triumphantly entered a new set of figures in the tables he had designed himself.