The Poisoning Angel (18 page)

‘Oh, chief warder Michel …’

The waves of light and shade alternately stretched and squashed the shadow of the gaoler’s snub nose (he reminded Thunderflower of someone) and that of his thin-lipped mouth, which gaped like a bottomless pit. ‘I am here at nine thirty at night to inform you that the Prince-President Napoleon has said he is unable to use his right of pardon in your case.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘My God, Hélène, it means that you must prepare for death. The sentence will be carried out at dawn tomorrow, 26 February 1852.’

The light from the resin candle made the head warder’s
bulging eyeballs sparkle like magnifying glasses, as he added, ‘The chaplain, Tiercelin, is in the corridor waiting to come and listen to you.’

‘Listen to me say what?’

‘Oh, something like, “On the point of appearing before God, etc.” It’s just a formality.’

Thunderflower kept her eyes on her gaoler’s peculiar face. ‘Warder, suddenly, as I’m looking at your face, you remind me of someone who used to be a little shepherdess in Plouhinec, called Émilie Le Mauguen. That little girl my own age gave me the poison I used at the start of my criminal career. It was she – and it was very wicked of her – who taught me how to kill people without risk to myself. I think she later became a day servant in one of the villages in Guern. You have to look for her and subject her to the same fate that awaits me tomorrow. Do you promise?’

For goodness’ sake, Thunderflower …

If the poisoner was in no hurry to confess her sins to the clergyman waiting in the corridor, she was very eager to incriminate an innocent woman. That was like her, at any rate. Even after her death she wanted to go on killing, and smiled with a childlike sweetness while the chaplain, accompanied by two nuns, decided of his own accord to come in, as the turnkey made a promise and an offer. ‘Émilie Le Mauguen at Guern, you say? Very well, I shall inform the prosecutor general. Now, Hélène, you have the right to a last meal. What would you like for supper?’

Thunderflower did not reply. The gaoler was concerned: ‘Are you afraid I might poison you?’

The two sisters of charity on either side of the chaplain each
had a lighted candle. Added to Michel’s this meant there were lots of lights dancing on the walls of the narrow cell. They reminded Thunderflower of evenings in the farm at Kerhordevin in Plouhinec, where a fire of gorse and cowpats would blaze in the fireplace while her parents told excessively grim Breton legends.

‘Whenever they spoke about the Ankou in front of me, I remember how terrified my parents were. When we heard a sound outside repeated three times, my father’s long hair used to stand on end and my mother panicked. I could see how important the Ankou was for the family, and I said to myself, “I’ll become important. I’ll become something that interests them.” So I killed my parents, maternal aunts, and my sister.’

Stock-still, Thunderflower looked down at her knees, and her feet resting on the brick floor. She was no longer thinking, but dreaming. ‘I became the Ankou in order to overcome my terrors. And then I no longer had any because I myself was terror. “I won’t be at the mercy of their fear any more. I’m the one who’ll decide.” At night I used to go and fill myself with the strength I needed by leaning against a menhir on the Caqueux moor. I could feel its amazing radiant energy deep inside me. My backbone still burns with it.’

‘Dubious idolatry … and a standing stone that ought to have been broken up or Christianised,’ lamented the chaplain, making the sign of the cross in the air. ‘Now, as for your expiation, you need to—’

‘I’m neither exonerating nor blaming, I’m explaining!’ Thunderflower interrupted him as the flames’ reflections continued moving round the walls and brick floor of the cell. ‘My parents’ fears made me so afraid. They gave me their fear
and the ground was no longer steady. I was too scared during those evenings. It was my fears that did for me. When parents are paralysed by a fear, they do not protect. Children are so impressionable, damn it!’ she said, getting worked up. ‘In fact, when parents are that afraid they transmit their fears to their young ones and there’s no protection any more, is there? And after that …’

In her homespun prison dress, she went on, ‘I think it makes perfect sense. When you’ve been lost in your parents’ anguish, you want to be master of it, and you’re even prepared to turn into death to do that, and you become invincible. It’s brilliant, being the giver of death. Can you understand the path I took to conquer my fear? It’s a vertical path. I went upwards. I am death. I’m at the top of the tree. I am the Ankou. I’m in charge and it’s amazing. It’s another perspective. There’s no feeling involved. You’re on top. From the top of the tree, I’m the one who’s going to frighten people. I won’t be afraid any more. I
am
fear. It’s fantastic. No more terror; it’s you who decides. You’re no longer bound by anything. I didn’t want any more emotional ties so I said to myself: I’m going to make some
soupes aux herbes
and little cakes. I’ve been too afraid.’

‘But why didn’t you say all this in front of the court, Hélène?’ said the warder Michel, moved by her words.

Thunderflower scored through the question with a sigh, but when the prison chaplain asked her again if she was ready to ask forgiveness of God, she finally answered the head warder’s question: ‘Actually I would quite like a boiled egg.’

When her cell was in darkness once more, because her visitors had gone – among them the chaplain, who hid the way he had
been sent packing with a curt, ‘Goodness, you’re starting to bore me’ – the poor, sad woman lost in the madness of another era, astray among Breton legends and who had merged with her childhood terror, plunged deep into the ravines of sleep beside a broken eggshell. The night birds sang songs of comfort. The deep wind, come from Morbihan, wept between the bars, it was tempting to think … and soon Thunderflower wanted to have a pee in her bed. She forbade it. ‘No, no, I can’t,’ but the Ankou said, ‘Go on.’

‘No, I have to get up and use the pail.’

‘Stay there. It’s fine. Go on.’

‘No.’

‘Go on.’

On the night before her execution Thunderflower wet the bed. It was the first sign she was human (and about time too).

She had rediscovered that fear from her early childhood as well; it was forbidden by her mother and she had been ashamed when it happened in the box-bed. For the rest of the night she turned over, and over again, always pressing different bits of her rough dress on to the big wet patch to mop it up. For her the final challenge was not escaping death but drying the pee.

Dawn, and in Place du Champ-de-Mars, bordered with chestnut trees and buildings, people in their Sunday best swarmed like walking dead. At the centre of the esplanade, in front of the guillotine raised on a platform so that even those at the back of the crowd could benefit from the coming spectacle, Tiercelin the chaplain commanded silence by lifting his hand then, holding a
piece of paper, declared: ‘Yesterday evening, Hélène requested my presence in her cell in order that she might express her regret for the evil she has done and her fervent desire to die in the odour of sanctity. In front of Sister Thérèse and Sister Clémentine she begged me to make public her statement of contrition, which she has been unable to sign as she cannot write, but which I am going to read to you.
I, Hélène Jégado, being on the point of appearing before the Almighty, and wishing, as far as it is in me, to expiate my faults, ask forgiveness and mercy of heaven. I willingly offer up my life as a sacrifice to the Eternal Father. I hope that God will grant me the grace to die in penitence.’

The sun rising above the rooftops extended the shadow of Tiercelin’s nose over the whole length of his vestments. In private, behind the inner yard of the prison, there was no need to hold Thunderflower down on her bed to tie her up. The Messieurs of Rennes, of Vannes and of Saint-Brieuc – the executioners – woke and bound her without encountering any resistance. The chief executioner, that of Rennes, said appreciatively, ‘If only they could all be so amenable.’

One of his assistants, the executioner of Vannes, pulled the condemned woman’s arm behind her back too roughly, and the pain from the cancer in her left breast made her yelp like a wild animal.

‘No need to make such a fuss,’ said the executioner, who was unaware of her illness.

‘Especially after poisoning thirty-seven people,’ confirmed the one from Saint-Brieuc.

‘Thirty-seven …’ Thunderflower raised her eyes. ‘Oh my, the law doesn’t know about all my misdeeds. I’ve brought sorrow
and desolation to a much larger number of families than that.’

Her last toilet completed, and having declined the offer of a glass of brandy, Thunderflower, with her hair cut up to her neck and still racked with pain from her malignant tumour, was helped up into the cart (
karriguel
?) which moved off, with a squeaking axle, of course.
Squeak, squeak!

The gendarmes cleared the area around the guillotine when the group drew near. The crowd, desperate to see, was kept at a distance. On the platform Thunderflower caused astonishment by asking Monsieur de Rennes for a mirror.

‘Ha, what a time to beautify yourself!’ sneered the executioner of Vannes.

‘Women,’ sighed the one from Saint-Brieuc. ‘Touching up her make-up just before her head falls into a basin.’

‘I’d like a mirror, maybe propped upright on a chair in front of the guillotine,’ explained Thunderflower. ‘When the blade cuts through my neck, I’d like to see myself – me this time – die.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ apologised the executioner of Rennes.

Flat on her stomach with her throat on a semi-circular crosspiece on to which a crescent-shaped frame came down to hold her neck, the victim bore no grudge for this refusal by the chief Monsieur (a colleague?) for whom she felt a burst of human respect such as she rarely experienced. But tough luck, he was her executioner … lifting the lever that activated a spring releasing the blade of the heavy sharp cutter. Man’s justice descended upon her condemned head. Thunderflower had been cut down.

Since the construction of the medical school at Rennes, which was to open its doors that year, was not yet completed by the end of February 1852, dissections were in the interim being carried out in the ossuary of the old cemetery of Saint-Etienne church. On its grim ruined façade was a bas-relief depicting a figure brandishing a skull and a femur, and a quotation:
Death, judgement and icy hell, man must tremble at the thought of them. He is a fool if through inattention his mind does not see that one has to die.
Not the finest lines of poetry ever written. The statues ornamenting the ossuary were obscene and bizarre.

Thunderflower was obscene and bizarre as well – lying naked on her back on a metal table, missing her head, legs apart and her chest open with her ribs and flesh hanging at the sides. She was like the whore offered in a nightmarish brothel with men in white smocks walking round her.

‘Tell me what mad misfortune made your eye burst with a smile of sorrow,’ said a phrenologist in an aside, speaking familiarly to Thunderflower’s head, which still bore traces of plaster from the mould taken of her face for a medical collection devoted to great criminals.

As he began to saw through her skull in order to examine the brain, another observant doctor standing between the poisoner’s thighs, noted: ‘She never gave birth, but was not a virgin … Faustin Malagutti, where did that wreath of everlasting flowers come from? It’s beside the body, getting in the way.’

‘A man from Lorient had it sent for her,’ answered the famous professor of the science faculty, attaching copper wires to the corpse’s exposed heart, on which he was conducting electro-magnetic experiments.

While he regulated the device linked to the conducting wires, Malagutti heard the phrenologist lamenting beside him, ‘That’s unbelievable, her skull is normal, which puts paid to the theory of the born killer. She has no bump for crime, just as no one has ever found anyone with the bump for mathematics or business. Idiots and assassins have the same brain as everyone else, which suggests that phrenology is wrong-headed from start to finish.’

The smells escaping from the makeshift laboratory poisoned the air. Through the coloured panes of a small window that was not quite airtight, the fumes spread a sort of terror into the nostrils of passers-by. Just then a sudden shout of triumph shot out of the ossuary.

‘Look!’ cried Faustin Malagutti. ‘Two hours after the execution the apparatus is still registering contractions of the right atrium. Her heart is still beating.’

The doctor came out from between the legs, and remarked of the trace, which the oscillator was producing on the graph paper: ‘If you can call it beating. It’s more like the last quivers of fear.’

Plouhinec

The crumpled front page of
L’Auxiliaire Breton
floated on the breeze as the sun set over the moor. Against the proud outline of a menhir it repeatedly rose and fell, circling the stone and brushing caressingly against it, before moving off. At the foot of the megalith was a heap of blond gorse twigs, like a head of hair. The sole of a worm-eaten sabot came down on a corner of the printed page, which had landed again, with its headline in bold type: A reply by the Mayor of Guern to Hélène Jégado’s posthumous revelations.

A very old hand, muddy, wrinkled and covered in extremely long
hair, picked up the newspaper page and scrunched it into a ball before wedging it in underneath the mound of straw and twigs forming a pyre around the base of the menhir. The same long thin fingers struck a flint, making a spark and then a flame, which licked the paper, which began to burn, setting light to the straw and the dry gorse.

The sudden blaze lit up an ungodly chapel in the distance with an open door, and a short, crooked, hairy old man with a back-to-front arm, pushing a bewildered woman in a wheelchair. Her flat, startled face – snub nose, eyes starting out of her head – seemed perpetually prey to a fear of invisible forces and of the dark.

At the approach of the female, even though she was paralysed, the menhir glowed erect and pink in the firelight. The damp night air made it glisten and its swelling tip was tinged violet by the dying glow on the horizon.

Grabbed under the arms like a child, the fifty-year-old cripple felt herself being forced out of her chair by four bare arms furrier than a monkey’s. She stood upright and panting, supported by two octogenarians – still in great shape, apart from being misshapen – who were sniffing at the flesh of her rump as if it were soup.

Around the megalith, the moor became shrouded in mist, furrowing its brow at the meddling of these Norman ancestors.

The wigmakers, now with long beards, pulled the woman right up to the standing stone. These converts to ‘Celticity’, thus more Breton than the Bretons, wearing
bragou-braz
and in the case of the tall, stooping one-eyed man, with a broken biniou under his arm, each seized one wrist of the former shepherdess, holding it in a vice-like grip, and they danced! First they jigged on the spot and then in a circle to please the stiff menhir, which was in raptures.
The pale old maid was only vaguely aware of what was happening as she was dragged into the dance round the monument, tossed into the air one minute, feet trailing across the ground the next.

From its place on the chapel altar, next to the statue of the Ankou with his scythe, the little plaster model of Thunderflower – the only one sold in Rennes – seemed to be enjoying the spectacle outside.

To the shrill sound of the tuneless biniou, the men span on the clay ground like Poulpiquet figurines emerging from a
far
cake. Like the bad bearded dwarfs of Celtic legend, they compelled the paralysed woman to keep going. The flames were reflected like candles in the bulging eyes of the servant from Guern and the long hairs caked to the Normans’ bodies with mud crackled into red stars with an acrid stench.

While the verbena-crowned Ankou and Thunderflower gazed serenely on, the dancing woman’s elbows were kept bent like a drinker’s. It was unbearable torment for her. Spinning out of control, she wondered how long she would suffer before it killed her. Over in the chapel, on the thick edge of the granite altar table, these words could be read: ‘I will spare no one.’

Round and round went Émilie (for it was she), circling the aroused menhir with the crows in one last delirious dance from which she would never recover. This was her destiny. Plunged into pagan madness, she called on humanity. Anyone passing in the distance would have said he had seen korrigans dancing on the moor. Her pubic bone and coccyx struck the stone and her jaws (which had years ago dodged those belladonna berries in her soup) cracked against the phallic menhir. The erotic structure broke her and carried her away in a mad dance. Under billions of
stars, the woman from Morbihan no longer knew where she was.

Held by her sleeves, which wrapped the troupe like a shroud, she opened her mind and legs to the mysteries around her. Sweat poured down on her like cider, the fire was a pancake of light, and as the dance sped up she thought her steaming intestines would burst out of her stomach. Again and again she pounded against the stone until she finally let out a cry in
brezhoneg: ‘Ya, c’hoazh, ya kae! Red-sp …’
(‘Yes, again, yes, go on! Ejac …’).

The rain was falling. The fire was smoking. Steam and prickling smuts rose up the menhir, on either side of which the wigmakers in burning
bragou-braz
were rolling around like swollen testicles. The cripple fell on the pyre and whoosh! Jets of flame shot up to the violet tip of the megalith and exploded everywhere. What fireworks there were in the darkness. Oh, milky way.

Thus it came to pass that Émilie was laid by a Breton legend, but looking on from the chapel – and with a grateful wink to the Normans – it was Thunderflower’s statue that came.