The Poisoning Angel
Page 17
It was half-past seven in the evening. It was late and everybody was hungry. That day when all the talk had been of poisonings, the spectators’ stomachs were rumbling, eager to go and dine, but the representative of the people – worried by the unexpected efficacy of the defence speech – obtained the judge’s permission to reply to the defence. So Guillou du Bodan stood up, still just as haughty and didactic.
‘I cannot allow to pass without protest the peculiar theories and unsafe assertions that have escaped from a young advocate carried away by his own words. So, the defence conceded the certainty of all the crimes, while the prosecution did not go beyond the stage of probability in some of them. And yet Hélène Jégado is not guilty? But why? The same defence advocate brought as support phrenology, physiology, psychopathology, and goodness knows what else. Gentlemen of the jury, it is easy to lose one’s way in the realm of ideas. Nothing is more difficult than to keep to the right path. Fortunately, I have a thread to follow, a sure guide; that guide is the penal code, which punishes murderers with death!’
He displayed his copy of Dalloz to the court as if he were Moses brandishing the Tablets of the Law.
‘After that, what argument is left to the defence, the unprecedented number of misdeeds? What a refuge for innocence that is. So because Hélène Jégado has committed more poisonings than any female killer under common law known on earth throughout all ages, that’s why she should be pardoned! As if by committing more and more crimes one earned the right to go unpunished. Perhaps I am failing to discern the “poetry” – I don’t know what sort, incidentally – that the defence appears to sense in such a litany of murders. My view is that, between virtue and crime, Hélène has freely chosen crime. Let her then feel the full consequences of her deplorable choice, and that’s that.’
Despite being mentally exhausted after his inspired plea for the defence, Magloire Dorange claimed his right of reply. ‘One sentence, just one sentence, Monsieur le premier président!’ Then without even waiting for permission he declared, ‘In his disdain for the defence, and blinded by the penal code behind which he is hiding, the prosecutor is refusing to see that for Hélène it’s as if some merciless thing had given her a mission, ordering her, “You must keep going, ever further …”’
It was the end of the session. The verdict was due the next day, Sunday 14 December 1851, starting at noon. People left the court yelling, ‘Time for dinner!’
‘Unless it’s Jégado doing the cooking, of course!’
‘Gentlemen of the jury, in my capacity as presiding judge, here is my recommendation for you as you begin your deliberations: above all, discuss things in a calm and collected state of mind.’
He rapped the desk in front of him with the tip of his finger so as to explain clearly to them. ‘If it has not been proven to you that Hélène Jégado has committed the acts for which she is blamed, acquit her!’
He thumped on the wood again, a little further to his right. ‘If you consider that, without being absolutely devoid of free will, this woman has been blessed with less of it than most human beings, grant her the benefit of extenuating circumstances …’
He gave another knock a little further along, still going from left to right. ‘If, however, you judge her guilty, seeing in her neither intellectual impairment nor ignorance of morality, then fulfil your duty to be firm, and in that case, remember that in order that justice be done it is not enough that sentence is passed; it must also be proportionate to the crime!’
The jury retired. Outside, the December sun was dazzling. At 4.30 p.m. everyone made their way back to the benches. The foreman of the jury, Pierre Boudinot, a Rennes wine merchant, announced the verdict: ‘Sentenced to death.’ President Boucly asked Thunderflower whether she had anything to say. She replied, ‘Those who have condemned me, thus preventing me from carrying out my mission, they will … repent in the hereafter, where they will meet me again and they will see … And he’ll see, Monsieur Bidard de la Noë!’
Shouts of anger rang out around the courtroom. The condemned woman was led out amid much commotion. Several gendarmes had to stand around her to protect her from the crowd, who would have ripped her to shreds. ‘Leave her to us! Give us that bitch, the filthy slut!’
Under her little headdress trimmed with Breton lace, Thunderflower grew quietly drunk on the shrill sound of the two muddy Normans’ broken biniou. She made a nice target for the Rennes marksmen who threw rotting sardines and stale brine at her, so that soon she gave off an appalling stench. Insults flashed through the air like lightning, or danced like will-o’-the-wisps. ‘Go to the devil, he’ll have a job for you!’ ‘No one will miss you, you nasty piece of work!’ ‘Poison pourer, the little stars spinning in the sky are closer to us than you are, much closer …’
As, at the mercy of them all, she was being taken across to the prison on the other side of the square, the shouts grew hoarse around her. The world said she was odious, but what of it? She remained calm amid this hostility, the universal hatred of which she was the object! Her lifelong dream of becoming the spittoon for the maledictions of the universe, fulfilled! Oh, the infinitely pleasing – to Thunderflower – contempt of respectable people making up the feverish and mad multitude of a crowd every bit as ignoble! As soon as they saw her, pilgrims bent the knee and said a prayer. Convulsing holier-than-thou types barked as they tried to empty their slop pails filled with blessed shit over her. It was clear that an abyss had opened up. Like a cloud of squawking crows, lots of men in double-layered waistcoats and round hats swooped towards her, laughing, and giving her nasty looks. Some of them stuck their tongue out, while others made fun of her body, calling her ‘ugly’ – she who, in the past, with her perfect siren beauty would have had them all falling at her feet. One of them made a show of disgust. ‘Put it away, love.’
‘Murderer! Worthless piece of muck! Devil’s spawn!’
The whole world had deserted her but she noticed Matthieu Verron standing still among the crowd, gazing at her out of the gesticulating rabble. She read the soundless words on his lips. ‘We will no longer go walking together on Sundays …’
The words he mouthed had such a perfect meaning and his hands, hanging by his sides, were bathed in tears. His loving eyes were too faithful. Thunderflower, at that moment (how silly), recalled one of Matthieu’s kisses on her soft flower of flesh, which would no more open up to love. She knew he would not want to be present at her execution but would go back to his little white house with the green shutters in Lorient and end his days there alone, hoeing his lettuces and his flowerbeds. It made you want to die.
Everyone wanted to see Thunderflower’s face better, in real life. Women tried to tear off her Morbihan headdress. The sculptor from the first day of the trial waved his arm in the air, inviting them to admire the plaster copies of his model instead. Beside him the reporter from Le Conciliateur enquired eagerly: ‘Have you sold many?’
‘I wish! Just one.’
First came the external walls with broken bottles along the top, then the thick doors with triple bars on them and then a rusty key turned in a gigantic lock to open the door into a very small space with an old maid hermetically sealed, as it were, inside it. Sitting on the edge of her straw mattress, she looked round, blinking her eyelids in the direction of the smoking candle carried by a warder whose flat face resembled a round cheese alive with maggots.
‘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.’
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.