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. Rovere--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
Societe 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 classe_,
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 _classe_, 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. Rovere'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.