Ambrose discovering that fifty years hence Azédarac will be canonized and his
transmigration from the earthly plane by means of black magic mistaken for an assumption into Heaven. This final ironic touch leaves the reader with an image of Averoigne as a place where deceivers and the self-deceived lived in perfect harmony.
In light of the foregoing discussion, it is hardly surprising that when the su-
pernatural erupts through the plain veneer of everyday life in Averoigne, it takes on a decidedly human cast. In this regard, the Averoigne stories resemble Smith’s fantasy fiction, in which the marvels that occur are consistent with the otherworldliness of their setting, more than straight horror stories like “Genius Loci,” “The Return of the Sorcerer,” and “The Nameless Offspring,” which depend for their
effect on abominations horrifyingly inconsistent with the natural world. To be
sure, the Averoigne stories are stocked with the monsters of supernatural horror fiction—vampires, werewolves, the reanimated dead, satyrs, and gargoyles, just to name a few. In each one, though, Smith not only emphasizes the human aspects of these creatures but uses them as mirrors to reflect on the behavior of his all-too-human characters.
For example, the Sieur du Malinbois and his wife Agathe, the vampire couple
of “A Rendezvous in Averoigne,” can be viewed as a demonic exaggerations of the troubadour Gérard de l’Automne and Fleurette Cochin, their mutual thirst for
blood mirroring the obsessive passion that has forced the pair of lovers to rendezvous in the shunned forest of Averoigne. The satyr who spirits away the lady Adèle in “The Satyr” is an expression not only of the bestial urges of lust and territoriality that motivate Adèle’s lover Olivier du Montoir and her husband, Raoul, Comte de la Frenaie (respectively), but also of Adèle’s own desires. In “The Mandrakes,” sorcerer Gilles Grenier discovers that the roots of the mandrake plants growing out of his wife Sabine’s grave both resemble her in physical shape, and mock the murder-
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ous rage that drove him to kill her, when those who drink love potions made from them are afflicted with “a woeful and Satanic madness, irresistibly impelling them to harm or even slay the persons who had sought to attract their love” ( OD 257).
In “The Maker of Gargoyles,” the town of Vyones is terrorized by a pair of ani-
mated gargoyles, one of whom wreaks random destruction upon the townspeople
while the other molests the womenfolk, as a result of stonecarver Blaise Reynard investing one with “all his festering rancor, all his answering spleen and hatred toward the people of Vyones, who had always hated him,” and the other with “his
own dour satyrlike passion” for a local barmaid. And “Mother of Toads” tells of the toadlike witch woman, Mère Antoinette, who seduces apothecary apprentice
Pierre Baudin and, in a scene redolent with Freudian implications, sends an army of toads to smother the boy when he flees in disgust.
It probably would be inaccurate to give the impression that Smith consciously
contrived these stories as a sort of roadmap to the human soul, or used the threads of common humanity they share to weave a more deliberate unity of setting or
spirit than found in his Zothique, Hyperborea, or Poseidonis stories. Both “The Holiness of Azédarac” and “The Satyr,” for example, are obviously meant as light entertainments, and several of the other stories might as easily have been transplanted to one of Smith’s otherworldly realms just as “Mother of Toads” and “The Mandrakes” could have been told as straight horror stories. Nevertheless, in the best tales of the Averoigne cycle, one finds Smith grappling with ideas so fundamental to human psychology that they could probably never have been executed
outside of the unpretentious environs of this homely and familiar milieu.
“The End of the Story” is more than just a vampire tale. It is, in fact, a recapitulation of the biblical story of the Fall of Man, in which Smith substitutes a forbidden text for the traditional apple as the object of temptation. It is not stretching the analogy too far to say that, for the scholarly Christophe, the library of Périgon represents a sort of Eden that eventually tests his free will. The abbot Hilaire gives the student free access to the manuscripts except for that of Gérard de Venteillon, forbidding him to think of it—although not making it entirely inaccessible to him-in a warning laden with biblical portents:
“Christophe, there are things beyond your understanding, things that it were
not well for you to know. The might of Satan is manifestable in devious modes, in diverse manners; there are other temptations than those of the world and the
flesh, there are evils no less subtle than irresistable, there are hidden heresies, and necromancies other than those which sorcerers practice.” ( RA 61)
If Hilaire’s is the voice of divine authority, then the satyr who has promised to tell Gérard de Venteillon “‘a secret, knowing which, you will forget the worship of Christ, and forget your beautiful bride of tomorrow, and turn your back on the world and the very sun itself with no reluctance and no regret’” ( RA 65) is surely the devil, tempting men like Gérard and Christophe to their downfall. Although Hilaire appears to have
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saved Christophe from doom, we know by the end of the story that he is lost. He has tasted the forbidden fruit of Nycea’s world and found the certain death it holds in store preferable to the pleasant but limited existence he has known before:
Soon, I shall return, to visit again the ruins of the Château des Fausses-
flammes, and redescend into the vaults below the triangular flagstone. But, in spite of the nearness of Périgon to Faussesflammes, in spite of my esteem for the abbot, my gratitutde for his hospitality, and my admiration for his incomparable library, I shall not care to visit my friend Hilaire. ( RA 75)
Smith leaves ambiguous in this story whether Christophe is acting under his
own free will or the influence of Nycea through a spell placed upon de Venteillon’s manuscript. In “The Enchantress of Sylaire,” though he resolves this question. As Behrends notes, this story is essentially “an unintentional remake” of “The End of the Story.” Once more Smith presents us with a young man, Anselme, tempted by
a sorceress, Sephora, who is “the essence of all the beauty and romance that he had ever craved.” Salvation intervenes in the form of Malachie du Marais, a wolf who turns back into a man long enough to warn Anselme that Sephora will subject him to the same feral transformation once she grows tired of his love, and to present him with a “mirror of Reality” in which he can view her true corruption. Anselme briefly weighs his options before turning his back on his mortal lover, killing du Marais, and throwing out the mirror, assuring Sephora, “‘I am content with what my eyes tell me, without the aid of any mirror’” ( AY 140). It is worth noting that this study of willful self-deception is the last-written tale in the Averoigne cycle.
Thus, consciously or not, Smith begins and ends the series with treatments of the fall, the supreme moment of human fallibility from which all others flow.
“The Colossus of Ylourgne,” with its series of increasingly bizarre events cul-
minating in the rampage of the most awesome monster to appear in Smith’s fic-
tion, comes the closest of any of the Averoigne tales to evoking the sense of
wonder in Smith’s otherworldly fantasies. Here again, though, the plot is one concerned with human ambitiousness that results in overreaching and downfall. The
story tells of the Nathaire, an ugly and deformed sorcerer of “minikin stature” re-viled by the citizens of Vyones. Hounded from the city, he takes up residence in nearby Ylourgne where he fashions a simulacrum as tall as the cathedral out of the skin and tissues of corpses into which he projects his soul. When the creature begins to ransack the countryside, the people of Aver
oigne discover one final surprise: “the face of the stupendous monster . . . was the face of the Satanic dwarf, Nathaire—re-magnified a hundred times, but the same in its implacable madness and malevolence!” ( GL 144).
Although Nathaire possesses the power of God in his ability to create a being in his own image, his handiwork is revealed here to be no more than a desperate act of psychological overcompensation by which he hopes to achieve the stature (literally) he was denied in life. Smith appears to be saying that even the sorcerers of Averoigne are unable to transcend their flawed humanity, a point he drives home
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symbolically in the final image of the monster dispatched by a sorcery that compels it to dig its own grave, lie down in it, and rot to pieces, even as Nathaire, now powerless to stop the process of natural corruption, protests vehemently.
In contrast to the grotesque excesses of “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” “The
Disinterment of Venus” is one of Smith’s most subtly understated stories, a human comedy that is as gentle in its satire as “The Holiness of Azédarac” is unrelenting.
While digging in the garden of the abbey of Périgon one day, three monks uncover a replica of the Roman Venus, yet another reminder of the pagan history underly-ing the region. The statue exerts a curious effect upon them:
During the course of their excavations, the brothers had felt a strange, powerful excitement, whose cause they could hardly have explained, but which seemed to
arise, like some obscure contagion, from the long-buried arms and bosom of the image. Mingled with a pious horror due to the infamous paganry and nudity of the
statue, there was an unacknowledged pleasure which the three would have rebuked in themselves as vile and shameful if they had recognized it. ( GL 111)
In essence, the statue appears to have reminded these holy men that they are not only holy, but also men, and have repressed the same appetites and desires that lay-men enjoy freely. The statue begins to disrupt monastic life throughout the abbey, spurring the monks on to indiscretions forbidden by their vows of poverty and
chastity, after which they blame the statue, “saying that a pagan witchcraft had come upon them from its flesh-white marble” ( GL 114). One hears this excuse enough to begin suspecting that, in the statue, the monks have found a convenient excuse for indulging their unspoken vices. Only at the climax of the tale does
Smith shift the burden of blame from the passions of the monks to a supernatural agency, when the fanatical Brother Louis leaves in the middle of the night to take a hammer to the statue and is found the next day crushed in the embrace of marble arms that have shifted position to hold him. “The iron hammer, lying beside the hole, was proof of the righteous intention with which Louis had gone forth; but it was all too plain that he had succumbed to the hellish charms of the statue” ( GL
117). This is as good a symbol as any of the adage that those who would enforce morality the most strenuously are those most insecure about themselves, and
Smith reinforces it by having Louis interred still wrapped in the arms of the statue.1
Of all the tales of Averoigne, the one which best expresses the human dimen-
sion of the cycle is “The Beast of Averoigne,” although one would not guess this from the version published in Weird Tales in 1933. The story is presented as sorcerer Luc le Chaudronnier’s account of the events of 1369, when a series of bestial murders throughout the region leads to the engagement of his services by the authorities of Averoigne. Le Chaudronnier consults a demon and is told that the
slaughter is the handiwork of a demon from a passing comet, which can only
manifest itself by infesting a human form. He lies in wait for the beast one night,
302 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
and after killing it watches it turn into the abbot Theophile of Périgon, one of the same men who hired him.
This unremarkable variation on the traditional werewolf tale was not the story
that Smith originally submitted to editor Farnsworth Wright. In its first full incarnation, “The Beast of Averoigne” was 1400 words longer and told in what Smith
referred to as “the documentary mode of presentation” ( SS 254): three different accounts from three different people of the story’s events. By merging these three viewpoints into the single perspective of le Chaudronnier, Smith created a story that appealed more to Wright (who initially had rejected it), but wound up purging it of the elements that make it one of his most extraordinary pieces of writing.
In the original version, the first third of the narrative is “The Deposition of Brother Gerome.” Gerome is the first person to catch a glimpse of the beast, and in his innocence blames this unfortunate honor on his having “broken the rule of St.
Benedict which forbids eating during a one-day’s errand away from the monastery”
( SS 52). Gerome has been charged by the abbot Theophile with the task of writing down everything that is known about the beast, and before he is found slaughtered in his cell he records an important observation that differs markedly between the two versions of the story (the original of which is presented first):
Our good abbot was greatly exercised over this evil, which had chosen to
manifest itself in the neighborhood of the abbey, and whose depredations were all committed within a five hours’ journey of Périgon. Pale from his over-strict austerities and vigils, with hollow cheeks and burning eyes, Theophile called me before him and made me tell my story over and over, listening as one who flagellates himself for a fancied sin [italics mine]. And though I, like all others, was deeply sensible of this hellish horror and the scandal of its presence, I marvelled somewhat at the godly wrath and indignation of our abbot, in whom blazed a martial ardor
against the minions of Asmodai. ( SS 54)
Theophile, the abbot of Périgon, was much exercised over this evil that had
chosen to manifest itself in the neighborhood and whose depredations were all
committed within a few hours’ journey of the abbey. Pale from overstrict austerities and vigils, he called the monks before him in assembly, and a martial ardor against the minions of Asmodai blazed in his hollowed eyes as he spoke. ( LW 147) In the second part of the original version, “The Letter of Theophile to Sister
Therese,” Theophile writes to a niece in the Benedictine convent of Ximes that the beast has struck several times within the abbey itself, leading him to despair that
“exorcisms and the sprinkling of holy water at all doors and windows have failed to prevent the intrusion of the Beast; and God and Christ and all the holy Saints are deaf to our prayers” ( SS 56). In addition to his crisis of faith, Theophile confesses how he frequently finds himself passed out on the floor after his prayer vigils, oblivious to the horrors that have swept through the abbey. His final plea to his sister, steeped in his belief that he has somehow failed both God and his fellow
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man, is one of the most poignant passages to be found in all Smith’s writing: “Pray for me, Therese, in my bewitchment and my despair: for God has abandoned me,
and the yoke of hell has somehow fallen upon me; and naught can I do to defend
the abbey from this evil” ( SS 57).
In the revised, published version of the story this section, like the first, does not exist. The events recounted by Theophile are delivered purely as facts by le Chaudronnier, and mention of the abbot’s letter is condensed into a single sentence regarding Therese’s own death at the hands of the beast that fails to do justice to Theophile’s painful soul-searching in the original version: “In her dead hands, it was told, the pious Therese tightly clasped a letter from Theophile in which he had spoken at some length of the dire happening at the monastery, and had confessed his grief and despair at being unable to cope with the Satanic horror” ( LW 149).
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br /> Not surprisingly, the final third of the original version, “The Story of Luc le Chaudronnier,” is the one part that most faithfully echoes the published version of the story. Coming after the first two parts of the story, though, it treats le Chaudronnier as a mere participant in the final slaying of the beast, rather than the central character in the published version. Smith clearly thought his man-slays-werewolf plot of subordinate importance to the meditation on the limits of human understanding developed through his portrayal of the naive ignorance of Brother Gerome in the first part and Theophile’s tortured lack of self-awareness in the second part. Thus, the parts of le Chaudronnier’s story that he retained for the published version take on an added significance when read in the context of the original version. For le Chaudronnier is wise enough to know that, even though the abbot is not responsible for the murders he has committed while under the influence of the comet demon,
“the good renown of the holy Theophile” is in jeopardy unless the monk can be
made out a martyr to thereby reinforce his holy image in the eyes of the citizens. This imparts an intriguing ambiguity to the final passage of the story, which can be read as something of an epigraph for the entire series:
[T]hose who read this record in future ages will believe it not, saying that no demon or malign spirit could ever have prevailed upon true holiness. Indeed, it were well that none should believe the story: for strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies; and the gulf is haunted by that which were madness for man to know. Unnameable things have come to us in
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