The Cthulhu Encryption (9 page)

“That Jack Taylor was a
bad man
?” I suggested. “But which one? Her father, or the pirate?”

“One of them, at least,” he said, pensively, “seems to have sailed for the South Seas…perhaps to raise the Devil…or perhaps as an explorer.”

The last conjecture, I supposed, was his inference, for I had heard nothing in what the woman had said to support it. “An explorer?” I queried. “Looking for what?”

“R’laiyeh,” was his terse reply.

“Did he find it, do you think?”

“I hope not,” he retorted. “My God, I hope not.” Then he stood up. “Food,” he said, succinctly. “I need food—and strong coffee.”

“I shall have to send the Bihans out in search of supplies,” I said. “After all, the sage of Bicêtre is coming to dinner tonight, and we must put on a show. Do you have any conception, Dupin, of how drastically you have upset the pattern of my life?”

He pulled a face—which was quite uncharacteristic of him. “Yes, I have,” he said, “and I’m truly sorry.”

“But it was a matter of dire necessity,” I added, on his behalf.

“And is,” he said. “I wish I knew how dire the necessity might become.”

“We have faced Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos and the Dwellers of the Threshold,” I reminded him, “not to mention the Egregore of Parthenope. Will this be very much worse?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I have no idea how Ysolde came to have the Cthulhu encryption engraved into her very flesh, or for what purpose—and I have no idea who or what might come to search for her, once the word spreads that it is manifest. No one in that ward but me could possibly have recognized what she said, of course—but there’s enough detail in the story to attract unwelcome attention and curiosity. I only hope that Père France’s obsessive bibliotaph is in Brittany just now, not in Paris. Once he scents her name….”

“If it’s scent that you’re worried about,” I observed, “perhaps we should have left her where she was. The keenest bloodhound in the world could not have detected her there.”

“I was speaking metaphorically,” the notorious pedant said.

“I had already inferred that,” I told him. “Let’s go downstairs and make our preparations shall we? There’s fresh bread in the larder, so we can have a bite to eat as well.”

“Tom Linn,” he said, “your every word is music.”

“My memory’s a little sketchy,” I said, “but didn’t Thomas the Rhymer’s story end tragically—just like Tristan’s?”

“Folklore is full of sticky ends,” he told me. “And yet, somehow, fairyland always seems so pleasant and peaceful in modern dreams and hallucinations. Perhaps Monsieur Leuret can explain the psychology of that to us, after dinner tonight.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed.

CHAPTER FIVE

A PHILOSOPHICAL DISAGREEMENT

Leuret arrived very punctually at seven o’clock, scrupulously well-dressed and very self-composed. I got the impression that he was glad to be away from Bicêtre, and did not often have the opportunity. I could understand why, even though he was a gentleman through and through, and I fully expected him to by an amiable dinner-companion. The kinds of people who plan dinner-parties as a matter of routine would probably think twice about inviting the director of a lunatic asylum as a guest—especially a reformist who might wax lyrical about the humane treatment of the insane, or the danger posed to the cause of progress by Romantic poets and story-tellers.

Chapelain was late, and did not arrive until near quarter past, but that did not delay the serving of the soup unduly. Madame Lacuzon was still in the house, “helping out,” but she had been appointed to sit with the sleeping Ysolde Leonys, leaving the preparation of the meal and the actual serving to the Bihans—who did a very creditable job, in my opinion, given that it was not a kind of service to which they were accustomed. The soup was first-rate, and the
magret de canard
served as the centrepiece of the entrée was not far short of excellent. I blessed the circumstances that had led me to hire servants, for I dread to think what the meal might have amounted to had I still been living alone.

As convention required, the talk prior to the serving of the coffee—for which we would retire to the smoking-room—was conspicuously general, light and polite. That was in spite of the impatience of all concerned, and I have to admit that it carried a certain underlying edge by virtue of a measurable tension between Leuret and Chapelain, on the one hand, and Leuret and Dupin, on the other. The first two obviously respected one another, and would probably have been unhesitating in naming one another as good friends, but the philosophical differences between them had been further sharpened by the day’s extraordinary events, while the second two did not, as yet, know quite what to make of one another.

As the soirée’s host, I suppose I might and ought to have deflected the conversation away from any matters likely to prove controversial, but given that Leuret was an exceedingly determined psychologist, Chapelain an exceedingly devoted mesmerist physician and that Auguste Dupin was exceedingly eager to involve himself in their differences of opinion, it would have needed a conversationalist far more talented than myself to deviate them in the slightest.

As I have said before, the mid-1840s was a time of rivalries, when intellectual battle-lines were being drawn and forces readying themselves for conflict. Bellicosity of every kind was in the Parisian air just then, even though it was to be more than a year before actual barricades went up in the streets and political Revolution reared its hoary head yet again, condemning Louis-Philippe’s
juste milieu
to the dustbin of history.

In such times as that, essentially petty disputes can sometimes become exaggerated, to such an extent that when one looks back at them ten for twelve years later—as I am doing now—it is not easy to see what all the fuss was about. Fundamentally, Leuret and Chapelain were on the same side, allies in the same long war of attrition, but they could not quite see eye to eye in matters of tactics and strategy. They were not supposed to discuss their patients in front of laymen—even expert laymen like Dupin—but there was a loophole in that particular barricade when the patients in question had public reputations and could be discussed in their public roles. Leuret had to know that Honoré de Balzac was Chapelain’s patient, and that Chapelain had treated other notable writers in the past, just as Chapelain knew full well that Leuret had looked after Victor Hugo’s brother when he was at Charenton, and must have met the great man on numerous occasions—but that did not prevent them from discussing the great men’s published works, nor from incorporating a certain subtext into their discussion.

“I am aware of the prevailing opinion,” Leuret said, “that
Notre-Dame de Paris
and
La Peau de Chagrin
are literary masterpieces, and I do not dissent from it, in terms of pure artistry. I will even concede that their employment of hallucination as a theme is full of interest from the viewpoint of psychological science—but that is because they are, in a sense, pathological, and hence dangerous. They do not merely use hallucination as a theme or a device; they are, in themselves, hallucinatory, and thus unhealthy, for their readers as well as their writers.”

“There is a sense in which all novels are hallucinatory,” Chapelain replied, “even the stubbornly naturalistic novels that Monsieur Balzac began to write when he had laid his Swedenborgian fascinations to rest. But I dispute that literary fantasies, even if they are blatantly and unrepentantly fantastic, are unhealthy. Quite the opposite, in fact; I believe that the two works you cite are more conducive to mental health than injurious to it, not because of their careful moralizing component, but because of the way they engage with and exercise the reader’s emotions. The ability to identify with others, to stand imaginatively in their shoes and empathize with their standpoint and feelings, is the key to self-understanding as well as social understanding, and novels help us to do that, not merely by providing a training in the art but by offering us hypothetical identifications that the narrow routines of contemporary social life cannot offer.”

“I agree that all novels are essentially hallucinatory,” Leuret said, “even those that strive for the utmost naturalism—but their seductiveness is, or at least can be, a dangerous trap. To encourage people to empathize with unreal individuals, even when those individuals are not fanciful or insane, is to encourage a dangerous kind of fantasy. And you must admit, I think, that very many of the characters in novels, however naturalistic they are supposed to be, would be reckoned insane by any competent physician. Do you really believe that it is good for readers to be encouraged to stand in the shoes of madmen and madwomen, as Monsieur Balzac and Monsieur Hugo routinely invite them to do? My own view is that such identification is essentially perilous.”

Dupin intervened at this point—but not to deflect the conversation on to safer ground or pour oil on troubled waters. “Do you agree, Dr. Leuret,” he asked, “with the common opinion that genius and madness are closely allied?”

“Very much so,” Leuret replied, as Dupin must have known that he would, having read the
Fragmens
. “Indeed, I must confess that I agree wholeheartedly with my colleague Dr. Lélut, who considers that genius is but a species of madness, and that many men we consider great, from Socrates onwards, owe their reputations to their hallucinations.”

“Which proves, does it not,” Chapelain put in, “that hallucinations can be virtuous as well as dangerous—that they have played a key role in human intellectual progress.”

“That is to simplify the argument unreasonably,” Leuret countered. “The reality is that a man can be capable of solid reasoning as well as hallucination. Consider Isaac Newton, for instance—a man who was very obviously mad, but also a fine logician and mathematician. In the end, his madness got the better of him completely, and he spent the later years of his life trying to indentify and solve ciphers that he believed to be encrypted in the text of Bible, but in his early days, while he was still struggling for sanity, he produced arguments from evidence and mathematical proofs whose objective competence is indubitable. Think what Newton might have achieved, Dr. Chapelain, if only he could have received effective treatment for the madness that ultimately claimed him!”

“You consider logic and mathematics the antithesis of hallucination, then, Dr. Leuret?” Dupin asked.

“Absolutely,” said Leuret. “They are provable, and indubitable; they provide us with our firmest grip on the substance of reality. But they are powerful to the exact extent that they are applied to secure, reliable and conscientious observation of the world as it is: the orbits of planets, the behaviour of falling objects, the deflections of rays of light by prisms and lenses. When logic is earnestly applied to false premises—figments of the imagination—the process leads, inexorably, from fancy to further fancy, elaborating extraordinary patterns of delusion that can confuse and ultimately swamp an entire mind, dragging it down into the depths of unalloyed insanity. That is the kind of tragedy that I try, every day, to prevent—but as you saw today, I am fighting against a veritable tide, whose sheer mass of numbers makes even tiny victories inordinately difficult to achieve.”

“But if Newton and Socrates were mad,” Chapelain interjected, “And owed their genius and greatness in part to their madness, does that not prove that madness can, if only occasionally, be virtuous?”

“I can only repeat what I said before,” Leuret retorted. “Imagine what they might have achieved had their sanity been unalloyed with hallucination! If only they could have been cured….”

He seemed enthused by the idea that he might one day have a Socrates or a Newton in his care, to whose flights of fancy he might put a stop. But was not that, in itself, a fantasy, dangerous by his own definition to the balance of his mind?

“You think, therefore, that it was wrong of me to pander to Mademoiselle Leurys’ seeming delusions this afternoon?” Dupin said, somewhat careless of convention, as ever.

Leuret did not seem upset by Dupin’s originality; he was something of a Revolutionary himself. “I fear, Monsieur Dupin,” he said, sententiously, “that I do—I was disappointed in you, I must confess, although I suppose I might have anticipated it, since I had taken Dr. Chapelain to task the day before, for doing exactly the same thing, and he brought you to Bicêtre. I know that the lady is dying, and that it really does not matter in the great scheme of things whether she dies sane or deluded, but there is a principle at stake, and I fear that I can sometimes be overzealous in defending it. I hope you will pardon me for saying so, but I do not think that you are doing the lady any good by bringing her here, even if she will be more comfortable than she could ever be on the ward, if you intend to encourage her fantasies…and I certainly do not think that you are doing yourselves any good.”

“You have no need to apologize, Dr. Leuret,” Dupin assured him, “for I can agree with you wholeheartedly that it would be better by far if she were be to die sane—but I fear that we do not have that choice. Perhaps the world would be a better place if there were no hallucination in it, and we were all able to be the kind of scientists that Monsieur Comte would like us to be, using mathematics and scrupulous logic to deal with reliable facts gleaned from careful observation—but the fact is that we do not live in such a world, and cannot be people of that kind, no matter how hard we try. We have no choice but to deal with hallucination, and must try to do so wisely. For that reason, I do agree with what Dr. Chapelain says—that the genius of men like Balzac and Hugo is an invaluable resource for men like us.”