The Bloody Doll Page 23

  They found the widow Gérard in the courtyard, as if she had been turned into a statue, her mouth still hanging wide open from the scream that she had forced out. She stared like a lunatic, straight in front of her, into the countryside... instinctively, their eyes followed the direction of her maddened stare... and they saw a white shape, draped in a long veil, coming across the fields...

  The light of the night was so vivid, the full moon shone so brightly that they could distinguish the garland of flowers that crowned the head of the phantom, which fell onto her shoulders, tangled in her hair. They did not hesitate. With scarcely a glance, they knew it was her: her, the new vampire, who had escaped from her tomb and was walking towards Coulteray.

  All six of them could not have been seeing things! They pulled the widow Gérard back and rushed into the inn... they closed the doors and windows, warned the servants, then barricaded themselves inside. Everyone hid in the same room. Widow Gérard began reciting Ave Maria. The servants gave her the responses. The men said nothing... they had turned pale... they were ashamed of their fear.

  “All the same,” pronounced Achard, the innkeeper, “we’re all idiots! It’s impossible!”

  But the others protested to the contrary. They had seen her all-too well! She had come out through the wall of the chateau. “Surely,” the blacksmith agreed, “we are the victims of some alchemist, who has cast a wicked spell on us... well, I’ll be damned... I’d not have thought such things could happen nowadays!”

  “What d’you think she’s come to do here, this strange spirit?”

  Achard was unable to remain in one place... highly agitated, he hushed the women and their interminable repetitions of Ave Maria.

  “No... it can’t be possible. They’ll say that we made all of this up... tomorrow they’ll all be laughing at us,” and then he left the room.

  They called to him to keep quiet... but it was more than he could do... he re-opened one of the windows and called to the others, who rose reluctantly...

  The women refused to move... but they could hear what was going on.

  “Over there... that’s her! She’s goin’ up! She’s goin’ back to the chateau! Look! There she is, by the wall! She’s goin’ back into the cemetery... well, let her go and maybe she won’t be coming back... vampires only go to work at night... they’re afraid of the daylight... but what about the Marquis?”

  The women resumed their Ave Maria, Ave Maria with a kind of holy fury... but the men silenced them once more as soon as they came back into the room. By now, they were familiar with the idea of the vampire... they had seen her return to her domain... they felt reassured... they had a whole day ahead of them in which to decide what they ought to do. What bothered them most of all was the thought that no-one was going to believe them. They would say that they had made all of it up...

  This was a chimerical fear because, in the first rays of daybreak, when they finally dared to show themselves, all of Coulteray was already up and about.

  The people who had hidden in the inn were not the only ones to have seen the new vampire. There were even some that had heard her. For example, there were two neighbours of the widow Gérard, who lived close to the bridge, who had been awakened the sound of her calling “Adolphine! Adolphiiine!” (this was widow Gérard’s Christian name).

  They had got up and recognized the Marchioness, attired just as they had seen her in her coffin that morning.

  She had rested for a few moments in the middle of the road, with her head turned up towards Adolphine’s room (who was unable to answer her since she was at the inn). The two neighbours swore that this information was the absolute truth. As for the vampire, she had gone on her way after emitting a prolonged sigh.

  The two neighbours had spent the remainder of the night saying their prayers. One can easily understand that it did not take much to turn the whole of the countryside upside down.

  When they found out what had happened to Drouine, even the most incredulous bowed to the common belief... except for three: the mayor, the doctor and the parish priest.

  The doctor, Monsieur Moricet, explained the extraordinary event with science...it was not the first time that he had been confronted with a ‘collective hallucination.’ It could be explained by the legend of the ‘Empouse’ that had become firmly established in this part of the country. The lads at the inn had been half-drunk. Of course Jacques Cotentin, when consulted, was of the same opinion as these three gentlemen... why... he had seen nothing! Nothing but a tomb which had not been touched.

  Nevertheless, they were faced with a population, agitated by this superstition, that they needed to calm down. This is what they said:

  “If the tomb had not been a temporary one, if the stone had been sealed, cemented shut as it ought to have been, if the lead coffin had been sealed properly (rather than with rivets that allowed the coffin to be opened easily during the funeral ceremony), the vampire would not have been able to escape to come and walk the night in Coulteray. We will give you people satisfaction. We will go to the tomb and open it... and show you all the mortal remains of Bessie-Anne-Elizabeth. Then, in the presence of all of you, we shall close the casket and the tomb and seal the stone that covers it with cement. Then, finally, and with great ceremony, the priest shall speak the rites of exorcism.”

  After all this had been done, everyone was calmed for the moment. Christine was able to see her friend one last time and, in truth, after seeing that she was as dead as she could possibly be, the events of the preceding night, the promenade that had led to all this talk, had all seemed to jumble her ideas. She no longer knew what she had seen... nor, indeed, if she had seen anything at all!

  As for Drouine, he was more sombre than ever – and no-one dared speak to him of hallucination, whether collective or singular. He had seen the dead woman under his window! He had seen the empty tomb! Jacques was forced to silence him...

  Christine, who was in an extremely fragile condition, wanted to leave that very evening. This day would always remain in the annals of Coulteray: when the legend of the ‘Empouse’ took on such a persuasive force that it shone its light way beyond the borders into neighbouring provinces – so much so that visitors flooded into the territory in such numbers that Achard, the innkeeper, and Drouine’s successor, made their fortunes. They never failed to tell the story of the ‘new vampire,’ as if she had come to them.

  To return to Christine: on her return to the chateau, after the ceremony of exorcism, she was overtaken by a strange torpor which came, perhaps simply, from her state of weakness. She was forced to go to bed and only emerged from the condition the following morning – just in time to see the famous limousine with its iron shutters, that she had not seen started, enter the courtyard of the chateau. There was nothing mysterious about the car that morning. The shutters were open and it was being driven by Jacques – which did not fail to astonish Christine.

  “Where have you been in that limousine?” she demanded...

  “I took pity on poor Drouine, who wanted to get out of here at once! Widow Gérard, whom he intends to marry, also wanted to get out of the country, so I answered their prayers and drove them to Sologne in the night. Drouine has a little house down there, where he has decided to end his days. I took this car because there aren’t any others in the chateau...t he poor unfortunates would have gone mad if they’d had to stay in this land for another hour!”

  “By my faith, I can understand that now,” said Christine, “let’s get going too, and straight away!”

  During the journey, she sat for hours without saying anything. He could not tell if she was sleeping or simply deep in reflection. For a moment, she opened her eyes and said to Jacques:

  “I still find it strange that you left me like that, without telling me, in that chateau... while you were driving Drouine and widow Gérard to Sologne, I must have been all alone.”

  “No, you were never on your own,” answered Jacques, “I asked Dr. Moricet to spend the night at the cha
teau.”

  The same evening, as they drove into Tours, they received a telegram from old Norbert:

  “Come back at once – I am worried about Gabriel!”

  XXVI

  The Scaffold

  The trial of Benedict Masson took place at the beginning of November, in Melun. It proceeded as predicted at the preliminary hearing. All the cynicism of the accused seemed to have been augmented, if that was possible. His responses were a mixture of Jean Hiroux and Emile Henry, full of intended stupidity and audacious menace, in language that was, at times, that of a trooper, which could elevate itself suddenly into the sovereign fierceness of a biblical prophet, and thence into flowery language as if from a page written by Bernadin de Saint-Pierre [26] – although most often it would terminate in a phrase from some abominable slang.

  The jury served as the target for his worst jokes. To the presiding judge in the court, he repeated what he had said to the examining magistrate – that he was not paid to do the judge’s job, and it was for the law to ascertain what had happened to the young ladies that had passed through Corbillères; that, in the matter that concerned the court, he had no interest whatsoever, he had not even the slightest interest in their fate; and that, even if they had found him burning a girl that had been cut into pieces (an accident to be regretted, mostly by her…), it did not in any way prove that he was guilty of her murder.

  We will not insist on the attitude that, they say, then rose in the hearts of all honest folk. The indictment read out by the counsel for the prosecution was, as one might have expected, implacable. Benedict Masson could count on very little indulgence on the part of this representative of the Republic, having treated that honourable magistrate, whose face had been pitted by smallpox, with acerbic contempt.

  The most sensational moment of these shameful exchanges came, without a doubt, when Christine Norbert stepped into the witness box. The manner of the accused changed completely. He lost his haughty tone, dropped down onto the bench, and hid his face in his arms. Christine’s testimony was brief and damning.

  Mademoiselle Norbert did not even once look in the direction of Benedict. When she turned to face the jury, she seemed to dictate their duty to them. They did not fail her. Benedict Masson was sentenced to death.

  He refused to sign his appeal for clemency. On the 2nd of December, the ‘sinister machine’ (to use the sensational vocabulary of the Gazette des Tribunaux) was erected in Melun, in front of the cemetery gates. There was a severe frost. Everyone present shivered. Only the condemned man did not tremble, as he exited the wagon that had brought him from the prison. His head, which was about to be cut-off, was held high. He contemplated the crowd, that had assembled there, without any show of emotion. They were expecting to hear a final insult to society from him, or a complaint about the manner in which the trial had been conducted, but he had vented all of his bitterest bile. He kissed the crucifix, that the priest held out to him, and uttered the words:

  “Here is my brother, my sister, my mother...”[27]

  Then he gave himself up to the executioner’s assistants.

  The guillotine’s blade fell. Monsieur de Paris [28] has often said that he had never presided over such an execution.

  Ordinarily, the condemned, as soon as he has been secured to the plank, and had his neck introduced into the lunette, would appear to stiffen and retract his head back into his shoulders. Benedict Masson, on the other hand, threw himself onto the plank as if onto a long-awaited bed that promised eternal rest... and his head projected itself forwards, as if it was going in search of the basket into which it was about to roll.

  The cemetery was a matter of steps away. The grave had already been dug. There followed the semblance of a funeral ceremony – but, afterwards, Benedict Masson’s head was delivered to an aide of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris who disappeared immediately, clutching his bloody trophy (according to various sources in the press).

  On the same day, the counsel for the defence of this ill-fated creature forwarded the only paper that had been left by his client to Mademoiselle Christine Norbert. On it, she could read these verses from Verlaine’s Promenade Sentimentale: [29]

  The sunset extinguished its final rays

  And the wind rocked the pale nenuphars;

  The broad-leafed nenuphars, between the reeds,

  That glistened sadly on the still waters.

  There I walked alone, promenading my wound

  Along the pond’s edge, through the willow trees,

  Where the murky mist conjured a milk-white

  Ghost, looming tall, in the throes of despair.

  It drifted and wept with the voices of teals

  That called to each other, while beating their wings,

  Through the willow trees, where I walked alone,

  Promenading my wound.

  And a dense shroud

  Of darkness seemed to drown the final rays

  Of the sunset in their pale, fading waves;

  And the broad-leafed nenuphars, between the reeds,

  That glistened sadly on the still waters.

  And under these verses, this line: “Why did you come?”

  Now that Benedict Masson has been guillotined, one might ask why the writer who reported these events has described this terrible adventure as ‘sublime.’ It is ‘horrific,’ yes, and ‘abominable,’ indeed, but: sublime? Well, yes, indeed – the adventure of Benedict Masson is sublime: It is sublime because it has only just begun!

  End of Part 1.

  You will be able to read the conclusion of The Bloody Doll in

  Part 2: The Mechanical Assassin.

  NOTES

  [1] L’Homme qui rit – the title of an 1869 novel by Victor Hugo that tells the story of Gwynplaine, a man whose face has been mutilated to resemble a clown’s mask.

  [2] Paul Verlaine – ‘Colloque Sentimentale’, from Fêtes Gallantes, my translation, SM.

  [3] Louis Lambert – an 1832 novel by Honoré de Balzac that describes the opinions and exploits of a boy genius who is fascinated, to the edge of madness, by the metaphysical ideas of the philosopher, scientist and mystic, Swedenborg. The Quest of the Absolute, 1834, also written by Balzac, describes the sorrows of Mme Josephine de Temninck Claës whose husband, Balthazar, ignores his family and squanders its wealth in relentless pursuit of proof of the existence of a force, immanent to all chemical and electrical reactions, that he calls ‘the Absolute.’

  [4] Charles Baudelaire – ‘Chanson d’après midi,’ from Les Fleurs du Mal, my translation, SM.

  [5] Tour Pointue (‘Pointy Tower’) – Parisian slang for the headquarters of the Prefecture of Police at 36, Quai des Orfèvres, the home of the Sûreté générale in the early twentieth century: the French equivalent of Scotland Yard.

  [6] Paul-Louis Courier (1773-1825) was a prominent Hellenic scholar and political pamphleteer who, escaping from a charge of having deserted from Napoleon’s army, took refuge in Florence, Italy. In the library there, Courier discovered a manuscript copy of Longus’s erotic romance Daphnis and Chloë (written c.. 2nd Century vulg.), which he translated into French. Unfortunately for him, while doing so, he spilled some ink on the manuscript – which led the government of Tuscany to have him expelled from the city.

  [7] My spelling of the word ‘Brucolac’ (there are several possible) follows China Miéville’s in The Scar. Leroux’s description of this figure from European folklore is perfect – it is not the callow, gothic waif that characterizes so many contemporary vampire fictions, but a creature defined by ubiquity – its body is an enormous sac of red skin, swollen with blood. See: vampmyth.com.

  [8] Bernard Brunhes – a French geophysicist who was famous for his groundbreaking work in the field of paleomagnetism; the study of the scars of the Earth’s magnetic field that are graphically locked into rock formations, that gives all kinds of data on the Earth’s geological pre-history. He was the first scientist to claim that, at some point in the past, the
Earth’s magnetic polarity reversed.

  [9] Pierre Duhem – a French physicist and philosopher of science; he was an early exponent of the indeterminacy principle in thermodynamics.

  [10] Hermann von Helmholtz – a German physician who, in 1847, wrote a treatise on the conservation of energy in the organism which attempted to demonstrate that no energy is lost in muscular movement, because no vital force is necessary to move a muscle. He later recanted, persuaded by the law of entropy, and became one of the first proponents of the idea of galactic heat death. (Source: Oxford Dictionary of Science).

  [11] Francesco II, the Duke of Gonzaga, was the commander of the army of the League of Venice, which expelled the French from Italy following the bloody Battle of Fornovo in 1495. Stradiots, or stratioti, were mercenary troops recruited by the Italian principalities (and, indeed, by the French army) up until the early 17th Century. Most of them were recruited in Albania, Serbia, Greece, and Dalmatia (part of modern Croatia).