The Vampire of Ropraz (4 page)

Albert Mahaim examines Favez and finds him to be an alcoholic, taciturn, inclined by his atavism to fits of anger that are liable to escalate into violence. But perhaps Favez is not the monster that people think. In any case, not a dismemberer of corpses or a cannibal.

His physical examination of Favez finds that he has a very robust physique and an uncommon tolerance of hardship. A tree that fell in the forest, during an unfortunate time of his life when the subject was working under a master woodcutter, has injured one of his shoulders seriously enough to leave him with a slight dislocation between bone and collarbone. But it causes Favez no pain, his upper body is powerful, his arms long and very muscular, his penis and testicles very well developed. A notable detail: as a consequence of frequent masturbation from an early age, the foreskin has been pulled back from the glans; the solitary practices of the subject have circumcised him naturally.

“Has the subject had sexual relations with a woman?”

“Despite his reticence and after many hours of talking, the subject admitted that he has never been with a woman. He has had encounters with prostitutes in Lausanne and Yverdon, but had had too much to drink and the women did not insist.”

“The subject has a strong constitution. Why has he not done military service?”

“The army rejected him because of his disjointed shoulder. It is the right shoulder, used for shooting. The army physicians who examined him concluded it was a congenital malformation making him unfit for service. Too bad for the federal army,” adds Dr Mahaim with a smile, “he would have made a good soldier.”

However, one detail puts Dr Mahaim on the qui vive: Favez’s eyes are always red and inflamed as if ringed by raw flesh; he blinks continuously, as if the daylight causes him pain. Albert Mahaim notes this detail with reluctance, knowing that he is endowing Favez with the red eyes of a vampire, unable to tolerate the light of day.

His injured, lopsided shoulder will always make his gait look as if he is fleeing, another characteristic of the monster.

A further detail, and one that takes on its full meaning if we remember the particularly long, sharp teeth of the nocturnal prowler with his thirst for blood: Favez’s dental examination finds a jaw with abnormally long teeth, incisors sharper than is natural, which force his mouth open in a rictus that is difficult to look at.

As for the search of the personal effects of the accused, of his clothing and of the attic where he slept in Mézières, under the roof of the Chappuis’ shop, it reveals nothing of interest, apart from a little wooden-handled pocket knife with a dull, rusted blade. A pathetic object, as Dr Mahaim demonstrates and explains, unable to cut into flesh with the quick and terribly effective precision of the three graveyard assaults.

The pocket knife is examined by two forensic experts brought in especially from Basle and Zürich, Dr Paulus Betschacht and Professor Johannes Berg, two experts consulted by the police
forces of both Germany and Austria in murder and vice cases. These two austere gentlemen find no trace of human blood on the unremarkable blade, merely some fatty residues with a casein base, and fructose left by the cheese and the apples stolen from orchards that frequently provide the subject’s only nourishment.

“So there was no blood, or trace of human fat in the accused’s clothing either? Or on his footwear? In his bed?”

“No physical trace. The subject himself is clean, and the attic where he sleeps regularly is well aired and swept out by himself.”

Also worth mentioning is that the Swiss-German experts, criminological specialists with European reputations, tested Favez on several pieces of animal flesh, ordering him to slice and cut up a beef carcass, a pig’s belly and the breast of a young cow. The defendant showed that he was incapable of doing so. Whether using his “little knife” or with the help of extremely sharp butcher’s utensils, Favez could not, or did not know how to, slice the meat of an animal slaughtered the evening before.

Dr Mahaim’s concluding recommendation was that Favez should be released as soon as possible. A release accompanied by a fine of thirty-five francs for unnatural practices towards animals, and entered in the penal record, together with psychological supervision for at least three months, with an order to attend at the Cery institution on the first day of each week. Dr Mahaim added that at Cery he personally would see this Charles Favez, since in the course of his brief investigation he had become attached to an individual who was more a victim of rural poverty than the tormentor of a society unwilling to allow him a chance in life.

What a vampire dreams at night, bolted with three padlocks within his medieval jail – he reimmerses himself in scenes of childhood where he is dying of hunger, suffering, enduring, submitting and so often wishing for death. Locked in his cell in Oron’s gloomy prison, Favez relives very old scenes he thought he had been able to wipe from his memory when he was free to roam. As a hunter, an avenger thirsting for blood? He is three or four, it is before the welfare services place him in Mézières, with the Chappuis; he is with his parents, the blows rain down, there is shouting, his father yelling and his fits of drunkenness, and the hunger, and the beatings, always the beatings and the hunger.
There is the miserable nourishment stolen from the children he rarely dares approach. There are the leftovers of rotting meat and old bones stolen from the dishes of the neighbourhood dogs. And later, after a long-drawn-out period, always the same in its sadness, a new family for him – he is four, maybe five – people he does not know and of whom he immediately feels afraid. It is in a remote hamlet among hills and ravines, beyond Vucherens; the man takes him on his knees and makes him lower his trousers so that he can put his big thing into him. Be quiet, Favez, no one can hear you. We’re all alone here, just me and you, Charles Favez, little poor boy, there’s only me and you, and you are going to let me have your little hole the way you did yesterday evening, and this morning too. Turn around Favez. Suck, Favez. Cry, Favez. And be quiet. Anyway, what happens here will never get out, never, there’s just me and you, Favez, and my wife, the big sow, who will join in the dance. The man cries out, I wipe myself with my fingers, the palm of my hand, the sticky stuff is drying on me, and it hurts, I’ve
bled again. Then the whip. Or the belt, the stick used for driving the swine. The man beats away, I am on my knees, my buttocks are bare, the man keeps hitting me and puts his big thing in my hole again.

And his wife? In the fields, his wife. In the forest to fetch firewood. The man is an invalid. A bad leg. Never leaves the house. Stays shut up with me. Once when I was on the ground, with his big thing well in, his wife suddenly appeared in the room, and right away got undressed and came to rub her hairy underbelly, her moist slit, all over my head and mouth. Stinking slit. And oozing. She cried out and kept rubbing away and crying out, and I still had his big thing in my hole and it hurt.

Later I was with the Chappuis and I was able to sleep in peace. No more big thing to hurt me. But the big thing’s woman, his wife, that one, if ever I get my hands on her…

Who among your torturers do you ever find again? Violent male rapists with women looking on, saying nothing, vicious, who allow the child to
become a prey, or use him for their own ends. In his cell Favez wakens in a sweat, drinks from the water bucket, and goes back to sleep under his coarse sheet. It is a sleep haunted by the figures, of women especially, who, now that the child is at last a man, will have to be made to pay, to pay for their cruelty with an even greater cruelty. One without witnesses. Without limits. And that day will come, you are sure of it, child now almost a man. You can’t wait, Charles Favez? It will be that night. Or all those nights in the dark cold, or warm darkness, in the snow, at night or in the spring, to make someone pay for that filthy slit.

Cannibalism, offences against three dead young women, bestiality, aggravated rape: Dr Mahaim’s sense of the source of the “mania” is of no help to him. As he thoughtfully explains, he feels doubt, loses all assurance, knowing only that he is far from imagining the specific martyrdom suffered by the child Favez before his placement in Mézières. All those years of crucifixion from abuse, from the sperm, the mucous of wanton brutes. “People talk about the ‘Vampire of Ropraz’,” notes
Mahaim in the register of his observations. “It is a popular, terrified simplification for the rapist, the necrophile, the dreaded consumer of the dead. In this wilderness, the vampire will live on as a symptom of evil, live on for as long as this society remains a victim of primordial squalor: the filth of bodies, the promiscuity, isolation, alcoholism, incest and superstition that infest this countryside and will create other sources of sexual exaction and merciless horror.”

The second individual’s involvement is still a mystery. On one of the first days of Favez’s imprisonment, on Saturday the 16th of May, at six in the evening, a mysterious lady dressed in white gets out of a horse-drawn carriage at the gate of Oron prison. A coachman in dark livery waits for her on his seat. The gate is opened to let the lady in, and she enters the building; on Saturdays there is only one warder, who escorts the mysterious woman to Favez’s cell.

He opens the door and leaves; the lady goes into the cell, closing the door behind her with the key given to her by the warder when she came in.

Favez is not expecting this visit. He is standing, tense, his features showing the bewildered suspicion of a prisoner ready to defend himself against a blow, against ill treatment. The woman draws nearer, looks him up and down from head to foot, and then gazes directly into his face. So this is he, the woman-eater. She draws even closer. The one who drinks young women. Favez can smell his visitor’s perfume. She breathes in the smell of jailbird, the smell of death-lover. She draws even closer. Favez pulls back. Suddenly the woman extends an arm, clasps Favez, pressing herself to him in an almost convulsive embrace; Favez falls; a prolonged shudder runs through the woman, thrusting her against the prisoner. It is unclear what happens next. After half an hour the warder glues his ear to the cell door; later he will talk of a moaning, or groaning, or whimpering, he doesn’t know which; it was “like a beast being strangled”.

Who is this mysterious woman? There will be decent talk of a pious woman come to bring divine succour to a social outcast. Others, more
pedestrian, but failing to solve the mystery of the strange intruder, will speak of a prison visitor – a novel career at the time – but, more realistically, others surmise that she is an adventuress thirsting for potent emotions, or even a fashionable sufferer from hysteria with the ability to pass herself off as a do-gooder in order to get close to a man who embodies her fantasy. A fantasy of sucking or ghoulish gorging. Of unnatural practices. One thing is sure: she paid the warder to allow her access to the Vampire. Several months later, when Favez was sentenced to the heaviest penalty available at the time, life imprisonment, the warder, called upon to explain himself and subjected to a strenuous interrogation by the
Sûreté
, would admit to having accepted several sums of money in coin and fifty-franc notes.

For the woman would return. During the two months of Favez’s incarceration, she would seek him out on at least three occasions, as the warder’s secret accounts testified. When the white lady, the mysterious woman, shuts herself in for over an hour with the man of graves and perforated
heifers, the warder is riveted to the door; he is shaking too, the warder, he is dizzy at the moans coming from the shadows over and over, and at length, in the prison, where he is alone with the frantic couple.

Even today no one knows who the lady in white was, or who gave her away. For two centuries the Oron prison has been housed in a wing of the château above the town, its access making it difficult to watch from outside. The château stands on rather a high outcrop that discourages observers from either town or country. The lady in white must have been well acquainted with the locality and usages of the district. Nevertheless, she took a risk in gaining entry to an official building to seduce an individual accused of extremely serious crimes.

Was the white lady a doctor, as some supposed at the time? Maybe she became acquainted with Favez’s case at the Cery clinic, from Dr Mahaim himself, or by stumbling on his papers. Could she have been a medical student, or some idle, wealthy auditor of Dr Mahaim’s lectures, excited
to the point of distraction by the person of Favez and his crimes, always sexual in nature. Hysteria, as is well known, draws in the deranged, as do seminars analysing the ecstatically possessed.

The warder was suspended. But having shown remorse, and being responsible for children in the town of Oron, he was restored to his position on condition he turned over his revenues to the abstinence society recently founded in the canton, bearing the empyrean name of “The Blue Cross”.

Favez is set free on Thursday the 9th of July. His release from prison provokes outrage. The Vampire of Ropraz is free! In vain the justice authorities defend themselves, citing the psychiatrist’s report, the expert witnesses from Basle and Zürich, the complete lack of proof regarding the three graveyard crimes and, above all, the decisive factor in the eyes of justice, the manifest inability of Favez to cut up or dissect any kind of flesh – animal flesh during the tests to which he had been subjected, or human flesh in the worst of cases. A vast, angry murmur sweeps through the countryside, and there are fears for the safety of the wrongly accused, considered a vampire by
the public, fears of a lynching or a kidnapping followed by extreme abuse. Everywhere in the overwrought countryside, groups of “rural youth” are formed, with banners, posters and noisy meetings at which Favez’s name is called out and chanted: “DEATH-TO-FA-VEZ, DEATH-TO-THE-VAM-PIRE”, to the point that the police in Oron receive an order from the State Council, Justice and Police Service, to protect the outcast and repress the public disorder. But Favez has vanished. Fled, the Vampire. Gone. Without a trace. Where can he be hiding on these July days, when the popular rage is calling for his head? Later, people will imagine that the mysterious woman in white sheltered him in some hideaway where she could vampirize the Vampire as she pleased. Has he gone to earth in the foothills of La Broye, or maybe in the gorges of the Mérine, behind gloomy Villars-Mendraz, living on roots, river water and whatever he can forage from isolated farms? During this period people point to the theft of chickens from farmyards, of rabbits, of cheese set out in the open to dry on wooden
racks. Gypsies? Tramps? Or Favez in his solitude, hunted, starving, making do with what he can find in the wild?