I decided to retrace my steps. I knew that I kept an appointment book, which is where I found the following notes:
21st March, Mass
22nd March, Taxil
23rd March, Guillot for Bonnefoy will
24th March, to Drumont?
I have no idea why I had to go to Mass on the 21st. I don’t think I’m a believer. A believer believes in something. Do I believe in something? I don’t think so. Therefore I’m not a believer. This is logical. Besides, sometimes you go to Mass for all sorts of reasons, and faith has nothing to do with it.
What I felt more sure of was that the day, which I thought was Tuesday, was in fact Wednesday, the 23rd of March, and that Guillot did in fact come for me to draw up the Bonnefoy will. It was the 23rd and I thought it was the 22nd. So what happened on the 22nd? And who or what was Taxil?
The idea of having to see that fellow Drumont on Thursday was now out of the question. Not knowing who I was, how could I meet someone? I had to hide until I had worked it all out. Drumont…I thought I knew who he was, yet if I tried to think about him, it was as if my mind was clouded by wine.
Let’s consider other possibilities, I told myself. First, Dalla Piccola is someone else, who for whatever mysterious reasons often comes to my apartment, which is linked to his by a more or less secret corridor. On the evening of the 21st of March he returned to my place in impasse Maubert, left his coat (why?), then went to sleep in his own apartment, where he woke the following morning, having lost his memory. And I woke two mornings later, also having lost my memory. In that case, what could I have done on Tuesday the 22nd if I had woken on the morning of the 23rd with no memory? And why did Dalla Piccola have to undress here, then, with no cassock, go to his place—and at what time? I was struck with dread at the thought that he had passed the first part of the night in my bed…My God, it’s true that women fill me with horror, but with a priest it would be much worse. I am celibate but not a pervert…
Otherwise Dalla Piccola and I are the same person. Since I found the cassock in my bedroom, after the day of the Mass (the 21st) I would have been able to return to impasse Maubert dressed as Dalla Piccola (if I’d had to go to a Mass, it is more credible that I’d have gone as an abbé), before taking off the cassock and wig, then later going to sleep in the abbé’s apartment (and forgetting that I had left the cassock at Simonini’s). The morning after, Tuesday, the 22nd of March, waking up as Dalla Piccola, not only would I have found myself with no memory, but I wouldn’t have been able to find the cassock at the foot of the bed.
As Dalla Piccola, with no memory, I would have found a spare cassock in the corridor and would have had as much time as I needed to escape the same day to Auteuil, only to change my mind by the end of the day, steel myself and return to Paris later that evening, to the apartment at impasse Maubert, hanging the cassock on the hook in the bedroom, and waking up with no memory once again, but as Simonini, on the Wednesday, believing it was still Tuesday. Therefore, I reasoned, Dalla Piccola loses his memory on the 22nd of March and remains amnesiac the whole day, finding himself on the 23rd as an amnesiac Simonini. Nothing exceptional after what I had learned from—what’s his name?—that doctor at the clinic in Vincennes.
Except for one small problem. I reread my notes. If that was how things had happened, Simonini would have found in his bedroom, on the morning of the 23rd, not one cassock but two—the one he had left on the night of the 21st and the other he had left on the night of the 22nd. Yet there was only one.
But no, what a fool I am. Dalla Piccola had returned from Auteuil to rue Maître-Albert on the evening of the 22nd, put down his cassock, then gone to the apartment in impasse Maubert and slept there, waking the following morning (the 23rd) as Simonini, to find only one cassock on the rack. It is true that, if events had taken that course, when I entered Dalla Piccola’s apartment on the morning of the 23rd, I should have found the cassock that he’d left there on the evening of the 22nd, but he could have hung it back up in the corridor where he had found it. All I had to do was check.
I went along the corridor, with lighted lamp, feeling a certain trepidation. If Dalla Piccola and I were not the same person, I told myself, I might have seen him appear at the other end of that passageway, he too perhaps carrying a lamp in front of him…Fortunately that didn’t happen. And I found the cassock hanging at the far end of the corridor.
And yet, and yet…if Dalla Piccola had returned from Auteuil and, on leaving the cassock, walked the whole length of the corridor to my apartment and happily gone to sleep in my bed, it was because at that point he knew who I was, and knew that he could sleep here just as well as in his own place, seeing that we were the same person. Dalla Piccola had therefore gone to bed knowing he was Simonini, whereas, the morning after, Simonini had woken not knowing he was Dalla Piccola. In other words, Dalla Piccola first loses his memory, then regains it, then goes to sleep and passes his loss of memory on to Simonini.
Loss of memory…This phrase, meaning nonrecollection, opens a gap in the mist of time that I had quite forgotten. I remember talking about people with memory loss at Chez Magny, more than ten years ago, with Bourru and Burot, with Du Maurier and with the Austrian doctor.
3. Chez Magny
25th March 1897, at dawn
Chez Magny…As far as I can recall, it used to cost no more than ten francs a head at that restaurant in rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine, and the quality matched the price. I’m a lover of good food, I know, but you can’t eat at Foyot every day. In years gone by, many used to go to Magny to catch a glimpse of famous writers like Gautier or Flaubert or, earlier still, that consumptive Polish pianist kept by a degenerate woman who went about in trousers. I looked in there one evening and left right away. Artists are insufferable, even from afar, always looking around to see whether we have recognized them.
Then the «great men» stopped going to Magny, and moved on to Brébant-Vachette, in boulevard Poissonnière, where you ate better and paid more, but evidently carmina dant panem—poetry does give you bread. And once Magny had been purged, so to speak, I started going occasionally, starting in the early ’80s.
I saw men of science there, including eminent chemists such as Berthelot and many doctors from the Salpêtrière. The hospital isn’t exactly close by, but perhaps the clinicians find pleasure in taking a short walk in the Latin Quarter rather than eating at the filthy gargotes where the patients’ families go. Since medical discussions invariably relate to the infirmities of others, and since at Magny, to compete with the noise, everyone talks loudly, a trained ear can usually pick up something interesting. Listening doesn’t mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don’t know you know.
While the writers and artists had always sat together at long tables, the men of science dined alone, as I did. But after sitting at neighboring tables on several occasions, I became familiar with a few medical men. My first acquaintance was Doctor Du Maurier, a man so loathsome that I wondered how a psychiatrist (which he was) could inspire the trust of his patients with such an unpleasant face. It was the pale, envious face of one who thinks he is destined always to remain in second place.
He was, in fact, the director of a small clinic for nervous illnesses at Vincennes, but knew full well that his institute would never enjoy the fame and prosperity of the clinic run by the more renowned Doctor Blanche—though Du Maurier used to mutter sarcastically that one of Blanche’s patients thirty years before had been a certain Nerval (according to him, a poet of some merit) who had been driven to suicide after being treated at his famous clinic.
Another two table companions with whom I became familiar were Doctors Bourru and Burot, unusual fellows who looked like twin brothers, both dressed in black with almost the same cut of coat, the same long black mustaches and clean-shaven chins, with collars slightly grubby, inevitably, as they were in Paris as travelers, since they practiced at the École de Médecine at Rochefort and came to the capital for only a few days each month to follow Charcot’s experiments.
«What, no leeks today?» Bourru asked one day, irritated. And Burot, scandalized: «No leeks?»
While
