Читать книгу The Crime of the Boulevard - Jules Claretie - Страница 7

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Some time passed before the arrival of the Attorney, and through the closed Venetian blinds the murmurs of the crowd collected below could be heard. The Commissary wrote his report on the corner of a table, by the light of a single candle, and now and then asked for some detail of Bernardet, who seemed very impatient. A heavy silence had fallen on the room; those who a short time before had exchanged observations in loud tones, since the Commissary had finished with Mme. Moniche had dropped their voices and spoke in hushed tones, as if they were in a sick room. Suddenly a bell rang, sending shrill notes through the silent room. Bernardet remarked that no doubt, the Attorney had arrived. He looked at his watch, a simple, silver Geneva watch, but which he prized highly—a present from his wife—and murmured:

"There is yet time." It was, in fact, the Attorney for the Republic, who came in, accompanied by the Examining Magistrate, M. Ginory, whom criminals called "the vise," because he pressed them so hard when he got hold of them. M. Ginory was in the Attorney's office when the officer had telephoned to M. Jacquelin des Audrays, and the latter had asked him to accompany him to the scene of the murder. Bernardet knew them both well. He had more than once been associated with M. Audrays. He also knew M. Ginory as a very just, a very good man, although he was much feared, for, while searching for the truth of a matter he reserved judgment of those whom he had fastened in his vise. M. Audrays was still a young man, slender and correct, tightly buttoned up in his redingote, smooth-shaven, wearing eyeglasses.

The red ribbon in his buttonhole seemed a little too large, like a rosette worn there through coquetry. M. Ginory, on the contrary, wore clothes too large for him; his necktie was tied as if it was a black cord; his hat was half brushed; he was short, stout and sanguine, with his little snub nose and his mouth, with its heavy jaws. He seemed, beside the worldly magistrate, like a sort of professor, or savant, or collector, who, with a leather bag stuffed with books, seemed more fitted to pore over some brochures or precious old volumes than to spend his time over musty law documents. Robust and active, with his fifty-five years, he entered that house of crime as an expert topographist makes a map, and who scarcely needs a guide, even in an unknown country. He went straight to the body, which, as we have said, lay between the two front windows, and both he and M. Audrays stood a moment looking at it, taking in, as had the others, all the details which might serve to guide them in their researches. The Attorney for the Republic asked the Commissary if he had made his report, and the latter handed it to him. He read it with satisfied nods of his head; during this time Bernardet had approached M. Ginory, saluted him and asked for a private interview with a glance of his eye; the Examining Magistrate understood what he meant.

"Ah! Is it you, Bernardet? You wish to speak to me?"

"Yes, Monsieur Ginory. I beg of you to get the body to the dissecting room for the autopsy as soon as possible." He had quietly and almost imperceptibly drawn the Magistrate away toward a window, away from the reporters, who wished to hear every word that was uttered, where he had him quite by himself, in a corner of the room near the library door.

"There is an experiment which must be tried, Monsieur, and it ought to tempt a man like you," he said.

Bernardet knew very well that, painstaking even to a fault, taken with any new scientific discoveries, with a receptive mind, eager to study and to learn, M. Ginory would not refuse him any help which would aid justice. Had not the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences crowned, the year before, M. Ginory's book on "The Duties of a Magistrate to the Discoveries of Science?"

The word "experiment" was not said in order to frighten M. Ginory.

"What do you mean by that, Bernardet?" the Magistrate asked. Bernardet shook his head as if to intimate that the explanation was too long to give him there. They were not alone. Some one might hear them. And if a journal should publish the strange proposition which he wished to——

"Ah! Ah!" exclaimed the Examining Magistrate, "then it is something strange, your experiment?"

"Any Magistrate but you would think it wild, unreasonable, or ridiculous, which is worse. But you—oh! I do not say it to flatter you, Monsieur," quickly added the police officer, seeing that the praise troubled this man, who always shrank from it. "I speak thus because it is the very truth, and any one else would treat me as crack-brained. But you—no!"

M. Ginory looked curiously at the little man, whose attitude was humble and even supplicating, and seemed to seek a favorable response, and whose eyes sparkled and indicated that his idea was no common one.

"What is that room there?" asked M. Ginory, pointing to the half-open library door.

"It is the study of M. Rovère—the victim"—

— "Let us go in there," said M. Ginory.

In this room no one could hear them; they could speak freely. On entering, the Examining Magistrate mechanically cast his eye over the books, stopping at such and such a title of a rare work, and, seating himself in a low, easy chair, covered with Caramanie, he made a sign to the police officer to speak. Bernardet stood, hat in hand, in front of him.

"M. le Juge," Bernardet began, "I beg your pardon for asking you to grant me an interview. But, allowing for the difference in our positions, which is very great, I am, like you, a scholar; very curious. I shall never belong to the Institute, and you will"——

"Go on, Bernardet."

"And you will belong to it, M. Ginory, but I strive also, in my lower sphere, to keep myself au courant with all that is said and with all that is written. I was in the service of the Academy when your beautiful work was crowned, and when the perpetual secretary spoke of those Magistrates who knew how to unite the love of letters with a study of justice; I thought that lower down, much lower down on the ladder, M. le Juge, he might have also searched for and found some men who studied to learn and to do their best in doing their duty."

"Ah! I know you, Bernardet. Your chief has often spoken of you."

"I know that M. Leriche is very good to me. But it is not for me to boast of that. I wish only to inspire confidence in you, because what I wish to say to you is so strange—so very strange"——

Bernardet suddenly stopped. "I know," he began, "that if I were to say to a physician what I am about to say to you he would think I ought to be shut up in Sainte-Anne. And yet I am not crazy, I beg of you to believe. No! but I have searched and searched. It seems to me that there is a mass of inventions, of discoveries, which we police officers ought to make use of. And, although I am a sub-Inspector"——

"Go on! Go on!" said the Magistrate, quickly, with a movement of the head toward the open door of the salon, where the Attorney for the Republic was conducting the investigation, and his nod seemed to say: "They are at work in there—let us make haste."

"I will be as brief as possible," said Bernardet, who understood what he meant.

"Monsieur," (and his tone became rapid, precise, running up and down like a ball), "thirty years, or, rather, to be exact, twenty-six years ago, some American journals, not political, but scientific, published the fact that the daguerrotype—we have made long strides since then in photography—had permitted them to find in the retina of a murdered man's eye the image of the one who struck him."

"Yes, I know," said M. Ginory.

"In 1860, I was too young, and I had no desire to prove the truth of this discovery. I adore photography as I adore my profession. I pass my leisure hours in taking instantaneous pictures, in developing them, printing, and finishing them. The idea of what I am about to propose to you came to me by chance. I bought upon one of the quays a volume of the Societé de Medicine Legale of 1869, in which Dr. Vernois gives an account of a communication sent to the society by a physician, who also sent photographic proofs, thus indorsed: 'Photographs taken of the retina of a woman assassinated the 14th of June, 1868.'"

"Yes," again said M. Ginory. "It was a communication from Dr. Bourion, of Darnez."

"Precisely."

"And the proof sent by the Doctor showed the instant when, after striking the mother, the assassin killed the child, while the dog sprang toward the little carriage in which the little one lay."

"Yes, Monsieur Ginory."

"Oh, well, but my poor Bernardet, Dr. Vernois, since you have read his report"——

"By chance, Monsieur, I found it on a book stall and it has kept running in my head ever since, over and over and over again."

"Dr. Vernois, my poor fellow, made many experiments. At first the proof sent was so confused, so hazy, that no one who had not seen what Bourion had written could have told what it was. If Vernois, who was a very scientific man, could find nothing—nothing, I repeat—which justified Dr. Bourion's declarations, what do you expect that any one else could make of those researches? Do not talk any more or even think any more about it."

"I beg your pardon, Monsieur Ginory; one can and ought to think about it. In any case, I am thinking about it."

A smile of doubt crossed M. Ginory's lips. Bernardet quickly added: "Photography of the invisible has been proven. Are not the Roentgen Rays, the famous X Rays, as incredible as that photography can find the image of a murderer on the retina of a dead person's eye? They invent some foolish things, those Americans, but they often presage the truth. Do they not catch, by photography, the last sighs of the dying? Do they not fix upon the film or on plates that mysterious thing which haunts us, the occult? They throw bridges across unknown abysses as over great bodies of water or from one precipice to another, and they reach the other side. I beg your pardon, Monsieur," and the police officer stopped short in his enthusiastic defence as he caught sight of M. Ginory's astonished face; "I seem to have been making a speech, a thing I detest."

"Why do you say that to me? Because I looked astonished at what you have told me? I am not only surprised, I am charmed. Go on! Go on!"

"Oh! well, what seemed folly yesterday will be an established fact to-morrow. A fact is a fact. Dr. Vernois had better have tested again and again his contradictory experiments. Dr. Bourion's experiments had preceded his own. If Dr. Vernois saw nothing in the picture taken of the retina of the eye of the woman assassinated June 14, 1868, I have seen something—yes, I have seen with a magnifying glass, while studying thoroughly the proof given to the society and reproduced in the bulletin of Volume I., No. 2, of 1870; I have seen deciphered the image which Dr. Bourion saw, and which Dr. Vernois did not see. Ah! it was confused, the proof was hazy. It was scarcely recognizable, I confess. But there are mirrors which are not very clear and which reflect clouded vision; nevertheless, the image is there. And I have seen, or what one calls seen, the phantom of the murderer which Dr. Bourion saw, and which escaped the eyes of the member of the Academy of Medicine and of the Hygiene Council, Honorary Physician of the Hospital, if you please."

M. Ginory, who had listened to the officer with curiosity, began to laugh, and remarked to Bernardet that, according to this reasoning, illustrated medical science would find itself sacrificed to the instinct, the divination of a provincial physician, and that it was only too easy to put the Academicians in the wrong and the Independents in the right.

"Oh, Monsieur, pardon; I put no one in the right or wrong. Dr. Bourion believed that he had made a discovery. Dr. Vernois was persuaded that Dr. Bourion had discovered nothing at all. Each had the courage of his conviction. What I contest is that, for twenty-six years, no one has experimented, no one has made any researches, since the first experiment, and that Dr. Bourion's communication has been simply dropped and forgotten."

"I ask your pardon in my turn, Bernardet," replied M. Ginory, a little quizzically. "I have also studied the question, which seems to me a curious"——

"Have you photographed any yourself, M. Ginory?"

"No."

"Ah! There is where the proof is."

"But in 1877, the very learned Doyen of the Academy of Medicine, M. Brouardel, whose great wisdom, and whose sovereign opinion was law, one of those men who is an honor to his country, told me that when he was in Heidelberg he had heard Professor Kuhne say that he had studied this same question; he had made impressions of the retina of the eye in the following cases: After the death of a dog or a wolf, he had taken out the eye and replaced it with the back part of the eye in front; then he took a very strong light and placed it in front of the eye and between the eye and the light he placed a small grating. This grating, after an exposure of a quarter of an hour, was visible upon the retina. But those are very different experiments from the ones one hears of in America."

"They could see the bars in the grating? If that was visible, why could not the visage of the murderer be found there?"

"Eh! Other experiments have been attempted, even after those of which Professor Kuhne told our compatriot. Every one, you understand, has borne only negative results, and M. Brouardel could tell you, better than I, that in the physiological and oculistic treatises, published during the last ten years, no allusion has been made to the preservation of the image on the retina after death. It is an affair classé, Bernardet."

"Ah! Monsieur, yet"—and the police officer hesitated. Shaking his head, he again repeated: "Yet—yet!"

"You are not convinced?"

"No, Monsieur Ginory, and shall I tell you why? You, yourself, in spite of the testimony of illustrious savants, still doubt. I pray you to pardon me, but I see it in your eyes."

"That is still another way to use the retina," said Ginory, laughing. "You read one's thoughts."

"No, Monsieur, but you are a man of too great intelligence to say to yourself that there is nothing in this world classé, that every matter can be taken up again. The idea has come to me to try the experiment if I am permitted. Yes, Monsieur, those eyes, did you see them, the eyes of the dead man? They seemed to speak; they seemed to see. Their expression is of lifelike intensity. They see, I tell you, they see! They perceive something which we cannot see, and which is frightful. They bear—and no one can convince me to the contrary—they bear on the retina the reflection of the last being whom the murdered man saw before he died. They keep it still, they still retain that image. They are going to hold an autopsy; they will tell us that the throat is cut. Eh! Parbleu! We know it well. We see it for ourselves. Moniche, the porter, knows it as well as any doctor. But when one questions those eyes, when one searches in that black chamber where the image appears as on a plate, when one demands of those eyes their secret, I am convinced that one will find it."

"You are obstinate, Bernardet."

"Yes, very obstinate, Monsieur Ginory, and very patient. The pictures which I took with my kodak will give us the expression, the interior, so to speak; those which we would take of the retina would reveal to us the secret of the agony. And, moreover, unless I deceive myself, what danger attends such an experiment? One opens the poor eyes, and that is sinister, certainly, but when one holds an autopsy at the Morgue, when one enlarges the gash in the throat in order to study it, when one dissects the body, is it any more respectful or proper? Ah! Monsieur, if I but had your power"——

M. Ginory seemed quite struck with all that the police officer had said to him, but while he still held to his convictions, he did not seem quite averse to trying the experiment. Who can say to science "Halt!" and impose upon it limits which cannot be passed? No one!

"We will see, Bernardet."

And in that "we will see" there was already a half promise.

"Ah! if you only will, and what would it cost you?" added Bernardet, still urgent; indeed, almost suppliant.

"Let us finish this now. They are waiting for me," said the Examining Magistrate.

As he left M. Rovère's study, he instinctively cast a glance at the rare volumes, with their costly bindings, and he reentered the salon where M. Jacquelin des Audrays had, without doubt, finished his examination.