Nora, The Ape-Woman Read online

  The battle was fierce; the young males and the females fought desperately to defend and project their offspring. In the end, however, the white men had the advantage of fierce, and Goldry returned to Riddle Temple with thirty young apes, including a son of Dilou and Ouha, and also a young female snatched from the cadaver of Kri-Kri’s widow, who posed, for the doctor, an anguishing enigma of possible paternity.

  To remain at Riddle Temple with that whole menagerie would have constituted a permanent danger; the females and a few males who had escaped the massacre had taken refuge with another tribe, and had recounted their misfortunes. All the orangutans of the island made the decision to vanquish them, determined to regain possession of the orphans. It was a war of skirmishes, because the anthropoids now feared the firearms that killed at a distance, but woe betide any man who strayed far from the temple! He was never seen again.

  2. Serge Voronoff

  Goldry, a member of several academies, and especially occupied with primates, had been in correspondence several times with the celebrated surgeon Serge Voronoff, and was not unaware of his work on regeneration by glandular grafts.

  The importation to France of thirty orangutans was bound to be of immense interest to Voronoff. Goldry wrote to him, and an active correspondence ensued, which resulted in the foundation of an establishment, a veritable stud-farm, for the elevation and reproduction of apes. Voronoff recommended a region to him, which, in terms of temperature and the purity of the atmosphere, seemed to fulfill all the necessary conditions for the establishment of a simian colony. It was in a corner of the Côte d’Azur, east of Beaulieu, near Eze.

  Once the establishment was completed, Voronoff and Goldry immediately occupied themselves with their boarders, most particularly with the son of Ouha and the daughter of Kri-Kri’s widow, and perhaps the American. Those two subjects seemed more progressive than the other orangutans.

  In the meantime, Voronoff had occasion to remove the ovaries of a Russian ex-princess who wanted to amuse herself a great deal without running any risks.13 The expert surgeon then had the idea of allowing the young she-ape to profit from that windfall. He therefore had Nora brought into the next room, and carried out the double operation very adroitly.

  The result, for the young orangutan, was surprising; her intelligence increased in a sensible manner, and when she reached the age of two—the age of puberty in the apes—her menstrual discharges, which in apes, are white, became red.

  3. Marc Vanel

  At that time, a friend of Goldry’s came to visit Little Borneo, that being the name by which the establishment of the Côte d’Azur was known. And, quite naturally, Goldry introduced Nora and Narcisse—the son of Ouha and Dilou—to Marc Vanel, the fantastic scientific genius. The latter than had the idea of attempting one of those fabulous experiments that made him a kind of sorcerer or demigod:14 to transform the she-ape into a woman, thus accomplishing in a few months, the work into which nature had put thousands of years!

  A tempting project for that formidable intelligence!

  A mysterious conference took place between Drs. Vanel, Goldry, Voronoff and Jean Fortin; from that collaboration a marvelous phenomenon was born: the fantastic ballerina Nora, who became, as soon as she made her debut at the Folies Bergère, one of the queens of Paris.

  How? By what means?

  But one fact summons another. Before going any further, it is necessary to say that Marc Vanel, a universal scholar, had a mind capable of resolving all the enigmatic secrets of nature. A pupil of Jean Fortin, the young scientist had left France following a disappointment in love; the precocious misanthrope drowned his sorrows by traveling. He spent ten years roaming the world, particularly in India, where he was initiated into all the mysteries of the fantastic practices of fakirs and yogis. Then he returned to Europe, where he undertook research into the invisibility of certain substances. He reasoned that, if certain solid substances like sand and potassium can give birth to a transparent substance, such as glass, water or atmospheric air, then it was possible to attain the invisibility of the human body.

  The research was long and difficult, but it finally succeeded. Since then, Marc Vanel merited his nickname, Homo-Deus: the man-god, the invisible being who, like the creative will, could make his efforts felt without being seen.

  4. Jean Fortin

  Marc Vanel then returned to Paris with his formidable secret, and entered into collaboration with his former science teacher, Jean Fortin. Fortin too was a scientist of unlimited genius. He had, most of all, made a specialty of the psychic sciences, aided, and perhaps overtaken, by his daughter Jeanne, an elite individual, a veritable personification of science.

  The association of those three monstrous intellects had inevitably led them to carry out fantastic experiments. They resuscitated a cadaver, and did it so well that they attracted the fierce hatred of a trio of bandits. One night, they were attacked at Dr. Fortin’s house at Saint-Cloud, the Red Nest. The battle was desperate on either side; the three bandits perished, but Jeanne Fortin was mortally wounded.

  It was then that in those three unparalleled minds the formidable thought was born of vanquishing death. With the will-power of her father combined with her own, Jeanne caused her spirit—her soul, her self—to pass into that of Marc Vanel, her spiritual spouse.

  “Death is vanquished!” Vanel cried, when he sensed his soul, his mind, doubled by that of Jeanne Fortin. That is why, from time to time, Marc Vanel will address Dr. Fortin, in the course of this story, as “Father.”

  Such was the quartet of fantastic doctors—Marc Vanel, Jean Fortin, Serge Voronoff and Abraham Goldry—who undertook the strange metamorphosis of Nora, the ape who became a woman.

  V. How to Make a Woman and a Man

  Drs. Georges Clemenceau, Jean Fortin and Abraham Goldry had retraced their route in an inverse direction. To the right of the main house were the work-rooms, where all the most modern methods and instruments were employed, as well as an immense laboratory for chemical manipulations and the utilization of cathode rays. Nothing was lacking, even an observatory—which, however, had nothing to do with the aim of the establishment.

  “Who can tell?” Fortin had said one day. “One of our orangutans might become a great astronomer.”

  On perceiving the individual who came to open the door to them, Clemenceau took a step backwards. There was good reason: an orangutan nearly six feet tall stood before him, and greeted him with a respectful: “Bonjour. Monsieur le Président.”

  Reassured, the excellent and ferocious gentleman with the abundant white moustache burst out laughing.

  “Damn! What’s this new masquerade?”

  Marc Vanel came forward “Excuse me, Monsieur le Président, for not having accompanied you, but I was completing an experiment that could not be postponed.”

  “It would be for me to apologize if I had disturbed you, but I didn’t think you were so facetious...”

  “Oh, I understand your error. Permit me to introduce Monsieur Narcisse.”

  “Narcisse!” murmured the former President of the Council.

  “Delighted to meet you, Monsieur Clemenceau. I have a book about you by Gustave Geoffroy,15 which I found very interesting.” And he extended toward the visitor a hand that was twice as big as one of his.

  “But…but…am I mad?” said the other, alarmed.

  “Not in the least, my dear Monsieur. My genre of beauty seems strange to you, but what do you expect? An orangutan, in spite of being named Narcisse, can’t resemble an Antinous.”

  “An orangutan? You? But you can talk...”

  “I can talk and I can think, thanks to Monsieur Vanel.”

  “Truly, I’m wondering whether I’m really awake, or dreaming.”

  “We’re going to explain all that,” said Vanel. “Let’s go into my study. In the meantime, Narcisse, you can finish making a clean copy of the notes that we were in the process of sorting out.”

  Narcisse bowed, and sat down tranquilly in the mo
bile chair in front of a vast desk.

  “Let’s begin at the beginning,” said Marc Vanel, when they were all comfortably seated. He addressed Jean Fortin: “It appears, Father, that you’ve found Nora?”

  “Yes, now an accomplished woman, and furthermore, a choreographic artiste at the Folies Bergère. A great personality, a star.”

  “I believe, since you know Nora and have admired her with us at the Folies Bergère, that it’s with her story that it’s appropriate to begin. According to what our friend Goldry has told us, this Nora is his own progeniture, with a she-ape with whom circumstances put him in relationship on the island of Borneo, just as Narcisse is the son of a native woman named Dilou and a heroic orangutan, Ouha, nicknamed the king of the apes.

  “When Goldry came here, on the advice of our friend Dr. Voronoff, Nora was scarcely two years old. At that time, Voronoff had to perform an ablation of the ovaries on a slightly mad Russian princess. He decided to take advantage of the opportunity to graft the princess’s ovaries into the young ape. Shortly afterwards, in my turn, I entered the lists. A kind of phenomenon had occurred within the young ape after the operation; her vitality had increased, her hair became longer and more supple, her intellect, above all, was superior to that of all her peers. It was a marvelous experimental field, and I took care not to miss it. To make that sketch into a woman—a true woman—seemed to me to be desirable, and I devoted myself to it with enthusiasm.

  “Once, my father and I had succeeded in creating arterial blood by means of a tissue culture. This time, it was necessary for us to find the formula of the primordial atom—the atom constitutive of every living thing...let us say, in parenthesis, that everything of which the earth is comprised is alive; death does not exist; everything is transformed; nothing is created from nothing, and in the same way, nothing is destroyed...”

  “There are, however, dead things,” Clemenceau interjected. “Minerals.”

  “Minerals, like everything else: debris of beings that have been. Time is nothing in the ensemble of phenomena that rule the planet. It requires thousands or hundreds of thousands of years for a mass of vegetation to become peat, as many for that peat to become coal, and similarly for porphyry or granite to become what they presently are.”

  “But what about rocks of a plutonian nature, vitrified issues of the molten earth?”

  “La la! Don’t get carried away! If the center of the globe were molten, it would be considerably dilated, and in consequence, less heavy than it is; in the same way that making glass requires sand and potassium, to make granite or any other vitrified stone requires vitrifiable matter. Soft beings produce hard bodies like coral and seashells. Those are the foundations of the solid part of the globe, and there is no other. In the beginning there was nothing but living matter, a primordial atom that was, and still is, the basis of everything that exists.

  “Thus, there’s no need to seek elsewhere for that microcosm; it is in everything and everywhere, in ourselves as in a tree or a blade of grass. It was sufficient, therefore, once it was found, to isolate it and care for it, as one develops parts of organs in culture media; as with an arm or a piece of meat, once can continue to nourish it, and even to progress it, cell by cell. The soil itself is something living; it contains billions and billions of micro-organisms that work for plants, preparing their humificatory aliments.”

  “The primordial atom is unique,” said Clemenceau, gravely. “Just as an early Christian said ‘I believe in God,’ it’s an act of faith in science.”

  “But its combinations,” Dr. Vanel went on, “are innumerable, and as life develops on the globe, the atom combines with its own residues to form the primal infusoria. Let’s not follow that gradation—you’re familiar with it. Let’s return to the organic cell that I needed in order to modify a living bring.

  “In sum, it was necessary for me to do, in a few months, the work that nature accomplishes in thousands of centuries. I was in the presence of a two-year-old ape—which, in terms of simian growth, corresponds to the age of ten in human growth. That constituted a further difficulty, since, for what I wanted to do, I would have required a much younger child. Let us take, in thought, a human being and observe her growth, her development. By what strange phenomenon does that individual grow and develop? It’s evidently by the gradual augmentation of organic cells—but what gives birth to those cells? Is it uniquely nutrition, or do we possess special organs that spread those cells within the body in some fashion, augmenting strength and stature? Yes! And those organs are the glands, the glands whose importance was neglected for so long, which are the source of our physical progression—and, can I affirm here, our psychic progression, since Nora is the proof of it.”

  “Then Nora, the ape who has become a woman, is really the daughter of science?”

  “To describe to you all the operations, all the manipulations, grafts and inoculations we carried out would be rather tedious, my dear President, because all of that could only be done with infinite precaution. The main thing was the intellectual progression, because it was able to aid the physical progression powerfully, via magnetic suggestion. We know now that the concentration of thought toward a unique end can influence an organ to the point of modifying it. The difficulty, in my case, was procuring the pineal gland of a living man or woman and grafting it on to Nora’s brain.

  “Finally, I found what I needed; one of the foremen who was working here fell victim to an accident; a metal plate fell and broke his back. The man was doomed. I took advantage of it, and before he died I carried out an ablation of the pineal gland and grafted it into Nora. My injured man was a mine. I also took the thyroid gland and grafted it in the same way. That was a great deal all at once, but I had no choice. Fortunately, orangutans have an astonishing resistance. To make the graft I was obliged to trepan the subject. I took advantage of it to raise the cranial cavity, in order to make more room for the encephalum and permit its development without the brain being compressed. That work was done with bone taken from a living animal. Fortunately, my ape held on, and I was able to pursue my enterprise.”

  “By what method did you procure the cells?”

  “Oh, the simplest: the testicles of a chimpanzee, placed in the same culture medium I’ve already mentioned. The organ lived therein, was nourished and, on the other hand, spread its production of cells through the medium in which it existed—in sum, the same phenomenon that occurs in our organism.

  “I then had a statue made by a sculptor, in accordance with the modern esthetic, and then a mold made, hollowed out in that form. That statue was the size of a ten-year-old child, the equivalent of my simian subject. Needless to say, I had to shorten the arms of my ape, Nora, by breakages, and elongate the legs by gradual traction using lead weights. The subject, in a magnetic trance, placed herself in the mold, where I compressed and softened her form, as an artist manipulates clay. At the same time, with a Pravaz syringe, I stuffed the thin parts, so to speak, with organic cells.

  “That work cost me an entire year—with, of course, the aid of my colleagues, Fortin, Voronoff and Goldry. At the end of the year, however, the work was complete. Nora was born…the ape had become a woman.”

  “And then?” asked Clemenceau, breathless with emotion.

  “Afterwards? Nora was then three simian years of age, eleven in feminine appearance. Her intelligence was somewhat in advance of her age. Goldry, her adoptive father, recognized her legally under the name of Nora Goldry; then he put her in a boarding-school with the Mères du Saint-Pleur at Gadijoz in the Dordogne.16 She stayed there for two years; then, one night, she climbed over the wall of the convent and disappeared. And now, five years later, my father, Dr. Fortin, and I have just rediscovered her in Paris, in a music hall, the Folies Bergère. You applauded her with us.”

  “Marvelous!” said the Tiger, “I can’t find any other word: marvelous! But that isn’t all! What about the other, Narcisse?”

  “Narcisse is something else, and much more intere
sting than making a puppet, like the majority of humans! In sum, an improved ape isn’t as marvelous as you’ve just claimed, but to raise an ape to the dignity of a superhuman was much better: the same procedures as for Nora, but uniquely directed toward the goal of intellectual development.

  “Narcisse has conserved the simian appearance, but if you had looked at him more carefully you would have noticed that his forehead doesn’t slope backwards, that his facial angle is the same as ours. The cranial cavity is larger by a third than ours, and two pineal glands have been grafted into his brain, plus a thyroid. In addition, I’ve worked on his larynx, and loosened the tongue and the vocal cords. As he told you himself, he talks and he thinks.

  “He thinks! He understands me! He will be my equal, will surpass me, and will be what I desire: a superhuman. What does it matter that he’s ugly? Physical beauty is only a convention, and Narcisse is a being who is advancing by several rungs along the ladder of progress...”

  “The ladder of progress!” stammered the Tiger. “In the name of God! These people are driving me mad—I can feel my skull splitting.”

  “Well, well!” exclaimed Dr. Fortin. “The Tiger going dingo? That would be funny.”

  And the eccentric scientist sketched out the steps of a tango around the room. Then, stopping suddenly in front of the former President of the Council, the victor of the Great War, he said: “That’s not all, my dear Georges. You don’t think I’ve brought you here with the sole aim of allowing you to admire the establishment and those who inhabit it?”

  “Why, then?” said the other, nonplussed. “You don’t have the intention of taking me as a boarder?”

  “No, your grimaces are too well-known. I simply thought of you in order to find a place for Narcisse. We don’t want to make him a functionary, you understand, or a député. You’re in the Académie but don’t sit there. Cede your place to him, make him your secretary and representative. He’ll be exactly what’s needed.”