Plague and Cholera

by Patrick Deville, J.A. Underwood

Genres: General Fiction; Biographical; World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Paris, May 1940. Nazi troops storm the city and at Le Bourget airport, on the last flight out, sits Dr Alexandre Yersin, his gaze politely turned away from his fellow passengers with their jewels sewn into their luggage. He is too old for the combat ahead, and besides he has already saved millions of lives. When he was the brilliant young protégé of Louis Pasteur, he focused his exceptional mind on a great medical conundrum: in 1894, on a Hong Kong hospital forecourt, he identified and vaccinated against bubonic plague, later named in his honour Yersinia pestis. Swiss by birth and trained in Germany and France, Yersin is the son of empiricism and endeavour; but he has a romantic hunger for adventure, fuelled by tales of Livingstone and Conrad, and sets sail for Asia. A true traveller of the century, he wishes to comprehend the universe. Medicine, agriculture, the engine of the new automobile, all must be opened up, examined and improved. Ceaselessly curious and courageous, Yersin stands, a lone genius,against a backdrop of world wars, pandemics, colonialism, progress and decadence. He is brought to vivid, thrilling life in Patrick Deville's captivating novel, which was a bestseller and shortlisted for every major literary award in France.

Release date: February 27, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 305

Sample

The old freckled hand with the split thumb parts voile curtains. Following a sleepless night, dawn comes crimson, a glorious cymbal-clash. The hotel room, all snow-white and pale gold. In the distance, the four-beamed light of the tall iron tower through a hint of mist. Below, the strikingly green trees of square Boucicaut. The city is calm in this wartime spring. Heaving with refugees, though. The thousands who thought their lives had struck root. The elderly fingers, dropping from the window catch, grasp the suitcase handle. Six floors down, Yersin pushes against the gleaming wood and shiny brass of the revolving door. A uniformed doorman shuts the taxi door behind him. Yersin is not fleeing. He has never fled. His seat was booked months ago in a Saigon travel agency.

 

The man is almost bald now, white of beard and blue of eye. The sort of jacket a gentleman farmer might wear, with beige trousers and an open-necked white shirt. Le Bourget’s picture windows give onto the runway, where a parked seaplane stands on its wheels. A small white whale with a rounded belly for a dozen passengers. The gangway is being pushed against the fuselage from the left, because the early aviators, Yersin among them, were also horsemen. He is off to rejoin his little Annamites now. A scattering of would-be escapees wait on the benches of the departure lounge. In their luggage, tucked away beneath shirts and evening gowns, wads of notes and rows of ingots. German troops are at the gates of Paris. These people, wealthy enough not to collaborate, eye the clock on the wall and the watches on their wrists.

A single Wehrmacht motorcycle with sidecar would be sufficient to ground the little white whale. It is late taking off. Ignoring the tenor of the anxious conversations, Yersin jots down the odd phrase in a notebook. Up above the cockpit, where the wings meet, the propellers are seen to move. As he walks across the tarmac, the fugitives want to jostle him from behind, make him run. Those already aboard are in their seats. He is helped up the steps. Today is the last day of May ’40. In the heat, the mirage of a pool of water dances on the runway. The aircraft shudders and soars into the air. Brows are mopped. This will be the last flight operated by Air France for some years. No one realises that yet.

 

It is also Yersin’s last flight. He will never return to Paris, never again enter his room on the sixth floor of the Hôtel Lutetia. He suspects as much. Far below, the columns of the exodus heading for La Beauce. Bicycles and handcarts piled high with chairs and mattresses. Lorries at walking pace, held back by people on foot. All of them drenched by spring showers. Columns of frightened insects, fleeing the hooves of the herd. His Lutetia neighbours had all checked out. That towering beanpole of a bespectacled Irishman, Joyce in his three-piece suit, is in the Allier already. Matisse will have reached Bordeaux and be going on to St Jean de Luz. The aircraft sets course for Marseilles. Between the twin pincers of Fascism and Francoism as they close together. Meanwhile, to the north, the scorpion’s tail rises, poised to strike. The ‘Brown Death’, France will call it.

He is familiar with both, Yersin – with both languages, both cultures, the German and the French, as well as their ancient quarrels. That other ‘Death’, too, he knows, the Black Death. Bubonic plague. It bears his name. Has done for forty-six years now, ‘now’ being the last day of May ’40, when for the last time he finds himself flying over France, through its stormy sky.

Yersinia pestis.

The old man, leafing through his notebook, nods off amid the engine hum. For days he has had trouble sleeping. The hotel was awash with Passive Defence volunteers in yellow armbands. Warnings after dark. Armchairs stored safely in the basement, down galleries lined with bottles laid on their sides. Through his closed eyelids, the play of sunlight on sea. Fanny’s face. A young couple’s trip to Provence, down as far as Marseilles, catching insects. How can the son’s story be written without the father’s? The latter’s was brief. The son never knew him.

 

In Morges in the canton of Vaud the Yersin household, like those of their neighbours, though hardly destitute, observes strict frugality. There, every penny counts. The mothers’ threadbare skirts get passed down to servants. This particular father contrives, by giving private lessons, to pursue quite intensive studies in Geneva, becoming for a time a qualified secondary-school teacher with a passion for botany and entomology but subsequently, to earn a bigger crust, taking a management job in the gunpowder industry. He wears the long, close-fitting black jacket of the scientist, accompanied by a top hat. He knows all there is to know about coleopterans, specialising in Orthoptera and Acrididae.

He sketches locusts and crickets, kills them, places wing cases and antennae under the microscope, communicates with the Vaudois Natural History Society and even with the Entomological Society of France. Then he becomes ‘Intendant of Powders’, which is not to be sneezed at. He continues to study the nervous system of the field cricket and modernises the gunpowder industry. His forehead falls on the last of the crickets, squashing it. One arm, in a final spasm, knocks over the specimen jars. Alexandre Yersin dies aged thirty-eight. A green scarab runs across his cheek. A grasshopper becomes entangled in his hair. A Colorado beetle crawls into his open mouth. His young wife Fanny is pregnant. The boss’s widow will have to leave the powdermill. The funeral over, between bundles of laundry and piles of washing-up a child is born. He is named after the dead husband.

 

On the shore of the Lake with the pure, chill water the mother buys Fig Tree House in Morges and turns it into a boarding school for girls. Fanny has style and knows how to behave. She teaches them deportment and cookery, with some painting and music on the side. The son will maintain a lifelong contempt for such activities, seeing art as a mere pastime. Painting and literature and all that crap will always remind him of the futility of the future matrons his letters refer to as the ‘young bags’.

One gains the impression of a little savage, setting snares, bird-nesting, lighting fires with a magnifying glass, coming home covered in mud as if back from the battlefield or some jungle trek. The boy roams the countryside alone, swims in the Lake, builds kites. He catches insects, sketches them, transfixes them with a pin and mounts them on card. The sacrificial ritual brings the dead back to life. From his father, as warrior tribesmen hand down spear and shield, he inherits emblems, bringing the microscope and the scalpel down from a trunk in the attic. Here is a second Alexandre Yersin, a second entomologist. The dead man’s collections are in a Geneva museum. It’s a possible goal in life: to spend one’s days in austere study, awaiting one’s turn for a blood vessel to burst in the brain.

 

Tormenting insects aside, for generation after generation the canton of Vaud has offered little in the way of fun. The very idea is suspect. Life in these parts means atoning for the sin of living. The Yersin family performs its atonement in the shadow of the Free Evangelical Church, begotten of a schism in Lausanne, the very heart of Vaudois Protestantism. The Free Evangelical Church withholds from the state the right to pay its pastors and fund the upkeep of its places of worship. Congregations, in their destitute strictness, all but bleed themselves dry to meet their preachers’ needs. It is quite another matter, keeping a Catholic priest, even one blessed with a healthy appetite. Your pastor, to please the Lord (go forth and multiply), is one who reproduces with great rapidity. Huge families fill the nest, all agape. No longer are the mothers’ threadbare skirts passed down to servants. The faithful robe themselves in their elitism and probity as in togas. They are the purest of the pure, the persons most remote from material existence, the aristocrats of faith.

From this lofty coldness in the blue frigidity of Sundays, the young man, as a child, is said to have retained a brusque candour and a contempt for worldly goods. The well-behaved schoolboy (well behaved out of boredom) becomes a studious youth. The only men received in the little chintz parlour of Fig Tree House are doctor friends of his mother. Eventually it is time to choose between France and Germany and their different university systems. East of the Rhine, brilliant theoretical lectures, science passed down by learned men, professors in dark suits and celluloid collars. In Paris, clinical teaching at the patient’s bedside by men in white coats, the so-called patronal system created by Laennec.

The choice falls on Marburg because of his mother and his mother’s friends. Yersin would have preferred Berlin, but the provinces win. Fanny rents a room for her son with a worthy teacher, a prominent figure who does his sermonising at the university but is a regular churchgoer. Yersin complies, keen to cut the apron strings. To keep on the move. His dreams are those of a child. It is the beginning of a correspondence with Fanny that will end only with her death. ‘When I’m a doctor I shall take you with me and we’ll set up shop in the South of France or in Italy, all right?’

French becomes a secret language, truly a mother tongue, something special for the evenings, the language of his letters to Fanny.

He is twenty, and for a while his daily life will be wholly German-speaking.

Eventually, yes, but first he must wait for a long, long year. In a letter written in July he notes that ‘it is raining and cold as usual, Marburg is definitely not a sunny spot’. The teaching is as much of a disappointment to him as the climate. Yersin’s mind is pragmatic, empirical, he needs to see and touch, to handle things, to build actual kites. His prominent host has features to grace a banknote. The Americans have a word for such folk: dwem. Elderly sages, white, select, learned, with goatee beards and pince-nez spectacles.

Marburg possesses four universities, a theatre, botanical gardens, law courts and a hospital. All dominated by the castle of the Landgraves of Hesse. A researcher, a writer clutching a moleskin-covered notebook, a ghost of the future on Yersin’s tail, currently a guest at the Hotel Zur Sonne, climbing the steep streets in search of traces of our hero’s youth, looking down on the River Lahn, has no difficulty, in this oasis of civilisation spread out beneath a low and heavy sky, in locating the tall half-timbered stone house in the dim recesses of which languishes a slight young man with sharp blue eyes and the beginnings of a beard.

The ghost, who is able to pass through walls as well as travel in time, sees behind the half-timbered façade the dark wood of the furniture, the dark leather of the armchairs and bookbindings ranged in the library. The blacks and browns of a Flemish painting. In the evening, golden lamplight for the murmured blessing, the silent meal. The pendulum catches a reflection. Higher up, it drives the gearing round by one cog, making the clock tick. On the pediment of the town hall, Death turns his sandglass to mark the hours. No one takes any notice. It is eternal, this present. The world will gain little by continuing to evolve. This civilisation has reached its peak. A few details may need to be sorted out. Some drugs could probably do with refining.

At the head of the table sits a solemn, silent Jove, Professor Julius Wilhelm Wigand, Doctor of Philosophy, Director of the Pharmaceutical Institute, Curator of the Botanic Gardens, Dean of Faculty. Each evening he receives the young Vaudois in his study. His attentions are of a paternalistic nature. He seeks to give the youth guidance in his academic rise and help him avoid mistakes. For instance, he chides him for keeping company with a man called Sternberg (the name says it all). He counsels him to join a fraternity. But then Yersin, the shy student in the armchair before him, never had a father. He has done without one up to now.

 

Whether reading medicine, law, botany or theology, the Marburg students of the time have one thing in common: nine out of ten belong to a fraternity. Following the initiation rites and the taking of vows, what this involves every evening is repairing to a particular watering-hole, where the walls are covered with coats of arms, to get seriously plastered and fight duels. Throats are protected with scarves, tickers with plastrons, blades are unsheathed. Fights are halted at first blood. Unshakeable friendships are born. A person will show off the scars on his body much as in later years medals will be displayed on uniforms. However, one man in ten is excluded from such camaraderie. That is the numerus clausus allotted to Jews under university law.

The slight young man in black opts for the tranquillity of study, country walks, discussions with Sternberg. Anatomy and clinical courses are dispensed in the lecture theatre, when these two are ready for a hospital setting. Dissection. Experiencing the real thing. In Berlin, where Yersin eventually moves, he attends two hip resections in the same week, while Marburg used to see only one a year. At last he is walking the streets of a major capital. That year, the hotels are full of diplomats and explorers. Berlin is becoming the capital of the world.

On Bismarck’s initiative, all the colonial nations assemble there around the atlas to divide up Africa. The occasion, the Congress of Berlin. At which the mythical Stanley, who fourteen years earlier found Livingstone, finds himself representing the King of the Belgians, owner of the Congo. Yersin reads the newspapers, researches Livingstone’s life, and the Scotsman becomes his role model: the man who is simultaneously explorer, man of action, scientist, pastor, discoverer of the Zambesi and doctor, the man who, lost for years in unknown reaches of central Africa, when Stanley finally found him again opted to stay put and died there.

One day, Yersin will be the new Livingstone.

He writes as much in a letter to Fanny.

 

Germany, like France and Britain, is deploying sabre and machine gun to carve itself out an empire, colonising the Cameroons, what is now Namibia, what is now Tanzania and up as far as Zanzibar. In that year of the Congress of Berlin, Arthur Rimbaud, author of a polemical pamphlet entitled Bismarck’s Dream, hauls two thousand rifles and sixty thousand rounds of ammunition by camel train to Abyssinia for King Menelik. The former French poet turned promoter of French interests is against the territorial designs of the British and Egyptians under Gordon. ‘Their Gordon is a fool, their Wolseley an ass, and all their undertakings a senseless string of absurdities and depredations.’ He stresses the primary strategic significance of the port; he uses the spelling ‘Dhjibouti’, as Baudelaire writes ‘Saharah’. He draws up an exploration report for France’s Geographical Society, dispatches geopolitical articles to a Cairo newspaper (Le Bosphore égyptien) that find an echo in Germany, Austria and Italy. He describes the ravages of war. ‘The Abyssinians, in the space of a few months, have consumed dourah supplies left by the Egyptians that might have lasted several years. Famine and plague are just around the corner.’

It is an insect that spreads bubonic plague. The flea. No one, at the time, knows this yet.

 

From Berlin, Yersin goes on to Jena. He buys from Carl Zeiss the very latest microscope, which will never leave him subsequently, accompanying his global travels in his baggage, the microscope that, ten years hence, will help him identify the plague bacillus. Carl Zeiss is a kind of Spinoza, and for both men polishing lenses fosters contemplation and brings Utopia closer. Baruch Spinoza was another Jew, Sternberg tells him. The two students, back in Marburg, take turns leaning over the brand-new instrument, fiddling with the notched focusing wheel to discern the geometry of a dragonfly’s wing. Yersin, too, witnesses anti-Semitic violence at first hand, shop windows being smashed, punches thrown. The word plague may well slip into the two students’ conversation.

 

People who have had neither often confuse plague with leprosy. The great plague of medieval times, the Black Death, gives us the demographic statistic of twenty-five million dead. Half Europe’s population is cut down, no . . .