Under the influence of an indifference most praiseworthy, in these unfortunate circumstances, the official doctor asked no questions, examined nothing. I told him how my late uncle had died of syncope. He had heard about his heart-disease, and this official doctor gave me the Burial Certificate.

“Dr. Lerne is dead,” said he, “and our mission to-day will stop at that, if you please. For the rest, it is not our business to set investigations on foot which might bring us to contradict so eminent a master, and make him die otherwise than he desired.”

The funeral took place at Grey-l’Abbaye, without any pomp or spectators, after which I employed ten days in unraveling the affairs of this inconceivable duality; this unparalleled amalgam of assassin and victim: Klotz-Lerne.

During the course of his “phenomenal” existence, that is to say the last four and a half years or so, he had made no testamentary dispositions. This was to me the proof that in spite of his forebodings of his end, death had overtaken him unexpectedly, for no doubt had it been otherwise, he would have done everything to disinherit me.

I found in his desk, at the bottom of the secret drawer, my uncle’s Will, as the letter of long ago had told me I should. It appointed me his residuary legatee.

But Klotz-Lerne had charged the estate with a super-abundance of mortgages, and contracted numberless debts.

My first thought was to appeal to the Courts, and then the absurdity of the case struck me, and I perceived all the confusion, which such a substitution of persons could cause to legal minds—those frauds of a kind not provided against by the Code, those false pretenses and all this legacy-hunting, which were a defiance of nature and law alike.

I had to resign myself to all the consequences of an astounding imposture, and not say a word about it, for fear of arousing the worst suspicions.

Everything considered, however, the acceptance of the succession still brought me some profit, and whatever happened, I was resolved to get rid of Fonval, judging that it would, henceforward, be for me but a nest of evil memories.

I went through all the papers. Those of the real Lerne, confirmed his medical honor, and the legitimacy of his researches in grafting in every line. Those of Klotz-Lerne, usually recognizable by the illustrations in the manuscript, and often blackened with German Gothic characters, were carefully examined, and were reduced to ashes, for they were irrefutable witnesses of several crimes, and contained nothing to refute the presumption that a certain Nicolas Vermont, who had been present at Fonval for six months, had been a partner in them.

Under the influence of this same dread, I ransacked the park and outhouses.

That done, I presented the animals to the villagers, and dismissed Barbe.

Then I summoned help. We filled trunks and cases with family treasures, whilst Emma packed her boxes—half annoyed at the loss of her daydream, and half pleased to follow me to Paris.

After the death of Klotz-Lerne, eager to take my place again in the world, and to enjoy once more the comforts of wealth, without passing through the worries of too small a house, I had written to one of my friends, asking him to take a flat for me, a little larger than my bachelor rooms, and suitable for a couple of lovers. His answer delighted us. He had found out a home for us in the Avenue Victor Hugo—a little house built as if to our measure, and furnished exactly to our taste. Servants, recruited by his good offices, awaited us.All was ready. I sent off a mountain of parcels belonging to Emma along with her trunks.

One morning MaÎtre Pallud, the Notary of Grey, had a final interview with me with regard to the sale of the property. Emma could not keep still. We fixed that very evening for our departure in the car, intending to sleep at Nanthel, in order to be in Paris the next day.

And the hour came for departing from Fonval for ever. I went over the chÂteau, which was empty of furniture, and the park, in which there was no leafage. It looked as if the autumn had stripped them both.

The old perfumes still clung to the abandoned rooms, recalling sad memories. Ah! what charm there sometimes is in musty things! One saw on the walls the indelible outline of pictures or mirrors now taken down, sideboards or chiffoniers that had gone, leaving behind patches that looked new against the faded paper, outlines of things magically given by them to the familiar wall, bright spots destined to grow pale, as time went on, just as the memory of the absent.

Some of the rooms seemed made smaller by being emptied, others larger, without any obvious reason.

I went over the house from garret to basement, by the light of the skylight and the gleams of a grating. I explored from attic to cellar, and I did not grow weary of wandering through this scenery of my youth, like a living being haunting a phantom place. Ah! my youth! It alone dwelt in Fonval. I felt that. In spite of their importance, the recent dramas were pale beside it. The bedrooms were duller than ever, and Donovan’s and Emma’s were no longer anything but my own and my aunt’s.

Was I not right to have put up Fonval to auction?

This double feeling accompanied me in my farewells to the park. The paddock became a lawn, and the summerhouse of the Minotaur only recalled Briareus to me.

I made a circuit to the cliff. The clouds were so low that one would have said it was a ceiling of gray wool, laid over a circular crater.

Under this subdued light, which is that of winter, the statues, now bereft of their green togas, showed their concrete, weather-beaten and rain stained, with their noses knocked off, or their chins broken; some of them were crumbling to bits—one with a Bacchante’s gesture, was stretching out her arm, the hand of which, carrying a mixing-bowl, only stuck to the wrist by its iron bone, which was dreadful to see. They were going to continue their poses in solitude.

Something wild and savage was already beginning to emerge, but no more than was vaguely perceptible. A hawk was sharpening his beak on the weather-cock of the summerhouse. A weasel crossed the paddock with little quiet jumps.

Unable to make up my mind to depart, I unlocked the door of the chÂteau again, then I came back to the park. I heard my movements resounding on the flooring of the corridors and rustling amongst the leaves of the alleys.

The silence was deepening every moment. I felt a certain difficulty in breaking it. It knew well it was going to reign as a master, and as I paused in the midst of the domain, it put forth its almighty power.

There I dreamt a long time—I, the human center of the enormous amphitheater, the center, also, of a Walpurgis dance of thoughts. To my call there came in a whirlwind, the faces of long ago and yesterday—imaginary or real—personages of fairy tales, or truth; they whirled round me in a wild crowd, and made of all the deep valley a maelstrom of remembrance, in which the whole past turned and turned again.

But I had to go away at last, and leave Fonval to the ivy and the spiders.

In front of the coach-house, Emma ready dressed for her journey, was impatiently mounting guard.

I opened the door. The car was standing askew at the end of the old shed. I had not seen it again since the accident, and I did not even remember having housed it. The assistants, no doubt, through some tardy act of courtesy, had got it in somehow.

Heedless of my negligence, the engine roared admirably, the moment the electric contact was made, so I brought out the car as far as the semi-circular terrace, and shut on so many memories a symbolical portal, which closed with a sound like a sob.

Thank Heaven! No more of the awful business of Klotz, but no more, also, of my youthful years. Then it occurred to me that by keeping Fonval I might prolong them.

“We shall stop at Grey, at the Notary’s,” I said to Emma. “I am not going to sell, I am going to let it.”

I plunged on the straight road; the rocky walls seemed to straighten themselves. Emma was prattling.

At first the car hummed cheerfully. However, I was not slow in repenting that I had paid so little attention to it. With a sudden jerk it slowed down; then several more, and its progress was soon no more than a succession of abrupt jumps.

I have said, with regard to this car, that it was the perfection of automatism—pedals and handles reduced to the minimum. Such a machine presents only one drawback. It must be perfectly in order before setting out, for once en route, one has no more influence on it, except to quicken the pace, or to moderate it, but not to fortify it by dosing and repairs.

The prospect of a halt spoiled my good humor.

Meanwhile, the car pursued its jumpy course, and I could not prevent myself laughing.

This manner of advancing recalled to me, in a comical way, the walks I had taken in this very place, with Klotz-Lerne, and the capricious way in which my sham uncle would stop, and then set off again.

Hoping that it was merely a passing indisposition of the machine,—too much oil, for example,—I let the engine run on, and endeavored to find out by the noise it made, which of its functions was defective, and every now and again caused those inequalities of power transmission, which grew more marked at every pause, and some of which were so accentuated, indeed, that we were almost motionless for a second.

My absurd comparison became clearer to me, and that amused me.

“Just like that blackguardly Professor,” I said to myself. “It is amusing!”

“What is the matter?” said my fellow-traveler. “You are not looking cheerful.”“I? Nonsense!”

It is a curious thing, but this question had affected me. I should have thought that my face was quite calm. What motive had I not to be easy in my mind? I was annoyed, that was all. I simply was asking myself what organ was suffering in this great body (as the Professor had called it) and not being able to find anything, and it being about to stop altogether, I was annoyed, that was all.

In vain I listened with a carefully trained ear to the explosion, clickings, dull-sounding knocks; no characteristic sound revealed to me the stiffness of valves or cranks.

“I bet it is the clutch which has gone wrong,” I cried, “and yet the engine is all right.”

And then Emma said, “Oh, Nicholas, do look! Should that thing there move?”

“Ah! I told you so. There, you see!”

She had pointed to the clutch-pedal, which was moving by itself, while the jolts of the car coincided with its motions.

“That was the trouble.”

Whilst my eyes were fixed on the pedal, it remained pushed right over.

The car, unclutched, stopped. I was going to get out of it, when it set off again in a most brutal way. The pedal had come back. A certain uneasiness tormented me; it is certain nothing is so annoying as a car that will not work; but all the same, I do not remember ever having been so curiously affected by engine-trouble.

Suddenly the hooter began to yell of its own accord. I felt the insurmountable need of saying something or other, but my dumbness redoubled my anxiety.

“It is out of order generally,” I said, endeavoring to speak in a casual tone. “We shan’t get there before night, my dear.”

“Would it not be better to repair it immediately?”

“No, I prefer to go on. When one stops one never knows when one will be able to set out again. There will always be time to....”

“Perhaps it will warm up again,” but the hooter drowned my hesitating voice with a great clamor, and my fingers clutched hold of the steering-wheel, for when this clamor had died down, it turned to a continuous note which took on rhythm and inflections, and I felt coming through this cadence an air—a marching tune (after all, it was perhaps I who made myself hear it).

This air drew nearer, so to say, became more defined, and after some halting attempts like those of a singer trying his voice, the car resolutely thundered out with its copper throat, “Rum fil dum, fil dum.”At the accent of the German’s songs, a horde of suspicions swooped on my uneasy mind. I had an intuition that something fantastic, mysterious, monstrous, had happened. I tried cutting off the petrol. The handle resisted. The brake resisted. A superior force kept them immovable.

Losing my head altogether, I let go the steering-wheel, and took two arms to the diabolical brake. The same result, but the hooter made a gargling sound, and then was silent.

The girl exclaimed angrily, “That’s a funny trumpet!”

As for me, I had no desire to laugh. My ideas began to follow one another in a giddy whirl, and my Reason refused to sanction my reasoning.

This metallic car, from which wood, india rubber and leather had been banished—of which no fragment belong to matter at one time alive, was it not an organized body which had never lived? This automatic mechanism—was it not a body capable of reflexes, but a body devoid of intelligence? Was it not in fact—according to the note-book—a possible receptacle of a soul in its totality,—that receptacle which the Professor in his haste had declared to be non-existent?

At the moment of his apparent death, Klotz-Lerne had doubtless indulged in an experiment on the car, recalling that of the poplar tree, but having been absent-minded for some weeks, perhaps he had not foreseen (fatal want of logic), that his soul would slip entirely into that empty receptacle, and that the “attachment” being broken, his human form would be no more than a corpse, into which the laws of his own discovery forbade him to return. Or else, perhaps, weary with pursuing the fortune he could not seize, Klotz-Lerne had acted of his own free will, and committed a sort of suicide, by exchanging the substance of my uncle for that of a machine.

But why should he not have wished, simply and solely, to become the new beast, foretold by him in a moment of eccentricity—the animal of the future—the ruler of creation, which the re-fitting of its organs was to make immortal and infinitely perfectible, according to his lunatical prophecy?

Once more, however sensible this inner discussion with myself was, I would not accept its conclusions. A resemblance in manner between the car and the Professor, a probable hallucination of my sense of hearing, and possibly the way of gripping the lever, should not suffice to prove this absurdity. My distress wanted a more decisive proof. It came without delay.

We were coming to the edge of the forest, to that limit where the dead maniac invariably paused in his walks. I understood that I was going to have the question settled, and at all hazards, I gave Emma warning.“Hold tight; keep your body back!”

In spite of our precaution, a sudden stop of the car threw us forward.

“What’s the matter?” said Emma.

“Nothing, do not worry.”

Frankly, I was undecided. What was to be done? To get down would have been perilous. Inside the Klotz-car we were at least out of his reach, and I did not desire to be butted at by him, so I endeavored to get him forward.

As before, no bit of him would obey my orders.

We were in this awkward position, when suddenly I felt the steering-wheel turn round, (levers and foot-breaks working away); and the car, making a wide sweep, faced about, and began to take us back again towards Fonval.

I was luckily able to turn it round again by a sudden movement, but the moment it was set in the right direction, it definitely manifested the wish not to move a wheel forward.

At last Emma perceived that there was something unusual the matter, and she urged me to get down to put this right, but for some moments my terror had been changed into rage.

The hooter laughed!

“He who laughs last, laughs loudest,” I cried to myself.

“What is the matter? What is the matter?” said my companion.Without listening to her, I took from the grid a steel rod, which served me as a defensive weapon, and to the profound stupefaction of Emma, I hit the restive car with it. Then there was an epic scene!

Under the formidable hail of blows, the heavy vehicle behaved like a restive horse—plunged, kicked and bucked. It tried everything to fling us out of the saddle.

“Hold fast!” I said to my companion, and I laid on all the harder.

The engine growled; the hooter yelled with pain, or bellowed with rage. On the sheet-metal of the hood, the blows rained thick and fast, and the thrashing made the woods resound with a fabulous noise.

Suddenly uttering a shrill scream like an elephant, the metallic mastodon gave a bound, executed two or three plunges, and then dashed forward with the speed of lightning.

A runaway!

I was no longer master of the situation. The frenzy of a mad monster ruled our fate. We were almost flying. The 80 h. p. car sped on with the rapidity of a falling body. We could no longer breathe the wild rushing air. Sometimes the hooter gave a strident cry.

We flashed through Grey-l’Abbaye like lightning. Hens and ducks were under our wheels—blood on my glasses. We were going so fast that the brass-plate of MaÎtre Pallud gave me the impression of a golden streak.

On issuing from the village, the Route Nationale hedged us with its plane trees, then the long hill with its slope formed an obstacle to our speed. There, showing signs of weariness, for the first time, the car slackened down, and allowed itself to be managed.

I had to thrash it often, to make it bring us as far as Nanthel where we got in late, and without any hitch. As we passed over a gutter, however, the copper mouth uttered an exclamation of pain, and I saw that the jolt had just broken a spring of the off hind wheel.

When we got into the courtyard of the Hotel, I tried to fasten a new spring into the felloe, but did not succeed. My attempts roused such a noise from the hooter, that I had to give up trying to repair the damage; besides it was not very urgent.

I had resolved to finish the journey in a train, and to put my recalcitrant machine in the goods station. The future should decide about its fate. For the moment I put it in the garage amongst the phaËtons, buggies and limousines, but I hastily withdrew, knowing that behind me, the round eyes of its head-lamps were shining with a treacherous look.

As I reflected on all the ins and outs of this astonishing phenomenon, and as I moved away, a phrase in a scientific article which I had once read, and which had struck me, came into my mind, and I was not a little surprised at finding in those words a vague explanation of the marvel, and the promise of happenings no less astonishing.

“It is possible to imagine that there exists an intermediate link between living creatures and inert matter, just as there exist links between animals and vegetables.”

The Hotel had all the outward signs of luxurious comfort. A lift took me up, and I was taken to our room.

My partner had preceded me. After being a prisoner for so long, she was looking with a sort of eagerness at the street, the people moving about, and the shops, whose glories were being lit up.

Emma could not tear herself away from the spectacle of life, and as she dressed, she turned continually to the window, drawing aside the curtains to behold the spectacle again.

I thought I perceived that she was less affectionate towards me.

My strange conduct in the car had not failed to surprise her. As I had made up my mind not to give any explanation, I had no doubt that she regarded me as a lunatic, hardly cured of his madness.

At dinner, which we took at little private tables lit up by candles, whose soft light was that of a boudoir, Emma, surrounded by men in evening dress, and women in low-necked frocks, made herself conspicuous by her aggressive behavior which was quite out of place. She ogled the men, and looked with a sneer at the women—sometimes admiring and sometimes contemptuous—speaking her approval in a loud voice, and laughing ostentatiously—which caused amusement and astonishment all round us—in the most ridiculous and delicious manner.

She wanted to jabber with everybody there.

I carried her off as soon as I could, but her desire to get back to the life of the world was so ardent, that we had to go immediately to some place of public entertainment.

The theater was shut, and only the Casino was open, and that evening, the entertainment consisted of a wrestling tournament organized in imitation of Paris.

The little Hall was full of counter-jumpers, students and common folk. A cloud was floating in it which was a mixture of all proletarian and lower middle-class tobaccos.Emma spread herself in her box. A vulgar bit of ragtime proceeding from the shameless orchestra plunged her into ecstasy, and as her ecstasies were not discreet, three hundred pairs of eyes turned round to look at her, attracted by the waving of a fan, and the hat-feathers which also courageously beat time.

Emma smiled and looked at the three hundred pair of eyes.

The wrestling aroused her enthusiasm, and more especially the wrestlers. Those human brutes, whose heads—great jaw, and no brow—seem destined for the sawdust-box of the guillotine aroused the most unseemly excitement in my fair friend.

A hairy, tattooed colossus won. He came to make his bow, and as he did so, awkwardly nodded a myrmidon’s head, with two little pig’s eyes surmounting his titanic body.

He belonged to the town. His fellow-citizens gave him an ovation. He was given the title of “Bastion of Nanthel,” and “Champion of the Ardennes.”

Emma rose in her seat, applauding him so loudly and insistently, that she both scandalized and amused the audience.

The Champion threw her a kiss. I felt my face getting red with shame. We returned to the Hotel, exchanging bitter remarks.Our apartment happened to be above the arch of the main door, where motor-cars kept passing and re-passing until morning, which made me dream of misfortunes and absurdities. My awakening brought me real ones. Emma was gone!

In my astonishment, I endeavored to find plausible reasons for her absence.

I rang for the waiter. He came, and handed me this letter, which I have preserved, and whose criss-crossed paper, bespattered with blots and blobs of ink, I now pin on to my piece of white paper:

“Dear Nick,

“Pardon me for the pain I am causing you, but it is better that we should part. I found again yesterday, my first lover Alcide, the man I fought with LÉonie about. He is the handsome fellow who won the wrestling-match yesterday. I am going off with him. I could not give up that kind of life, except for the sort of money which Lerne promised me. I should have made you unhappy, and should have been unfaithful to you. All the rest amounts to nothing. I want a real man. It is not your fault, and so I hope this will not cause you any pain. Adieu for life.

“Emma Bourdichet.”

In the presence of so categorical an intimation, couched in jargon almost as barbarous as that of the Law Courts, I could only bow to fate. Moreover, were not those sentiments which Emma was expressing, exactly those which had charmed me in her? Had I not loved in her just that thirst for pleasure which was the cause of her bewitching beauty, and the cause of her infidelity?

I had the energy and wisdom to defer the rest of my reflections until the morrow. They might have brought on weakness in action.

I inquired about the first train for Paris, and sent for a mechanic to undertake to dispatch my 80 h. p. car, or, if you prefer to call it, the Klotz-automobile, to me.

I was soon informed of the man’s arrival. Together we went to the garage.

The car had disappeared!

It can easily be imagined that I put the two treasonable acts together, and accused Emma of a secret complicity.

But the Manager of the Hotel, thinking he had to do with audacious thieves, went off to the police-office. He came back, saying that they had found in a little street of the faubourg, a car with the number 234XY, which had been abandoned, as he thought, by thieves, for want of petrol. The tank was empty.

“Ah! just so,” said I to myself. Klotz wanted to run away. He forgot about the exhaustion of the petrol, and there he is, paralyzed.

I kept the true version of the incident to myself, and advised the mechanic to push the car to the train, without making the engine go.

“Promise me this,” I insisted, “it is very important. My train is due, I must be off. Off you go, and remember, no petrol.”