The Vampire of Ropraz (5 page)

The unfortunate Charles-Augustin will commit the irreparable.

Is it because he has tasted the flesh of the white lady in his cell in the château of Oron? It seems that masturbation can no longer satisfy him. In his hideout Favez is almost dizzy remembering the advances of the Dubois woman, a flirtatious widow of Mézières, who had often titillated him with various provocations. The widow Dubois is fifty years old, dark and buxom, with a gleam in her eye, and moistens her lips with her tongue when she meets young men, bats her eyelids and laughs very loudly. Her bedroom window overlooks the Chappuis’ shop; from his attic on the upper floor, Favez has often spied and studied her. He has met her in the town, and once she even dragged him into her stairway, laughing and wriggling, but Favez took fright and ran off. Among his bushes, along his side roads, he thinks of the widow Dubois, again sees her proffered
bosom, her white neck, her firm thighs beneath the housecoat.

Favez has come closer to Mézières. On Wednesday the 15th of July, prowling around the outskirts, he stole a chest of spirits from the tram depot and drank all day, ten pints of abominable “schnapps”, a mixture of apple and pear, leftovers from nobler, more sought-after distillations. He slept off his liquor in the thickets around Carrouge, dozed a little, and spent the rest of the night prowling around the widow’s house. At dawn he saw her open the shutters, push open the window, and lean on the sill in her nightdress. She has seen him. He is sure of it. He returns to the tram depot, breaks open a case of spirits, and steals another bottle, which he polishes off without taking a breath.

It is 8:45 in the morning of Thursday the 16th of July, 1903. Intoxicated, slowed down by his effort not to stagger and collapse, Favez walks along the single street of Mézières and enters the passageway of widow Dubois’s house. One flight, two flights; he knocks on the door, the
widow opens. It is later revealed that he threw her violently down on the bed, tore off her nightgown, bit her on the mouth and neck until he drew blood – as the red marks attest, real holes that remain visible for several days – then spread her legs and quickly entered her, in spite of the blows she was raining on him. The widow screams, the window is open, two customers from the Chappuis’ shop rush in, followed by the widow’s grandson, the young Justin Dubois, aged fourteen, on a visit to his grandmother that morning.

Favez, wild-eyed, his member still erect, is overpowered and his clothes are put on.

An hour later he is in the hands of the police, who again lock him up.

At noon that day a great crowd assembles in front of the Oron police station – in the same building, on the first floor, are the offices of the judge of the District Court, the Justice of the Peace, and a branch of the
Sûreté
. There is rioting, threats, angry chanting: “DEATH-TO-THE-VAM-PIRE, DEATH-TO-THE-VAMPIRE,” chants the crowd, moving off towards the
château, where the accursed creature is under lock and key. Several policemen on horseback will be needed to block the way of the most incensed, especially those from Ropraz, who want Charles-Augustin Favez dead to avenge Rosa Gilliéron – the first victim of the Vampire drunk on blood and human flesh – and rid the countryside of the monster poisoning its existence.

In his cell, Favez is frightened. At any moment the triple-bolted door may give way under the weight of the rioters. Favez knows that the people of Ropraz are especially vindictive. He has been about long enough to know the tenacity of these country people. He knows he is
their
Vampire. One of the ringleaders would only have to decide – Aloïs Rod, Pierre Gilliéron or big Desmeules, who knocked out three fairground men by himself at the last Marksmen’s Festival – for the barrier of police to give way and his cell door to shatter. Charles-Augustin Favez has often wandered around Ropraz; he remembers the girls’ beauty, especially Rosa’s; he gazed at her so much in school and later
at dances and sing-songs that his eyes still hurt. The hills of Ropraz. The pink château. The other château, on the hill. And the graveyard before the forest, the Ropraz graveyard with its secret passage leading into the woods and gorges.

Favez is frightened. This evening, Thursday 16th July, it must be warm and bright outside; men and boys from Ropraz have come back to shout in front of the prison, and it is always the same cry that Favez catches, the chant that puts a knot in his stomach:

In his cell Favez is frightened. Why has the warder not brought him his soup yet? Why can he no longer hear the police detachment’s horses in front of the jail? That is what is happening all right. That evening the police have returned to their station, leaving the field open for the men and boys from Ropraz. They will smash down his door, those men as hard as nails, they will beat
him with a cudgel, break his bones and teeth, and then drag him out into the courtyard to drive a spike through his heart and burn him alive. Or they will bring him back to Ropraz, a stake will be set up by the chapel, and he will be roasted, he, Favez, naked and screaming as the whole village looks on, avenged at last.

Favez goes over to his bed, places his hand on the rough sheet. Linen, the sheet. Strong. Mechanically, the prisoner begins to tear away the hem, using so much strength that he pulls off a long strip and the cloth gives way with a rip. Now, a loop. Favez is afraid. He must be quick. The crowd of rioters is roaring, still calling for his death… A very big loop. Favez stands up with the loop around his neck, ties one end to the bar in the door, and then launches himself forward. He hears his neck crack; at that moment there comes the sound of a key turning in the lock; it is the warder with his soup.

“What are you doing, Favez, for God’s sake!”

The man has leapt on the prisoner; he pulls off the death-collar. Favez stands up, his glassy eyes
quickly clearing; Favez rubs the nape of his neck, says nothing.

“So you wanted to die, Favez? You’d do better to keep your strength for the examinations and the trial. You’ll need it. I heard your famous doctor just now in my lodge, he was talking with one of the judges; it won’t be before winter.”

Favez swallows his soup, his bread; nothing will disturb his lugubrious calm until the single visit paid him by his court-appointed lawyer. And the one the white lady would again be able to make at the end of July, in return for a generous bribe to the warder, as would also come out at the inquiry.

The visit by Favez’s court-appointed lawyer, on Tuesday 21st July, in his cell in Oron:

“You are accused of violating three graves,” Maître Maillard, of the firm of Maillard, Vinet and Veillard, 12 Rue de Bourg, Lausanne, states calmly. “In the cemeteries of Ropraz, Carrouge and Ferlens. Sexual acts and vampirization perpetrated on the corpses of three young women. Butchering and mutilation. In any case,
disturbing the peace of the dead. Very serious crimes, Monsieur Favez! Of the three, Ropraz is the most serious – as you very well know, Monsieur Favez, Rosa was the judge’s darling daughter… and purity itself, in the eyes of all. But no one can prove it was you who committed these three violations, of which you have been previously accused. So keep your mouth shut. At the hearing, remain silent. Given a fair trial, doubt will prevail and it will all work to your advantage.”

Maître Maillard glances down at his notes, pauses for a moment, and then goes on:

“Two other charges are proven. At the Café du Nord, in Ferlens, a series of unnatural acts committed upon the cattle belonging to M. Georges Pasche. In Mézières, the rape of Mme Dubois, a widow. In both these cases the defence will be more difficult, because in the eyes of the court and in the minds of the jurors these facts clearly confirm the violations in the three cemeteries. Sexuality, bestiality, cruelty: let me remind you that several heifers belonging to M.
Pasche had their recta perforated with a sharp instrument, which does nothing to help our case. Do you follow me, M. Favez? And I must add one more thing: in a countryside where discontent and anger are rife, you are the ideal accused. A settling of accounts, the hatred of Judge Gilliéron, whose daughter was sacrificed… and you are the providential scapegoat, M. Favez. Unfortunately, there is the matter of those beasts. Perforated recta, a sharp instrument, bleeding membranes, a bad outcome – obviously the expected complement to the dismembering of the three dead young women…”

The lawyer breaks off again, as if bowed down by his task, and then looks Favez directly in the eye:

“For all these reasons, Favez, keep your mouth shut. Leave it to me to separate the graveyard incidents from the two other cases, which are, all the same, less extraordinary in a countryside hardly renowned for the purity of its morals. On the one hand the widow and the cows. On the other, your lechery-butchery…”

The lawyer is very pleased with his little wordplay. He knows he will use it again in town; this brute of a client is incapable of appreciating it.

What Maître Maillard has not pointed out, because he has failed to appreciate the extent of the ferocious feelings of guilt oppressing this countryside, is that far from making Favez’s cause more banal, the acts committed with the heifers and the rape of the widow Dubois weigh heavily on his case, for they are a reminder of too many shameful secrets in the villages round about. Foul things, dark and unspoken. Drink. Superstition. Incest. Ancient, furtive fornications in stables and cowsheds. Repeated cruelty to crazed animals. Meditated murders. Long-harboured vengeance.

Maître Maillard, this witty city lawyer, is too unfamiliar with the stifling, paralysing remorse concealed by the fresh landscape and sturdy physiques. He knows nothing of the dense derangement affecting minds and bodies. Of the evil beneath the idyll. Of the wish for death. Of the unspoken, skulking fear.

“Let me speak in court, Favez, I’ll win those people over for you in a flash. I’m on your side, Favez. Stay confident. Say nothing. And I’ll see you get out of this mess.”

At that, the lawyer returns to his distinguished office on Rue de Bourg with his two partners and three secretaries, and the course he teaches in the Faculty of Law at the University of Lausanne.

Dr Mahaim has returned.

The mysterious white lady has returned.

After Dr Mahaim, a respite, a cunning, placid calm.

After the lady in white, tension, stupefaction, a terrible longing for love. An entire life, twenty-one years, a long, hard childhood, an adult too soon, the solitude of the body, always the wasteland of the heart. Like a confirmation, a sacred message that she gives him: “You made a mess of it, Charles-Augustin. Now you are Favez, a vampire for all eternity.” This is the monster’s ordination, just as for 2,000 years there has been an ordination of priests before
the altar.
Sacerdos eris in aeternum. Vampyrus eris in aeternum.

The lady comes closer, touches him, takes the Vampire’s mouth in hers. “Did you play when you were little, Charles-Augustin? Were you weaned too soon? Animals that haven’t suckled their mother don’t know how to play. From the start they scratch to wound, bite to kill. You’ve never been a little child, Charles-Augustin. You were a child vampire. A child murderer. And I, I love you, Charles-Augustin.”

The lady takes the Vampire’s tongue in her mouth and gently nibbles it. The lady is trembling.

Is it this concentration of evil that attracts the white lady? The violence taut beneath this skin? Or the solitary man’s fear? Or this smell of death, of earth full of death, of skin rubbed against death, of a member red with the blood of death? And all the victims are here, bound, cut open, trussed and devoured, within this lonely man who is trembling with desire and fear as he stands by the bed in his cell.

The lady takes into her mouth his member, stained with the blood of death. The lady sucks and swallows the Vampire in sharp little gulps.

The sepulchral lovemaking lasts an entire hour. An hour for which the lady pays twenty-five francs into the warder’s greasy palm. Five shiny silver
écus
bearing the Federal mark. Enough to live less miserably for three months.

Will she come back again? No one knows. The warder will say no more. In certain beings there is a burning thirst for sacrifice and sexual crime. In many women. The white lady was one such. It is interesting how, in Favez’s prison cell, she reconstructs, though in reverse, the abominable episode of the desecrated graves. In the graveyard it is the Vampire who cuts up and consumes his women victims; in the cell it is the woman who drinks the Vampire until he begs for mercy. A ritual in reverse that plunges Favez’s history into strange, troubled emotions, while it makes you one of us, Vampire of Ropraz, my brother, my twin.

The trial goes badly for Favez. After five months of imprisonment the man is more sombre than ever and the anger has continued to grow, calling for his head or for life imprisonment. In the meantime several more incidents have been unearthed, forgotten cases have been reopened, and the trail picked up again of crimes it had been thought could safely be filed away. Girls with their clothes torn off after sunset, night-time assaults, unescorted women flung to the ground at a crossroads by someone impossible to identify, or swifter than an animal – again impossible to recognize him, but now it is known to be Favez. The Vampire Favez, Favez, always
Favez. In Ropraz, since he had no access to the young Jaunin child, despite numerous attempts to climb in and break down doors, a cow was bled in the Jaunin’s meadow, its innards devoured on the spot. Already Favez. Favez again. At Corcelles one of the Porchet girls was followed along a hedgerow; she ran off and got away, but from afar she recognized Favez.

The presiding judge recalls her.

“What do you mean, recognized? How can you be sure? You were too far away to see him.”

“He was laughing the way vampires do. Do you think I didn’t see his teeth?”