I opened my eyes on thick darkness in a place where there was neither noise nor smell.

I wanted to say once more, “Do not begin, I am still awake,” but no word sounded.

The delirium of the night was being prolonged. It seemed to me that the bellowing had got nearer, so much so, indeed, that I seemed to hear it in myself. I could not manage to master my ridiculous senses. I kept quiet.

Then there grew in me the assurance that the mysterious business was at an end.

Gradually the darkness lightened. Unconsciousness was coming to an end.

As my blindness got better, smells and sounds, ever in greater number, were like a welcomed crowd coming towards me.

“Oh, happiness, to remain thus—thus for ever!”

But this inverse death struggle came ever on in spite of me, and life seized me once more.

However, objects, though now distinct, remained shapeless, without perspective, and curiously colored.

My vision embraced a wide space—a field vaster than before. I remembered that the influence of certain anesthetics on the dilatation of the pupil, a phenomenon which no doubt brought on these disturbances of sight.

I noted, however, without very much difficulty, that they had lifted me from the table, and laid me on the ground, on the other side of the room, and in spite of my eye, which functioned like a distorting lens, I succeeded in recognizing the situation.

The curtain was no longer drawn.

Lerne and his assistants, grouped round the operating table, were busy about something which their grouping hid from me—probably the cleaning of instruments.

Through the wide-opened door, one could see the park, and hardly twenty yards away, a corner of the paddock, where the cows were ruminating and lowing.

Only, I might have imagined myself transported into the most revolutionary picture of the impressionist school. The azure of the sky, without losing its limpid depths, had changed into a fine orange dye. The paddocks—the trees—instead of being green seemed to me to be red. The buttercups of the meadow, starred vermilion grass with violets.

Everything had changed color, except, however, the black and white things. The dark trousers of the four men obstinately remained as before, as also their overalls, but those white overalls were marked with green stains.

Green stains were also shining on the ground, and what could this liquid be except blood, and what was there astonishing in its appearing green, since greenery gave me the sense of red?

This liquid exhaled a pungent smell, which would have driven me far away, if I had been capable of budging, and yet, the smell was not that which I had been accustomed to associate with blood.

I had never smelt it, any more than those other perfumes, or any more than my ears remembered having heard sounds like these.

It was strange that the aberration of my senses had not been dissipated along with the vapors of the ether. I endeavored to fight against this feeling of numbness. No use! They had stretched me out on a litter of straw, of purple straw.

The operators kept their backs turned to me, except Johann.

Every now and again, Lerne flung into the basin cotton-wool stained with green blood....

Johann was the first to perceive my awaking, and he told the Professor of it. There was then a movement of general curiosity with regard to me, which, breaking up the group, allowed me to see an absolutely naked man bound to the table, with his hands under it—motionless and white, the color of wax, like a corpse, the blackness of his mustache making the paleness still paler, and his head, enveloped in bandages bedabbled with spurts of green.

His breast rose rhythmically. He was breathing in the air with all his lungs, his nostrils quivering with each inhalation. This man—it took me some time to accept it—was myself.

When I was certain that no mirror was giving me back my own image, which was an easy matter to settle, it came into my mind that Lerne had doubled my being, and that now I was two....

Or else, was I not dreaming?

No, assuredly not, but up to now the adventure had not got beyond the bizarre stage. I was neither dead nor mad, and the evidence of this cheered me mightily.

(Protest as one may against the conviction which I felt of possessing all my reason, the future was to confirm this rash judgment.)

The man on the operating-table shook his head. Wilhelm had unfastened him, and I beheld my other self awaking to a faint-like condition.

Opening eyes like those of a blind man, he waggled his head about with an idiotic air, stroked the edges of the table and sat up.

He did not look at all well. I could not accept the idea that my double should behave so like a brute beast.

They laid the patient in the little truckle-bed. He allowed himself to be patted; but soon he was convulsed with painful vomiting proving beyond doubt the total absence of communication between him and me, since I suffered in no wise from his troubles, except mentally, and through the effect of a feeling of compassion, which was very natural, towards a gentleman who was so very like myself.

Like! Was that only a replica of my body, or was it really my body?

Bosh! Absurd! I could feel, see and hear—very badly, it is true, but enough in any case to convince myself that I possessed a nose, eyes and ears.

I made an effort, and cords cut into my limbs, so I had flesh—flabby and benumbed, but still flesh. My body was here, and not there.

The Professor announced that he was going to unbind me. The hempen thongs were undone. I rose with one shake, and a complex impression spread terror into my soul and made it sink.

Good Heavens! how heavy I was, and how short. I wished to look at myself, and there was nothing below my head, and as I bent it more, with great trouble, I saw, instead of my feet, two cloven hoofs which ended black and knotty legs covered with thick hair!

A cry arose in my throat!...

And it was that nocturnal bellowing which broke out in my mouth, making the house shake, and echoing far away amongst the inaccessible rocks.

“Hold your tongue, Jupiter,” said Lerne, “you are annoying poor Nicolas there, who needs rest,” and he pointed out my body, which had raised itself in alarm on the bed.

So I was the black bull! Lerne, that loathsome magician had changed me into a beast!

He abandoned himself to brutal enjoyment. The three servile ruffians held their sides and guffawed, and my ox’s eyes learned to weep.

“Well,” said the sorcerer, as if replying to the rush of my thoughts. “Well, yes, you are Jupiter, but you have a right to ask me more.”

“Here is your birth certificate. You were born in Spain, in a celebrated ganaderia, and you come from famous parents, whose male posterity falls gloriously with a sword at their throat, on the sand of the bull-rings. I rescued you from the bandarillos of the toreadors, your pedigree suiting my purpose, and paid a high price for you—you and the cows. You cost me two thousand piastres, exclusive of carriage.“You were born five years and two months ago, so you can live as long again—no more; if we let you die of old age.

“To sum up, I bought you in order to try some experiments on your organism. This is only the first one.” My facetious relative was seized with an attack of uncontrollable laughter. When he had exhausted his superfluous gayety, he went on:

“Ah, ha! Nicolas! you are all right aren’t you? You are not at all uncomfortable? I am sure your curiosity, you son of woman, your infernal curiosity, must be keeping you up and I bet that you are less annoyed than interested. Come! I am a kindly chap, and since you are discreet now, my dear ward, listen to the information which you desire.

“Did I not say to you, ‘The time is drawing near when you shall know all?’ Nicolas, you are now going to know all, and indeed it would not please me to pass as a devil—a miracle-monger, or a sorcerer. I am neither Belphegor, nor Moses, nor Merlin—I am just Lerne, tout court! My power does not come from the outside, it is my own, and I am proud of it. It is my science. All that one could say by way of correction, is, that it is the science of humanity, which I have continued in my day, and of which I am the most advanced pioneer and chief master.“But, do not let us be conceited! Do the bandages stop up your ears? Can you hear me?”

I made a sign with my head.

“Well, listen, then, and do not roll your eyes about—all will be explained.”

Good Lord! we are not in Wonderland.

The assistants were cleaning and arranging the instruments. My body was asleep and snoring.

Lerne dragged his stool up beside me, and sat down, with his mouth on a level with my ear, and discoursed in the following terms:

“To begin with, my nephew, I was wrong a moment ago, in calling you ‘Jupiter.’ To use words in an exact way, I have not metamorphosed you into a bull, and you are still Nicolas Vermont, for the name denotes, above all, the personality which is the soul and not the body.

“As, on the one hand, you have kept your soul, and as, on the other, the soul has its seat in the brain, it is easy for you to argue by induction, in the presence of those surgical instruments, that I have just exchanged Jupiter’s brain with yours and that it now lives in your cast-off body.

“You will probably say, Nicolas, that it is a disgusting pleasantry on my part!

“You do not divine either the supreme object of my studies, nor the series of ideas which has inspired them, and yet, from this logical series is derived this little pleasantry derived from Ovid; but it is possible that it means nothing to you, for I have only gone in for this by the way.

“We will call it, if you like, a workshop joke!

“No, my ultimate aim does not reveal itself in this form—a funny and malicious one, you will admit, but puerile, without any results social or industrial that can be exploited.

“My aim is the ‘introversion’ of human personalities, which I have endeavored to achieve, in the first place, by the interchange of brains.

“You know my inveterate passion for flowers! I have always cultivated them with the utmost enthusiasm. My earlier life was absorbed by my profession, which was interrupted only on Sundays with this recreation—a day’s gardening.

“Well, the hobby influenced my profession. Grafting influenced my surgery, and in the hospital I was inclined to give myself up more especially to animal grafting. I became a specialist in that, and grew fond of it, finding in my clinics the enthusiasm of the hothouse.

“Even in the beginning I had dimly foreseen a point of contact between animal and vegetable grafts—a hyphen which my logically conducted labors made clear some time ago.... I will return to that.

“When I took up animal grafting with enthusiasm, this branch of surgery was languishing. In fact, ever since the Hindoos of antiquity, who were the first grafters, it had remained stationary.

“But perhaps you forget its underlying principles. That doesn’t matter. Learn them afresh. They are based, Nicolas, on this fact, that animal tissues possess, each of them, a personal vitality, and that the body of an animal is only the milieu adapted to the life of those tissues—a milieu from which they may be removed, and live for a more or less long time.

“1. Don’t the nails and the hair grow after death? You are not ignorant of that. They survive.

“2. A man who has been dead for fifty-four hours, and has left no descendants, still fulfills the chief condition for remedying that. Unfortunately, other essential faculties are wanting. But I will pass on.

“3. In certain conditions of humidity, oxygenation and heat, scientists have been able to keep a rat’s tail, which had been cut off, alive for seven days; an amputated finger, for four hours. At the end of those periods they were dead, but if during those seven days or those four hours, they had been cleverly glued on again, they would have continued to live.

“This is the procedure employed by the Hindoos, who thus restored to their places reintegrated noses that had been cut off by way of punishment, or if those appanages had been burnt, they replaced them by noses made of flesh and skin, taken, my dear Nicolas, from another part of the anatomy of the man who had been punished.

“The operation thus effected goes into the first category of animal grafting, and consists in transplanting a part of the individual to himself.

“The second consists of joining together two animals, by two wounds which coalesce. One can then cut off from first, the fragment of his person nearest the point of junction, which thereafter will live upon the second.

“The third consists of transplanting, without any attachment, a part of one animal to another animal, always in such a way that it preserves its own life. That is the most elegant way of the three, and the one which has attracted me.

“The operation was regarded as a ticklish one, for many reasons, the principal one of which is, that a grafting is less likely to succeed the further removed the two subjects are from one another in the scale of relationship.

“Grafting succeeds when it is done on the same animal; less well from father to son, and worse and worse from brother to brother, from cousin to cousin, from Frenchman to Spaniard, man to woman, and child to old man.

“When I came on the scene, the exchange I am talking about always came to naught in different zoÖlogical families, and more so still in the case of genera and species.

“However, some experiments are an exception to this—experiments on which I have based my own, wishing to accomplish the greater thing, before successfully accomplishing the lesser, and to graft a fish on a bird before dealing with humanity alone. I say a few experiments.

“1. Wiesmann tore from his arm a canary’s feather, which he had transplanted into it a month before, and which left a little bleeding wound.

“2. Baronio has grafted the wing of a canary, and the tail of a rat on the comb of a cock.

“This was not much, but Nature herself encouraged me.

“3. Birds cross without any shame, and produce numerous hybrids, which bear witness to the possibility of fusion between species.

“4. Then, getting further away from man, vegetables have considerable plastic force.

“Such, reduced to its simplest expression, is the summary of the situation in the presence of which I found myself, and on which I staked all.

“I came here to work more comfortably, and almost immediately I performed remarkable operations, which became very famous. One more especially. I wonder if you remember it?

“X, the Pickle-King, the American millionaire, had only one ear, and desired to have a pair of them. A poor devil sold him one of his for five thousand dollars. I performed the little ceremony. The grafted ear only died with X two years later, when he succumbed to indigestion.

“It was then, when the world was applauding my triumph, and just as the very moment when love, having come on the scene, was urging me to make money, in order that Emma should live a life of luxury—it was just then that I conceived my great idea, which proceeded from this reasoning:

“If a millionaire, dissatisfied with his physique, pays five thousand dollars for the pleasure of embellishing it a little, what would he not give for changing it altogether, and acquire a new body for his ego, for his brain—a covering full of grace, vigor and youth, in place of an old sickly and repulsive casing!

“On the other hand, how many beggars I know would give up their magnificent anatomy for a few years of jollification!

“And observe, Nicolas, this purchase of a young body would not only furnish advantages of suppleness, warmth and endurance, but also the enormous advantage that in a youthful milieu, the transferred organs are rejuvenated.

“Oh! I am not the first to advance this theory, and Paul Bert, admitted the possibility of grafting an organ on several consecutive bodies, as each of these latter grow old, so that by a series of rejuvenations, he foresaw that one might make the same stomach, the same brain live indefinitely—as an integral part of successive constitutions. This was tantamount to declaring that a personality can live indefinitely, by a series of incarnations, in a journey through different carcasses, each discarded at the proper moment.

“The discovery to be made surpassed my hopes. I was not only pursuing the choice of a pleasing outward appearance—I had my hand on the secret of IMMORTALITY!

“The brain being the seat of the ego (for you know that the spinal cord is only a transmitter, and a center of reflexes), the only question was ability to graft.

“Certainly the ear is one thing and the brain another and yet this difference is only a question of the degrees which separate:

“1. Cartilaginous matter from the nerve matter, and

“2. The accessory from the principal organ.

“Logic backed up my conviction, and my reasoning was based on famous premises officially verified.

“1. Besides their grafts of mucous membrane, skin, etc., in 1861, Phillippeaux and Vulpian replaced the nerve matter in an optic nerve.

“2. In 1880, Gluck exchanged a few centimeters of sciatic nerve in a hen for a rabbit’s nerves.“3. In 1890, Thompson removed a few cubic centimeters of brain from dogs and cats, and into the cavity thus obtained, introduced the same quantity of cerebral substance taken from dogs and cats, or from different species. Here we have passed from cartilage to nerve, and from ear to fragment of brain.

“Let us now turn to the difficulty of the second order:

“1. Gardeners often graft whole organisms.

“2. Besides fingers, tails and paws, Phillippeaux and Mantegazza grafted rather important organs—spleens, stomachs and tongues. They made a hen into a cock as a joke, they even tried to graft the pancreas and the thyroid.

“3. Carrel and Guthrey, in 1905, in New York, came to believe that they can substitute the veins of the arteries of animals for those of man. We have bridged the distance between the accessory and the principal.

“4. Finally, Mantegazza maintained that he had grafted spinal cords and brains of frogs!

“These examples were ample proof that my projects were realizable, so I said to myself I would realize them.

“I began my task. An obstacle was in the way!

“It being impracticable to employ an ‘attachment,’ it resulted that the body and the brain, once separated, perished, one or other, or both, before having been placed in contact with their new companions.

“But here again facts gave me courage. So far as the body is concerned:

“1. An animal can live quite well with one cerebral lobe. You saw a pigeon circling round, which has been deprived of three-fourths of its brain!

“2. Often decapitated ducks fly for a hundred yards from the block on which their severed head remains.

“3. A locust lived for fifteen days without a head—fifteen!

“That is an experiment duly attested.

“So far as the severed organ is concerned, there were these certified cases.

“This persuaded me that the brain and the body, if properly treated, would be able to live, each independently, for the few minutes of separation which the work requires. However that may be, the necessary slowness of trepanning induced me as a rule to exchange not brains, but heads, having learned from Brown SÉquard that a dog’s head injected with oxygenated blood, had survived decapitation a quarter-of-an-hour.

“From this period date heteroclite creatures—a donkey with a horse’s head—a goat with a stag’s head—which I should like to have preserved, because the beasts which composed them were somewhat distant from one another, although they belonged to the same family—a distance which I have never been able to increase by this means.

“Alas! on the night of your arrival, Wilhelm left the doors open, and those monsters, worthy of Dr. Moreau, escaped, with many other subjects which were under observation. You may boast of having come into Fonval like a bull into a china shop!

“I resume; but in order to avoid exhausting the attention of a convalescent, I shall pass over, as far as details are concerned, the abandonment of this method, the discovery of the Lerne trepanner with an ultra-rapid-circular-saw, that of the brain-preserving globes or artificial meninges, that of the ointment for joining nerves, the recognized efficacy of the injection of morphia, approved of by Broca, for contracting the blood vessels, and so diminishing the loss of blood, the generally accepted employment of ether as an anesthetic, the manipulation of brains for the purpose of fitting them exactly to skulls, etc., etc.

“Thanks to all that, I exchanged the personalities of a—ah, I can never remember that word—squirrel and a wood-pigeon. That wasn’t bad! Then that of a wren and a viper. Then that of a carp and a blackbird—hot blood and cold blood. It was perfect!“In face of these prodigies, my aim, that of human substitution was mere child’s play.

“At this juncture Karl and Wilhelm volunteered to submit themselves to the convincing test. It was quite epic. Otto Klotz had left me. Hum! Macbeth was not to be trusted! I operated alone, with the help of Johann and automatic machines.

“Success! ah! what fine fellows! Who would have imagined that whole bodies had been amputated? and yet, each of them, ever since that day, lives in the carnal abode of his friend. Look!”

He summoned his assistants, and raising their hair, showed the violet colored scar.

The two Germans smiled at one another, and I could not prevent myself from admiring them.

Lerne went on:

“My fortune, then, was made, and at one stroke, I was assuring my own and Emma’s happiness, and her love, which is my most inestimable possession, Nicolas.

“But the discovery, one certain, had to be applied.

“To tell the truth, one dark spot worried me. I mean the influence of the moral side on the physical and vice versa.

“At the end of a few months my patients became modified. If I had endowed their body with a mentality finer than before, the latter ruined the former, and I have seen, amongst others, pigs with a dog’s brain become ill and thin, and die soon.

“On the other hand, intellects coarser than their predecessors, allow themselves to be overcome by the corporal part, and the composite animal then becomes stupider and fatter. That is an invariable rule.

“Sometimes, also, the imperious flesh refashions the mind according to the instincts of brutal matter.

“One of my wolves, my dear nephew, installed cruelty in the brain of a sheep! But this drawback was bound, was it not, in the case of my future clients—men—to reduce itself to slight indifferences of health and character? It was not worth thinking about, and it did not give me any pause.

“Not caring to leave Macbeth with Emma, I sent him off to Scotland, and I set out towards America—the land of audacity, of millions, and of the grafted ear—as it seemed to me the best soil to cultivate.

“That was two years ago.

“The day after my landing, I had thirty-five ruffians at my disposal, who were resolved to part with an impeccable bodily constitution, for the benefit of any thirty-five millionaires I should get to know, teach and convince.

“Check!“I began with the most dreadful ones, and the most unhealthy.

“Some called me a madman and showed me the door. Others got angry, looking me majestically up and down with displeasure in their eyes, thrusting out very consumptive chests or flabby thoraxes; or they drew themselves to their full height on their twisted legs and expressed astonishment that anybody should think them ugly.

“Those who were dying were sure they would get well—surer than that they would not collapse under the ether.

“Some showed fear. ‘It was tempting Providence!’ They stood aloof from me as from the Devil, and some of them would have sprinkled me with Holy Water.

“It was no use my declaring, in answer to them, that man is modified more completely in the course of his life than they would change under my lancet, and that religious doctrine has traveled some way since 1670, when that Russian was excommunicated, for having had his skull mended with a piece of a dog’s bone.

“It was no use.

“Many sententiously remarked, ‘One knows what one has got—one does not know what one is getting.’

“Would you believe it! The women nearly saved me! Crowds of them aspired to become men. Fortunately, my black-guards—except one or two—categorically refused to adopt the female sex.

“In despair, I dangled before them the attractive prospect of a life prolonged indefinitely, resuming its course at each new incarnation.

“‘Life, replied the three-score-years-and-tenners, is already too long, as God has limited it. We desire nothing more than to die.’

“‘But I shall restore to you all your desires, at the same time as your youth.’

“‘Thank you, the fate of desires is to remain ungratified!’

“Amongst adults I often received this reply:

“‘The charm of acquired experience is worth preserving from all things that might lessen that experience, and let us not risk diminishing it through the inexperienced rashness of adolescent blood.’

“There were some, however, who were ready to imitate Faust, and sign the pact of youth, but all these Nabobs I sounded offered me the same objection—the danger of the operation—the folly of risking life in the desire to prolong life.

“To tell you the truth, Nicolas, the only people who allow themselves to be operated on without any qualms, are young people at the point of death, and aware of their state.

“Understanding the necessity of overcoming the danger they apprehended, I felt ready for new researches—but greatly disillusioned, thenceforward knowing that even were these rewarded by a second discovery, my clients would be few, but also aware that they would be sufficient to secure me my fortune and happiness. But all this was deferred till the Greek Calends.

“I came back to Fonval—bitter, silent, and with rage in my heart.

“Emma and Donovan could not have found a more implacable judge. I surprised them. I took my revenge. You have guessed it, have you not? Yesterday, the two Macbeths carried off the brain of Nell, and the soul of Donovan is lodged in the body of the St. Bernard!

“The same punishment awaited both of you for the same fault. Solomon could not have better judged, nor Circe have better carried the sentence into execution.

“Now, look here, nephew! I have worked at what, but for your intrusion, and my need for watching your acts, would in a few days, have been the beginning of the interchange of personalities without surgical intervention.

“I was wise enough, you see, not to give up my vegetable grafting. I had even carried all its developments very far, and this training, supplemented by my zoÖlogical experiments, constitutes almost the whole curriculum of grafting.

“It was the combination of this science with other sciences, which revealed the probable solution to me.

“People never generalize enough, Nicolas! Devoted to interminable subdivision, fanatical about the infinitely little, which is always becoming infinitely less, we have a mania for analysis. We live with our eyes glued to microscopes. In half our investigations we should employ another instrument to show things as wholes—an apparatus of optical synthesis—a synoptic telescope, or if you prefer to call it so, a megaloscope.

“I foresee a colossal discovery! And to think that but for Emma, I should have disdained financial rewards and never aspired to wealth! So that love caused ambition, and ambition brought glory!

“Apropos of this, nephew, you very nearly put on the features of Professor Lerne! Yes, she adored you with such a fine ardor, nephew, that I thought of disguising my appearance by assuming with your features, in order to be loved in your place....

“That would have been the very best revenge, and very piquant, but I have still need, for some time, of my antique and awkward carcass. Later on we shall see about getting rid of this old trumpery frame. Is not your captivating appearance always at my disposal?”

At those sarcastic words, my weeping was redoubled.

My uncle went on, affecting consideration for me.

“Ah! I am abusing your courage, my dear patient. Have a rest. The satisfaction of your curiosity will give you, I hope, a refreshing sleep.

“Ah! I was forgetting! Do not be astonished if the world appears to you other than it was.... Amongst other novelties, things must be seen by you as flat as in a photograph. That is because you look at things only with one eye at a time, so that one might say—using the terms jocularly, that many animals are only double one-eyed things. Their sight is not stereoscopic. Other eyes—other phenomena.

“New ear-drums, other sounds, and so on!

“Amongst men, themselves, each one has his manner of appreciating things. Habit teaches us, for example, that we must call a certain color red, but a man who calls it red receives from it a green impression—that is a common occurrence, and another, an impression of olive or dark blue.

“Well, good-night!”

No, my curiosity was not satisfied, but I realized that that was so without being able to fix the points which my uncle had not made clear, for my awful experience overwhelmed me with anguish, and the Circeean operation left me impregnated with ether, whose penetrating vapors upset in me the man’s understanding and the bull’s stomach.