The Bloody Doll Page 5

  “Very well! I’ll see!”... I repeated for the sake of having something to say and in a tone commensurate with being quite at a loss for words.

  “By God, you must! At least I hope you will, otherwise there would be no reason for me to come here and confide all of this in you...”

  “Very well... good... I’m listening… continue..!”

  “At the end of the library there is a small room a few metres square that the Marquis has turned into a workshop for me, which could also serve you if… oh, dear God... if you wanted it to! If you agree to consent to my proposition of the other day… Monsieur Benedict Masson, I have every confidence in you..! I am telling you everything!” (Oh, how these women can’t prevent themselves from lying !) “Come to my rescue..! If I break it off with the Marquis… I wouldn’t just lose the small allowance that we depend upon, I am sure he would not hesitate in putting us out of the house..! But we would not be able to leave our house on the Isle Saint-Louis without a veritable catastrophe taking place! ”

  After this has passed, silence. Now we are getting to the point. It is always dangerous to leave a spot that is still warm with the remains of a murder! A corpse always leaves traces, even when it has been stuffed into a stove! The annals of the law furnish us with many examples of this..! So, I thought, since at last she had confided in me this new revelation, which I didn’t expect, my thoughts had been returning to the drama that I had witnessed: the same one that she seemed to have forgotten..! Here, as they say in court, we are entering into the heart of a ‘live’ discussion; if one can express oneself in this manner in the presence of a corpse. Once again, I was wrong! Gabriel never becomes, directly or indirectly, the subject of this conversation. Sure enough, Christine continues, sadly…

  “Yes, a veritable catastrophe… for our work! We cannot move it all out to carry on somewhere else… that would be impossible, materially and financially… that would be the end of everything… that certainly would be the end of three lives and – and maybe many more!”

  So it’s clear, then, isn’t it? It’s not a question of Gabriel! She imagines that I know nothing. Nonetheless, she knows (oh, she does), and it doesn’t seem to bother her! After all, what is it that I imagine? Perhaps, in spite of her flushed complexion and radiant looks, she is only thinking about that. Doesn’t that make her a monster... why not? With her I fall from the Heavens into Hell at the speed of a Hertzian ray. We are both monsters, made for one another…

  “If I understand you correctly, you’re asking me to accept a position as something like the librarian-cum-bookbinder to his lordship, the Marquis de Coulteray, because you’re afraid to be left alone with him!... Is that it?”

  “There you have it, sir, that’s it!... you see what confidence...”

  “Perfectly! Confidence!... confidence!... understood!... But won’t the Marquis simply look upon me as an enemy?”

  “No, because I have made certain conditions! It is better if you know everything….I wanted to leave… or rather I pretended that I wanted to leave… and that I would never return... he had spoken to me of things that displeased me… for although he is a very great gentleman, and extremely polite, he is sometimes inappropriately bold. He believed me when I told him I would never return, and he implored me not to leave. I told him that I would only agree to remain if he would be willing to have a third party present when we are together in future... He agreed… The exchange only took place recently... it was this morning, in fact... and I thought of you straight away.”

  (Yes, of course, like an old friend, like a brother…I know!)...

  “But what of the Marchioness?” I asked suddenly, “what was her part in all of this?”

  “In all of this,” answered Christine, raising her beautiful eyebrows, “why, the Marchioness has also asked me to remain.” (It’s always the same, I thought).

  VI

  The Marchioness Of Coulteray

  Christine can lead me wherever she wants. I accept all that she proposes to me. I am the most abject coward, because now I know exactly why she came to find me, and why she tolerates having me there beside her..! It’s because I’m so ugly…

  I am well aware of why they thought of me immediately, when they realized the necessity for a third party to mediate in their intimacies. Am I not the ideal ‘third party?’ Neither of them imagines that they have anything to fear from my presence; but, and this is strictly between you and me, the monster does not appreciate being the object of such mockery.

  We shall see. In the meantime, let us allow ourselves to be led: we cannot really do very much otherwise.

  Here we are, together, in the small street that leads to the quays, the small street where ordinarily there is only a light current of wind and which, this morning, was ravaged by a squall that cleaned the Isle of all the ashes and slag that fell in the night! Ah, nocturnal cinders! Odour of funerals! Let it all be carried away on the wind! For I no longer see anything through the wind but Christine’s silk stocking-sheathed legs, clicking their little Louis XV heels along the old pavement of the King’s Highway – “beneath your satin slippers, prostrate – beneath the charms of your silken feet I lay the sum of all my joys today, my genius and my fate!” [4]

  It still has a great allure, the demure architecture of dereliction that stands before us like a lavish shadow of the past… The Coulteray mansion is, with the possible exception of the Lauzun mansion, surely the finest on the Isle, and, if not, at least one of the best preserved in its original state, the only one that has not been retouched by our modern architects. We enter through an archway, which is closed by heavy doors that have been nailed shut, and then through a small door; behind which we find a noble-looking old man, wearing a gold-braided cap, who seems to be expecting us. Then the small door slams shut behind us with a dull thud and we plunge into the shadows that have clung to this place for centuries.

  Then Christine rapidly leads me across a triangular courtyard… over cobblestones carpeted with moss where she is the only one who does not slip…

  She gives me no time to admire the harmonious spirals of the staircase… we are already up high and in a grand, high-ceilinged hall; when, suddenly, there appears, from out of a niche I did not see, a species of humanoid cat with a face of polished bronze, with enormous jade-green eyes, wrapped in an immaculate silk turban…

  “That’s Sing-Sing,” said Christine under her breath, “the Marquis’ little Indian valet… a very friendly little fellow, and very helpful, but always at your heels. He’s always swinging out from some cornice, or balancing on top of an antique door. He makes you laugh... Just clap your hands, if you want to chase him away, the same way as you would any little monkey, for that is what he is. Leave us be, Sing-Sing!”

  At the sound of her words, Sing-Sing leaves us and in three bounds scampers into a kind of upholstered niche, where you can see his face sticking out of the corners of a basket, as he waits for orders and thinks up his little buffooneries.

  Christine pushes a door open, we walk through several rooms full of incomparable woodworks, of old gilding, of furniture fitted with covers allowing only their scaled feet to be seen… ah, the glorious past! The glorious, unspoiled past! But from where, all of a sudden, out of a Louis XV doorway, did this statue from the Punjab, this Indian Hercules come, who greets us coldly as he opens the door to the library with a solemn gesture?

  “That,” whispered Christine, “is Sangor, the Marquis’ head valet, his most trusted servant. Sangor always seems to have something of the divine about him. He always has the air of someone that has just come back from a meeting with the Buddha… and he’ll pass you a glass of sugared water as if he thought he were making you a gift of all the treasures of Golconda. You would do well to be careful around him. You can easily see that he’s a brute and, I believe, a highly intelligent one at that. You can never really tell if he understands you or just pretends to! What’s more, he’s as strong as a caryatid!”

  “But do they only have In
dian servants here?”

  “No, you’ve already seen the nightporter – he’s French. He’s the only one, mind you. The ladies in waiting of the Marchioness are all English. The Marquis’ staff are all Indian… You know that he was married out there, in Hindustan…”

  “Yes, I had heard… but, tell me, is this library as vast as you say it is, you have not exaggerated?”

  “I never exaggerate!...”

  In this library, pale, so pale, with its old faded wood and mouldings crumbling behind friezes, I saw frail and gilded trellis work, like the first delicate wrappings of lace around a basket destined for the boudoir of a coquette… there were thousands upon thousands of volumes in their centuries-old bindings… on the tables, on the music stands, wherever they lay, at first glance, I could see they were rare wonders.

  “You’ll see, you’ll see!” said Christine, “that there are priceless books in here! With autographs rarer than anything possessed even by the Arsenal: take this…in the box with the fleur de lys, this is the book of hours kept by Blanche of Castille that she left to her sainted little son! Read: this is the psalter of Monseigneur Loys, left to him by his mother; these are from treasures deposited in the Sainte Chapelle; this is the bible of Charles V, with these words in the King’s own hand: “Ce livre a moy roy de France” …and this missal in which each sheet is framed by an incomparable garland from the brush of a master painter of flowers, a great artist whose name is to this day unknown. Ah, my dear bookbinder, my neighbour, what treasures are here for you, what inspirations… Here we have, in this desk, a love letter in which Henry IV kisses the Marchioness de Verneuil ‘a thousand times…’ The Marquis wants to make up a collection of autographs, if he can find a bookbinder good enough to carry out the work. Here you are, then, Monsieur Benedict Masson.”

  I was transported. There was nothing else in me but the artist… the lover seemed to have fled… when, in an instant, into that grand, murky room a miserly light pierced, and I felt that the tragedy (that I had momentarily forgotten) was entering the room in the ghostly form of a figure from dreams, adorned in white furs, that made its way towards us. What tragedy..? I mean the one that I had witnessed, partly, the tragedy that had unfolded before my own eyes... yet could it be that there was someone else in there, of which I was ignorant..?

  Yes, if I remember one thing about that first strange hour, passed in the old Coulteray mansion, the memory that preoccupies me, it’s the impression that one of these tragedies might perhaps some day be explained by the other; in any case, they were not completely unrelated to one another… and that the wall, once built to separate the antique residence from the tower, would no longer suffice to separate anything, since Christine had so easily circumvented it.

  Was there any truth in the things that she had told me that morning? I was going to learn something from the mouth of the pale phantom that advanced towards us… it was the Marchioness… I ought to have recognised her, although she appeared even more drained of blood than when I saw her for the first time. Her apparition immediately plunged me into the indefinable reverie that is evoked by a sweet and melancholy piece of music, that falls upon our ears like a distant breeze across a vast silence…what breath from the beyond was awakened in this fragile image? While Christine represented the ideal embodiment of life, with all her resemblance to the impeccable figures of the Italian Renaissance, the face of the Marchioness had a dream-like air, a vision of a transparency so delicate that one would be reluctant to profane it by looking at her. I never wearied of looking at Christine, but before this languorous lady, I could only lower my eyes – whether out of a fear of wounding her with my gaze, or perhaps out of pity… all the more when her fugitive form was illuminated softly by the sad light of a smile full of inquietude and pain.

  I noticed immediately that I had been expected, for no sooner had Christine presented me to the Marchioness than she began to thank me, almost effusively, for coming – and in a manner that was so hurried, it sounded as if she was afraid of being caught. In a voice that reminded me of the fearful twittering of a little bird that has fallen out of its nest, she said to me:

  “Mademoiselle Norbert has told us about you. You are most welcome. The Marquis has need of a man like you to look after his collections, to which he has always attached a great value. Imagine that: Mademoiselle Norbert wanted to leave us..! It is frightfully gloomy here..! But perhaps she will learn to be more patient now she has the company of an artist like you. I will, too: I also love the library… I will come to pay you a visit from time to time….I am overcome with boredom, sometimes… If only you knew how lonely I have become! I must beg your forgiveness for burdening you like this but… I was brought up in India, you know! You mustn’t leave me! You mustn’t leave me!”

  With that, she left, or rather… she disappeared, vanishing from view at the end of the room, as if she was walking through the walls, repeating the words : “You mustn’t leave me!”

  So Christine had not lied to me. And it was probably less for the Marquis than for the Marchioness that she had stayed, perhaps out of charity… if she had been involved in a genuine intrigue with this man, she would certainly never have warned me of it.

  “Poor woman,” she murmured…

  We remained silent for a moment. Out of the window, I looked into the garden which stretched out in front of the mansion, which seemed to me to be a little neglected, but not displeasingly so. The approaching summer already appeared triumphant in a mass of greenery and an abundant blooming of flowers…I turned to face Christine:

  “The health of the Marchioness seems a little fragile to me.” She replied, while pressing her forehead against the windowpane:

  “It depends on what day it is. Sometimes you would think she’s about to expire…but then, after a few pieces of rare steak and some meat juice, she regains her strength…she seems quite normal again!”

  “What do you mean by normal... what on earth are you talking about?”

  “Oh, nothing… it’s just that I think that the Marchioness imagines a great many things… Yes, there are days when she seems to believe herself to be sicker than she actually is… which, in itself, is enough to make her quite sick.” And, without pausing, Christine continued:

  “Ah, Monsieur Masson… I want to tell you something… do you see that small door down there, at the foot of the garden… it leads onto the street that we came by way of today… it is only about fifty metres away from your place… it would be so much easier for you if you could come in directly through this door and enter the library from the garden, instead of having to walk all the way around to the main entrance, to wait upon the good will of ‘the Swiss,’ as they still call the nightporter around here... I’ll ask the Marquis if he’ll let you have the key!”

  “And what makes you think that the Marquis would give it to a stranger?”

  “First of all, you are not a stranger… and the Marquis won’t be able to refuse you this key, as long as I ask for it on your behalf! It’s just that, as soon as you have it, you have to give it to me!”

  “To you?”

  “That’s right, to me! Oh, don’t open those astonished eyes… they show your wicked thoughts. Monsieur Benedict Masson, if I have need of this key, it is not in order come here secretly, believe me… it is in order to escape if it becomes necessary!”

  I could scarcely believe my ears !

  “Do you have reason to fear the Marquis?” I asked…

  “…You’ll see!”

  Another silence… I can see him if I so desire, nothing has been decided as yet, but I keep this thought to myself, judging it to be useless to express it, because my will is weak when faced with Christine. That being said, I am not able to dissimulate my anxiety; since, for some minutes now, the Marchioness and Christine have conducted me into a very uncertain atmosphere. The watchmaker’s daughter understands my hesitation:

  “Nothing has passed here that was in any way different from what I told you, and nothing
has been out of the ordinary!”

  “Aren’t we going to see the Marquis?”

  “Maybe not today! I had hoped that we would be able to… but maybe he’s still a little shamefaced after a scene that took place this morning…”

  “Eh, this morning?”

  “Yes, he tried to kiss me!... and that is the most serious thing that has passed between us… it is quite forgivable..!”

  “How so?”