The Bloody Doll Page 28

  “His eyes burn me; his immovable mask, that I sculpted with my own hands so that he would be beautiful, terrifies me... as would the face of a djinn, carved out of marble from a tombstone, whose heavy eyelids are raised suddenly to fix me in a gaze that consumes me.... A radio-active serum has made him into a Thing... Now I have nothing but a single hope: that he will return to his nothingness... It is no longer Gabriel! It is not even Benedict Masson! It is a horrible whirlwind... I am nothing but a wound...”

  Which, incidentally, has been poor Benedict’s fate all along. The inclusion of the poem, found among his personal effects and addressed to Christine, at the end of the Bloody Doll is the key to this. The narrating voice, haunted by an impossible, missing love, with which Verlaine promenades the memory of an unspecified amorous wound, that seems to weep with the voices of puddleducks, warns of Benedict’s later unmasking as someone who truly loved her, who sacrifices himself to save her from the Marquis and the death cult that surrounds him – a true lover, with a refined ear for lyrical beauty, driven to voyeurism by his own timidity… and a talent for cutting up corpses to cover the Marquis de Coulteray’s tracks… nothing more… there is at least something serious in his Landru-esque defence: just because he cut a girl into pieces and burned her doesn’t mean that he killed her… but that should not be taken to mean that Leroux believed Landru to be innocent!

  Notes on sources: the text follows Francis Lacassin’s definitive edition of Gaston Leroux’s Aventures Incroyables (Bouquins, Éditions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1992), which collects his later fiction, from Le Capitaine Hyx (1917) to Mister Flow (1927). Anonymously translated, incomplete, and quaintly censored versions of La Poupée Sanglante (‘the gory puppet...’) and La Machine à Assassiner appeared briefly in the USA in 1934 under the titles The Kiss that Killed and The Machine to Kill, but they seem to have disappeared, along with their publisher, shortly afterwards. The US Library of Congress only lists the first editions of these in its collections. They have never appeared in the UK. On Henri Désiré Landru, I relied heavily on: Dennis Bardens, The Ladykiller: The Crimes of Landru, the French Bluebeard (Senate True Crime, Twickenham, 1988) and also Henri Désiré Landru, le Barbe Bleue de Gambais: du petit escroc au tueur en série, from the French Justice Ministry’s website at www.justice.gouv.fr/histoire-et-patrimoine. For another fictional account of these events, in which, incidentally, Landru is innocent, see Christoph Chabouté, Henri Désiré Landru (graphic novel, Les Éditions Vents d’Ouest, Issy-Les-Molineaux, 2006) For the ultimate black comedy version, see: Jean-Baptiste Botul (aka Frédéric Pages), Landru, précurseur du féminisme (Éditions Mille Et Une Nuits, Paris, 2007). Biographical data on Gaston Leroux is from a Bibliothèque Nationale de France profile and Francis Lacassin’s chronology of his life, appended to Aventures Incroyables. All quotations from Slavoj Žižek are from How to Read Lacan (E-book, Granta, London, 2011).

  Stephen Metcalf, Easter 2016.