French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (18 page)

‘Well, dammit all,’ he exclaimed at last, in a strong Toulouse accent, ‘I haven’t come to your shop in search of fire and brimstone. I want you to print out a hundred wedding invitations.’

‘Very good, Sir. Here are some models for you to choose from. Would Sir care for our luxury option, printed on Ivory, or on Japanese Imperial?’

‘Luxury? What else! One doesn’t get married every day of the week. I did assume you wouldn’t print it out on toilet paper. The most imperial stuff you’ve got, understood? But whatever you do, don’t for God’s sake do it out with a
black border
!’

The printer, who was a simple fellow from Vaugirard, fearing he was in the presence of a lunatic who must be humoured, simply protested calmly that such an act of gross negligence would be unthinkable.

When it came to filling in the names, the client’s hand started trembling so violently the printer had to take them down at his dictation.

‘Monsieur le docteur Alcibiade Gerbillon has the honour of announcing his marriage to Mademoiselle Antoinette Planchard. The nuptial blessing will take place at the parish church of Aubervilliers.’

‘But Vaugirard and Aubervilliers are miles apart!’ thought the printer, who calmly drew up the bill.

They are indeed miles apart. Doctor Alcibiade Gerbillon, dentist by profession, had been wandering about Paris for fifteen hours.

He had accomplished all the other tasks preparatory to his wedding—which was to take place in two days—quite calmly, like a somnambulist. But this business of the invitation had completely overwhelmed him. Here’s why.

Gerbillon was a
murderer
who got no sleep.

Explain this as you will. Having perpetrated his crime in the most cowardly and ignoble manner, without emotion, like the brute he was, remorse had only begun to bite when he received the notice of death, broadly framed in black, in which the entire family, bereft, implored him to attend the obsequies of his victim.

This masterpiece of typography had horrified and destabilized him. He pulled three perfectly good teeth, filled mere chips copiously with gold, attacked perfectly healthy gums, dislocated jaws that time had respected, and generally inflicted upon his patients tortures as yet unheard of.

His lonely orthodontist’s couch was visited by dark nightmares, in which full sets of dentures, made of vulcanized rubber according to his own design, and which he had built into the orifices of trusting citizens, would grind and clatter all around him.

The cause of all this disturbance was the same printed message that the certified burghers roundabout had welcomed with untroubled souls, Alcibiade being one of the worshippers of the Moloch of imbeciles, who received such printed notices.

Could it be credited? He had murdered, truly he had murdered,
out of love
.

Justice would have to conclude that such a crime was due to the dentist’s reading-matter, the only such matter that fed his murderer’s brain.

Having read a stream of cheap novels in which amorous entanglements ended tragically, he ceded little by little to the temptation to suppress, in a single act, the purveyor of umbrellas that stood in the way of his happiness.

This young businessman, whose dentition was superb, and whose jaw he had no opportunity to massacre, was about to take to wife Antoinette Planchard, daughter of Planchard, the big ironmonger. Gerbillon had smouldered in silence for the girl, ever since the day when, having broken off a tubercular molar in her mouth, she fell fainting into his arms.

They were about to publish the banns. With the lightning decisiveness that marks out great dentists, Alcibiade had schemed for the extermination of his rival.

On a morning of torrential rain, the purveyor of umbrellas was found dead in his bed. A medical examination proved that a rogue of the worst stripe had strangled the wretched man as he slept.

The diabolical Gerbillon, who knew better than anyone what happened, had the effrontery to confirm the scientific validity of this finding. In fact he had covered his tracks so well, that after an inquiry as vain as it was meticulous, the authorities had to abandon their hunt for the culprit.

The bloodthirsty dentist was saved, but he did not go unpunished, as you shall hear.

As his crime had always been a means to an end, no sooner was the umbrella-seller under the sod than the dentist began to lay siege to Antoinette.

The dignity and superiority he had shown during the inquiry, the light he had shed upon this obscure crime, and above all, the delicate way in which he had made his compassion felt for the young person so cruelly afflicted, eased the access to her heart. It was not, truth be told, a heart that was difficult to take; it was no Babylon of a heart. The ironmonger’s daughter had a steady head on her virginal shoulders. She was doing all right, and her plunge into grief was altogether a shallow one.

She had no pretensions to eternal, vainglorious lamentation, and made no show of being inconsolable.

‘Let the dead bury the dead, lose one husband, find ten more, etc,’ murmured Alcibiade. A few more sentences plucked from the same abyss soon revealed the nobility of this raptor, who appeared quite transcendent to her.

‘It is your heart, Mademoiselle, that I should like to extirpate,’ he told her one day. That clinched it.

At this charmingly turned phrase, which was one that the girl—who was educated—could savour, she made up her mind. Besides, Gerbillon was an acceptable husband. They soon came to terms and the marriage went ahead.

But why should this dearly bought happiness be poisoned by the memory of the dead? The black-bordered letter, the memory of which had begun to fade, returned to haunt the mind of the murderer: he felt roundly denounced by it. Two days before his wedding—as we have seen—the obsession had returned stronger than ever, driving him almost to madness, and he wandered about for a whole day, in parts of Paris he didn’t know, until the terrible moment when he at last summoned the courage to order his marriage invitations from the printer in Vaugirard, who had surely guessed he was a murderer.

It was all very well to have been so clever and so cunning; to have put justice off the scent; to have won the hand, against all the odds, of the woman he adored—all of this, just to have his life poisoned by guilty dreams!

The ecstasy of the first days was a mere respite. The fine horns of the newlyweds’ crescent honeymoon had not even ceased to pierce the azure when the first sign of trouble appeared.

One morning Alcibiade found a portrait of the purveyor of umbrellas. Oh, just a simple photograph that Antoinette had innocently accepted from him as a gift, shortly before they were due to be married.

Beside himself with rage, the dentist smashed it into pieces before the eyes of his wife, who was appalled by his violence, even though the relic meant precious little to her.

At the same time—it being impossible to destroy anything—the threatening image which up till then had existed only on the paper, like the visible reflection of one of the fragments of that invisible photographic film that envelops the universe, ended up by fixing on to the suddenly
suggestible
memory of Madame Gerbillon.

From then on, she was thoroughly haunted by the memory of the deceased she had almost forgotten; she lived only for him, she lived him perpetually, she breathed him through all her pores, and through all her exhalations, which flooded her poor husband, who was at first surprised, and then desperate, upon finding that cadaver perpetually interposed between him and his wife.

At the end of the first year they had an epileptic child, a monstrous male child with the face of a thirty-year-old, that bore an uncanny resemblance to the man Gerbillon had murdered.
*

The father fled the house, uttering dreadful cries, wandered like a madman for three days, and then, on the evening of the fourth, he bent sobbing over the cradle of his son, and strangled him.

When one is dead, it lasts for a long time.

(An Inheritor)

M
ONSIEUR
F
IACRE
-P
RÉTEXTAT
L
ALBARIE
had retired from business at the age of sixty, having amassed considerable riches from his coffin-making.

He had never once disappointed his clientèle, and the aristocracy of Geneva, that had placed so many orders, were unanimous in celebration of his loyalty and care.

The excellence of his handiwork, which passed muster even in scrupulous England, had also obtained the plaudits of Belgium, Illinois, and Michigan.

His retirement had thus been met with bitter regret in both worlds, when lamenting international dispatches announced that the famous artisan was leaving the rites of the shop-counter to devote his august white hairs to his beloved studies.

Fiacre was, in truth, a contented old man, whose philosophical and humanitarian vocation did not emerge until the very moment at which his own fortune, less blind and less mean than the vain multitude might suppose, had heaped its benefits upon him.

In no way did he despise, like so many others, the infinitely honest and lucrative business which had raised him from almost nothing to the pinnacle of his ten millions.

On the contrary, he used to recount, with all the naive enthusiasm of an old soldier, the numerous campaigns waged against his competitors; and he liked to recall the heroic rolling fire of his inventories.

He had simply abdicated, like Charles V,
*
from his empire of the invoice, to devote himself to the higher life.

Having amassed, in short, enough to live on, and now too elderly to keep his beady eye much longer upon his business—that flare for spontaneity which knows how to forestall and disarm the competition—he had the wisdom to dispose advantageously of his commercial empire before the star of his patent began to pale.

From this moment on, he devoted himself to the pleasures of the human species.

With touching lucidity, he had grasped the fact that a crowd of nincompoops had failed in all their efforts to improve the condition of the poor; and convinced as he was, moreover, of the
usefulness
of the poor, he concluded that he had better things to do than to put his financial and intellectual resources at the service of the unwashed masses.

Instead, he resolved to dedicate the last glimmers of his genius to alleviating the sorrows of millionaires.

‘Who ever thinks’, said he, ‘about the sufferings of the rich? I alone, perhaps, along with the divine Bourget,
*
whom my clientèle all adore. Because they fulfil their mission, which consists in slaving for the sake of business, people think too hastily that they must be happy, forgetting the fact that they have a heart. People have the effrontery to set against them the crude tribulations of the wretched, whose duty is to suffer, after all, as if hunger and rags could be put in the balance against the dread of dying. Such is the law. No one really dies, if they possess nothing. The possession of capital assets is an indispensable condition of giving up the ghost, this is what no one seems to grasp. Death is nothing other than to be separated from one’s money. Those without money, are without life, so how can they know what it is to die?’

Heavy with such thoughts—that went deeper than he supposed—the coffin-maker set his whole soul to abolishing the pangs of death.

Monsieur Lalbarie had the signal honour of being among the first to conceive the generous invention of the Crematorium.
*
To his thinking, the traditional horror of death was in large part caused by the dreadful image of the corpse in decomposition. The Guild of Incinerators elected him their president, and it was to them he described the stages of putrescence—that subterranean chemistry—with an eloquence fuelled by fear; the idea of turning into a flower, for example, was repellent to his accountant’s soul.

‘I do not want to end up a corpse!’ he bellowed. ‘As soon as I die, I demand to be burned, I insist on being carbonized, reduced to ashes, purified by fire, etc.’

His wish was fully granted, as you shall see.

The excellent man had a son, which is something to be wished on everyone who knows the value of money.

And here I must beg permission to launch for an instant into dithyrambic mode.

Dieudonné Lalbarie was, if possible, even more admirable than his father. Conceived in a most auspicious hour, one that saw his father triumph over impertinent competitors, he was the very model of all the solid virtues that a serious house of credit requires.

At the age of fifteen he had already invested his savings, and he kept his own person as tidily as his account book. No instrument could detect in him the slightest trace of frivolity.

It would have been a gross injustice to charge him with giving way to a moment of enthusiasm, or with an access, even repressed, of gratuitous tenderness for anyone, or over anything whatsoever.

When he spoke, his happy father was obliged to lean against the counter or the till, such was his pride at having spawned such a son.

This blessed child is alive and prospering. He has already doubled his wealth since losing his parents, having contrived to make himself loved by a hugely wealthy keeper of tortoises, to whom he is married; many there are who will know of whom I speak, but I fear I would offend his modesty if I sketched him out more fully.

I shall let you guess. Perhaps it is already saying too much, if I add that he has the face of a handsome reptile, and is usually accompanied by a hound of monstrous size.

What follows is the little-known story of his father’s death and funeral. Lovers of mild emotions are advised to stop reading here.

One morning the coroner declared that the great Fiacre had ceased to exist.

Instantly, Lalbarie
fils
went into action. Without wasting a moment on useless tears, without wearing out the precious ‘fabric’ of his own life, by which is meant ‘time’, to adopt Benjamin Franklin’s expression,
*
which he quoted endlessly, he set to and got things ready.