the room, soiling and breaking everything; the stove, black with smoke, looked as if it had not been lit for months, and the heap of cold ashes which filled it had partly fallen out on to the floor: the copper of the apparatus was all bent, the glass broken: the phials and bottles on the shelves shivered into a thousand bits, lay piled in a comer, like those heaps of broken crockery one sees in slums; the shelves themselves were hanging down, as if they had been torn from their supports by some furious hand: as for the books and manuscripts, they were strewn, tom and half burnt, in another corner. And this wreck was not of yesterday; the laboratory seemed to have been devastated for a considerable time; huge spider-webs hung from the ceiling, and a thick layer of dust covered the rubbish that lay scattered everywhere.
At the sight of such destruction, William felt an oppression at his heart. He thought he could account for it. His father had formerly spoken to him of science with secret jealousy and bitter irony. He must have looked on it as a lewd and cruel mistress sapping his life-blood with her charms: and so, from tenderness for her, and disdain for the world, he would have no one take her after him. And the young man drew a sad picture of the day when the old philosopher, seized with rage, had wrecked his laboratory. He could see him kicking the apparatus against the walls, smashing the phials on the floor, wrenching down the shelves, and tearing and burning his manuscripts. An hour, a few minutes perhaps, had been enough to destroy the researches of a lifetime. Then, when not one of his discoveries, not one of his observations remained, when he had found himself standing alone in the midst of his laboratory in ruins, he must have sat down and wiped his face with a terrible smile.
What horrified William above everything, was the thought of the frightful days which the man had passed afterwards, buried in this room, this tomb where slept his life, his toils, his loves. For months, he had shut himself up here as before, touching nothing, walking up and down, lost in the nothingness that he thought he had found. He would crush beneath his feet the fragments of his beloved instruments, he would kick away disdainfully the scraps of his manuscripts, the broken pieces of the phials that still contained a few atoms of the substances that he had analysed or discovered: or he would finish the work of destruction, upsetting a vessel still full, or giving a last stamp to an apparatus. What thoughts of supreme disdain, what bitter jeers, what a longing for death must have risen to his powerful mind, during the long hours that he spent in idleness musing on the self-made ruins of his labour!
Nothing remained. As William went round the room, he noticed at last, however, an object which his father’s hand had spared; it was a sort of cupboard fastened in the wall, a little bookcase with glass doors containing small bottles full of liquids of different colours. The count, who had taken great interest in toxicology, had kept there certain violent poisons still unknown, and discovered by himself. The little bookshelf had come from a sitting-room on the ground-floor where William remembered to have seen it in his childhood; it was of foreign wood, ornamented at the corners with brass, and very chastely inlaid at the sides. This costly bit of furniture, of rich and wonderful workmanship, would not have disfigured a pretty woman’s boudoir. The count had dipped his finger in the ink and written the word “Poisons” on each pane, in big black letters.
William was deeply touched at his father’s cruel irony in preserving from all harm this cupboard and its contents. The whole life, the whole range of knowledge of the count was concentrated there, in a few phials of new poisons. He had destroyed his other discoveries, those which might have been useful, and out of his vast researches, out of the labours of his powerful mind, had bequeathed to humanity merely a few agents of suffering and death. This hit at learning, this sinister mockery, this disdain for mankind, this last avowal of sorrow, showed clearly what the death-agony of this man must have been, who after fifty years of study seemed to have found in his retorts nothing but the few drops of the drug with which he had poisoned himself.
William fell back to the door. Fright and disgust were driving him out. This filthy room, full of nameless rubbish, with its spider webs and its thick dust, exhaled a fetid odour which almost made him sick. The dirty heaps of broken bottles and old papers lying in the corners, seemed to him the filth of that science from which the count had estranged him, and which he seemed to have scornfully swept aside before dying, as one puts to the door a vile creature that one loves, with a contempt still full of longing desires. And as he opened the door of this poison cupboard, he fancied he could hear the pained laugh of the old chemist as he meditated for months on his suicide. Then, in the middle of the laboratory, he shuddered as he saw the narrow streak of blood which had come from his father’s skull and trickled right under the stove. He could see too that this blood was beginning to clot.
Meantime the doctor was rummaging about. The moment he had crossed the threshold, he had understood all, and he had become really angry.
“What a man! what a man,” he murmured. “He has destroyed everything, broken everything — Oh! if I had been there, I would have chained him up as a furious madman.” —
And turning towards William he went on:
“Your father was a very clever man. He must have made some wonderful discoveries. And see what he has left. It is madness, sheer madness — Can you understand it? A scholar who might have been a member of the Institute and yet preferred to keep to himself the result of his labours! Still, if I unearth one of his manuscripts, I will publish it, and it will be an honour both to him and myself.”
He went and groped about among the heap of papers, regardless of the dust; but he soon began to moan:
“Nothing, not a single whole page. I never saw such a madman.”
When he had visited the pile of papers, he passed on to the heap of broken bottles, and there continued to moan and cry out. He put his nose to the broken necks of the phials, sniffing, trying to discover the chemist’s secrets.
At last he came back to the middle of the room, furious at not having been able to learn anything. It was then that he noticed the cupboard containing the poisons. He rushed towards it with a shout of joy. But the key was not in the lock, and he had to be content with examining the phials through the panes.
“Sir,” he said seriously, addressing himself to William, “I beg you as a favour to allow me to analyse these substances.
I address this request to you in the name of science, in the name too of the memory of Monsieur de Viargue.”
The young man shook his head, and pointing to the rubbish which strewed the floor, he replied:
“You see, my father has wished to leave no trace of his labours. Those phials shall remain there.”
The doctor insisted, but he could not break his resolution. He began to walk round the laboratory again, more exasperated than ever. When he came to the streak of blood, he stopped and asked if this blood was Monsieur de Viargue’s.
When William replied in the affirmative, his face seemed to brighten. He bent down by the pool which had formed under the stove; then, with the tips of his nails, he tried, with delicate care, to detach a clot already almost dry. He hoped to be able, by submitting this blood to a minute analysis, to discover what poisonous agent the count had used.
When William understood for what object he was doing this, he advanced towards him with quivering lips, and, taking him by the arm, said to him in a peremptory tone:
“Come, sir, you can see very well that the place is stifling me — We must not disturb the peace of the dead. Let that blood alone. I insist on it.”
The doctor left the clot with very bad grace. Urged on by the young man, he went out under protest. William, who had waited for him a moment with feverish impatience, breathed at last when he was in the passage. He shut the door of the laboratory, quite disposed to keep the oath which he had taken to his father never to set foot in it.
When he got downstairs, he found in the drawingroom on the ground-floor a magistrate from Véteuil. This gentleman explained to him, in a courteous tone, however, that he had come to put the seals on the deceased’s papers, in case a legal will could not be shown him. He even had the delicacy to give the young man to understand that he was aware of the bond of relationship between him and the deceased, of his title of adoptive son, and to say that