The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 1) Read online

  “So it’s believed.”

  “It’s a fairy tale!” the chemist scoffed.

  His irony was aborted by the sound of voices. What did it all mean? Was Tornada completely mad, or an utter genius? Was he attempting his promised vengeance? Monsieur Vernet recalled, in order to excuse him, that it was after having lost his wife and daughter—both of whom he adored—in a single night that the inventor had shown the first signs of strangeness.

  And it was while a few instances of that strangeness were being cited that that a manservant opened the drawing room door and announced: “Monsieur le Professeur Tornada!”

  II

  There was a stir. One might have thought that the bizarre name fell upon the room like the announcement of a catastrophe. Instinctively, obedient to a protective impulse, I moved closer to my fiancée.

  The sight of the newcomer was, in any case, conducive to some malaise. He was a short, simian man, of whom one only noticed at first the black beard, so thick that it hung down in two carefully-combed sections all the way to his legs. By contrast, the head was almost completely bald, and the polished cranium permitted observation of the abnormal conformation of the head, which one might have thought kneaded by the Devil, undulating with excessive bumps that must have lodged a particular intelligence. The rest of the physiognomy, when one took inventory of it, did not attenuate in the least the surprise provoked by those first impressions. The ears stuck out like the appendages of a wolf, twitching at the slightest sonorities. The exceedingly dark eyes, very small and mobile, filled with flashes at times, and retreated behind the eyelids at others. Finally, numerous tics, some more singular than others, continually shook the head, the arms and the legs, testifying to incessant convulsions beneath that Hoffmannesque exterior.

  Nevertheless, my future father-in-law welcomed Tornada deferentially. He introduced him, not without malice, to the influential individuals present who had just been heaping their criticism on his inventive genius. The little man accompanied each handshake he gave with a snigger. When it was Monsieur Serviat’s turn, he turned away with a manifest disgust and immediately came toward Suzanne and me.

  I was surprised then by the transformation that had overtaken him. His nervous phenomena seemed suddenly to have calmed down. He gazed with an undisguised and thoroughly paternal admiration at my fiancée’s lovely face. He took us to one side and complimented us with a softness of voice all the more surprising because we might have expected to hear nothing other than inarticulate sounds issuing from such a scarcely human face.

  He questioned us about the tenderness of our idyll, and seemed very sensitive to it. He confided to us, wiping away a tear, that his daughter would also have been of an age to get married, if destiny had not snatched her away. Then, to dissipate that sadness, he offered Suzanne a book of verses that he had composed for her—and I recall that my fiancée, seduced by the gesture, requested silence, and read a few agreeably-turned lines, which drew applause addressed as much to the reader as to the poet.

  That incident had effaced the bitterness and malevolence of the words that had preceded the professor’s arrival. Tea was served, and he accepted it, like everyone else, with a good grace, while elegantly stroking his beard. He even made a few witty remarks. And the rest of the soirée would have gone by normally, in an inattention salutary for everyone, had it not be for the fact that, exactly at midnight, at the first stroke of the clock, Tornada began to show signs of anxiety.

  He grimaced several times; his legs launched kicks into empty space; his hands described a very particular gesticulation, which I compared to the ameboid movements of certain animalcules. One sensed that a crisis was brewing. Although the conversations continued with an apparent indifference, the attention of the entire salon was nevertheless fixed on him.

  Finally, at the last stroke of midnight, he uttered a more resounding snigger, bounded on to a sofa, and declared: “Messieurs, it’s exactly a year since I was rejected by the Académie. Illustrious, jealous individuals—you were one of them, Serviat—considered my paper on ‘The Abnormal Development of Organisms Favored by Culture Media’ as the work of a poorly equilibrated mind. Come on, look at me—do I look like a madman?”

  His tics had returned, more frightfully. Taking pity on him, fearing an attack that might cause him to fall down, I made a movement as if to catch him in my arms, but the particularly alarming expression of his eyes at that moment stopped me.

  He went on: “No, I’m not mad! I’m merely a misunderstood and insulted genius. And I’ll have my revenge, my good friends! I’ll savor a terrible revenge! Look! It’s beginning at this moment. In an hour’s time, I’ll open the door, and they’ll go forth, they’ll go forth! On your way, my lovely macrobes! On your way! Feast! There’s flesh! There’s blood! Flesh, and blood!”

  He was shouting. Dolorously amazed, we were already thinking about putting him in a straitjacket—but he calmed down somewhat, in order to address himself to a few of us for whom he seemed to have a particular hatred.

  “You, Commandant Junisseau, heave been spying on me: prepare your dirigible for flight! You, Dardant, your paper has ridiculed me; do you think you can laugh much longer? It’s my turn now! In a week’s time you’ll no longer have a single one of those readers whose minds you’ve perverted. You, Duverdon the banker, you’ve supported my competitors with your influence: quickly, close your counters, for you’ll have no clients...and in any case, the Bourse will be destroyed! You, Minister Vigueur, no more posts, no more telegraphs! You, Serviat, ha ha! you… prepare tons of fracassite! My children are going to eat you, Serviat On your way! On your way! They’re going forth! They’re going forth! On your way, my lovely macrobes!”

  Everyone around him had fallen silent, shivering with an instinctive fear, resulting not from the incomprehensible threats that the orator was uttering but from the malady that had afflicted him to such an extent. Monsieur Vernet tried to calm him down. He helped him to get down from the sofa and drew him gently toward the door.

  In any case, Tornada had suddenly calmed down again, and I was not far from thinking that he was trying to attenuate, by a reasonable attitude, the amazement and alarm that he had read on my fiancée’s face. As he went out he beckoned to us, and we followed him into the antechamber, drawn as if by a magnetism.

  There he put his hands together to make a plea.

  “My children, and you, Vernet, are the only ones I want to spare, so listen to my advice and follow it. I’m lucid, and I’m fonder of you than you can believe. Listen to me. Within a week, Paris will be devastated. There won’t be a single Frenchman left alive in a fortnight’s time. Flee! Flee! Arrange your affairs swiftly, and leave by the first steamer. Flee tomorrow! The day after, it will be too late!”

  “My good friend, would you like me to take you home?” Monsieur Vernet proposed.

  “He thinks I’m mad too!” Tornada lamented. “Oh, if I didn’t love you” Look, you know me, right? Reread my book. You know that my Micrococcus aspirator lives in alkaline environments, and that my culture media enable it to develop abnormally. So, then, what do you think, eh? If, all of a sudden…ha ha!”

  He became furiously exited again, brandishing his umbrella. “In an hour they go forth! Flesh screams! Blood flows! Everything crumbles! Flee!”

  He slipped away, without our being able to make a move to stop him and care for him. He plunged into the dim light of the boulevard. We went to the door and saw him go to an automobile without a chauffeur, into which he bounded, and drove off furiously.

  We went back to the drawing room, dolorously impressed. People there were laughing, without any commiseration for that brain afflicted with disequilibrium. Monsieur Serviat declared that a madhouse would collect him before much longer. Then we finished taking tea, talking about the threat of a railway strike that was causing Undersecretary Vigueur far more anxiety than Tornada’s predictions.

  III

  As soon as the soirée was over I went home. My ap
artment was in the Chaussée de la Muette, in the delightful quarter of Paris bordering the Bois de Boulogne. I plunged into my sheets, but although I was very tired, I could not go to sleep at first. A nagging thought was running through my head, which one word dropped into Tornada’s rambling summarized in its entirety.

  What was the meaning of the term “macrobe,” which he had pronounced several times? Not that I had any trouble establishing its etymology. Macrobe was obviously the term opposite to microbe, signifying very large, in the same way that the latter term signifies very small. It wasn’t necessary to be much of a Hellenist to deduce that. But how big had those animals been able to grow, assuming that the scientist really had developed them abnormally? Would they have a destructive effect as phenomenal as his sinister prophecy indicted?

  No! It would become slightly unhinged oneself even to dream of it. And I strove to drive away that stupid anxiety. As it did not cease to recur, I thought about my fiancée, and then about my automobile, which I had just changed in order to buy a more powerful one. My imagination placed Suzanne in the vehicle by my side, while Monsieur Vernet was in the back seat, and I finally departed for a delightful excursion that occupied my entire slumber.

  The next morning, I woke up feeling very spry. It required the perception of my newspaper to remind me of the incidents of the previous day. I opened it unhurriedly, without even searching for some sensational headline. Anyway, the rag contained nothing new, except that the railway strike was still threatening. I got dressed and had breakfast cheerfully, and went out under a radiant sky in order to go to the Institut Pasteur on foot.

  I felt less enthusiasm than usual to devote myself to my customary tasks that day. Those who love the atmosphere of a laboratory know the veritable satisfaction one experiences in going into rooms bathed with light, putting on the long white smock that is like a uniform for pupils and their masters alike, and sitting down amid the greetings of comrades at the glass-topped table garnished with the hundred various utensils whose precious mechanism and ingenious complication aids bacteriological research. In truth, I felt that I was a very small and very modest cog in the vast factory of health to which the great Pasteur gave the initial impetus, but it seemed that the scientist’s memory encouraged my efforts, and that his glorious past was prolonged in my humble labor.

  That day, as I said, I took longer than usual to make the journey. I would gladly have let myself idle. The weather was so conducive to dreaming, and nature was putting such seduction into everything! The young leaves on the trees had never been as green, the air was calm, as fluid as the celestial spaces. Everything was vibrant with the joy of spring, and the Seine, which I crossed by the Pont de la Concorde, deliberately extending my route in order to savor the terrestrial beauty more fully, was nothing but a vast crucible in which a thousand diamonds were glittering, given birth by a breeze that was adorable to breathe.

  My hopes as a fiancé came into unison with the tenderness scattered over the city; I saw myself a few months older—our marriage was arranged for the middle of August—holding Suzanne in my arms, walking beside the river, initiating her into the marvels of the great liquid way, renewed at every hour of the day, adopting, in accordance with the influence of the light—mist, sunshine, darkness, even rain and storms—such diverse and ever-seductive appearances. The quays silent or animated; the water peaceful with the slumber of boats, or noisy with the bustle of barges, the smoky and whistling passage of steamboats; the bridges crowded of deserted; the reflections of grave monuments or the pure profiles of domes, towers, belfries—yes, the whole river was a poem that I would read with Suzanne, and no power in the world, save for death, would be able to prevent me from traveling it with her.

  But I perceived that I was late. I hailed a cab; and, rapidly transported to the Institut Pasteur, I went through the door and reached my laboratory.

  As I went in I was surprised to find a highly unusual animation there. Twenty students were surrounding one of my colleagues, who was leaning over a microscope, listening to him pronounce words whose meaning I could not grasp, but to which bursts of laughter replied. I advanced toward them. It was only then that the name of Tornada, which was stimulating their gaiety, reached my ears and reminded me, with a disagreeable—even painful—sentiment, of the previous evening’s scene, to which I had not given another thought, so much had my thought built me an ivory tower inaccessible to the actions of others.

  “Here’s Gérard!” exclaimed my colleague, perceiving me. “You’ve arrived just in time, my dear friend, to give us your opinion. Put your eye to this microscope...”

  I did as I was asked; taking his place, I interrogated the field of the apparatus, which was extremely powerful. I saw there, moving between the two transparent slivers of the preparation, several animalcules of a form that was unknown to me. Magnified a thousand times, they presented a swollen central section with seeming extremities, one a tail and one a head, the latter rather elongated and endowed with a few vibratile movements. The ensemble was, moreover, rather confused, for one can imagine how tiny an animal is that has to be magnified to that extent for one to begin to make it out.

  “Do you recognize that dirty beast?” joked my colleague, addressing himself to me.

  “No.”

  “What might it be?” he asked, again.

  I consulted the objective again.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, no, my dear chap; it’s the famous Micrococcus aspirator of alkaline environments described by Tornada, which we’re trying to fatten up by means of his method. I believe, in truth, that we’ve only succeeded in making it thinner...”

  At the tone of his response, and the laughter that broke out around me, I thought he was trying to trick me, by presenting me with one of those microorganisms that abound in nature but that science has not yet classified. Although my research was not orientated in that direction, I did not want, even so, to appear ignorant, and I joined in with the gaiety. However, a sharp interior disturbance contradicted the amusement on my lips, and it was further accentuated when my knowledgeable comrade went on, more seriously: “Yes, that wretched little beast has remained inexorable to all our attempts; we’ve cared for it and pampered it for months on end, rigorously following Tornada’s method—but nothing; it gives its belly the cold shoulder; our cooking isn’t to its taste, and I firmly believe that Tornada’s paper is nothing but a joke in rather poor taste.”

  He turned to the students. “Messieurs let’s not waste any more of our time on this joke; let’s go on to other exercises. If I ever see Tornada again, I’ll ask him whether he’s making fun of the Institut Pasteur. To work, Messieurs!

  A few further ludicrous reflections by the pupils saluted the definitive burial of that research. One offered the straight-faced suggestion that the scientist ought to be trepanned in order to discover the microbes that were inspiring such delirium in his brain. Another proposed extracting therefrom a serum usable in the treatment of madness, although wisdom was also a very tedious malady. A third, finally, regretted the failure of the experiment, because it would have been amusing and lucrative to exhibit the Micrococcus aspirator in a menagerie.

  “Shutting Tornada in with it dressing him as an animal-tamer, eh? What receipts!”

  A new order from my colleague extinguished the juvenile jokes pitilessly, however. Soon, there was nothing to be heard in the room but the discreet noises of a laborious anthill.

  For my part, the failure of the scientist’s method, and the buffooneries that had been its consequence, had dissipated the malaise and the puerile presentiment that had oppressed me briefly. I started to smile at the vague dread to which the threats of the madman and Commandant Junisseau’s revelations concerning the giant laboratory had given a kind of logical consistency.

  I resumed my ordinary occupations serenely, and at six o’clock in the evening, satisfied with my day, I escaped from the Institut, like a bird drunk on liberty, in order to go to Monsieur Vern
et’s house the Boulevard de Sebastopol, where I was to dine.

  I was scarcely in the street when I heard a special edition being advertized. I approached the crier, and was able to read in the huge characters of the headline news that stupefied me:

  A scientific phenomenon! Public danger! Appearance of giant man-eating animals near Mantes!

  I could scarcely believe my ears. I bought the paper and discovered, in no time, quite simply what the newsvendor had just been howling. The paper gave no further details, and the few lines that related the circumstance would have passed unnoticed if the headline had not printed them in such large letters.

  I must confess that a little frisson ran through me at first, but the idea occurred to me at the same time that Dardant, the editor of the Parisien, had heard Tornada’s declaration, and that he was occasionally wont to print “hoaxes”—a hoax excusable on this occasion, to deflect attention from worries about the impending strike. Those reflections reassured me.

  I took the Metro, and became even more confident when, having reached the great boulevards, I observed that my opinion was shared by the public. On the sidewalks, on the terraces of the cafés, everywhere, people were reading the newspaper and welcoming the dispatch with bursts of laughter and shrugs.

  I bought a bouquet, and it was with a light heart that I crossed my future father-in-law’s threshold. I kissed my fiancée’s hand and gave her my flowers, and we sat down at the dining-table. That family meal, with its admirable intimacy, distanced me so completely from the external world that it was only at dessert that I thought of unfolding the Parisien to show her the news.

  It produced the same effect on Suzanne as it had had on me. It seemed to her to be an amusing invention, significant of Dardant’s prodigious mercantile talent. But as Monsieur Vernet remained pensive, I was surprised, and asked him what he was thinking.