From: blueshirt@indigo.news   
      
   DOCTOR OMEGA - By Arnould Galopin   
      
   (English translation)   
      
   -----------------------------------   
      
   *CHAPTER I*   
      
   THE MYSTERIOUS MAN   
      
      
   How did I know Doctor Omega?   
      
   This is the whole story... a strange story... fantastic...   
   inconceivable, and perhaps would I wish that I had never met   
   this man! ...   
      
   Thus my life had been upset by such extraordinary events that I   
   wonder sometimes if I did not dream the surprising adventures   
   which occurred and made a hero of me, although I was undoubtedly   
   the least daring of all mortals.   
      
   But the reviews and magazines, the newspaper cuttings which   
   litter my table are there to remind me of the reality.   
      
   Not! ... I did not dream... I was not the toy of some morbid   
   hallucination...   
      
   During nearly sixteen months I actually left this world.   
      
   What a strange creature is man! ...   
      
   It is almost always at the time when he is quietest, when he   
   enjoys an ardently coveted happiness that he seeks the most   
   stupid complications and creates the most useless worries.   
      
   After having for a long time pursued fortune without managing to   
   seize it, I had had the unexpected chance to inherit a million   
   from an old uncle whom I had always believed poor as Job because   
   he lived in a dreadful shack and wore sordid clothing which   
   couldn’t have been held together but by a miracle.   
      
   After his death one had however found in his straw mattress a   
   thousand thousand-franc bills.   
      
   They were second-hand, but please believe that I did not make   
   any objections to accepting them.   
      
   As soon as I was in possession of this heritage, I withdrew   
   myself at once to the country.   
      
   I acquired at Marbeuf, my birthplace, a pretty cottage   
   surrounded by a park of five hectares and I gave up without   
   regret the Parisian swirl in which energies are used up and hope   
   all too often sinks.   
      
   Me, who had been a slogger... an untiring workman of letters, I   
   renounced suddenly, as soon as I was rich, any further work with   
   the pen—even reading.   
      
   Locked up in my home, I lived quietly.   
      
   It appears that certain natures do not need a world of incidents   
   to occupy themselves or have fun, and what appears monotonous   
   with some abounds for others in excitement, in unutterable   
   pleasures.   
      
   All that was actively noisy and disordered afflicted my ear by   
   its discordance and gave me nothing but pain.   
      
   I would have liked to have had the only noise around me to have   
   been that of my violin.   
      
   I forgot to mention that one thing, only one, still attached me   
   to the civilised world: a passion for music.   
      
   I had bought a Stradivarius from a great virtuoso who had died   
   suddenly while performing a concerto by Spohr and I had been   
   lucky enough to obtain the instrument for almost nothing:   
   forty-five thousand francs.   
      
   That will make, I know, everyone who has a horror of music smile.   
      
   To spend forty-five thousand francs on a violin, what madness!   
      
   Perhaps, but each one to his taste.   
      
   I prefer to play the works of the old Masters on a Stradivarius   
   than to burn the roads at a hundred miles per hour.   
      
   I thus spent my time working on the strings of my instrument   
   with a superb bow made of wood from Pernambouc, the frame of   
   which was a little marvel.   
      
   Standing in front of my desk, I worked with some heat on the   
   driest concertos of Paganini, Alard and Vieuxtemps.   
      
   One will not be able to say that I played with the aim of   
   filling my contemporaries with wonder.   
      
   I was quite simply a solitary violinist, filled with his art, an   
   impassioned, untiring and modest executant.   
      
   At one time, I received a visit from an old friend, a member of   
   the Academy of the Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, who had   
   formerly been my collaborator and with whom I had created some   
   best-sellers.   
      
   Well! will I acknowledge it? ... when this friend rang at my   
   gate and I saw in the alley his long silhouette, I could not   
   repress a sudden bad mood.   
      
   I however endeavoured to receive him (one does not become a   
   savage in a single day) but, when I had endured his presence for   
   an entire day, I started to express impatience... The second day   
   after his arrival I did not listen to him anymore, and, when he   
   launched into a long essay on the recent discovery of a   
   “palimpsest” of the Middle Ages, I abstractedly played out in   
   silence an adagio of Beethoven.   
      
   This friend undoubtedly found that I was, with my violin, as   
   tedious as Mr. Ingres, because he never returned.   
      
   However, through unceasingly reading double eighth notes and   
   thirty-second notes, my eyes were sometimes tired; my fingers,   
   in consequence of excessive overwork, became stiff and clumsy.   
      
   Then, I carefully fastened my violin in a case in purple wood, a   
   true masterpiece from the end of the seventeenth century, and I   
   went to sit on a small terrace located at the end of my park, at   
   edge of the road.   
      
   There, while dreaming of sonatas, ariettas or cantilenas, I let   
   my gaze wander over the landscape which extended in front of me.   
      
   As far as the eye could see, there were wood through which   
   protruded here and there the uniform slate roofs of bell-tower.   
   At my feet, i.e. at the bottom of the terrace, some houses were   
   aligned along a street hardly suitable for motor vehicles, the   
   majority of a disturbing architecture; their walls of red and   
   black bricks laid out symmetrically, resembled vast chess-boards.   
      
   At the end of the village was a large monotonous plain in the   
   center of which were two dreadful-looking hangars of tarred   
   boards that I had always taken for aerostatic factories or   
   warehouses.   
      
   These lugubrious buildings spoiled my view a little, but I   
   didn’t let them bother me much.   
      
   I was, in matters of esthetics, not a little indifferent.   
      
   One evening while I was on my terrace, my spirit lost in some   
   melodic daydream, I had not realized that night had come...   
      
   I was getting to my feet preparatory to returning to my cottage,   
   when suddenly, in front of me, a sinister gleam leaped into the   
   sky, spreading before me like an immense snake of fire... a   
   great sparkle abruptly illuminated sleepy fields, and a   
   formidable noise, a tumultuous crash like the voice of thousand   
   cataracts echoed across the countryside and the ground shook as   
   though it had the ague.   
      
   I was thrown from my rocking chair and the panes of my kiosk   
   fell like rain on my head...   
      
   I gave out a cry.   
      
   My gardener and my manservant ran at once and raised me with   
   concerned expressions. Perhaps they feared that I had been   
   seriously hurt; perhaps they were also concerned about the   
   possibility of a death which would have deprived them of an   
   ideal Master, one not very demanding of service, and of a quiet   
   workplace which was a true sinecure. When they realized that I   
   was not wounded their faces cleared up.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)