by Guy Endore
Among the churches searched for caches of guns and bullets was that of the Fathers and Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Piepus, two societies which owned adjoining buildings in the rue de Piepus. The story ran that eighteen hundred chassepots (a newly introduced rifle), were hidden there, along with the great “treasure of the Fathers.” On the seventh of April, the place was searched. Nothing was found. Nevertheless, one newspaper announced the discovery of “arms, munitions and aworkshop for the manufacture of bombs, with some bombs in construction.”
The public clamored for more news. On April 12th, a second search was made. But the mysterious underground chamber could not be found, though trenches were dug everywhere and the walls pierced in dozens of places.
At this juncture, with the legend about to perish, a fortunate stroke of a workman’s pick uncovered human bones in the garden of the convent. Bombs and chassepots were forgotten before this more horrible discovery.
In line with this gruesome find, directly implicating the convent not only of violation of the law against burial outside of official cemeteries, but also of the suspicion, which grew stronger every moment, of wholesale murder, was another strange discovery. Up in the attic were three small rooms, clean, but iron-barred, and in each of these rooms a gray-haired woman, unable to speak intelligently, or muttering gibberish and voicing threats and loud shrieks. In short, three insane women. What were they doing there? How had they gotten there? There could be no doubt upon the matter. These poor women had formerly been beautiful girls, pensioners, no doubt, in the convent, and for expressing some opinion of their own or for refusing to obey some cruel order they had been shut up here so long that they had lost their reason.
Worse than this was to come. It was to be shown that there existed secret relations of a most sordid, but readily comprehensible nature, between the monks and the nuns. What this commerce was is easily guessed.
Among the possessions of the nuns was found a crib! Yes, a small baby crib! Worse still, in the cell allocated to Rev. Father Bousquet, superior-general of the brothers, who was, for the moment, absent from Paris, was found a treatise: a manual of practical obstetrics! Of all things. In addition, a chest of human bones! And upstairs in a kind of garret, iron instruments of strange and frightening shapes, and peculiar beds with ratchets and winches. And still a further discovery: in the crypt of the nun’s chapel were found eighteen coffined cadavers in all states of decay.
The case was complete. The newspapers presented it with all the lugubrious details painted in vivid colors: “Why was poor Sister Bernadine shut up in a kind of cage, so small that if she dropped her needle she could not stoop to pick it up? What is the meaning and purpose of this iron crown, this racking bed, this corset of steel? These are parts of the arsenal of torture, necessary adjuncts to a branch house of the medieval Inquisition, flourishing in Paris of the nineteenth century.”
One paper recalled that ten years before a man had fallen asleep in the Piepus church, and remaining unnoticed, had been locked up for the night. Hours later, he was aroused in the dark by an indescribable moaning.
An observant reporter noticed that all the eighteen bodies were of women and that their bodies seemed disarranged in their coffins. The corpses were evidently recent. The abundant ash-blond hair of one woman was particularly striking. It was said that a wine dealer of the neighborhood recognized her as his daughter who had disappeared some years ago. “The gaping jaws of these human remains,” wrote the reporter, “when brought up to the light of day, take on surprisingly fantastic appearances. It seems as if these fleshless bones craved to speak, as if they yearned to recount the tragedies that had terminated their lives.” And filled with inspiration, the reporter himself wrote what these bodies could not utter: “See,” they (the cadavers) said, “see our poor heads, all bent either to the right or to the left. Is that not proof that we were buried before our bodies had stiffened in death?” He went on to describe ghastly midnight orgies held by the monks in the crypts, under the vacillating flare of torches. It was a tale of girls lured by promises of special religious festivals, the attendance of which brought safe-conduct to heaven.
However desirable this promissory note to future bliss might be, there was not one girl who wanted to call for payment, for many years to come. But the wine had been heavily drugged. The sacred wafer had been formed of flour mixed with the dust of dried soporific herbs. And the priests wreaked their horrible, perverted lust on the maidens who, dulled by the drugs, resisted only weakly, until the curtain of complete loss of consciousness descended upon them.
When the effect of the narcotic had dissipated, the feeling of life returned and the girls woke to find themselves in a dark, confined space of which the horrible nature gradually dawned on them, only to extinguish in the final blotting out of death. And there, in their premature graves, their bodies remained, along with the evidence of their final struggle: bodies contorted, jaws distended, fingers crooked, signs of their agony, their chests gulping for air, their hands seeking for freedom.
“But justice,” says our writer, “advances inexorably, majestically! However deeply hidden crime may be, it must some day come to light. Advance! All you good and kind-hearted citizens of Paris and gaze on these black deeds of the infamous clergy. Gaze! And either lie down in your coffins alive like Charles V, or rise up like Lazarus from your long sleep of laissez-faire. Here, before this charnel house, mount guard! And let this be your luminous pharos to guide mankind to the sublime association of harmonious,” etc., etc., etc.*
Another journal grew expansive and rhetorical on the crib in the convent. What poor babies, products of the union of monk and nun, had here been lulled to sleep, separated by only a few feet, a few walls, from the altar of the Virgin? What became of these children? The aim of the monks was surely not to keep them alive, as living evidence of a disgraceful breach of holy vows. No, their intentions were only too plain. Alas! When the mothers, nuns cruelly deprived by a stupid religion of their right to parenthood, had grown fond of their offspring, and could look at the image of Mary and the infant Jesus, and understand something they never had known before: the tug of a baby’s mouth at the nipple of the breast, a tug which reaches to the heart, then the monks tore the baby from the mother’s bosom, slew it or cast it into some ditch. And if poor Sister Bernadine, or Celestine, went mad with grief, they locked her up in a cage in the garret, where her crazy lullabies, intermingled with frantic shrieks for her baby, died among the rafters of the roof.
Later the monks bethought themselves of a better system. They would study obstetrics and learn the art of aborting, and thus safeguard themselves against babies. The empty crib was put away. It was no longer necessary. Nuns and monks now could conceal their misdeeds behind permanent angelic smiles.
Decidedly a breath of folly was sweeping through Paris. The public flocked toruede Piepus. Aymar among others. Etienne Carjat, “employing the miraculous aid of electric light,” photographed the skeletons in the crypt. In shops a drawing of the secret funeral was exhibited for sale. Other convents were ransacked, other monasteries. More horrible discoveries! Chains fastened to walls, handcuffs, straitj ackets, etc., all evidently destined for the adoration of recalcitrant Venuses.
Of course, all Paris was not so stupid, but the unthinking mass, accustomed to playing the sounding board to the tune of the journalists, responding first to one sentiment and then to its opposite, was stirred profoundly by these romantic tales of horror.* At the Paris Medical School, many students must have known that a Bousquet, nephew of the superior-general of the Piepus brothers, had recently submitted his thesis on obstetrics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree, and he must have told his friends about the matter. But they chose to keep quiet. He, too, said nothing. It had become dangerous to speak out of turn. Dr Paillet, physician to the Sisters, had been arrested as “an accomplice in the crimes of Piepus.”
In the neighborhood there must have been many who recalled the annual theatr
ical representation given by the nuns of the birth of Christ and the visit of the Magi. And it could not have been difficult for them to realize that the crib was a part of the permanent stage properties. But they kept quiet. And they were justified. On the tenth of May a young lady who dared emit some skeptical reflections anent the origins of the skeletons in the crypt was arrested and locked up.
What ignorance was abroad that a coffer of bones was not recognized as a reliquary with the remains of a saint in it? One man, bolder than the rest, sent the police a marked copy of Dulaure’s History of Paris. The buildings on rue de Piepus were constructed over a former cemetery part of this cemetery was still in use,* the rest was built on or converted into garden space. The Reign of Terror of 1793 had buried here 1,306 guillotined aristocrats in a big ditch. Perhaps the police couldn’t read.
Ancient pupils of the convent did indeed appear to declare that the instruments of torture, the beds of Procrustes for racking victims at the “branch house of the Inquisition,” were only orthopedic devices, employed in the treatment of crippled children who were taken care of by the nuns. The three crazy women, it was shown, were old sisters who had lost their reason and were most kindly treated by the convent. But this evidence was not spread abroad in the papers.
Dr Piorry, professor at the Academy of Medicine, was commissioned by the Commune to draw up a medico-legal report. He delayed sending in the results of his observations until the Commune was a matter of the past, and a free opinion was safe. Then he published his paper. The eighteen corpses were all of old women, not of young girls. They had been buried long ago. How long, the doctor could not say, but certainly a great number of years. There was no evidence of any recent crime.
But when this article appeared, the comedy of Piepus had long reached its seemingly predestined tragic finale. Raoul Rigault, chesty little fellow, strutting in his bright uniform, always ready to offer his snuff to his friends, appeared on the scene one day and ordered wholesale arrests. Rigault was a genius, a born detective, who from his earliest days had determined some time in his life to be chief of police. He had achieved this, but his insatiable ambition and his evil disposition were also his ruin.
Rigault wanted important churchmen as hostages, for the Versailles government was holding the aged revolutionary, Blanqui, and the chief of police thought it might be possible to effect an exchange of prisoners.
A long line of monks and nuns were led off to the ex-prefecture. Here, too, a number of other clerics had been brought, in particular Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, Lagarde, his grand vicar, and a host of lesser priests.
Rigault examined them personally.
“What is your profession?” he asked a Jesuit.
“Servant of God.”
“God? What is your master’s address?”
“He is everywhere.”
“Write,” said Rigault to one of his secretaries. “So-and-so, styling himself servant of God. Citizen God, a vagabond without fixed address.” He caressed his luxurious growth of beard and mustache.
The archbishop sought to make an appeal. “My children—” he began, spreading his arms.
Rigault interrupted him: “There are no children here. Only citizens.”
The archbishop halted and then wished to pursue.
Again Rigault interrupted him. The police had enough information, he said, to show that the priests were plotting with the government of Versailles, that the priests were responsible for recent skirmishes in which the National Guard had been worsted by the Versailles troops. There were traitors, that was certain. Information was leaking out. At last they had the guilty ones and meant to hold them.
And as the prelate wished to reply: “Enough,” said Rigault dryly. “You fellows have been getting away with it for eighteen centuries. Since you refuse to confess your conspiracy, the matter will be investigated. In the meanwhile, I shall hold you.”
He picked up a sheet of paper and wrote: “The director of the Dépôt will hold incommunicado the two calling themselves Darboy and Lagarde.” On the walls of the vacant churches, signs were placed: “Stable for rent.”* The religious houses were turned over as meeting places for the political clubs.
The police were right in one respect: there was treachery, there was conspiracy. No government was ever more conspired against, no government ever so riddled with treachery, as the Commune, but in looking for the infection in the priesthood and in religious organizations, the police missed the real nest of vipers, the Café de Suède, from which the net spread out over the whole Commune.
Paris was full of men to whom the revolt was purely an opportunity for speculation. The Thiers government at Versailles knew the prices to be paid and was ready with its money. Men occupying high posts in the Commune came to the Café de Suede and received the gold. Captain Barral de Montfort, on the staff of the 7th legion, an honored officer of the Commune’s military forces, sat there at his little table and conversed casually under a heavy cloud of cigar smoke. To all appearances it was only apéritif time, and a moment for sprightly repartee.
But from all over agents came to see him there. He received them as friends, talked of indifferent matters, slipped them a few bills on the Banque de France. The price was agreed on: For opening a gate, five thousand francs, to be debited to the prefect of police at Versailles; ten thousand francs for a battalion, to be charged to the Ministry of War; three thousand francs for a man—the Home Office paid for that. This was the activity that went on while the police exhausted themselves hunting for an underground communication with Versailles, dozens of possible tunnels being suspected, but none found. This was the activity that went on while the police pursued nonexistent murderers of cadavers dead a hundred years.
When the business meeting at the Café de Suède was over, the glasses empty, the trays full of silvery cigar ashes, then Captain Barral de Montfort arose and, before returning to his military duties, took a cab or else walked to the canteen where the 204th battalion congregated.
An astonishing dark-haired beauty looked up at his entry.
“Well, what is new today, Sophie?” he said casually.
She looked around to make sure that she was not observed and then whispered:
“I hear that troops are being taken away from the redoubt at Hautes Bruyères and the advance post of Cachan.”
“Hm! That’s a stupid move.”
“Any good to you?”
“Might be. If they’re weak there, then that’s the place for us to attack.”
She smiled slightly: “Let me know how it turns out. And if I’ve done my work well, if I’ve paid, you do your share.”
“You can rely on me,” he declared solemnly. Then they spoke of indifferent matters. She took off the apron that protected her fine dress and they went strolling out hand in hand.
“You still love him?” he questioned. There was a bitter expression around his mouth.
“Why, of course,” she said carelessly.
“You’re a liar, he replied. He stopped at a lonely corner and took hold of her shoulders. “Why do you lie!” He shook her and raised his voice: “Tell me why you lie?” He wouldhave screamed if he had dared.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said, annoyed.
“Huh! Do you think I haven’t any eyes to see? Your face is getting paler every day. More and more like a lacquered mask.”
“Why must you always be annoying?”
His face distorted as if he were going to cry. “You don’t know that I love you?” he asked sadly, quietly.
“You’re a good boy, Barral. I wish I loved you too. But it’s too late, now.”
“Don’t say that,” he exclaimed. “Why is it too late? Come, we’ll leave this terrible city. I can get out any time I want to.” And as she made no answer but only looked away into the distance as if she yearned for something beyond the possibility of reach, he continued hastily, “Come, we’ll go together to the country, to my little place at Vallauris.”
She cut
him short. “Let’s take a cab. I must hurry; he’ll be waiting for me. He’s doing guard duty at the Piepus and he will be relieved about this time.”
He muttered something under his breath. She did not catch his words, but she gathered their import. “Don’t you dare touch a hair on his head! Mind you, if anything should happen to him, I’ll kill you, whether you did it or not.”
“I promised I would do nothing to him,” he said, “and I’ll keep my promise.—Look, will you give me your address?”
“What for?” she asked suspiciously.
He wouldn’t answer for a moment. But later, seated in the cab, he repeated his request.
“I don’t see what you can be wanting my address for. I suppose you want to tell Aunt Louise where I’ve run off to.”
“No,” he said soberly. “It’s something else. I want to write to you. You know how long I’ve been in the habit of writing to you every night. Well, I can’t stop. And as for handing you my letters personally, that’s not the same thing. There was so much pleasure attached to that act, of going out late at night to post a letter to you.”
“That’s sweet of you, Barral. You are always very sweet.”
A lump rose in his throat. He pursued his advantage. “And of course, once you left Mme Hertzog’s, it wouldn’t do to send the letters there, because I know you’d want her to think that we were together.”
“You’re really very sweet, Barral,” she repeated, deeply touched. And she put her hand on his. “You’re far too good for me. Oh, you haven’t any conception of how rotten I am. Of the terrible things I do. Oh, Barral, you should be thankful that I’m going out of your life.” As she said this, she was conscious of something more than sympathy for Barral. She was conscious of a touch of pride. She felt superior to the “sweet” Barral. She was so very, very bad.
* I should say rather the delegate to the ex-Prefecture of Police, since the odious prefecture of police of Imperial days had been abolished. The ex-prefecture continued, however, to function under its new name, with Raoul Rigault delegated to take charge.
