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!"