The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (42 page)

‘My modesty,’ he said to himself as he walked along, ‘prevents me from believing that Heaven intervenes in my small affairs; yet, without any shred of superstition, one could see in all this the finger of Providence, for I was the one who should have been thrust down that well.’

The corridor he went down, exploring its walls with his lantern, showed him paintings against a red background in the manner of the frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum and quite well preserved in parts. These were dancers, bacchantes, satyrs fighting goats, pigmies doing battle with cranes, cupids mounted on chariots drawn by sparrows, cicadas and snails which they whipped on with all their might, as chimerical architectures rose up from background landscapes, the customary motifs of antique ornament.

At one point, the wall had collapsed, uncovering other sub-terranean levels which did not seem to belong to the same category of ruins. Lothario went through this opening, and a few steps further on perceived that it led into the catacombs. Still visible inscriptions carved into the rock and filled with red lead indicated the tombs of early Christians. One could see the drawn outlines of the lamb and fish symbols. This was not the right place for the prince to seek a way out; he would become hopelessly lost among the streets, mazes, intersections and coecums of this subterranean Rome which was as big in extent as the living city. So he went on his way and soon came out into an enormous room, so high that the beam of his dark lantern could not reach its vault. As his steps strayed to right and left in the search for a passage, he stumbled against something, a large stick like some kind of wooden shaft, and as he stooped to pick it up he was delighted to see that it was a torch left there, probably by bandits who in former times would seek out a refuge in these ruins, known to them alone; and by its sputtering, smoky flare, which was brighter than that of the lantern, he was able to make out the whole of the room wherein he stood, and saw that it resembled the thermal baths of some imperial palace.

At the far end was a vast brick dome, whose stucco coating had come away and through which poked the roots of trees which grew in the layers of earth above it; it was rounded into a barrel arch, crowning a semicircle of hollowed-out niches in which a few statues could still be seen, some of them intact, others broken with half torsoes or merely decapitated. It was not the time for undertaking archaeological investigations to work out whether the capitals of the columns supporting the architrave were in pure or composite Corinthian style with the dimensions prescribed by Vitruvius.

A breach was open in one corner of the room, the remains of a door whose marble casing had crumbled. By the process of deduction that a door must always lead somewhere, Lothario crossed the threshold and encountered a stairway which appeared to descend into the bowels of the earth, leading to a vaulted cellar, doubtless the treasure house, for there were chests, their wood rotted and only held together by their fixings and rusted bronze nails, which must have contained gold and silver coins; but these had long since collapsed and been emptied.

Another staircase became apparent, twisting and turning capriciously through the blocks of masonry. Steps that had become uneven or loosened by flooding were unsteady beneath Lothario’s tread, and sometimes a stone would break off and roll the whole way down, awakening sepulchral echoes under the low vault. Sometimes the sole of his boot would slip on something flaccid, viscous and fetid, simultaneously living and inert, a toad disturbed in its age-old peace. Sometimes a frightened bat would swing its ribbed wings across the smoke of the torch; a root-like serpent’s tail would slide out of sight among the stones. Intermittently Lothario thought he could hear footsteps behind him, but it was only the reverberation of his own and when he turned round all he could see was the shadow closing in as the light passed on, like ebony doors falling shut again. This never-ending rising and falling stairway, which was sometimes blocked with rubble, reminded the prince of that nightmare etching in which Piranesi showed an endless ladder whose rungs wind across an architecture of grim blackness being climbed laboriously by a man who is seen looking wearier, thinner, more wrecked and ghostly at each of the landings, and who, after so much striving, reaches the top of this Babel tower of stairs rising from the centre of the earth only to see with appalling despair that it ends in a trap door which can never be raised. If Roman ruins are not haunted by spectres dragging their chains like gothic ruins, they still have their terrors. Larvae, lemures, lamias, manes and harpies are a match for ghouls, wraiths, hobgoblins, imps and the whole gruesome nocturnal population of deserted places, and, from wandering about in this dream of stone, Lothario began to experience nervous anxieties and unhealthy shiverings. He was attired only in thin evening clothes; the damp sepulchral cold of these underground rooms enveloped him like a wet sheet. Fatigue and low spirits overwhelmed him; his lantern had gone out, his torch was failing, and what would he do when its last beam had been shed, caught as he was in this deep darkness, lost in this labyrinth of passages, corridors, chambers, stairways, sunken floors which could swallow him up and cast him with broken bones into the depths of a darkness even more absolute and opaque? It seemed to him particularly unpleasant to die in this way, even though no way was good. Indeed, for a Donati prince, it would be a pathetic end to be snuffed out like a rat beneath a pile of rubble. So, he thought to himself: ‘Why didn’t that tart Dafné tell me about it, I’d have given her double what my melodramatic stepmother offered her, and instead of wandering about among these heaps of stones and bricks, perhaps never to escape, I would be sleeping comfortably in that big Renaissance bed with its carved cornice.’

The onset of a fever whipped up hallucinations in his mind, hallucinations given external form as ghosts. He thought he saw the skeleton in the hat approaching him with obsequious grimaces and exaggerated bows, asking him, on behalf of the other two corpses, to be so good enough as to make a fourth at whist. They had been waiting for this opportunity long since, but customs had become more mild, and no one was thrown into dungeons these days. Then the vision altered. The statues left their niches, the paintings came off the walls and around him executed sarabands of mythological nudity. ‘Antique delirium is better than the modern kind,’ Lothario said to himself; ‘these dancers with their transparent pink draperies are prettier than the rag and bone skeletons and the sound of their golden rattlesnakes is preferable to creaking joints.’

Aware of being overcome by feverish chimerae, the prince pulled himself together and reined in his runaway senses. Thus calmed, he soldiered on, and soon a sound of running water like the rumble of a waterfall met his ears. The pipe bringing water into the thermal room had long since collapsed under the pressure of soil, and the spring’s outflow had formed a bed through the ruins and ran swiftly towards a dark opening where it disgorged its black expanse, which was streaked with fiery serpents in the torchlight. A beam thrown from one side to the other made out a narrow bridge which Lothario hesitated to cross, fearing that it would topple over, split along some hidden crack. But he quickly made up his mind, since his situation could hardly get any worse. The beam did not sag beneath the prince’s feet and it played him no nasty tricks. On the other side he found himself in a suite of rooms which were relatively less delapidated. Through fissures in the vaults a faint blue light leaked in, for in the course of this subterranean journey hours had gone by and dawn was breaking on the Roman countryside. The daylight soon became brighter and Lothario was able to abandon his torch. The light penetrated the ruin through cracks obstructed by grasses and undergrowth. Crudely fluted columns with mossy capitals supported the arches of the vaults, and climbing plants had hung their green draperies upon the walls stripped of their marble claddings, veiling their nakedness. At the end, a small crack of blue sky shone like a star. Raising himself up on a pile of bricks, stone and marble shards mixed with earth, Lothario reached the opening and had no need to widen it in order to pass through, for as we have said he was svelte and slender. With the flat of his hands as support, he pulled up his body and was soon outside the pit, in broad daylight, in the midst of a herd of buffalo who gazed at him in timid stupefaction, the froth dribbling from their slavering mouths as they snorted and scraped at the ground with their hooves. Lothario gently cut a path through them, uttering the words they are wont to obey, and he made off away from them at a slow pace without being pursued.

The pink and blue light of morning spread out over the vast empty countryside, gilding the arches and aqueducts, and leaving its sparkle here and there upon the puddles of water which had gathered in the furrows of the ground. The thin smoke of shepherds’ fires rose into the limpid air and buzzards in search of prey described circles in the azure sky above this grandiose solitude. Rome was silhouetted against the horizon, dominated by the dome of St Peter’s, resembling a rounded mountain. With an inexpressible sensuality the prince drank in this pure air, this fresh breeze and serene light, this calm and splendid magnificence of nature; his lungs, stifled for several hours by the vault of those subterranean ruins which could have been the lid of his sepulchre, now swelled delightfully. He had climbed back from the pit to the surface of the earth, he was revived and resurrected.

A barouche which had taken some travellers to Castel-Gandolfo the night before was returning empty. Lothario hailed it, and in less than an hour little Roman horses, galloping full of energy and fire, had brought him to his palace; he went to bed and slept a deep sleep. When he rose around noon, he yawned and stretched, quietly noting: ‘And they say the day for adventures is over!’

And now a few words in conclusion.

Violanta’s disappearance remained forever a mystery, and an investigation was opened and abandoned for want of any clues. Pious souls said that the Devil had carried off the princess, who practised magic. In Rome this explanation does not seem unlikely.

The son of the tenor Ambrosio was stricken by the fever and died.

Dafné had gone back to Paris, where the young ambassadorial attaché went to join her. She had resumed her customary life. But, last carnival, while she was supping at the café Anglais with a few cocottes and dandies of the purest water, kicking up a great row and starting to smash the crystalware, a pale young man with a black line of side whiskers and an air of great distinction, and with a very elegant blue domino brought with him from the Opera on his arm, opened the door of their private booth, doubtless mistaking the number. The young man, who was none other than Lothario, politely apologised for having thus intruded upon such fine company, and was on the point of retreating when Dafné rose bolt upright, her eyes frantic, her complexion livid, betokening some unspeakable terror as if she were seeing a ghost, and murmured in a strangled voice: ‘So! The dead do come back.’ Then she fell flat, overturning her chair and dragging down the tablecloth in her clenched hands; she was whiter than her white taffeta dress, and death covered her cheeks with its ghastly face powder.

They huddled around her, lifted her up, but everything they did was to no avail.

She whispered a few more strange words: ‘The dark woman, the
left
eye of the sphinx on the
right
, press the button, whoosh,’ then she died.

‘Well, that’s a pretty end,’ said Zerbinette; ‘Dafné expired from a fatal bout of indigestion – crayfish à la bordelaise. It’s always the things we like the most that kill us.’

This was the only funeral oration there was for mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury, and to complete her disgrace, death, which loves truth, only admitted her into Montmartre cemetery under the name of Mélanie Tripier.

Truth be told, she deserved no other funeral oration or epitaph.

As for Prince Lothario, he had discreetly closed the door again, and in the next-door booth, he removed the lace beard from the blue domino who did not want to unmask herself, and placed on lips which said ‘no’, a kiss which said ‘yes’.

  
1
   Alessandro
Sanquirico
(1777–1849). Italian painter and set designer. Stendhal pays tribute to his work in
Rome, Naples et Florence
(1817) and
Promenades dans Rome
(1829).

  
2
   
Polidoro da Caravàggio
(1495–1543). Pupil of Raphael.

  
3
   
Angelo, Tyrant of Padua
. Play by Victor Hugo first performed in 1835.

  
4
   
Nada y nadie
. There is no known etching by Goya which goes by this title.

  
5
   
Cosimo Ruggieri
, Italian astrologer who came to France in the service of Catherine de’ Medici;
Jeanne d’Albret
, Queen of Navarre and mother of Henri IV, died unexpectedly in 1572 and a rumour, linking the two events, soon circulated that she had been poisoned.

  
6
   Reference to Alfred de Musset’s historical drama
Lorenzaccio
, first published in 1834. It is interesting to note how many times Gautier refers to cultural events of his youth – though written towards the end of his life,
Mademoiselle Dafné
could almost have been written thirty years earlier.

The death has just occurred in Paris, in a small building across the river, of a somewhat peculiar personage, who was well known to the numismatists and gem-cutters of the Pantheon district: Monsieur de Burdhe. (I am deliberately disguising his name, though perhaps to no purpose, since everyone who had dealings with the strange individual of whom I speak must have been struck by him and would surely recognise him.) Monsieur de Burdhe lived alone with an old valet de chambre for twenty years in the west wing of a building dating from the time of Louis XVI in a street called … which was recently obliterated by the construction of the boulevard Raspail. It was a quite extensive and handsome edifice only two storeys high, set above a five-step front entrance, gently decaying in between a mildewed courtyard, whose cobblestones were overgrown with weeds and velvety mosses, and a small garden soaked in shadow, planted with age-old chestnut trees, deep and cold as a well; an airless and sunless garden where de Burdhe managed to grow the most beautiful irises in the world, from white irises with petals of soft silk and mother-of-pearl to the black irises of Suse, which resembled huge crêpe bats suddenly fixed in the form of an opening flower.