Journey to the End of the Night (37 page)

They themselves, when all's said and done, were nothing but monstrous old rodents in overcoats. Glory, in our time, smiles only on the rich, men of science or not. All those plebeians of Research had to keep them going was their fear of losing their niches in this heated, illustrious, and compartmented garbage pail. What meant most to them was the title of official scientist, thanks to which the pharmacists of the city still trusted them more or less to analyse, for the most niggardly pay incidentally, their customers' urine and sputum. The slimy wages of science.

Arriving in his compartment, the methodic researcher would spend a few moments gazing ritually at the bilious, decaying viscera of last week's rabbit, which was on classic and permanent display in one corner of the room, a putrid font. When the smell became really intolerable, another rabbit would be sacrificed, but not before, because of the fanatic thrift of Professor Jaunisset,[69] who was then Secretary General of the Institute. Thanks to this thrift, some of the rotting animals gave rise to unbelievable by-products and derivatives. It's all a matter of habit. Some of the more practiced laboratory technicians had become so accustomed to the smell of putrefaction that they would have had no objection to cooking in an operational coffin. These modest auxiliaries of exalted scientific research sometimes outdid the thrift of Professor Jaunisset himself, taking advantage of the Bunsen burners to cook themselves countless ragouts and other, still riskier concoctions. After absently examining the viscera of the ritual guinea pig and rabbit, the men of science slowly proceeded to the second act of their scientific daily life, the smoking of cigarettes. Thus they strove to neutralize the ambient stench and their boredom with tobacco smoke, and managed, from butt to butt, to get through the day. At five o'clock they put the various putrefactions back in the ramshackle incubator cabinet to keep them warm. Octave, the technician, hid the string beans he had cooked behind a newspaper to get them safely past the concierge. Subterfuges. Taking them home to Gargan all ready for supper. The man of science, his master, was still writing a little something, diffidently, doubtingly in one corner of his laboratory book, with a view to a forthcoming and utterly pointless paper that he would feel obliged to present before long to some infinitely impartial and disinterested Academy and that would serve to justify his presence at the Institute and the meager advantages it conferred.

A true man of science takes at least twenty years on an average to make the great discovery, that is, to convince himself that one man's lunacy is not necessarily another man's delight, and that all of us here below are bored with the bees in our neighbors' bonnets. The coldest, most rational scientific madness is also the most intolerable. But when a man has acquired a certain ability to subsist, even rather scantily, in a certain niche with the help of a few grimaces, he must either keep at it or resign himself to dying the death of a guinea pig. Habits are acquired more quickly than courage, especially the habit of filling one's stomach.

I ransacked the Institute for Parapjne, I'd come all the way from Rancy to see him, so naturally I kept on looking. It was no small order. I made several false starts, hesitating a long while before choosing among so many corridors and doors.

Parapine was an old bachelor, he never ate lunch and I doubt if he ate dinner more than two or three times a week, but then enormously, with the frenzy of the Russian student, all of whose outlandish ways he had retained.

Parapine was an undisputed eminence in his special field. He knew all there was to know about typhoid in animals as well as human beings. His reputation went back twenty years to the day when certain German authors claimed to have isolated the Eberthella in the vaginal excreta of an eighteen-month-old girl, so creating an enormous stir in the Halls of Truth. Only too delighted to take up the challenge in the name of the National Institute, Parapine had outdone those Teutonic braggarts by breeding the same microbes, now in its pure form, in the sperm of a seventy-two-year-old invalid. Instantly famous, he managed to hold the limelight for the rest of his life by publishing a few unreadable columns in various medical journals. This he had done without difficulty ever since his day of audacity and good fortune.

The serious scientific public trusted him implicitly and consequently had no need to read him. If those people were to start getting critical, no further progress would be possible. They would spend a whole year over every page.

When I came to the door of his cell, Serge Parapine was spitting steady streams into all four corners of his laboratory, with a grimace of such disgust that it made you wonder. Parapine shaved now and then, but he always had enough hair on his cheeks to make him look like an escaped convict. He was always shivering or at least he seemed to be, though he never removed his overcoat, which presented a large assortment of spots and still more of dandruff, which he would scatter far and wide with little flicks of his fingernails, at the same time bringing his always oscillating forelock back into position over his red-andgreen nose. In the course of my laboratory work in medical school, Parapine had given me some instruction in the use of the microscope and had shown me unquestionable kindness on several occasions. I hoped he had not forgotten me completely since those remote days and that he might consent to give me valuable advice in connection with Bébert, with whose case I was really obsessed.

Undoubtedly, I was much more interested in preventing Bébert from dying than if he had been an adult. You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it's one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure. There's always the future.

Once acquainted with my difficulties, Parapine asked nothing better than to help me and to orient my perilous therapy, but unfortunately, in twenty years, he had learned so many, so diverse, and so often contradictory things about typhoid that by that time he was just about unable to formulate any clear and definite opinion concerning that most commonplace ailment and its treatment.

"First of all, my dear colleague," he said. "Do you believe in serums? Huh? Give me your honest opinion ... And vaccines? ... What do you really think? ... Some of the best minds today have no use for vaccines at all ... That of course is a bold way of thinking ... Yes, indeed ... but even so ... in the last analysis ... Don't you think there's a certain truth in that sort of negativism? ..."

The sentences issued from his mouth in terrifying bursts, amid avalanches of tremendous R's.

While he was struggling like a lion against other enraged and desperate hypotheses, Jaunisset, the illustrious Secretary General of the Institute, who was still alive at the time, passed our windows frowning superciliously.

At the sight of him, Parapine turned if possible paler than ever and abruptly changed the subject in his haste to show me all the disgust aroused in him by the mere daily sight of this Jaunisset, who was glorified by just about everyone else. In half a second he disposed of Jaunisset as a crook and maniac of the first water, accusing him of enough monstrous, unprecedented, and secret crimes to fill a penal colony for a century. I was powerless to stop Parapine from giving me hundreds of hate-ridden pointers about the clownish trade of medical research, which he was obliged to practice if he wanted to eat. This hatred of his was more precise, more scientific you might say, than the hatreds emanating from other men occupying similar positions in offices or shops. He spoke in a very loud voice, and I was amazed at his outspokenness. His technician was listening to us. He, too, had finished his bit of cookery and was still moving about, for form's sake, between incubator and test tubes, but he had grown so accustomed to listening to Parapine pouring out his more or less daily maledictions that he had come to regard these tirades, however extravagant, as absolutely academic and meaningless. Certain little private experiments that this technician pursued with great seriousness in one of the laboratory's incubators struck him, on the other hand, as prodigiously and deliciously instructive compared to Parapine's outpourings. Parapine's rages in no way tempered his enthusiasm. Before leaving, he tenderly, scrupulously shut the door of the incubator on his private microbes, as if it were a tabernacle.

"Did you notice that technician of mine, my dear colleague?" said Parapine as soon as he had gone. "Did you notice that old fool? He's been cleaning up my rubbish for almost thirty years, and all he ever hears people talk about is science, but that most abundantly and sincerely ... well, far from being disgusted, he, unlike everyone else in the whole place, has come to believe in it! After handling my cultures for years, he thinks they're marvelous!

He dotes on them ... The most meaningless of my buffooneries enchants him! Isn't it the same with all religions? Hasn't the priest stopped believing in God years ago, while his sacristan goes on believing ... Heart and soul! ... It's sickening! ... That old fool carries absurdity to the point of aping the dress and goatee of the illustrious Joseph Bioduret! Did you notice? ... Between you and me, the great Bioduret wasn't so very different from my technician except for his worldwide reputation and the intensity of his manias ... That giant of experimental science with his mania for rinsing his bottles with care and observing the hatching out of moths in incredible detail, has always struck me as monstrously vulgar ... Take away his prodigious pettiness, his housekeeping and, I ask you, what's left to admire about the great Bioduret? All right, I'll tell you: The hateful look of a malignant, cantankerous concierge. That's all. In his twenty years of membership in the Academy he had ample time to exhibit his vile, contemptible character ... nearly everyone hated him, he quarreled ... and what quarrels! ... with just about everyone in sight. The man was an ingenious megalomaniac, nothing more ..."

Parapine was slowly getting ready to leave. I helped him put a scarf around his neck and a sort of mantilla over his eternal dandruff. Then he remembered that I'd come to see him about something precise and urgent. "My word!" he said. "Here I've been boring you with my own little problems and forgetting your patient. Forgive me, colleague, and let's get back to our subject. But after all, what can I tell you that you don't already know? Among so many shaky theories and questionable experiments, reason, in the last analysis, forbids us to choose. Just do your best, colleague! Since you have to do something, do your best!

Personally, I must tell you in confidence that typhoidal infections have come to disgust me beyond all measure! Beyond all imagination! When I came to typhoid as a young man, there were only a few of us prospecting the field, we were able to help one another ... to advance one another's reputations ... While now, what can can I say? They pour in from Lapland, my friend! from Peru! More and more every day! Specialists are turning up from all over the world! In Japan they roll off the assembly line! In less than a few years I've seen the world become a hotbed of universal and preposterous publications on this same hackneyed subject. To maintain and more or less defend my position I've resigned myself to writing and rewriting my same little article from congress to congress, from journal to journal, throwing in a few subtle, innocuous, and quite tangential modifications toward the end of each season ... Believe me, colleague, typhoid in our time is as botched and bungled as the mandolin or banjo. It's maddening. Everyone wants to play some little tune in his own way. I may as well admit it, I haven't the strength to drive myself anymore, what I'm looking for, to see me through to the end of my days, is some quiet little backwater of research that will bring me neither enemies nor disciples, but only the mediocre celebrity without jealousy, which I sorely need and with which I shall gladly content myself. Among other absurdities, I have considered studying the comparative influence of central heating on hemorrhoids in northern and southern countries. What do you think of it? The role of hygiene? Of diet? That kind of thing is fashionable nowadays. Such a study, properly handled and ingeniously dragged out, is sure to be favorably received by the Academy, since the majority of its members are old men to whom these problems of heating and hemorrhoids can hardly be indifferent. Look what they've done for cancer, which concerns them so closely ... Don't you think the Academy might vote me one of its hygiene awards?

Why not? Ten thousand francs? Not bad ... Enough for a trip to Venice ... Yes, my young friend, I was in Venice once as a young man ... Oh yes! You can starve there just as well as anywhere else ... But you breathe a sumptuous aroma of death that's not easy to forget ..."

By then we were out on the street, but had to hurry back for his galoshes, which he'd forgotten. That delayed us. Then we rushed through the streets, but he didn't tell me where we were going.

Making our way down the long Rue de Vaugirard[70] strewn with vegetables and other encumbrances, we approached a square surrounded by chestnut trees and policemen, and we slipped into the back room of a small cafe, where Parapine sat down at a curtained window.

"Too late!" he moaned. "They've gone."

"Who?"

"The little girls from the Lycée ... Some of them are charming ... I know their legs by heart. I ask for nothing more at the end of my day ... Let's get out of here! I'll see them another day ..."

I'd have been glad if I'd never have had to go back to Rancy. Since the morning when I'd left it, I had almost forgotten my daily cares; they were so deeply incrusted in Rancy that they didn't follow me. Perhaps they'd have died of neglect like Bébert if I hadn't gone back. They were suburban cares. Even so, on the Rue Bonaparte, reflection came back to me, the gloomy kind, though it's a street that would normally be pleasing to a passer-by. Few streets are so smiling and so gracious. But on approaching the Seine, I began to worry. I strolled aimlessly about. I couldn't make up my mind to cross the river. Everybody can't be Caesar! Across the bridge, on the opposite bank, my troubles would begin. I reserved the right to wait on the left bank until nightfall. At least, I said to myself, I'd be saving a few hours of sunlight.