The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (30 page)

‘Listen, listen, Sister,’ said Mother Jeanne de Saint-Joseph, wringing her hands in despair as she stood by the pallet of Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit: ‘Oh! God in heaven, Sister, do you not hear?’

‘I hear as you do,’ answered Sister Françoise, recovering her sweet childlike smile ‘I hear the trumpet sounding and the horses stepping with their riders; I hear the people calling out, the penitents singing. Yes, I can hear very well,’ she continued. ‘I know that that poor innocent is with them, and that she is here now. I know that they are leading her to her death, but I tell you in truth that she shall not die. This is a promise you can give to her mother.’

Hélène was indeed walking to her death, assisted by two Jesuits and two Capuchin monks, who in turn offered her an image of Christ which she would kiss without guile. No-one had ever seen her look so beautiful. Her gown was white, as a sign of the virginity of her soul. Her lovely long dark hair had not been cut, either because the executioner had not dared put the scissors to it or because the pomp of ceremonial executions spared the nobility this outrage. Her hair was piled on top of her head and tied with a ribbon, but the movement of walking had loosened it and some of her hair had fallen in thick waves onto Hélène’s left shoulder where it covered up the shameful rope that had been cast around her neck. This detail is not without relevance to an understanding of the rest of my story.

And now, if you will for a moment lend me the magic wand of Hugo or Dumas, I shall transport my scene to another place. In Dijon there was a square whose name alone suggests a tragic destination. It was called the Morimont, or the Mountain of Death. At its centre there rose a scaffold draped in funereal hangings, which was reached by eight wooden steps but which was further raised upon a platform of masonry with four stone steps. All around, at a radius of some twenty feet, a fence of boards and posts had been laid as a barrier for the crowd. Within it there was the prosecutor general of the king, sitting on a folding stool and with an escort of hussars, and there were the Capuchin and Jesuit Fathers offering up their prayers for Hélène’s soul, along with a small company of archers. All along the cloisters, six penitents clad in black sackcloth, with an opening only for the eyes, made their way slowly, barefoot, with a hempen cord slung low at their waists, carrying torches and pleading a lament for the souls in purgatory. Hélène mounted the scaffold alone and halted before the executioner’s block, lifting up her heart to God. For Simon Grandjean had not yet come, since he was still finishing his prayers at the Conciergerie where he had taken Communion that morning. But four o’clock had rung out in all the parishes and the people were calling for Simon Grandjean with murmurings which soon changed to roars. Simon Grandjean was the executioner.

He made his appearance at last, accompanied by Madame Executioner, that is to say his wife, who was his helper on important occasions. He came armed with his cutlass, and his wife with a pair of scissors half a foot long, with which she had only now equipped herself in order to cut the loose tresses which she had seen hanging free from the knot of Hélène’s coiffure. This thought must have been very much on her mind, for she dashed into the enclosure brandishing these scissors and kept them close by her. But when she reached Hélène she forgot them.

A movement and a sign made by Simon Grandjean at the front of the platform alerted the spectators that he had something to say. This was an occurrence altogether unprecedented in the history of judicial executions, and the rumblings of discontent among the multitude were instantly quietened, as if by a sudden calm upon the surface of a stormy sea. Without doubt everything gave this scene a ghastly fascination which I shall not attempt to express by hyperboles drawn from this cold idiom; and the formidable protagonist whom I have just made appear could himself, at this point, lay a certain claim to public compassion. Weakened by his fast, his flesh scourged by the mortifications which he had taken upon himself so as to be fit to fulfil his terrible office, he was hardly able to stand and used his cutlass as support, while his disordered features made it plain that within him was being waged a dreadful struggle between duty and compassion. ‘Grace! Give me grace!’ he cried. Your blessing, Fathers! … Forgive me, your lordships of Dijon, for three months now I have been gravely ill and afflicted in my body! In this time I have never cut off any heads, and our Lord God has refused me the strength to kill this young girl! On my faith as a Christian I know that I cannot kill her!’

This lightning bolt was not so quick as the answer of those present: ‘Kill! Kill!’ said the people. – ‘Do your duty,’ said the king’s prosecutor. And what these words meant was the same as that other: Kill!

Then Simon Granjean raised his cutlass and, staggering towards Hélène, fell at her feet. ‘Noble demoiselle,’ he said holding the sword out to her by its hilt, ‘kill me or else forgive me! …’

‘I forgive you and I bless you,’ Hélène answered. And she rested her head on the block. At this the executioner, agitated by his wife’s volley of reproaches, could do naught else but strike the blow. The blade shone in the air like a flash of bright light, and the people voiced their approbation, while the Jesuits and Capuchins and the penitents cried
Jesus! Maria!

The sword came down, but the blow slipped on Hélène’s hair and pierced only her left shoulder. The condemned woman fell over on her right side. It was thought for a moment that she was dead, but the executioner’s wife knew that she was not; she tried to steady the cutlass in her husband’s shaking hands, while Hélène raised herself up to rest her head again upon the execution post, and uproar now raged the length and breadth of Morimont. For the bloodthirsty impatience of the people had altered its object, changing to sympathy for Hélène. The sword came down again and the victim, injured by a wound that was deeper than the first, fell into a faint and as if lifeless upon the executioner’s weapon, which he had dropped from his hand. You sensitive souls, so keen to feel the mishaps of any melodrama or tragedy, do not reproach me for these cruel details, for I relate them only in deference to what is exacted by my subject, with no design of my own in selecting them or giving them more weight. This, alas, is neither poetry nor fiction; sadly, it is but history.

You can see that before proceeding with my tale I have need to take certain precautions in the manner of its telling, something which is also in the interest of the reader, who must be impelled to seek respite from emotions, to lower the curtain at intervals upon their drama, and to remember as I do, while I catch my breath, that the all too real events of which I speak are now as if they had never ever been. The dreadful scene at the Morimont only came to an end after many still more dreadful happenings, and I know not which is more distressing, whether to be the writer of its history or to have been its witness. Had I the secret of a better style of telling, all the art that I give to it would be confined to curtailing much of its horror by reticence or in veiling it with words.

In describing the tragic enclosure of the Morimont, I have omitted to say that it encompassed an edifice other than that of the scaffold, but it is necessary for this to be known. It was a hut of a certain manner made of brick, where the executioner locked up his ironware, his ropes, his manacles, his braziers, and the whole hideous paraphernalia of judicial murder. This execrable branch of the dungeons was called
the chapel
, as in Spain, and this was where the condemned carried out their final acts of devotion, when eleventh-hour remorse urged the guilty to be reconciled with their judge in heaven, and the innocent to pardon their judges on earth.

Hélène Gillet had had no need of this place, but Simon Grandjean took refuge there to escape the blows of the furious crowd which began to cross the barriers with the awesome cry of SAVE THE CONDEMNED WOMAN AND LET THE EXECUTIONER DIE! The monks and the penitents flung themselves inside it with him, holding up their crucifixes to the people in order to avert their fury and deflect the hail of stones which pursued them.

The masons’ guild took it upon itself to demolish the chapel, which was locked from the inside; the butchers’ guild placed its ranks behind them as a reserve corps, fully prepared for the killing. This is no matter of clever phrasing or adept style, for these are the very terms of the verbal testimony given, four days later, in the town’s council chamber, and bearing the signature of the magistrate Bossuet, the father of the immortal bishop of Meaux. Finally the men of God opened up and came outside at a sober pace, all the while singing the prayers for the dead, as if they were walking to their own agonies, and the people killed the executioner.

While this was being accomplished, Hélène’s scaffold presented an even more dreadful scene. The executioner’s wife had vainly searched for the cutlass (perhaps you will remember that Hélène had fallen on it) but, just then, her scissors, which she still had with her, returned to mind. Seizing with one hand the rope that was tied around this wretched girl’s neck, she struck her six times with the other hand, dragging her over the eight wooden steps and the four made of stone, and stamping on her as each step struck the head of this already blood-drenched body. When she got to the bottom, the butchers had finished their first piece of work and the people killed the executioner’s wife.

I can breathe at last and I think it is time we all did so. Happily, Hélène is now no longer at the Morimont, but in the kindly arms which have carried her to that house at the corner of the square, the house of the good surgeon Nicolas Jacquin, whose honourable family, two hundred years later, continues to practise this same profession in our two provinces of Burgundy. None of Hélène’s wounds was mortal, none proved dangerous. When she regained consciousness, her first words were those of the innocent entering heaven, because she imagined that she had fallen into the hands of God, to whom the secret of all thoughts is known.

And at the same moment, Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit, still smiling, and listening out to the sound of the multitude returning home to its different districts, said: ‘At last, at last it is over; the people are going home happy, because that young girl is not dead.’

Among the many miracles which marked that memorable date of May 12, we must not forget the circumstance which made it coincide, as I have said before, with the last sitting of the parliament. The two weeks which that illustrious company had free of their duties until the day when it should resume its work left the process of justice suspended, and the functions of the executioner without an occupant! This delay, which was usual enough between sentence and execution, but which the abrupt manner of the verdict seemed to have deliberately shortened, gave Hélène’s friends all the necessary time to have recourse to royal clemency in favour of an unhappy woman whose innocence had now been made manifest through prodigies of Heaven; for this was an age of simplicity and faith, when it was not imagined that the natural order of earthly things would be reversed against all likelihood without some secret purpose of Providence; and I am among those who would still hold these views to be sensible ones, in this period of intellectual refinement and vast social improvement which we have had the happiness to reach ever since philosophy deprived Providence of its moral influence over events on earth.

The plea for clemency was in no time at all covered in innumerable signatures by all in Dijon who could lend it the recommendation of an honourable rank or an elevated piety; but it will be easily imagined that this avowal of compassion, carried to the throne by the elite of a population that was moved to tenderness, by itself offered only faint likelihood of success for hope and pity. Louis XIII was on the throne, and this young prince, whose only strength lay in being cruel, at the age of twenty-four manifested the inflexible and blood-thirsty severity which gave him the name of the JUST from his flatterers. What deplorable justice of kings which is only exhibited in history as a helping hand to executioners!

Thus, in the chapel of the Bernardines, Hélène’s temporary reprieve was a time of prayers, a fortnight at death’s door, through which her mother’s joyful kisses alternated with dreads and terrors, for at the smallest sound she heard she feared they were coming to take Hélène away to kill her. Yet all the while Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit would say, whenever Hélène’s story indistinctly came to mind from time to time and she would remember her: ‘I gave you my firm promise that this innocent would not die!’ In the moments when the surgeon’s ministrations brought her back to life, Hélène’s first words had expressed the same trust in divine protection: ‘Something in my heart told me that the Lord would succour me!’ she said. But her spirit, worn down by so much grief, could scarce endure the prospect of these opposing outcomes with equanimity. Sometimes, abruptly she turned pale; a violent shaking would seize her limbs, which were still not yet healed from their wounds, and she would be heard to murmur as she pressed her lips on the cross of Jesus or on saintly relics: ‘My God! My God! Am I not to return to the Morimont, where I suffered so much pain? Am I not to be made to die? My God! Take pity on me! …’

Then there arrived a despatch from Paris, undated, but which probably only arrived at the point when the law was about to take back its blood rights; for the charity of kings limps with an even slower gait than that of prayer. This despatch brought yet another miracle. Louis XIII had bestowed clemency.

The ratification of these letters of pardon, ‘which released Hélène from her shame and gave her back her good reputation’, was pronounced by the Dijon parliament on 5 June 1625, on the advocacy of
Maître
Charles Fevret, the author of the
Traité de l’Abus
, which is well known to learned advocates. This Charles Fevret, whose greatest merit in the eyes of philologists is in having been the great grandfather of the gifted and scholarly Charles-Marie Fevret de Fontette, the publisher, or, to be more accurate, the author of one of the most precious monuments in our literary history: the
Bibliothèque historique
of Father Lelong, was himself taken to be a great orator in his day, and this reputation is unassailed if we are to measure eloquence by the abundance of harmonious phrases and the majestic grandeur of delivery. It is that
Dictio togata
of the senate and the Capitoline Hill which has an indefinable air of the patrician and the consul, and which is raised above the common language by its magnificent turn of phrase and solemn words, as the magistrates of the highest courts are distinguished from the common folk by their purple and their ermine. It is as if one hears in his prose an echo of the verses of Malherbe, and one can glimpse a prefiguring of Balzac, in their profusion of images and the richness of allusion. It is in this manner that he gives us a picture of poor Hélène, humbly on her knees before the parliament, kissing the edge of the sword of justice which heals the wounds it has made as did Achilles’ lance. Here is a very fine passage: