The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (39 page)

The manuscript came to an end at this point. And suddenly, just as I was about to turn to the doctor again with a look of terror on my face, a terrible scream – a howl of helpless rage and frustrated desire – rang out in the asylum.

‘Just listen to him,’ said the doctor. ‘We have to give the pervert five or six cold showers a day. Sergeant Bertrand
²
isn’t the only one to have liked dead bodies.’

Overwhelmed by astonishment, horror and pity, I blurted out:

‘But what about this hair? Does it really exist?’

The doctor got up, opened a cupboard full of bottles and surgical instruments, and threw over a gleaming chain of blonde hair which seemed to fly towards me like a golden bird.

I shuddered as I felt its delicate caress on my hands. And there I stood, my heart beating with revulsion and envy – revulsion because I knew that I was handling something steeped in crime; envy because I could feel the powerful temptation of something both disgusting and mysterious.

With a shrug of his shoulders, the doctor remarked:

‘The mind of man is capable of anything.’

  
1
   François
Villon
, fifteenth-century French poet whose brief and turbulent life is reflected in his poetry. The following citation comes from
Le Testament
(c. 1461). Flora was a famous Roman courtesan; Thaïs was an Athenian courtesan.

  
2
   
Sergeant Bertrand
. French soldier found guilty in 1849 of desecrating the graves at the Père-Lachaise cemetry. When questioned, he admitted an irresistible impulse drove him to disinter and violate corpses.

Last year, the name on everyone’s lips was mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury, or just Dafné, as she was familiarly called in this milieu, whose main concern, or, to be more accurate, its only one, seems to be pleasure. Everyone who belonged to the rather smart type of club, who went to the races at Chantilly and la Marche, who turned up at the Opera to applaud the currently fashionable singer or dancer with one of Isabelle’s flowers tucked in their buttonholes, who played real tennis and cricket, skated on the lake, had supper at the café Anglais after the masked ball, and in summer would take themselves off to Baden to stake martingales, all of them knew Dafné. The rest, a sorry crew of modish hangers-on, unworthy of so great an honour, made a pretence of knowing her. Malicious gossips claimed that her real name was Mélanie Tripier, but people of taste approved her rejection of these graceless vowels, since an ugly name on a pretty woman resembles a slug on a rose; Dafné de Boisfleury was assuredly better than Mélanie Tripier. It had a little touch both of the mythological and the aristocratic which was altogether romantic. The unusual spelling of Dafné with an f, brought out its Italian Renaissance flavour and spiced it up. This name had doubtless been confected for this beauty by some lyric poet with nothing better to do, and baptised with champagne at dessert.

Be that as it may, Dafné would arrive at the races in an eight-spring barouche harnessed in such a way as to defy the criticism of the most exacting sportsmen and driven in the Daumont manner by grooms in white leather breeches, soft turned-down boots, apple-green satin blouses and hair crimped and powdered under their jockey caps. A full-blown duchess could not have been driven any better, and this fastidiousness over horsey things gave her a certain standing among the equestrian set. Her horses were horses in earnest and her black livery had style.

A natural blonde, in keeping with the fashion of the time, Dafné had dyed her hair red with the use of those cosmetics that had their origins in the Venetian beauty-kits of the sixteenth century. Falling onto her nape in a thick chignon, her hair was lit with the sun-dazzle of sequins and shone like golden butterflies in a net. She had sea-green eyes –
procellosi oculi
– stormy eyes enlivened by dark lashes and eyebrows, an unusual and piquant feature indebted to either nature or art, but whatever the case they were striking. Her skin was too white to be without freckles dotted under the powder and the layer of hydrangea-hued paint that covered it, but this defect was compensated by its extreme fineness of texture, and, besides, in this cosmetic century one can choose one’s complexion. Her lips were made brighter by a coating of crimson and when they were parted allowed a glimpse of pure white, perfectly straight teeth, though with very sharp canines which were reminiscent of the fangs of Elves, Nixis and other aquatic creatures with whom it was hazardous to have truck.

As for her attire, it was very varied, but always outlandish; colourful, however, like fancy dress. It was wildly luxurious and extraordinarily overloaded with every kind of frippery invented by the fashions of the demi-monde, whenever it runs out of ideas for making heads turn and causing a stir. Little Andalusian hats, Hungarian ones, Russian ones, with peacock feathers, half-veils, constellations of sequins made of steel, glass teardrop fringes, jet bead trimmings, and other furbelows of the same ilk that rushed like the headstall of a Spanish mule; Zouave bodices, Turkish waistcoats, Cossack blouses, Garibaldi tunics embellished with buttons, bells, braiding and tags so elaborate that the fabric disappeared beneath them; petticoats slashed, hitched up, puffed out, plastered with piping and harlequin squares in the gaudiest and most summarily matched colours; pretty Moroccan leather boots Levantine-style with red high heels and gold tassels; nothing was left out, and take my word for it that her buttons were emblazoned with horseshoes and crossed riding whips. She resembled, to the point of being indistinguishable, one of those elegantly exaggerated sketches of fashionable apparel with which Marcelin illustrates
La Vie Parisienne
.

Now it happened that in the midst of her triumph, at the height of her success, mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury suddenly disappeared. Her star was eclipsed and obliterated from the firmament of flirtation. What had become of her? Had her creditors wearied of waiting and sent her off to Clichy on a holiday? Had she fallen in love with some seraphic youngster demanding her complete renunciation of Satan and his sumptuous works? Had some civilized pasha, tired of Georgians, Circassians and negresses, offered her an engagement of five hundred thousand francs in his seraglio, with a stay-at-home and fidelity clause written in? Nobody had a clue. Some even went so far as to imagine that she had been gripped by some sudden remorse and buried herself in a convent. This odd event demanded some strange and romantic explanation, for Dafné was too beautiful, too young and too fashionable to allow any notion of one of those vulgar calamities which, when they age, return these creatures to the obscurity whence they come.

At the bois, at the Opera and at the club, there was talk of it for a good fortnight, then no one gave it another thought. Paris has far more to do than worry about shooting stars; everyone misses it and it misses no one. It is good if you come, if you leave it is better, for you make room for another. Paris is not slow to tell women
displicuit nasus tuus
: your nose did not please. The Boisfleury girl’s nose was formed very well and did not yet displease, but Zerbinette’s, which was sweetly turned up like that of Roxelan, took only a month to make people forget it.

Yet Dafné still had to be somewhere. She was not dead, that would have become known; her house, her horses and her carriages had not been put up for sale, and a creature so conspicuous as if she were a marble monument, like mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury née Mélanie Tripier, cannot just be erased in the middle of a civilized place. What was certain was that Dafné was no longer in Paris. A paramour to whom she had given an appointment, which she inevitably did not keep, had looked for her everywhere, even in the morgue, that terminus of desperate enquiries.

We shall be cleverer than the young swain, and perhaps we shall find mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury, but to do this a journey must be undertaken, between one paragraph and the next in a quick transfer from Paris to Rome, following our trail to the villa Pandolfi.

Just a short carriage ride outside the city walls, the villa Pandolfi is one of those palaces bearing the most pronounced imprint of the dominant Italian taste of the middle of the seventeenth century. It is situated at the end of vast gardens which are constructed rather than planted, for an understanding of nature is an altogether modern sentiment, and it is only recently that people took it into their heads to put flowers, lawns and trees in parks. A gateway resembling a triumphal arch and flanked by columns in the rustic style with vermiculated bosses from which hang stone stalactites jostling with whiskers of grass, opens into an antique wall which must have enclosed some patrician villa under the Caesars. Beyond the ironwork of the gate, the visitor is presented with an alley of cypresses several hundred years old. Their trunks ribbed with massive veins like columns twisted together in a bundle by some giant’s hand, these cypresses have foliage with the appearance of bronze scoria and they form two immense curtains of a darkling green which lead the eyes towards the palace rising up at the end of this perspective. Swift water runs along the stone rivulets either side of the alley, after feeding the villa’s fountains and water cascades, and then, with a torrential gurgle, sweeps down into a grating. Between the cypresses, marble urns and somewhat mutilated antique statues produce splashes of white whose effect in the evening is quite disturbing, and which faintly recall the Turkish graves of the Great Field of the dead at Scutari. We begin this description at an hour when the sun was setting in a turquoise-blue sky streaked with slim violet clouds and shifting towards a lemon colour or on the verge of those orange hues which surround the dying day star. The pyramids of the cypresses loomed up starkly against this pale background, and through their dark foliage there glinted, here and there, fiery specks that sent out rays, while lower down everything was bathed in a cold blue shadow.

The palace rose up on a great expanse of terrace with marble balustrades divided by acroteria supporting mythological statues writhing in the manner of Bernini and his school. Niches hollowed out in the supporting walls also contained crude figures unearthed in excavations by the former owners of the villa, and fragments of bas-reliefs were embedded in them.

A marble staircase split the terrace, climbing between the two underpinnings across broad landings. From one corner of the balustrade, like a balcony carpet, there escaped a vast sheet of ivy which felicitously broke the horizontal lines of the architecture.

At the top of the staircase, further back, rose the palace with its deeply jutting cornice, its great windows with their alternating v-shaped and triangular pediments, its peristyle with pilasters in the Corinthian manner fluted halfway up, and its facetted stylobate. To complete the overall effect of this ancient magnificence, just spread the rust of time, the blackish tones of rain and the green coatings of moss. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to what is meant in France by the words château or country house. It was more like a theatre set executed in stone instead of being painted on cloth. Everything was sacrificed for the sake of perspectival effect; the trees resembled stage wings, but this was a set like those by San-Quirico,
¹
who was so greatly admired by Stendhal: grandiose, solemn and designed by a true architectural talent.

From the top of the terrace, the view spread out over the gardens, where yews and box trees cut in a peculiar fashion formed symmetrical compartments, were rounded out in spheres, lengthened into pyramids and assumed every kind of shape, except those of nature. This was the manner that is called French and which is really Italian, for it came to us from the other side of the mountains and developed in all its splendour under Louis XIV. In the middle of these flowerbeds, fountains could be seen that recalled the style of those adorning the Piazza Navona. Bearded, arched-backed tritons twisting their scaly legs, holding up nereids in their sinewy arms and blowing through their conch shells jets of water which drizzled down onto their loins of a discoloured green. In crannies, rocky grottoes taken over by climbing wall plants, sheltered groups of statuary: Acis and Galatea being threatened by Polyphemus with a huge stone, and Pluto abducting Proserpina on a chariot which is partly engulfed by the yawning rocks. This invention must have seemed the very acme of romantic style in its day. Two other fountains, set into the wall as part of the facade, poured out water through tragic and comic bronze masks in wide-mouthed rictus, into a porphyry cistern, and a Roman tomb whose defaced bas-relief represented a bacchanal.

Beyond, above the walls, on the horizon’s edge, one could discern the solid contours of mount Soracte, sparkling with some patches of snow.

Night began to fall and in the darkness of the palace facade some of the windows shone with a reddish glow. Contrary to what one might have imagined, the villa was not uninhabited; surprisingly, it had other hosts besides the rats, spiders, bats and nocturnal terrors.

Carriages drove down the alley of cypresses where their lanterns glittered like glowworms in the opaque shadow, and set down their masters at the terrace stairway. These new arrivals appeared to be invited guests, for they were all in black tails, white ties and straw-coloured gloves. They were nearly all young, but for two or three persons in whom birth, power and wealth replaced youth. Although they climbed the steps with a slower and heavier step they were no less certain of their ascent.

The interior of the Pandolfi palace, despite efforts that had been made to introduce modern comforts, remained for all that joyless, gloomy, almost sinister.

The reception apartments were on the ground floor and were made up of a suite of salons leading one into the other, with communicating doors, and from the first threshold to the last room, creating a long perspective similar to that of those mirrors set facing one another and conveying an infinite reflection. The smallest of these salons could easily have contained a whole house on the scale that architects build today. To fill them, the gargantuan life of former times was needed. All the more so if the candle stumps set in the huge chandeliers sufficed to make visible the faded tapestries, the richly scrolled Cordoba leathers, and the darkened frescoes which decorated those vast walls. At intervals, the rusted gold of an old frame held a mythological scene painted by some Bolognese after the Carracci family, thrusting out of the chaotic shadow the white flesh of a nymph or a goddess; antique lacquer cabinets sent out pink and blue gleams from their inlaid mother-of-pearl work; old gilt armchairs caught sparkling light on their carved reliefs; the figures couched on the casings of windows and doors and upholding the Pandolfi arms shone strangely in the light and their distorted spectral shadows were cast up to the ceding.