CHAPTER XVII.

ALL the details of that murder, M. Ginory had drawn, one by one, from Prades in his examination. The murderer denied at first; hesitated; discussed; then at last, like a cask with the bung out, from which pours not wine, but blood, the prisoner told all; confessed; recounted; loosened his tongue; abandoned himself weakened and conquered, weary of his misery.

"I was so foolish, so stupid," he violently said, "as to keep the portrait. I believed that the frame was worth a fortune. Fool! I sold it for a hundred sous!"

He gave the merchant's address, it was on the Quai Saint Michel. Bernardet found the frame as he had found the painted panel, and this time, no great credit was due him.

"Now," said he, "the affair is ended, _classe_. My children (he was relating his adventures to his little girls), we must pass to another. And why"--

"Why, what?" asked Mme. Bernardet.

"Eh! there it is! Why--it lacks the elucidation of a problem. I will see! I will know!"

He still remembered the young Danish doctor, whom he had seen with M. Morin at the autopsy. With his knowledge of men, with the sharp, keen eye of the police officer, Bernardet had recognized a man of superior mind; a mind dreamy and mysterious. He knew where Dr. Erwin lived during his sojourn in Paris, and he went to his apartment one beautiful morning and rang the bell at the door of a hotel in the Boulevard Saint Martin, where students and strangers lodge. He might have asked advice of M. Morin, of the master of French Science, but he, the Inspector of Surete, approach these high personages, to question them. He dared not as long as there was a Danish doctor.

Bernardet's brain whirled. He felt almost certain that Dr. Erwin would give the same explanation which he, himself, suspected, in regard to the observed phenomenon.

"The dead man's eye has spoken and can speak," said Bernardet to himself. "Yes, surely. I am not deceived."

Dr. Erwin met Bernardet cordially and listened to him with profound attention. The police officer repeated word for word the confession drawn from Prades. Then he asked the Danish physician if he really believed that Jacques Dantin's image had been transfixed on the retina of the dying man's eye, during the time when he had held and gazed at the portrait.

"For the proofs which I obtained were very confused," said the officer, "it is possible, and I say it is quite easy to recognize Jacques Dantin's features. We have seen it, and, according to your opinion even the painting was able to be--how shall I express myself--stored up, retained in the retina."

"You found the proof there," said Dr. Erwin.

"So, according to your opinion, I have not deceived myself?"

"No!"

"I have truly found in the retina of the dead man's eye the last vision he saw when living?"

"Yes!"

"But the vision of a painting. A painting, Doctor."

"Why not!" Dr. Erwin responded in a sharp tone. "Do you know what happened? Knowing that he was dying the unhappy man went, urged by a tragic impulse, to that portrait which represented to him all that was left, concentrating in one image alone, all his life."

"Then it is possible? It is possible?" Bernardet repeated.

"I believe it," said the Dane. "The man is dying. He has only one thought--to go directly to the one who, surviving him, guarded his secrets and his life. He seized his portrait; he tore it from its hook with all his strength; he devoured it with his eyes; he drank it in with a look, if I may be allowed the expression. To this picture of the being whom he loved he spoke; he cried to him; telling him his last wishes; dictating to him his thoughts of vengeance. At this supreme moment his energy was increased a hundredfold, I know not what intensity of life was concentrated on this image, and gathering all his failing forces in a last look the man who wished to live; the man weakened by illness, dying, assassinated, put into that last regard the electric force, the fire which fixed the image (confused, no doubt, but recognizable since you have traced the resemblance) upon the retina. A phantom, if you wish, which is reflected in the dead man's eye."

"And," repeated Bernardet, who wished to be perfectly assured in regard to the question, "it is not only the image of a living being, it is, to use your words, the phantom even of a painting which was retained on the retina?"

"I do not reply to you: 'That is possible!' It is you who say to me: 'I have seen it!' And you have seen it, in truth, and the form, vague though it may be, the painted figure permits you to find in a passer-by the man whose picture the retina had already shown you!"

"Oh! well! Doctor," said the little Bernardet, "I shall tell that, but they will deny it. They will say that it is impossible!"

Dr. Erwin smiled. He seemed to be looking, with his deep blue eyes, at some invisible perspective, not bounded by the rooms of little room.

"One has said," he began, "that the word _impossible_ is not French. It would be more exact to affirm that it was not _human_! We attain a knowledge of the unknowable. The mysterious is approachable. One must deny nothing _a priori_; one must believe all things possible and not only a dream. Search for the truth, the _harsh_ truth, as your Stendhal said. Well! the word is wrong. One ought to say justly, the _exquisite_ truth, for it is a joy for those who search, that daily life where each movement marks a step advanced, where the heart beats at the thought of a rendezvous in the laboratory as at a rendezvous of love. Ah! he is happy who has given his life to science. He lives in a dream. It is the poetry, in our times of prose. The dream," continued the young doctor as in an ecstasy, while Bernardet listened, ravished, "the dream is everywhere. It is impossible to make it tangible. Thought, human thought, can sometime be deciphered like an open book. An American physician asked to be permitted to try an experiment upon the cranium of a condemned man, still living. Through the cranium he studied the man's brain. Has not Edison undertaken to give sight to the blind! But, in order to accomplish all these things, it is necessary, as in primitive times, to believe, to believe always. The twentieth century will see many others."

"Ah! Doctor! Doctor!" cried poor little Bernardet, much moved. "I do not wish to be the ignoramus that I am, the father of a family, who has mouths to feed, and I beg of you to take me as a sweeper in your laboratory."

He departed, enthused by the interview. Henceforth he could say that, he, the ignorant one, had, by his seemingly foolish conviction, proved the leader of an experiment which had been abandoned for some years; and the humble police officer had reopened the nearly closed door to criminal instruction.

A scruple, moreover, came to him; a doubt, an agony, and he wished to share it with M. Ginory.

All the same, with the admirable invention, he had caused an innocent man to be arrested. This thought made him very uneasy. He had produced a power which, instead of striking the guilty, had overthrown an unhappy man, and it was this famous discovery of Dr. Bourion's, persisted in by him, which had resulted in this mistake.

"It must be," he thought, "that man may be fallible even in the most marvelous discoveries. It is frightful! It is perhaps done to make us more prudent. Prudent and modest!"

Doubt now seized him. Must he stop there in these famous experiments which ended in this lie? Ought he abandon all research on a road which ended in a cul-de-sac? And he confided that unhappy scruple to the Examining Magistrate, with whom the chances of the service had put him in sympathy. M. Ginory not only was interested in strange discoveries, but he was always indulgent toward the original, little Bernardet.

"Finally, M. le Juge," said the police officer, shaking his head, "I have thought and thought about the discovery, our discovery--that of Dr. Bourion. It is subject to errors, our discovery. It would have led us to put in prison--Jacques Dantin, and Jacques Dantin was not guilty."

"Oh, yes! M. Bernardet," said the Magistrate, who seemed thoughtful, his heavy chin resting on his hand. "It ought to make us modest. It is the fate of all human discoveries. To err--to err, is human!"

"It is not the less true," responded Bernardet, "that all which has passed opens to us the astonishing horizon of the unknown"----

"The unknowable!" murmured the Magistrate.

"A physician who sometimes asks me to his experiments invited me to his house the other evening and I saw--yes saw, or what one calls seeing, in a mirror placed before me, by the light of the X-rays--greenish rays which traversed the body--yes, Monsieur, I saw my heart beat, and my lungs perform their functions, and I am fat, and a thin person could better see himself living and breathing. Is it not fantastic, Monsieur Ginory? Would not a man have been shut up as a lunatic thirty years ago who would have pretended that he had discovered that? We shall see--we shall see many others!"

"And will it add to the happiness of man? and will it diminish grief, wickedness and crime?"

The Magistrate spoke as if to himself, thoughtfully, sadly. Something Bernardet said brought a smile to his lips.

"This is, Monsieur le Juge, a fine ending of the chapter for the second part of your work, 'The Duty of a Magistrate Toward Scientific Discoveries.' And if the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences does not add"----

M. Ginory suddenly turned red and interrupted Bernardet with a word and a gesture.

"Monsieur Bernardet!"

"I can only repeat, Monsieur, what public opinion thinks and says," said Bernardet, bowing low. "There was an illusion to this affair written up. An amiable fellow--that Paul Rodier."

"Ah! Monsieur Bernardet, Monsieur Bernardet!" laughingly said the Magistrate, "you have a weakness for reporters. Do you want me to tell you something? You will finish by becoming a journalist."

"And you will certainly finish in the habit of a member of the Academy, Monsieur Ginory," said the little Bernardet, with his air of a mocking abbe.