The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (11 page)

The next day, at six in the morning, the grave-diggers found me where I lay, as cold as the stone beneath me.

Solange, discovered by the letter from her father, had been arrested, condemned, and executed in one day.

That head which had spoken to me, those eyes which had looked at me, those lips, which had touched mine, were the lips, eyes, and head of my Solange.

‘You remember, Lenoir,’ continued M. Ledru, turning towards the Chevalier, ‘that was the time I was not expected to recover.’

  
1
   
The Cordelier Club
was one of the most important political clubs of the left bank during the French Revolution and the power-base of Georges Jacques Danton (1759–1794) – a man whom Dumas, along with many other French Romantic writers, delighted to portray under the dramatic shadow of death.

  
2
   
Camille.
i.e. Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794), radical journalist active in the Cordelier section and the faction that gathered round Danton in the Assembly.

  
3
   The ‘itch’ is, presumably, scrofula. The original translator for
The London Journal
added the following footnote – worth repeating as it clearly demonstrates the sensitivities of the nineteenth-century British audience who saw in such fictions a reflection of their own social and political situation: ‘This sneer at the poor is very disgraceful. It is likewise libellous. Man for man, the poor are ten times healthier than the rich; and the itch is a disease which the poor man never has unless he is under-fed, and consequently plundered – like the poor children of Tooting.’

  
4
   
General Marceau.
One of two generals dispatched by the Convention in September 1793 to suppress the Vendean uprising.

A single candle placed on a small table alone shed light upon the vast airy chamber. But for the clatter of glasses and silverware, and the occasional burst of voices, it could easily have been mistaken for the lamp which burns at a funeral wake. Peering with deliberation through this chiaroscuro, just as one examines a Rembrandt etching, it was possible to make out a dining room decorated in the style of Louis XV, which the classicists of the absurdo-Roman school maliciously call the Rococo. And, appropriately enough, both the stringcourse and the necking of the cornice running around the ceiling were indeed sinewy and well-delineated, totally unlike those of the entablature of the Erechtheum, the temple of Antoninus and Faustine, or the Arch of Drusus. In compensation, there was an utter dearth of overhanging projections, dripstones, watercourses and outer fillets, designed to channel and repulse the rains which never fell. Nor were the archways surmounted by coping-stones of the kind called Attic, designed to channel and repulse the rains which likewise never fell. It would also be true to say that the height of the archways was not two-and-a-half times their width. Finally, no attention whatsoever had been paid to the
illustrissimo signor Jacopo Barrozio da Vignola
and the rule of the five orders had been completely disregarded.
¹

Still, it could not be claimed that this interior was merely a worthless pastiche of the clumsy architecture of Paestum; of the cold, bare, rigid, repetitive architecture of Athens; or of the derivative and bastardised architecture of Rome. This was a building which had its own physiognomy, shape, and particular charm. The perfect incarnation of its own epoch, each was ideally suited to the other. Indeed, so unique was its physiognomy that, even after the toll taken by the centuries, Louis XIV and Louis XV rococo is still immediately recognisable, a distinction altogether lacking in the work of contemporary craftsmen who provide us with nothing more than illiterate copies of the old styles without imparting any of the character of their own period – so much so that posterity will view the results as no more than second-rate antiques imported from abroad.

The wall-panelling was covered in still-life paintings worthy, though unsigned, of Venninx
²
and the mouldings represented pastorals like those which serve as backdrops at the opera, charming scenes of shepherdesses and their swains in the manner of the immortal Watteau. These graceful and delicate pictures, with their bright, pleasing colours, were truly in the style of that great master – an artist whom an ungrateful and unappreciative France should reclaim and hail as one of her principal glories. Let us honour Watteau and Lancret, Carle Vanloo and Lenôtre! Let us honour Hyacinthe Rigault, Boucher, Edelinck, Oudry!
³

If truth be told, I believe that I feel equally at home and free to let my imagination wander in these vast seventeenth and eighteenth-century residences as in a Byzantine chapter-house or a Roman cloister. All that reminds us of our fathers and forefathers, buried in a plot of honest French earth, overwhelms my heart with a religious melancholy. Shame on those who remain unmoved, whose pace fails to quicken, on entering one of these old habitations, a manor-house falling to wrack and ruin or a desecrated church!

At the table on which the candle was placed two men were sitting.

The younger of the two remained motionless, his pale head bowed beneath a stream of red hair; his eyes hollow and treacherous, his nose long and pointed. To say that his whiskers were trimmed squarely on his cheeks like gaiterstraps will disclose that this scene takes place under the Empire, around 1810.

The older one was stocky, the prototype of the native of the plains of Franche-Comté. His thick hair hung heavily, like Babylon’s garden, across his broad, flat face – the face of a nocturnal bird.

The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs.

One was less than a wolf: he was a public prosecutor. The other was more than a pig: he was a chief commissioner of police.

The police commissioner had just been appointed to a city in the provinces and was leaving the next day.

The prosecutor had held his office for many years at the Court of Assizes in Paris and was hosting a farewell dinner to celebrate his friend’s promotion.

Both were dressed in black, like doctors in mourning for the murders they had committed.

As they both talked in low voices, and often with full mouths, the negro who tended on them from the doorway – for young prosecutor de l’Argentière treated his staff like coolies and liked to play the indignant aristocrat – could only catch the odd word here and there of their conversation.

‘My dear Bertholin, I enjoyed a truly succulent repast yesterday at our friend Arnauld de Royaumont’s! From his apartments, which give on to the Place de la Grève, I could observe the execution of the seven conspirators that he tried a few days ago. It was absolutely exquisite! Every time I raised my fork to my mouth, a head fell!’

‘Silly fools! How can they go on believing in their country! They all see themselves as reincarnations of Brutus or Hampden!’
⁴

‘Do you know, they had the effrontery to try and harangue the crowd from the top of the scaffold! They were soon cut off – just like their heads! But not before they could shout out at the top of their lungs: “Long live France! Death to the tyrant! Death to the tyrant!” Stupid oafs! There can be no half-measures with curs like that. Off to the scaffold with them! We mustn’t allow such vermin to deprive the Emperor of his beauty sleep.’

Judging by these scraps of conversation, it was an extremely edifying discussion, and it was greatly to the detriment of the legal profession that the wretched negro could not benefit more fully from it.

By the time dessert was served, the Corsican wine had raised the decibels a fraction and the talk became noisy and ribald such that it would have been easy to note down the following:

‘By the way, my dear de l’Argentière, given that you are so experienced in subterfuge and chicanery, perhaps you could give me some advice. It is absolutely essential that I depart tomorrow morning, yet I have arranged an extremely appetising rendezvous for tomorrow evening.’

‘Very simple. Either I shall leave town in your place so that you are free to go to your rendezvous, or you shall depart tomorrow and I will go in your place.’

‘But seriously?’

‘You will have to provide me with more details if you want me to give you a considered opinion. Is your rendezvous with a man or a woman? Is it business or pleasure?’

‘A woman … and pleasure is not out of the question.’

‘In the name of Père Duchêne!
⁵
If you forget for a moment the Aristotelian rule concerning unity of place, the solution to your problem is easy. Tell the
princess
that you have changed the rendezvous point to Auxerre and have her follow you there.’

‘And if the little vixen turns out to be another Lucretia?’
⁶

‘By the gods, I’d play the little Jupiter: one way or another I’d force the beautiful Europa to pack her bags and come after me.’

‘And the next day?’

‘What next day? I’d leave her stranded at Auxerre still thinking of me!’

‘And what do you think the poor creature would do next?’

‘Poor creature? She’d have me to thank for turning her into a one-woman cottage industry! The only thing left for her to do would be to hop on a coach home and start looking for a good wet-nurse!’

‘What an unmitigated rake you are, de l’Argentière! No, no, she does not merit such harsh treatment, she’s no more than a child!’

‘What a sentimental ass you can be! Quick, handkerchiefs!’

‘No, she is the girl of my dreams, a little wood-nymph whose beauty enchants me …’

‘Lures you to the edge of the precipice, more likely.’

‘I would run after her … Even you could not help falling in love with her should you ever clap eyes on her.’

‘A plague on all you bashful lovers!’

‘She would melt even your iron heart.’

‘You old bear! In what cemetery did you unearth such fair flesh? And how the devil did you win the favours of this walking marvel?’

‘As for her favours, I never boasted that I
had
won them. Some matters one should not lie about. And as for unearthing her, that was more by chance than good management. We live in the same house and I have known her ever since she was a little girl. She was always elegantly dressed and she used to curtsy graciously before me every time our paths crossed. How the very sight of her used to sadden me, for I was celibate and lonely then! How I envied her father, blessed with such a beautiful child; though there always seemed to me, then as now, something slightly ridiculous about fatherhood. The father – this was at the time of the Consulate – had some high ranking position which kept the family’s coffers well filled; until, that is, he got mixed up in some trumped up conspiracy or other. Anyway, one fine morning, the Emperor’s men came to arrest him and he’s been locked away like a political prisoner from that day to this, though there never was a trial. His Majesty the Emperor is good at harbouring a grudge. The family have been in straightened circumstances ever since. Apolline grew poorer and more beautiful every year until she finally reached the age at which coquetry and the taste for finery made her acutely aware that she had not much more than a few expensive rags to her name, though she never lost that imperial air of hers. How sad it is to see a beautiful girl ashamed to go abroad in daylight! Her entire wardrobe consisted of a torn cashmere and a pair of worn out shoes, and in these she was obliged to go and buy cheap vegetables at the local market. How my heart used to bleed for her! What could be more poignant or more galling?

‘Stop laughing, de l’Argentière! If you want to laugh, laugh at me, not at her! Have you no feelings whatsoever?’

‘What I find so amusing, Bertholin, is to hear such fine sentiments coming from your lips. I am unused to it. You, a confirmed bachelor and inveterate misogynist! Is there something wrong with you? It’s hardly a propitious moment to start playing the devoted lover. You’d better get used to the part of Father Cassandre,
⁷
you’ve missed the boat as Harlequin.’

‘Was that intended as an insult?’

‘Funnier and funnier! It must be love!’

‘Very well! Yes, I am in love! I have every reason to be in love and there’s no reason for me to feel ashamed of a love born of pity. I bless God …’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort!’

‘I bless God that I have never committed myself until now so that I may act as this poor orphan’s guardian.’

‘You have been reading too much Chateaubriand, is that it?’

‘I tell you, I have every intention of being the guardian angel of this abandoned child, whom need would otherwise drive to death or prostitution. She has absolutely no-one to turn to: her poor mother, undermined by years of privations, and weakened further still by her daughter’s sufferings, died three months ago. When Apolline’s cries informed me that her mother had passed away, I immediately went up to comfort her and offer her my protection. I arranged the funeral, and got the town hall to pay for the burial. This was the first time I had spoken to Apolline. I cannot describe to you the effect it had on me as I went into that bare room, when she kissed my hand and, with a voice choked with tears, thanked me for my help. I was beside myself. All I can remember was that I burst into tears as well. Overwhelmed, she knelt down by her mother’s rickety bed and prayed for God to restore her to life.

‘That hour took ten years off my life!

‘And our love grew out of this compassion.

‘I called on her a few days later. All the time we were talking, I could not help but notice her embarrassment. She never moved from where she was seated, her hands folded on her lap. When she stood up to show me to the door, I saw that the front of her dress was torn and ragged, and that she had tried to hide her poverty with her hands.

‘I became increasingly enamoured of her manner, which was both sweet and sad, not to say besotted by her rare beauty. After courting her assiduously for some time, I declared my passion for her. She replied that she had too high a regard for me to presume that I wished to take advantage of her destitution, that she had complete faith in my integrity and the sincerity of my feelings, but that she had resolved to take leave of a world in which she had already suffered too greatly. Accordingly, she had written to the superior of the convent of Saint-Thomas and asked to be admitted as a novice. It was no easy matter to dissuade her from this plan, but I finally managed to convince her that the austerity of the convent, after all the hardships she had suffered, would surely kill her.