Locus Solus

by Raymond Roussel

  The example of Philip VI was followed by his successors, and in the course of history it repeatedly happened that commoners, after various great deeds, received some aristocratic privileges without thereby changing their degree.

  So when, under Louis XV, Saint-Marc de Laumon wrote his colossal work on the Armorial Bearings, Prerogatives and Distinctions of the Great French Families, he devoted only twenty-three of the twenty-five volumes to the nobility; the penultimate one he set aside for the most prominent section of the privileged commonalty, and the final one for the remainder. The author then proposed to make a difference in their production by reserving for the volumes on the nobility a luxurious unbleached paper, denied to those on the commonalty. However, on reflection, he finally condemned only the last to commonplace white paper, considering the penultimate one still worthy of a sumptuous text-bearer. As the fronts of the pages, in the first twenty-three volumes, showed up to greater advantage and were easier on the eyes, they were reserved for the better houses, whose armorial bearings occasioned the finest reproductions. The leaves were numbered on one side only, so they required the addition to their serial number of the words “recto” or “verso” in order to specify one or the other of their two sides. Consequently a mark of superiority or inferiority was clearly established for the names, thus usefully divided into two categories. After a brief hesitation, Saint-Marc de Laumon, for the sake of uniformity in the work, applied this unusual system wholesale to the two volumes in the commonalty, even though the original reason for its adoption — a purely aesthetic reason based on how beautiful the heraldic illustrations promised to be — did not apply. The twenty-fourth volume nevertheless retained its complete superiority over the final one, since the names filling the latter’s rectos were less honored than those carried on the versos of the former. In view of their importance and, above all, of the surpassingly ancient date of their institution, the two privileges of the Cortier family were recorded in a detailed paragraph on page 1, recto, volume XXIV, together with their ancestor’s determining deed of heroism. Flattered by this circumstance, the then head of the family acquired a complete edition of the bulky work, which occupied a whole shelf all to itself and had been handed on from father to son ever since, down to François-Jules.

  The latter, very proud of having so ancient and illustrious a lineage, was bent on using it as a corrective to disgrace by making a thorough examination of the glorifying paragraph indispensable to the discovery of the secret. He set this paragraph before him in order to compose a straightforward formula upon a loose sheet of paper, emphasizing two particularly honorific expressions:

  “Select the volume bis on the commonalty from Saint-Marc de Laumon’s work and on the recto of page 1, in the paragraph on the Cortiers, take the letters 17, 30, 43, 51, 74, 102, 120, 173, 219, 250, 303 and 348.”

  When these letters, intentionally taken from the most salient words of the glorious text as a reminder, were put together, they composed the following quite clear designative phrase: “Star in rubies” — which, by urging a steadfast scrutiny of the tantalizing red name on the jeweled playbill, would certainly give rise to the discovery of the spring, quickly followed by that of the hiding place.

  François-Jules had expressly instructed the goldsmith that in the course of his work he was to locate the first-operated catch in the large, glittering, crimson name, which was easy to indicate briefly and unequivocally by reason of its prominence and the uniqueness of its color.

  However, François-Jules wished the discovery of the formula itself to mitigate his infamy by forcibly directing attention to a certain highly extenuating object — none other than the skull under the globe, whose oddly marked forehead and lightweight cap reminded him, in such a tragic way, of his daughter Lydia’s last acts. Indeed, did not the almost childlike fact of his having reverently preserved this relic disclose a touching paternal love that was much to his credit and which cried out for sympathy?

  Examining the pathetic memento, he sought a way to make the strange cap and the frontal network participate together in revealing the formula, to which, in view of the plan’s purpose, attention ought to be directed more than to the rest, insofar as Lydia had created them. His fixed determination to associate the network and the cap in a common task soon made him notice a kind of resemblance between the stitches crudely graven on the bone and the runes adorning the vertical border of the improvised head covering.

  Inspired by this observation, François-Jules approached the death’s head and removed the globe — then, armed with a knife, whose point served him as a burin and the blade as a scraper, he devoted himself to the lengthy task of transforming the crude network by adding and effacing here and there, while making use of the old lines as much as possible. In this way he managed to set down the whole formula on the skull’s forehead in runic characters which, though misshapen, fused and sloping in all directions, were legible. Each of the two words emphasized in the original, which he was careful to burn, was cunningly placed in quotation marks, while in view of the absence of any runic numerals, the numbers were represented entirely by letters. When this task was completed, the several stitches still remaining were simply left unused.

  He returned the skull to its place, where, still wearing its cap, it once more received the shelter of the globe. While retaining the general appearance of delicate netting, the signs on the forehead showed a relationship with the runes on the paper nearby which was sufficiently striking to make it almost certain that attention would be quickened at some future date and the culprit’s conscience therefore set at rest — while allowing the comforting possibility to hover about the monstrous secret that it might remain for ever undisclosed.

  Then, in a fine, closely written hand, covering several sheets, François-Jules wrote out his confession on colombophile, an ultra-thin paper reserved for the messages carried by pigeons. He set out everything truthfully ab ovo, not omitting, finally, the wherefore of the curious stages destined to precede the handling of the manuscript which, well folded, was easily hidden away in the cramped hiding place of jeweled gold.

  Having long been unable to sustain more than a paltry amount of nourishment, François-Jules was just reaching a degree of weakness that obliged him to take to his bed. He kept the key of his locked study beside him so as to preserve the skull relic’s altered forehead from any premature notice that might have made his secret known before his death — which came to pass two weeks later.

  When it was time for the sorting-out that follows any death, François-Charles entered his father’s study one evening, after his meal, and sat down at the work table littered with papers, which he began to look through one by one.

  After two hours of uninterrupted sorting he allowed himself a break; he stood up and, putting a cigarette to his lips, walked over to a box of matches open on the mantelpiece, in quest of a light. After taking the first puff, just as he was shaking the match to extinguish it and throw it among the cinders, his absent gaze fell on the skull with the cap, which was well illuminated by an electrolier suspended from the middle of the ceiling.

  Apt to discern the slightest oddity in the appearance of an object familiar to his eyes from childhood, François-Charles suddenly felt his attention quickened by the frontal marks, which, once nondescript, now formed a sequence of strange signs resembling, as he then noticed, those on the border of the light headpiece. Curious, he put the glass cover aside, took away the skull with its cap and went to sit again at the table.

  There, where he was able to make a leisurely examination of the skull at close quarters and in comfort, he perceived that, as a result of subtle modifications, the network did indeed form several lines of runic text.

  Feeling himself to be on the track of some revelation undoubtedly emanating from the man he mourned, François-Charles experienced an impatience and curiosity — unalloyed, it must be added, by any apprehension, for to his eyes his father had always personi
fied rectitude and honor.

  Too accomplished a scholar to be ignorant of runes, he had soon transcribed the mysterious declaration into Roman letters, on a small slate with a white pencil lying on the table — putting the two words whose quotation marks attracted his attention entirely in eye-catching capital letters. Next he went to take the indicated volume from a great bookshelf near the fireplace — then settled down again and, by selecting the required letters from the paragraph on the Cortier family, obtained at the foot of the slate the short phrase: “Star in rubies.”

  Before him glittered the jeweled playbill which had always adorned François-Jules’s table, laid in an open case. He took hold of it, then thoroughly examined the prominent red name with the aid of a lens which was lying about amid pens and pencils, within reach of his hand.

  At length he discovered an imperceptible circular groove in the golden plaque, closely surrounding one of the rubies, which sank inward beneath the gentle pressure he at once essayed with the tip of his finger and sprang up again when he released it. After that, putting down the lens, it only took him a few tentative efforts to discover the rest of the secret, and the plaque opened gently, delivering its contents.

  François-Charles threw his finished cigarette into the distant fireplace and began to read the atrocious confession, deeply intrigued by the sight of his father’s handwriting.

  Gradually his face became convulsed and his limbs trembled. Andrée, his darling companion, loved by his father, killed, then violated by him! . . .

  He fell into a kind of daze when he had finished reading.

  Then he was seized by hellish torments. Son of a murderer! He seemed to feel these words branded on his forehead. Incapable of surviving the disgrace, he resolved to die that very night.

  But what course should he take with regard to the confession? If he were to let this document he had found see the light of day, he would actually be his father’s accuser; if he were to destroy it, he would be responsible for the perpetuation of an innocent man’s sufferings. François-Charles seemed doomed in either case to play an odious part.

  The only expedient left to him was to replace everything as it had been before. By thus remaining passive, he would permit exactly the same element of chance, accepted by his father, to preside over the disinterment of the secret, which would continue to be padded by the various ramparts of honor — the thought of which softened him in the midst of his pangs.

  By a conscientious scruple, François-Charles wished his conduct to be known and judged one day; so on a blank half-page that remained at the end of the confession, he recorded first of all the facts of his terrible evening, then, with their motives, his immediate intentions of hiding the confessions again and killing himself.

  After completing the document in this manner, he returned it to the bejeweled playbill, which was soon shut and replaced flat in the velvet interior of its case. Then, after returning the volume of Saint-Marc de Laumon to the bookshelf — and erasing everything that was on the slate — François-Charles put the skull back in its place, still adorned with its frail headgear, beneath its globe in the center of the mantelpiece.

  Next, he took from his pocket a loaded revolver that he always prudently carried in view of the isolation of his dwelling, opened his waistcoat and fell dead with a bullet in his heart, while people rushed toward the sound of the explosion.

  Next day, the news made a great stir in the neighborhood.

  Pascaline Foucqueteau, clinging to the idea of her son’s rehabilitation, suspected the existence of some mysterious relationship between Andrée’s murder and this suicide which no one could explain. She learnt, from some articles in the press, of all the results Canterel was getting from dead people, and it occurred to her that if François-Charles were to be reanimated, then it stood to reason that he would relive the minutes during which certain facts had impelled him to destroy himself, since these would have been more remarkable for him than any others, and would undoubtedly be pregnant with revelations of value to Thierry’s cause.

  As a result of canvassing feverishly and proclaiming her idea every­where, she prevailed upon the law to allow the body to be officially moved, with a view to a supplementary investigation, from the house at Meaux, which had been sealed up, to Locus Solus — despite the resistance of the family, consisting of near cousins, who were terrified by the disturbing possibility of the Foucqueteau affair being reopened, with the threat of scandal that this entailed.

  After preparation by Canterel, François-Charles chose to relive the last moments of his life — as was indicated by a certain tragic final gesture followed by an abrupt fall. It was certain that he had been constantly alone during these moments, for everything in his attitude went to prove it, and this fact made their complete reconstruction very difficult, since it ruled out all hope of any verbal source of direct information about them — while there was good reason why no subsequent account of them by the suicide could have been traced to anybody.

  Learning, from those who had found the body, exactly where the intriguing scene had been enacted — this at least was not difficult — Canterel mathematically noted down all the steps and movements of his subject and betook himself to the house at Meaux, where the seals were broken for him.

  Having reached the study, he realized from his notes and a little deduction that François-Charles had walked first of all to the mantelpiece, where he had taken hold of the barrister death’s head. His attention being drawn to this object, Canterel, whose immense learning did not fail to embrace a knowledge of runes, then recognized the signs covering the cap’s border, to which those of the forehead seemed to him to bear a strange resemblance. Removing the globe in his turn, he saw at close quarters that the scored bony surface did indeed display runic characters — and soon had the guiding formula clearly before his eyes, copied by his hand, in Roman letters, into his pocket notebook.

  Through the same subtle channels as François-Charles — his task upon the latter’s cadaveric manipulations having been facilitated by the precise notes that he incessantly consulted — Canterel at last reached the confession, which he handed over to the law after reading the whole of the father’s lengthy admissions, and the sombre postscript of the son, aloud to a radiant Pascaline Foucqueteau.

  Thierry, whose trial was briefly reviewed purely as a matter of form, was brought out of jail, recovering his liberty and his honor untarnished at the same time.

  Pascaline had not words enough to thank Canterel for François-Charles’s artificial resurrection, without which the celebrated cranial runes, whose decipherment constituted the only way of reinstating her martyred son, might possibly have gone unobserved for much longer, perhaps for ever.

  The cousin heirs regarded with horror everything connected with the revolting crime whose perpetrator was of their blood, and quite refrained from claiming from Canterel the despised body of the murderer’s son. They auctioned off the contents of the villa at Meaux and ignominiously doomed it to be completely demolished — it was old, anyway, and not worth regretting.

  At the sale, Canterel acquired almost the entire contents of François-Jules’s study, and was thus able to reconstruct the premises in the ice house, for he was eager to perfect the scene chosen by the suicide, which was quite clearly the most outstanding one of the latter’s whole existence.

  Guided by a paper that had published a facsimile of it in extenso, he had the terrible confession, without its postscript, copied on sheets of colombophile paper to be placed in the jeweled playbill, stipulating that the handwriting and signature were to be imitated — and ordering numerous copies of it which were to be used successively, since a blank half-page had to be presented for the dead man to fill at each experiment.

  Afterward, he often made the late François-Charles recommence his tragic evening at the request of Pascaline and Thierry, who never wearied of coming to view the actions to which, when all was
said and done, they owed their happiness. It was the fatal revolver itself that was used, loaded each time with a blank.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  One of Canterel’s assistants, wrapped in furs, would insert or remove the eight corpses’ controlling plug of vitalium — and make the scenes follow one another uninterruptedly, when required, by being careful always to reanimate one subject just before deanimating the one before.

  * * *

  * Marinette: a sailor’s companion.

  † “Stitched” and “unstitched.”—Tr.

  5

  Twilight had fallen while we were listening to the professor, who now led us up a precipitous path.

  A ten-minute climb brought us to a little stone edifice whose front, facing upward toward an immense stretch of forest, consisted entirely of the two closed leaves of a wide, very rusty gate with hinges of solid gold. Within its walls, devoid of openings or cracks, lay a single vast chamber, which was scantily furnished.

  An unfinished canvas on an easel depicted an obvious allegory of dawn: a woman whose body was composed of light was being drawn by a mass of cords with winged ends from beyond a pale horizon.

  Canterel pointed out to us a certain Lucius Egroizard in the middle of the room, giving us a brief explanation: he had suddenly gone mad when he saw his one-year-old daughter being odiously trampled to death by a band of brigands dancing the jig, and had been undergoing treatment for several weeks at Locus Solus. In the background stood a motionless attendant.