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

‘Blondina!’

‘My adored Muguetto!’

‘What is it that Sangouligo says?’

‘I love you, my lover, I love you!’

‘But what does that Fiend mean?’

‘Hold me! Hold me!’

‘Yes, yes, I have you; do not be afraid!’

‘Kill me, Muguetto!’

‘I did not hear; say that again!’

‘Kill me quickly!’

‘You are mad, look at me!’

‘Oh! Muguetto! Look at you!’

‘Lean on my chest, warm yourself, you are shivering!’

‘Oh! Muguetto, feeling you near!’

‘Give me your brow that I may kiss it!’

‘Muguetto, Muguetto, that you may kiss my brow!’

‘Yes yes, as one drunk!’

‘As one drunk!’

‘As one in rapture!’

‘My brow!’

‘A thousand times!’

‘Oh! …’

‘And your lips!’

‘Be silent, Muguetto, be silent!!!’

‘Your lips so pure!’

‘Oh! dear God, mercy! He touched them! I cried out … I scorned his mother, you know … I was not strong … and no one … He touched them … dear God! I am still alive! … Do you have your sword, Muguetto … Have you no more pity upon me because I was not strong?’

‘Ah! So that is it,’ the Tortosa man said with a prolonged growl, and one of those looks that the sun does not lower, ‘now we have the mystery explained, the mystery hissed by this serpent erstwhile. Moreover, you were impatient to send me away, as you did your servants. Yes … yes … I remember … Ah! You talk now, you ask for mercy for yourself, and for him too, is that not it? No doubt! The last of these you shall have, do not fret. It is this priest who brought him here to you, who made you know him, did he not? And whom heaven has punished! For long now I have seen you sad … you could not favour me above your mother who abandoned you. Yes, yes … it is that … You flattered me and you scorned him the more surely to deceive me. Ah! You well expected that he would be gone before I arrived, and later you would continue with your assignations! Why rid yourself of all your servants? You have not one single shabby reason you can give me. You must love one another well that both should forget a fearsome moment drawing near? You loved him! You loved him! You! You! Him! Him! Oh, this time do not answer me, I know for certain. Yes! Yes, you shall die.’

One must imagine that Muguetto and his reason had taken leave of one another.

Blondina, standing, looked like a scrap of winding sheet, whence a soul had escaped, in other words still swaying about like something, and not someone.

The man of Tortosa turned like a fish quickly flashing its tail in the water:

‘No more gentlemanly speech from my lips for you,’ he cried to Sangouligo ‘This moment gives me leave, even demands it; I could not do otherwise – and my sword unsheathed! Throw your Blondina, cast her upon it; if you will not, I shall throw myself on you and you will see! Waste no time, it must be done, it is resolved, I want it so, and take away this monk.’

Although startled by this idea of vengeance, still intoxicated as if he had drunk, and demented like Muguetto, Sangouligo was pleased enough by it. It was as if two damned souls had to share out Heaven between them. Blondina, staggering was about to fall on Monako when, in this same instant, Sangouligo caught her and pushed her upon the weapon that Muguetto held straight with both hands.

There came a faint and dreadful sound between the sword of the man of Tortosa and the body of the Spanish woman. The wretched lady died in seconds, without one drop of blood being visible. The scabbard wiped the sword clean.

‘It is left to us two,’ said Muguetto; ‘You are pale, and I too, I should be so. I am consumed by shivering; let us be quick in our match. Which of us two shall die first? The other will live if it should please him. And how are we to settle it? This sword exists no more for us. It must be chance …’

The man of Tortosa did not finish, but cried out: ‘Turn away, Sangouligo, and when I tell you that it’s done you are to look.’

The Spaniard obeyed.

Then, moving behind Blondina who was on the armchair that Monako had filled, the man of Tortosa ran his fingers like lightning over the head that was slumped to one side, and then, placing the closed hands of the dead woman in his own, likewise closed, he called out to Sangouligo: ‘It is done! It is done! Is it in this one or in that one? Answer?’

The Spaniard, understanding that death now was a matter of guessing something, pointed and said: ‘In that one!’

‘No,’ the man of Tortosa swiftly retorted, ‘in this one!’ And he revealed one of Blondina’s hands, then opened the fist, then added: ‘You are free, Sangouligo. Leave me, go and have yourself a dance if you will; but, see now, Sangouligo, it belongs to me. Do you see it? I am going to grind it down, and then … Depart! Depart! I will have none of you! I alone must follow her. Depart! You know where the key is.

What Muguetto frenziedly displayed to Sangouligo was Blondina’s glass eye, which he had just removed from her head.

When daylight came, Sangouligo was no longer in Tortosa, and people talked of the monk’s poor little one, then they said;

You know well Muguetto of Tortosa, the man who always carried orange blossom in his hand? Well now! He poisoned himself with the eye of a corpse.

Of all the virtuous actions which nature has put at our disposition, the performance of a good service to a neighbour is incomparably the one from which we derive the greatest pleasure. Is there anything in the world that gives us more delight than lending succour to a fellow human being? At such moments do not our souls almost assume the qualities of the supreme Being who made us? Misfortunes, we are told, often follow such acts of charity: no matter, we have given pleasure to ourselves, we have given pleasure to others. What else do we require?

For many a year there had been no greater friendship than that which existed between the Count and the Marquis de Dorci: they were brothers, both about the same age, that is to say between thirty and thirty-two, and the two of them were officers in the same regiment. Nothing had ever come between them; and in order to further strengthen the ties which were so precious to them both, especially since the death of their father, at which moment they had found themselves master of their own fortune, they shared the same house, were waited on by the same servants, and had resolved only to marry two women whose qualities were equal to their own and who would agree to the continuation of this charming communal existence for the rest of their days.

The tastes of these two brothers were far from identical though. The Count de Dorci, the elder of the two, enjoyed tranquillity, solitude, walking in the countryside and reading. Although his temperament had a somewhat gloomy cast, he was kind, sensitive and honest. For him, helping others was a real joy. Little inclined to company, he was at his happiest only during the couple of months which his duties permitted him to spend every year at a charming property the brothers owned on the Aigle hillside in the Forêt du Perche.

The Marquis de Dorci, infinitely more lively than his brother, infinitely more a man-of-the-world, did not share his brother’s love of the countryside. Graced with a charming figure and the kind of wit that women always find fascinating, he was rather too fashion conscious, and these defects, which he never learned to overcome, coupled with his ardent nature proved his undoing. A siren from the region we have just described took such a shine to him that he was no longer, so to speak, his own master. That year he failed to join his regiment and entirely neglected his brother in order to spend all his time in the small village where his idol lived; and it was there that, preoccupied by the object of his adoration, he completely lost touch with the very ground beneath his feet, which he hardly noticed any longer, and sacrificed his notion of duty and all the other sentiments which had formerly bound him to the amiable company of his brother.

It is said that love is spurred on by jealousy, and that was certainly the case with the Marquis. But chance had thrown a rival in his way who was, or so it was rumoured, a man as dangerous as he was lacking in courage. Such were the reasons – the desire to please his mistress, the need to forestall the plots hatched by his perfidious rival, and the urge to abandon himself blindly to his passion – that detained this young man far from the arms of the brother who idolised him and who wept bitter tears over his absence and apparent indifference. The Count hardly received as much as a word from the Marquis. When he wrote, there was either no reply or one so hasty that it only served all the more to convince him that his brother was distracted and that they were gradually drifting apart. Meanwhile, he himself followed his customary life in the country: books, long walks, innumerable acts of charity. Such were his unique occupations, and in this he was happier than his brother, since he was at least master of himself while his brother, who lived in a state of constant agitation, hardly had time for a moment’s reflection.

This is where matters stood when one fine day the Count, preoccupied by what he was reading and seduced by the warm weather, found himself, just at the time he needed to be thinking of turning back, more than two leagues from the edge of his own estate and no less than six from his château, in the corner of a distant wood, completely incapable of making up his mind which path he should take. Looking all around him in confusion, he spotted a tiny peasant’s cottage about a hundred yards away and he decided to ask the way there and rest for a moment.

He reaches the house … He opens the door … He steps into a dingy kitchen, the largest room in the cottage, and there his sensitive soul is exposed to a most irresistible tableau. What does he see but a young girl of sixteen who is cradling in her arm the head of a forty-year-old woman, presumably her mother, who has fainted. The young girl is weeping.

‘Whoever you are,’ says she, ‘I hope you have not come to tear my mother away from me. I would rather you kill me than disturb this unfortunate woman any more.’

As she said this, Annette threw herself at the feet of the Count and, still imploring him, she made a rampart between him and her mother by raising her arms towards heaven.

‘In truth, my child,’ said the Count, as touched as he was surprised, ‘these signs of fear are not necessary. I have no idea what has alarmed you, my friends, but I do know that, whatever your misfortunes, heaven has sent me to you not as an enemy but as your protector.’

‘Our protector!’ exclaimed Annette as she climbed to her feet and hurried to the side of her mother who, recovering consciousness, had taken refuge in the corner, terrified out of her wits. ‘Mother! Do you hear? A protector! This gentleman says he will protect us, that he has been sent by heaven in answer to our prayers!’

Turning to the Count, she said:

‘It would, indeed, be a noble action to come to our aid, sir. There cannot be two creatures on the face of the earth more to be pitied than we are. Help us, help us! This worthy woman has not eaten for three days! And what will I find to feed her with when she is in a condition to eat? There is not a crust of bread to be found in the whole house. Everyone has abandoned us … We have been left to die by inches, yet as God is my witness we have done no harm. Alas, my poor father! The most honest and the most unfortunate of men! He was no more guilty than you are … And yet it is perhaps tomorrow that … Kind sir, never have you set foot in a more wretched house than this one. God is said never to abandon those in distress, yet there can be none more needy than us …’

The Count, who realised from the girl’s behaviour, her wild words and the harrowing state of the mother that some terrible catastrophe had befallen the household, immediately wondered whether his charitable nature had not found the perfect opportunity to exercise its customary virtue. He began by begging the two women to calm themselves, repeated his assurances of his protection in order to give them confidence, and insisted that they recount the story of their troubles. After another torrent of tears, this time caused by their unexpected good fortune, and Annette having invited the Count to be seated, she told him the tragic tale of the atrocious misfortunes which had overtaken them.

‘My father, sir, is one of the poorest and most honest men of the region. His name is Christophe Alain and he is a woodcutter by trade. His poor wife, whom you see before you, had but two children: a son, who is now nineteen, and myself, just turned sixteen. My brother and I were boarders at a school in Aigle for more than three years, and we can both read and write; but our father took us away after we had celebrated our first communion; the cost was too much for him, and my poor parents had to subsist on bread in order to give us the rudiments of an education. When we returned home, my brother was strong enough to go out to work with my father, and things were looking up for us. In fact, fortune seemed to shine on us; it was as if the exactitude with which we fulfilled our duties had earned the blessing of heaven; then, a week ago today, the most terrible catastrophe which can befall people like us – without either money, credit or protection – occurred.

‘My brother was not with him that day and my father was working alone, some three leagues away, in the forest on the Alençon side, when he noticed a dead man lying at the foot of a tree … He approached the corpse with the intention of doing, if it was not already too late, whatever he could to help. He turned the man over and was rubbing a little wine which he carried in his gourd into his temples when four mounted officers suddenly rode up to him at a gallop, arrested him and carried him off to the prison at Rouen where he was charged with murdering the man he was trying to revive. You can easily understand our anxiety, sir, when our father failed to return home. My brother, who had just come in, immediately went out to look for him and told us the bad news the next day. We gave him the little money there was in the house, and he set off for Rouen to do what he could. He wrote to us three days later, we received the letter yesterday.