by Guy Endore
Just outside the oval window, to the right, was a steep roof, and from this projected a dormer window. That led, evidently, to Sophie’s room. On the other side was a blank wall, so that escape on that side was impossible. But the dormer window might be reached. The steep roof was dangerous, but accessible. Trembling with excitement, Bertrand made his preparations. He rolled up his mattress lengthwise, into a cylinder, and pushed it through the opening until it dropped to the ground below. “We’ll jump on that,” he determined. “We’ll either hit it and run off together, or miss it and die together in suicide, as we so often planned.”
It happened on this night that Paul was in a mood to be with a woman, and this was unfortunate, for the patient who had been accustomed to receive him for several years now had just been removed by her relatives. The only other possibilities were two female patients, who were, so to speak, the property of the other two orderlies. Paul debated whether to affront the jealousy and anger of one of his comrades or attempt to sneak out of the asylum and get to the village. Then the little mongoloid occurred to him. That’ll be fun, he promised himself. He knew she was fond of candy, so he took some up with him and expected no difficulty—nor did he encounter any.
His pleasure, however, was short-lived. He heard a noise at the window, looked up and had no time to escape a dark form that hurled itself at him. In a second the combat was over. The blood spurted from his torn artery in a high wide are and splashed onto the floor. The arc diminished, sank back to its origin, where now the blood only welled up in ever slower pulsations.
Bertrand lay there in a kind of stupor, from a surfeit of ecstasy. At last he roused himself, struggled against the sluggishness of his mind and looked about in the dark room. In this chamber, lit only by the moonlight from outside, he saw a strange, dwarfish woman with a heavy brown face and stringy gray hair. She was seated on the bed, naked, and sucking at a stick of barley sugar, and because it was good, she began to coo to herself.
His mind was incapable of accepting this. “Sophie!” he said, bewildered. “What have they done to you?”
There was a noise outside in the hall. Without puzzling out the matter, he picked her up and cried, “Come, Sophie, let us die together.” And holding her clasped tightly in his arms, he stepped upon the sill and leaped for the mattress lying on the lawn below.
“My most profitable patient, too,” Dr Dumas said, and sighed.
Investigations being annoying things at best, the doctor suppressed the triple death as much as he could, filled out appropriate death certificates, dated them differently and held the funerals at a week’s interval. There were only two funerals. Dr Dumas had long been anxious to dissect the mongoloid and wrote for permission to the marquis, saying that he would pay the usual price. “The old skinflint will be glad to earn a couple of francs.”
But the old skinflint was not. “The remains of Mme la Marquise de la Roche Ferrant must rest in the family vault,” he declared proudly and sternly. And when one comes to think it over, why not? Alive and in the family castle, she might have been a source of annoyance. But whom could she disturb or embarrass in the family tomb?
Barral de Montfort came just a week too late to the asylum, in search of Bertrand. He had been delayed by trouble with his eye. When he heard that Bertrand had just died, he cursed his fate. He had promised himself so much from his revenge. “Death,” he exclaimed bitterly, “robs me of both my love and my hate.”
He wanted to see the grave. For a tip, an orderly took him over to the cemetery and pointed out the mound. Barral bent down over the fresh sod and, rendered furious by this climax of frustration, muttered viciously: “I’d like to dig you up, you dog, and spit in your face.”
This completes the elucidation of the Galliez script.
* Famous American spiritualist and physical medium (1833-1886). He was examined by Lord Crookes, the celebrated physicist who was convinced of Home’s power to levitate himself, etc.
Appendix
About this period, that is to say, 1875-1880, the question of municipal hygiene was much to the fore. The great researches in microbiology, in the causes of disease, in sanitary engineering demanded that municipalities take an active hand in improving the hygienic conditions of populous centers.
Among other matters the disposal of the dead elicited much argument. The practice of burial was attacked as unhygienic, and proponents of cremation demanded state action making incineration of corpses not merely lawful but required. The practice long followed, and still followed, of burying stillbirths and embryos in privies or otherwise privately disposing of them, was forbidden by law in numerous places.
The history of municipal government shows that little attention was paid to such matters until the nineteenth century. Apparently one of the first attempts to show the insalubrity of intramuros burials in great cities was that of Drs Fernel and Houllier of Paris who in 1554 expressed fears concerning the Cemetery of the Innocents, a great charnel field which in 1186 had been allotted for the burial of the deceased of Paris. Here great pits were dug and the coffins placed solidly side by side and one upon the other until some two thousand were buried, or rather exposed, for only with the placing of the last coffin was the pit covered with soil.
During its existence this cemetery, swollen by the addition of two million bodies, rose ten feet above the level the surrounding territory and at places overflowed the walls. Old pits were frequently opened and the bones thrown into great heaps. Subsequently some of this vast mass of human relics was put in the Paris catacombs, which were really former quarries whence fine stone was extracted.
To make matters worse, this great Cemetery of the Innocents was surrounded by a vast gutter into which the surrounding quarters of the city were accustomed to cast the ordure of the houses. In those days latrines were generally on the top floors only, and when these were cleaned the matter was thrown into the moat about the cemetery, from whence it was upon occasion removed.
Such was the mephitic nature of the ground and air in this region that citizens complained they could not keep birds in cages, the poor beasts dying promptly within a week of being brought into the houses of the neighborhood. Moreover, it was impossible to go down into the cellars with a candle or lamp: any flame was at once extinguished in this noxious underground breath. Barrel-makers and other workers having to labor in cellars were frequently seized with such spells that they came near dying, and gradually these regions were abandoned, especially when it was found that the sweat of the walls was positively poisonous and would raise ill-smelling suppurating boils if it came into contact with the bare skin.
Despite this, the city had become crowded with poor people who could find no other shelter than this horrible cemetery. Many dug themselves subsoil grottoes in which they practically lived, with what effect on their general viability one may well imagine.
Perhaps worse than this was the habit of burying people in churches. The limited space and the desire for financial gain among the clergy caused the bodies to be withdrawn as soon as possible, even before complete decomposition, and stored elsewhere in the church, in the garret, etc.
In 1870 the work of De Freycinet on municipal sanitation, together with the necessity of providing for more cemetery space in Paris, caused considerable discussion on the matter of hygienic burial grounds. The recent Franco-Prussian War, too, had precipitated the question of the disposal of great numbers of dead in a sanitary fashion.
Among others, M. Coupry fils, an architect of Nantes, patented a hygienic cemetery construction, the “système Coupry” which he proposed to install in his Cimetièredel’Avenir.*A test of Coupry’s method was carried out in a portion of the Saint-Nazaire cemetery. Here a number of bodies were buried above the device which facilitated the circulation of air beneath the coffins and drained the soil of waters, and an equal number of corpses were buried as near to the test portion as possible and allowed to remain for varying years in the soil. In this system the deleterious gases which collect
in the underground pipes are brought to an oven and there burnt. For its best operation the Coupry system demands burial in simple wooden coffins without the use of antiseptic substances, embalming, impregnated sawdust or charcoal, since the purpose of the system is the rapid disintegration of the body to a skeleton, with the complete disappearance of all the corruptible fleshy parts.
It is, of course, well known that the French Revolution began the practice of forbidding church burial by state legislation of the 23rd of the month Prairial of the year XII, and limited the creation of new cemeteries to beyond the city walls. It forbade the burying of one coffin upon another and limited the burial to five years, except for those who wished to pay exorbitant sums for perpetual burial plots. Further, the depth of burial was stipulated so that noxious gases would not reach and contaminate the outside air.
Since then France, particularly the Prefecture of the Seine, has interested itself constantly in the betterment of burial grounds, and it early appointed a commission to investigate the Coupry system. The report published by Dr P. Brouardel and O. du Mesnil contains a complete study* of this system.
For the purpose of their report, the above-mentioned members of the committee appointed by the Prefecture of the Seine, Commission d’Assainissement (Board of Health), exhumed ten bodies, five Coupry, five plain, which they subjected to a complete examination.
Thus:
Sieur G…(Baptiste), 53 years of age.
Died March 20, 1876.— Buried March 21, 1876.—Exhumed, May 25, 1881.— Again exhumed June 9,1881. Length of inhumation: 5 years. In. untreated portion of the cemetery.
This cadaver (see accompanying photograph) † is absolutely intact. It has been transformed into corpse-fat. Bad odor.
Autopsy was performed by Professor Brouardel.
All the viscera have grown thinner, and are flattened out against the walls of the thorax and abdomen.
Only the heart is still voluminous and perfectly recognizable.
All process of decomposition seems to have been halted. Apparently the body will remain in this state indefinitely.
A single insect of the Staphilinides family: a Philonthus ebeninus is found in the coffin.
Contrast this with a body disinterred from a treated section, where it had remained but a year:
Sieur B… 66 years of age (see photograph) ‡
Died May 21, 1880.—Interred May 22, 1880. Cerebral congestion.—Length of inhumation: 1 year and 18 days.
Body was not shrouded.
No odor spread by body.
Skeleton is almost completely relieved of all soft parts.
Head is separated from body.
The destruction of the fleshy and soft parts is complete.
Numerous insects are found in the coffin. Anthomysides, Ophria cadaverina and lemostoma. One fly, quite alive, had just come forth from the numerous nympheas of the Ophia.
However, the reader of this book can hardly be interested in the above details.* The author’s reason for introducing this report is to quote a small portion of it which seems to have some relation to our story.
Among the bodies exhumed was one:
Sieur C…(Bertrand) Cerebral hemorrhage (not illustrated).
Died Aug. 9, 1873.—Buried Aug. 10, 1873.—Exhumed June 10, 1881.—Length of inhumation: 8 years, 2 months.
The following case was reported to the conservateur of the cemetery and by him forwarded to the department of criminal justice. Evidently a case of grave robbery, or a grim prank of the fossayeurs (gravediggers).
The body of Sieur C… was not found in the coffin, instead, that of a dog, which despite 8 years in the ground was still incompletely destroyed.
The fleshy parts and the furry hide are found mingled in a fatty mass of indistinguishable composition (adipocere). A nauseous odor spreads from the body.
No insects.
* Cemetery of the Future.
* See copy in the Forty-second Street library, New York.
† Not reproduced here. The reader may consult the original.
‡ See preceding footnote.
* The economic motive here is not to be concealed, and intrudes upon the hygienic. If bodies will, by the “système Coupry,” form skeletons in one year, the five-year burial period may be reduced to one year with a consequent greater turnover in the cemeteries and an increased income to the State.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1933 by Guy Endore
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