The Poisoning Angel

by Jean Teulé

  Thunderflower was obscene and bizarre as well – lying naked on her back on a metal table, missing her head, legs apart and her chest open with her ribs and flesh hanging at the sides. She was like the whore offered in a nightmarish brothel with men in white smocks walking round her.

  ‘Tell me what mad misfortune made your eye burst with a smile of sorrow,’ said a phrenologist in an aside, speaking familiarly to Thunderflower’s head, which still bore traces of plaster from the mould taken of her face for a medical collection devoted to great criminals.

  As he began to saw through her skull in order to examine the brain, another observant doctor standing between the poisoner’s thighs, noted: ‘She never gave birth, but was not a virgin … Faustin Malagutti, where did that wreath of everlasting flowers come from? It’s beside the body, getting in the way.’

  ‘A man from Lorient had it sent for her,’ answered the famous professor of the science faculty, attaching copper wires to the corpse’s exposed heart, on which he was conducting electro-magnetic experiments.

  While he regulated the device linked to the conducting wires, Malagutti heard the phrenologist lamenting beside him, ‘That’s unbelievable, her skull is normal, which puts paid to the theory of the born killer. She has no bump for crime, just as no one has ever found anyone with the bump for mathematics or business. Idiots and assassins have the same brain as everyone else, which suggests that phrenology is wrong-headed from start to finish.’

  The smells escaping from the makeshift laboratory poisoned the air. Through the coloured panes of a small window that was not quite airtight, the fumes spread a sort of terror into the nostrils of passers-by. Just then a sudden shout of triumph shot out of the ossuary.

  ‘Look!’ cried Faustin Malagutti. ‘Two hours after the execution the apparatus is still registering contractions of the right atrium. Her heart is still beating.’

  The doctor came out from between the legs, and remarked of the trace, which the oscillator was producing on the graph paper: ‘If you can call it beating. It’s more like the last quivers of fear.’

  Plouhinec

  The crumpled front page of L’Auxiliaire Breton floated on the breeze as the sun set over the moor. Against the proud outline of a menhir it repeatedly rose and fell, circling the stone and brushing caressingly against it, before moving off. At the foot of the megalith was a heap of blond gorse twigs, like a head of hair. The sole of a worm-eaten sabot came down on a corner of the printed page, which had landed again, with its headline in bold type: A reply by the Mayor of Guern to Hélène Jégado’s posthumous revelations.

  26 March 1852

  Sir,

  I was surprised and saddened to read in your newspaper the revelations made by Hélène Jégado in her final moments. She made a most serious accusation against someone in my village.

  I have had to gather every possible piece of information in order to discover whether or not these accusations were founded.

  I have questioned Émilie from whom Hélène Jégado claimed to have learned her fateful career as a poisoner. I am convinced, both by her replies and by information about this woman from elsewhere, that she would not be capable of that of which she is accused.

  She has been employed as a day servant in almost every house in the town, and no one has ever complained about her. There has never been any violent or suspicious death in any of the families for whom she has worked.

  Moreover the judge of the appeal court, delegated by the prosecutor general to look into these nefarious revelations, must have informed you that he finds them without substance.

  He may also have told you that this pure woman, Émilie Le Mauguen, who is today a poor paralytic with an exemplary life, is still known in Guern as a saint and a godsend to the area.

  It is deplorable that before she died, this unfortunate Hélène should have wished to blame an innocent woman for her own crimes.

  Le Cam

  A very old hand, muddy, wrinkled and covered in extremely long hair, picked up the newspaper page and scrunched it into a ball before wedging it in underneath the mound of straw and twigs forming a pyre around the base of the menhir. The same long thin fingers struck a flint, making a spark and then a flame, which licked the paper, which began to burn, setting light to the straw and the dry gorse.

  The sudden blaze lit up an ungodly chapel in the distance with an open door, and a short, crooked, hairy old man with a back-to-front arm, pushing a bewildered woman in a wheelchair. Her flat, startled face – snub nose, eyes starting out of her head – seemed perpetually prey to a fear of invisible forces and of the dark.

  At the approach of the female, even though she was paralysed, the menhir glowed erect and pink in the firelight. The damp night air made it glisten and its swelling tip was tinged violet by the dying glow on the horizon.

  Grabbed under the arms like a child, the fifty-year-old cripple felt herself being forced out of her chair by four bare arms furrier than a monkey’s. She stood upright and panting, supported by two octogenarians – still in great shape, apart from being misshapen – who were sniffing at the flesh of her rump as if it were soup.

  Around the megalith, the moor became shrouded in mist, furrowing its brow at the meddling of these Norman ancestors.

  The wigmakers, now with long beards, pulled the woman right up to the standing stone. These converts to ‘Celticity’, thus more Breton than the Bretons, wearing bragou-braz and in the case of the tall, stooping one-eyed man, with a broken biniou under his arm, each seized one wrist of the former shepherdess, holding it in a vice-like grip, and they danced! First they jigged on the spot and then in a circle to please the stiff menhir, which was in raptures. The pale old maid was only vaguely aware of what was happening as she was dragged into the dance round the monument, tossed into the air one minute, feet trailing across the ground the next.

  From its place on the chapel altar, next to the statue of the Ankou with his scythe, the little plaster model of Thunderflower – the only one sold in Rennes – seemed to be enjoying the spectacle outside.

  To the shrill sound of the tuneless biniou, the men span on the clay ground like Poulpiquet figurines emerging from a far cake. Like the bad bearded dwarfs of Celtic legend, they compelled the paralysed woman to keep going. The flames were reflected like candles in the bulging eyes of the servant from Guern and the long hairs caked to the Normans’ bodies with mud crackled into red stars with an acrid stench.

  While the verbena-crowned Ankou and Thunderflower gazed serenely on, the dancing woman’s elbows were kept bent like a drinker’s. It was unbearable torment for her. Spinning out of control, she wondered how long she would suffer before it killed her. Over in the chapel, on the thick edge of the granite altar table, these words could be read: ‘I will spare no one.’

  Round and round went Émilie (for it was she), circling the aroused menhir with the crows in one last delirious dance from which she would never recover. This was her destiny. Plunged into pagan madness, she called on humanity. Anyone passing in the distance would have said he had seen korrigans dancing on the moor. Her pubic bone and coccyx struck the stone and her jaws (which had years ago dodged those belladonna berries in her soup) cracked against the phallic menhir. The erotic structure broke her and carried her away in a mad dance. Under billions of stars, the woman from Morbihan no longer knew where she was.

  Held by her sleeves, which wrapped the troupe like a shroud, she opened her mind and legs to the mysteries around her. Sweat poured down on her like cider, the fire was a pancake of light, and as the dance sped up she thought her steaming intestines would burst out of her stomach. Again and again she pounded against the stone until she finally let out a cry in brezhoneg: ‘Ya, c’hoazh, ya kae! Red-sp …’ (‘Yes, again, yes, go on! Ejac …’).

  The rain was falling. The fire was smoking. Steam and prickling smuts rose up the menhir, on either side of which the wigmakers in burning bragou-braz were rolling around like swollen testicles. The cripple fell on the pyre
and whoosh! Jets of flame shot up to the violet tip of the megalith and exploded everywhere. What fireworks there were in the darkness. Oh, milky way.

  Thus it came to pass that Émilie was laid by a Breton legend, but looking on from the chapel – and with a grateful wink to the Normans – it was Thunderflower’s statue that came.

  About the Author

  Jean Teulé lives in the Marais with his companion, the French film actress Miou-Miou. An illustrator, film maker and television presenter, he is also the prize-winning author of more than ten books including The Suicide Shop and The Hurlyburly’s Husband.

  Melanie Florence teaches at The University of Oxford and translates from the French.

  Copyright

  First published in France as Fleur de Tonnerre

  by Éditions Julliard

  Copyright © Éditions Julliard, Paris, 2013

  First published in Great Britain in 2014

  by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,

  London, SW1W 0NZ

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  All rights reserved

  © Gallic Books, 2014

  The right of Jean Teulé to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781908313850 epub

  The best of French in English … on eBook

  The Suicide Shop

  Jean Teulé

  translated by Sue Dyson

  Has your life been a failure?

  Let’s make your death a success

  With the twenty-first century just a distant memory and the world in environmental chaos, many people have lost the will to live. And business is brisk at The Suicide Shop.

  Run by the Tuvache family for generations, the shop offers an amazing variety of ways to end it all, with something to fit every budget.

  ISBN: p-9781906040093/e-9781906040901

  Eat Him if you Like

  Jean Teulé

  translated by Emily Phillips

  A true story.

  Tuesday 16 August 1870, Alain de Monéys makes his way to the village fair. He plans to buy a heifer for a needy neighbour and find a roofer to repair the roof of the barn of a poor acquaintance.

  He arrives at two o’clock. Two hours later, the crowd has gone crazy; they have lynched, tortured, burned and eaten him. How could such a horror be possible?

  ISBN: p-9781906040390/e-9781908313171

  The Hurlyburly’s Husband

  Jean Teulé

  translated by Alison Anderson

  The Marquis de Montespan and his new wife, Athénaïs, are a true love-match – a rarity amongst the nobility of seventeenth-century France. But love is not enough to maintain their hedonistic lifestyle.

  When Madame de Montespan is offered the chance to become lady-in-waiting to the Queen at Versailles, she seizes this opportunity to turn their fortunes round. Too late, Montespan discovers that his ravishing wife has caught the eye of King Louis XIV.

  ISBN: p-9781906040390/e-9781908313171/audio-9781908313799

  An interview with Jean Teulé

  Jean Teulé tells Christian House how he was warned off researching his black comedy about a 19th-century act of cannibalism

  In the Parisian bustle of a popular Jewish pocket of the Marais, a nondescript pair of blue double doors hides a cobbled courtyard at the end of which is a little shop.

  In the last century it was a garage kiosk but now it acts as the office of Jean Teulé, a novelist who understands the power of revisiting historical sites for contemporary ends. Teulé invites me into a minimalist space. White walls, bookcase, pin board, iMac, and a neat stack of rolling tobacco. Above his desk hangs a single black-and-white photograph of a classroom of young boys.

  Teulé has all the bonhomie and cartoonish delight of a writer in his own little world. He is an idiosyncratic figure on the Gallic literary scene. A London publisher recently told me that he thought French publishing was in a slump. Teulé’s bestselling novels such as The Hurlyburly’s Husband, the story of a lovesick Marquis cuckolded by Louis XIV, conflict with this diagnosis. A cosy looking middle-aged man with an infectious childlike laugh, his appearance is discordant with his morbid, comic dramas. His latest, Eat Him if You Like, is published in the UK in translation this week.

  Acclamation led him to the source material for his new book. ‘After The Hurlyburly’s Husband had such success in France, I thought people would be disappointed. I thought “I’m going to be lynched,”’ says Teulé. ‘So I was looking on the internet at words such as “lynch” and “massacre”, and fell on the village of Hautefaye.’ Eat Him if You Like, which tells the true story of Hautefaye, is set over one day of collective madness in the sauna-hot summer of 1870. France was at war with Prussia and the rural inhabitants of the small Dordogne commune were getting twitchy. When Alain de Monéys, a respected local landowner, rode in to the teeming Hautefaye fair he was unprepared for his fate. A slip of the tongue about France’s chances and the drunken crowd turned on him. His neighbours became anarchists in their Sunday best.

  Passed from pillar to post, ragman to notary, one unimaginable horror to the next, de Monéys endured an extraordinary demise. He was tortured to the bounds of human endurance and then, as he still clung to life, a bonfire was hastily built and he was burnt alive. Insanity, of course, but what has given the de Monéys’ affair a particularly ghoulish place in the annals of French history is what happened next. The crowd took his burning fat, an awful kind of human dripping, spread it on hunks of bread and ate him like a party canapé. One reveller crunched on his steaming testicles.

  Research was problematic, says Teulé. ‘In the village they really weren’t happy. They didn’t want the story to be known. And to scorn them, I would say, “Well if the book works, I’ll open a little restaurant and call it the Hautefaye Grill,”’ laughs Teulé. ‘They said on local television that I had better not come back or there might be a second sitting. The current mayor wanted to put up a plaque to say that the village was sorry, but the villagers refused because it was their ancestors who were responsible. The book went out in May, and by August tourists were coming with their book asking: “Is this the village of the cannibals?”’ He cackles at the thought, and again when he explains that a Parisian brasserie has already named a dish the ‘de Monéys steak tartare’.

  Teulé relates to the victim. ‘I don’t like crowds of people. I’d never go to a rock concert,’ he says. ‘A few months ago my train was late. After a while, they said that the train could be boarded. Everybody has their place reserved. The train was not going to leave, and yet everyone roared to get their seat. If one little old lady or man fell? I surprised myself by starting to run too. It’s that mechanism of a crowd, like the cells in a body.’ He believes the Hautefaye story could reproduce itself, and gives the London riots as a case in point. ‘Mass can be heroic but it can also be strange and dangerous,’ he says. ‘That was the same thing. And it started from nothing. Just a little trigger and it blazes into a fire.’

  Teulé’s milieu is centred on the ‘merriment of vice and cruelty’. His novels are bawdy, full of rollicking sex and roiling violence. However, he undercuts this with a graphic humour born of his earlier career as an illustrator. ‘When I don’t know how to write a scene I will sketch it and put it on my board. I will look at it and the words will come. I can’t write a scene if I can’t visualise it.’ The result is exceptionally cinematic prose. (Teulé’s 2007 novel The Suicide Sh
op was recently filmed by Patrice Leconte.)

  The petit salon swirling with cigarette smoke in which we sit is Teulé’s retreat from the contemporary world with which he claims not to connect. Yet his private life is one that, at least on the surface, is Paris Match material. He is the partner of the celebrated film star Miou-Miou and his oldest friend is Jean Paul Gaultier. He points to the photograph of the Sixties schoolboys and there they are, the juvenile Jean and Jean Paul, looking back at us with beaming smiles. It is the only picture either has in his study.

  Teulé might orbit the cultural elite but he’s most at home here in his dark corner. ‘I love to be out of the world. In my bubble. When I am between two books I don’t feel comfortable,’ he says. His next bubble is inhabited by the Breton cook Hélène Jégado, who poisoned more than 30 people at random between 1833 and 1851.

  ‘She said that everywhere she went, death followed her. I was in Brittany at a book signing and a baker from Rennes came and gave me a cake saying, this is the Hélène Jégado cake. But without arsenic,’ smiles Teulé. He explains that Jégado was executed on his birthday, 26 February. Extraordinaire. And once again laughter bursts from Marais’s merry messenger of death.