The Vampire of Ropraz (6 page)

The trial opened on 21st December, 1903, in Oron-la-Ville courthouse, with Charles Pasche as presiding judge.

Favez was represented by Maître Maillard.

The courtroom was packed. All eyes were on the very pale complexion, red-ringed eyes and long teeth of the accused.

“Enough to send shivers down your back,” the first rows exclaim repeatedly.

The reading of the indictment arouses such fury
that the presiding judge threatens to break off this first session, and then to empty the courtroom.

From the outset, Favez makes a sorry impression, sniggering, remaining silent or, when pressed for an answer by the presiding judge, expressing himself in snatches and rumblings. “Nothing could be more like an animal”, denounced the
Revue de Lausanne
in the unsparing account it gave. This is what it wrote in its issue for 22nd December:

The tone was set. The court sat for four days. The dates and number of the sittings were as follows:

Monday the 21st of December: two sessions, morning and afternoon. Reading of the indictment, first hearing of evidence (six witnesses).

Tuesday the 22nd of December: two sessions, morning and afternoon. Remaining witnesses
(eleven). Starting at two o’clock in the afternoon, Dr Mahaim’s evidence.

Wednesday the 23rd of December: Closing speech for the prosecution. Maître Maillard for the defence. Consultation with the jury.

Thursday the 24th of December: judgement.

On the 24th of December at eleven-thirty in the morning, Charles-Augustin Favez, of Palézieux, born in Syens on the 2nd November, 1882, is condemned by the court of Oron-la-Ville to life imprisonment for all the acts of which he stands accused, none excepted, and with no attenuating circumstances. Given the extreme horror of the principal deeds committed by the said Favez, namely vampirism and the desecration of graves, the sentence includes twenty years in a high-security prison, without possibility of remittance.

The public stamps its feet in approval.

Dr Mahaim rushes to the rooms of President Pasche, out of sight of the crowd, and convinces the judge and jury, considering the obviously psychotic character of the crimes, which make them of scientific interest to the doctors and
students of the new establishment at Cery, to commute Favez’s sentence to detention for life in the said psychiatric institution. The court therefore orders that the condemned man be conducted under heavy escort to a cell in the Cery clinic, in the municipality of Prilly, west of Lausanne, to be used for the study of mental illness by physicians and medical students of the canton.

On 24th December it is snowing and the cold is intense when Favez spends his first night at Cery, in his heavily padded cell.

On 25th December, two nurses in blue caps fetch him from his cell to take part in the Christmas festivities of the patients and staff. The candles are burning on the big tree, and Favez, the mental patients, nurses and doctors sing of Christ’s birth, drink mulled wine and eat little cakes baked by volunteers in the kitchen.

Favez will spend twelve years in Cery. Three years confined to a cell, after which his good behaviour and athletic build allow him to be transferred to the hospital’s model farm. There he works looking after the pigs, and later the cattle, for nine more years of his story.

In February 1915 Favez escapes, crosses the frontier by way of the Vallorbe forest, to arrive in a France at war, where he joins the French army as a foreign volunteer. Three weeks later he is posted to the Foreign Legion. Inquiries by the Swiss authorities have been able to establish that the volunteer first-class Charles-Augustin Favez joined the battalion of the Foreign Legion
as an infantryman in the section led by the Swiss corporal Frédéric Sauser, the author of some poems under the pen name of Blaise Cendrars. This Cendrars welcomes him warmly, and, despite Favez’s reticence, worms some confidences out of him for a book he intends to write one day on a mad eviscerator of young girls. He has even decided on the title already:
Moravagine
. A violator of young bodies, Favez, a violator of graves? No judgement is passed. The Legion and the War wipe slates clean.

Cendrars, Favez and their comrades are thrown into the breach on the northern front between the Marne and the Somme; they fight in the mud at Notre Dame de Lorette, at Vimy, at Bois de la Vache, always pushing northwards, towards Champagne-Pouilleuse. On 28th September, 1915, at 19.30 hrs, along the Souain road, about 200 yards from the Navarin farm, after several assaults that are violently repulsed, the unit of Corporal Sauser-Cendrars and Favez is again thrown into the attack on the German trench nicknamed the “Kultur”. It is raining, it
is muddy, and the Cendrars-Favez section comes under enemy fire. Blaise Cendrars’ right forearm is shattered; he is carried to the rear and it is amputated. In the same fighting Favez is killed, his body left lying on the battlefield, every trace of him finally lost.

Until, that is, the Unknown Soldier is chosen by lot, on 21st November, 1920, from among eight coffins brought to the Fortress of Douaumont from all over the battle zones. The remains of a single anonymous hero above whom the eternal flame would burn beneath the glorious Arc de Triomphe.

For – and here we meet again – recent research has suggested that the remains of the Unknown Soldier, subjected to DNA analysis, belong to a native of the canton of Vaud, Charles-Augustin Favez, a volunteer enlisted in the French army at war in February 1915, and killed before the Navarin farm on 28th September of the same year. And that the Unknown Soldier – honoured as a hero by the Head of State, by the Last Post, and by the salute to the flag on every fourteenth
of July – that God himself has made, may be none other than a deranged man and dreaded ex-convict of Swiss origin and dark memory in the hallucinatory annals of the living dead. Of course the ministries involved have suppressed the results of these analyses, and the scandal has been hushed up. So only a few of us suspect that under the glorious Arc de Triomphe, beneath the Unknown Soldier’s eternal flame, lies Favez, the Vampire of Ropraz, sleeping lightly as he waits for other nights to be up and on the loose.

BITTER LEMON PRESS

 

First published in the United Kingdom in 2008 by

Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW

 

 

First published in French as
Le vampire de Ropraz
by

Bernard Grasset, Paris in 2007

 

Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland

 

 

 

This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London (
www.frenchbooknews.com
)

© Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2007

English translation © W. Donald Wilson, 2008

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

 

The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

 

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

 

eISBN : 978-1-904-73850-3

 

Typeset by Alma Books Ltd

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by

CPI Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire