The latter, even as an adolescent, could not relate all that without bitterness. His voice trembled with anger at the story of the execution of the ambassador and the canoness. His time was more taken up with reverie than it should have been, and within his reverie the losses of his family and the hostility of the rabble to the successive chatelains of Outremort were too preponderant. Even so, this obsession remained secondary for quite a long time, and the love of science held sway over such cares in Monsieur d’Outremort’s thoughts until the day that his father, Marquis Fulbert, expired.
Marquis Fulbert! He had never been anything but a master of hounds, utterly and completely—but he was that to the maximum. I can easily evoke the memory of his awkward appearance: that of a robust, unpolished, grumbling country squire, always gaitered in leather and mud, always reeking of gunpowder, fur and feathers. Nothing amused him but hunting. He devoted all the time to it that he did not spent ruminating on his disgust for democratic government and his regret for the monarchy. His gamekeepers, chosen like pugilists, were very hard on poachers; they had orders to be so, under threat of dismissal. Their master diverted to poachers his aristocratic fury against the triumphant mob. One evening, when he was 50 years old, the Master of hounds was found stone dead in a corner of the woods, his torso riddled with buckshot.
I took part in his funeral ceremony. We laid him to rest not far from the ambassador and the canoness, in the midst of a quantity of ancestors, in the crypt rounded out beneath the manor’s chapel.
Savinien took this new blow of fate badly. He did everything possible to avenge the memory of the murdered man. For want of proof, however, the assassins escaped, and my friend turned to hypochondria. From that day forward, he shut himself up at Outremort, and was never seen to go out again. He ceased all active participation in the scientific movement; at least, if he continued to work, it was in secret, given that the Academies received no further communication of his endeavors. Some claimed that he had given up; others accused him not of idleness but of mutism, saying that he was only depriving his fatherland of the results of his experiments in order to cheat the government.
He had married—in 1884 or thereabouts, if my memory serves me right—his cousin d’Aspreval, who died in childbirth the following year. Their son, Comte Cyril, died three years ago. The last time I made the journey to Outremort was to pay my last respects—for it is worthy of note, and passably ominous, that my relationship with the Marquis was now only marked out by funerals. That was in 1908; Monsieur d’Outremort no longer left his château any more than the Pope left the Vatican; but, being alarmed by his eccentricities, I had lost any interest in meeting him. He appeared to me then in the full perfection of his gloom and strangeness. His Raphaelesque mask might have served as a model for some wax figure representing Rancor. What am I saying? Did he not seem to be the wax figure itself?
He attributed his recent misfortune to the insatiable rascality of the country-folk, and I reckon that he was right. The late Comte Cyril, an adventurous sportsman, drove automobiles at high speed. A number of dogs and chickens run over, and several serfs brushed a little too closely, had served to win a bad reputation for the crimson vehicle, known to our manufacturers as a double phaeton, in which he burned up the Republic’s tar macadam. One night, when he was returning to the château, a metal wire stretched across the gateway had caught him under the chin. The wire had broken, thanks to some capricious Providence, which did not extend its protection of the wounded man beyond that rupture. Indeed, complications set in as a result of the injury. Favored by the impoverished constitution of the gentleman, which a marriage within the family had further reduced, they annihilated the escutcheon’s last hope. Many quarters come to that poor terminus, to that sorry omega. Savinien alone remained—and, by a striking coincidence, the crypt had room for only one more tomb.
Monsieur d’Outremort retained me beside his own sarcophagus when the rest of the funeral party had gone back up. Whether I liked it or not, I had to listen to his recriminations. He got increasingly excited as his monologue progressed. The scene rapidly became theatrical.
We were in the depths of a vast subterranean tower, damp and glacial. The wall was checkered with sepulchers, and the funerary flagstones rang hollow beneath Savinien’s footsteps. He strode back and forth. An air-vent—a grille fitted above our heads into the pavement of the chapel’s choir—poured a grey twilight into the place, scarcely the half-light of a cellar; the smoke from the incense-burner ended up dissipating in an undulating stream like a long and living spider’s web; its ecclesiastical aroma accorded admirably with the cavernous and mortal odor of the in pace. The Marquis’ complaints sounded muffled, the air of the tomb being a milieu of silence, dully resonating with the names of the dead that he harangued one by one. I saw him circling the rotunda in the imperfect darkness, pointing to the epitaphs in the order of decease, summoning the knights, the noblemen, the Constables, the squires and the commandants, the chamberlains, the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Marshals, the ambassador, the canoness, the Master of hounds and Comte Cyril as witnesses to his misfortune, and swearing to their spirits on his eternal salvation that they would be revenged.
I, meanwhile, thought I saw them all: the surrounding dead, lying in their suits of armor or uniforms, courtly dress or mantles of the Holy Spirit. At that apparition, I felt nausea overwhelming me, the damp transpiercing me more deeply, and chilling me with a new iciness. I attempted to calm the Marquis down as quickly as possible. His exuberance faded away, and a stupor took hold of him. We finally quit the crypt—and I slipped away that same evening, retaining the most painful impression of Monsieur d’Outremort.
The episode in the tomb that I had just witnessed was renewed many times in solitude. I knew, in fact, that Monsieur d’Outremort divided his existence between the crypt and the workshop. His heart full of resentment and his soul full of science, it was said that he passed from one to the other, mediating here, working here, without anyone figuring out the object of his ecstasies or the goal of his studies. He passed from one to the other as from an invincible regret to a joyless hope, and the ancestral manor in which his family would become extinct with him had never been so dismal.
And yet, it had always been a sad dwelling. The Outremorts of the 11th century had built on a mount at the center of their tenure. Imagine, at the heart of a somber forest, a colossal somber rock whose summit is carved into a fortress, and you have the Château d’Outremort at the top of its pedestal. That bluff ending in architecture, that basalt crowned with an abundance of pointed turrets, made one think of cyclopean stalagmites. Shadowed, feudal and gigantic, elegiac and romantic, with something of the fabulous about it—Rhenish, for want of a better word—it was reminiscent of something imagined by Gustave Doré as a location in the most heart-rending of Perrault’s tales; or, better still, of the original of one of those frightful sketches that Victor Hugo traced in ink, coffee and charcoal according to his redoubtable fantasy, and which he called Heppeneff or Corbus.4
If the exterior of that Vosgian burg seems geological, the interior is monastic. Galleries sustained by arches connect up vaulted chambers and courtyards like cloisters. No décor is more appropriate to the pensive walking of a solitary individual charged with knowledge and melancholy—an Edgar Poe décor haunted by a Hoffmann creation: Château Usher.
Monsieur d’Outremort invited me there frequently during our youth, while Marquis Fulbert was there, hunting. I did not like it there, and I felt a sudden relief whenever I left, as if I had escaped some great misfortune. The proximity of that defunct crowd spread an atmosphere of torment and disquiet throughout the edifice. In my eyes, the crypt extended itself throughout the citadel; its mustiness, reminiscent of churches and catacombs, rose up, for my nostrils, to the attics. I declined more than one invitation to hunt deer in the Outremort forest without any other reason, and I always avoided sleeping in the dwelling, which had no bed in which someone had not died.
Thus I re
member the burg. Thus I remember the astonishing burgrave who brought into the 20th century the anachronistic existence of the noble alchemist, Roman and modern, Romantic and laborious—as if legendary.
I made allusion above to the village situated beneath the château: Bourseuil.5 Presently the administrative center of the canton, it was once a very humble hamlet overshadowed by the enormous proximity of Outremort. It has not ceased growing since the end of the 17th century, to the annoyance of the chatelains, who could not see all the rancor of the region concentrated within its walls without irritation. They could not do anything about it. Bourseuil prospered. Its leading citizens struggled against a suzerainty that was baptized as tyranny. In that ultra-republican town, the bloodthirsty Houlon established his headquarters and put the district guillotine to work, after the hanging of the ambassador and the canoness.
Having related all this, I leave it to the reader to imagine Monsieur d’Outremort’s state of mind when he learned recently that a statue of Houlon was to be erected in the Bourseuil’s town square. It would be visible from the château. A public subscription was opened.
From that moment, it appears that Monsieur d’Outremort—whom I have not seen again—went so far as to surpass his own self-perfection, that superlative of his personality about which I have already said a few words. He absorbed himself in work and contemplation. Nevertheless, his domestics observed that now, of the crypt and the workshop, it was the latter that attracted him more. He augmented it with an immense garage, in which two post-chaises and a tilbury kept close company with huntsman Fulbert’s shooting-brake and Comte Cyril’s red automobile. At all hours, the noise of hammering and filing were audible there. It was Monsieur le Marquis playing the locksmith and the blacksmith, to erode his pain and pound his heart. What he was making was unimportant, in truth; he was tiring himself out in order to tire himself out, without any other aim—he, the scientist, the father of telemechanics!
Then it became evident that Monsieur d’Outremort had succeeded in killing his excessively dolorous soul, for he appeared to become joyful, and laughter was heard by night, in the garage, amid the rasping and the ringing. His people loved him for his magnificent indulgence. They feared a fatal outcome occasioned by the inauguration of the statue, which was to take place on July 14, the national holiday.
From his window, Monsieur d’Outremort doubtless saw the stone demagogue perched on his pedestal, in his carmagnole, coiffed with a bonnet that one imagined to be red in spite of its white color, if I might venture to write such a silly sentence. Houlon was depicted in an attitude of bravado. His eyes stared brazenly up at the château. He was the very personification of the conquering lout.
Watching the festivities, Monsieur d’Outremort scrutinized the simulacrum with the aid of binoculars, and smiled. This is certified by his manservant Nazaire, a very devoted old fellow who swears that his master was never more cheerful than on July 11, 12, 13 and 14, 1911. He concluded that Marquis Savinien was putting on a brave face against ill-fortune, and that insanity is sometimes a blessing. Fortified by that opinion, and Monsieur d’Outremort having instructed him and the other valets to go and mingle with the people in order to report back to him what the rabble was saying, Nazaire went down to Bourseuil at about 1 p.m., the ceremony being fixed for 2 p.m. The entire household staff accompanied him.
The village was furiously overpopulated. The reported statistic alleges that 5000 people crowded into the commune of 900 souls. This is clear evidence of the importance attached in the region to that libertarian demonstration, and provides as measure of the ardent “citizenship” that still animates the former tenants of the marquisate. In spite of the torrid heat, the entire society packed the square around the statue, which was covered by an almost-immaculate linen sheet. A makeshift podium emerged from the crowd like a pontoon from a turbulent pond. Four oriflammes hung from four flagpoles; colored flags decorated the windows garnished with spectators; Venetian lanterns were already interlacing their garlands for the evening ball—and the animation continued all along the main street, at the end of which the looming Château d’Outremort provided a taciturn image of the Bastille whose storming was being commemorated.
From the utmost depths of his retrenchment, Monsieur d’Outremort clearly heard the Marseillaise that opened the solemnities. Houlon, unveiled, appeared to universal applause. A deputé of the extreme left took the floor. His speech was not so much socialist as Jacobin. A native of Bourseuil, he was familiar with the kind of bombast that it was necessary to proclaim to move his fellow citizens. The populist made facile and pitiless allusions to Outremort. Listening devotedly, the audience contained its jubilation, several bumpkins squinting at the castle with expressions of evil delight. They saw someone at the latticed-window of a corner turret, which did not cause them any anxiety at all; they were unable to tell, at that distance, who the curious person was.
Nazaire, however, could not be mistaken on that score. While his peers were busy drinking in an inn, he had scrupulously obeyed the instructions he had received, and kept his ears pricked in the direction of the podium. As soon as he noticed Monsieur d’Outremort’s presence at the turret window, he knew that it portended nothing good, and he set off on the return journey. Weaving through the crowd in the main street, addressing frowning glances to the château, he suddenly perceived something that caused him to go pale: the drawbridge had been lowered, the portcullis raised and the doors opened wide.
Nazaire accelerated his pace, gripped by an indefinable anxiety. Meanwhile, Monsieur d’Outremort had not left his post, and that was reassuring. Indeed, he did not seem to be interested in the distant spectacle of the rustic celebration, since, from closer range, he seemed to be manipulating something… yes, that was reassuring.
Even so, as soon as he had disengaged himself from the crowd, the honest manservant began to run. He came to a sudden stop, and uttered a piercing scream that was heard as far away as the square, thanks to the attentive silence engendered by the speech.
Five thousand heads turned toward Outremort.
They saw no reason to be afraid. Everything offered the most placid appearance. An automobile, having emerged from the château, was coming along the inclined ledge whose triple-zigzag slope led to the drawbridge between Outremort and the entrance to Bourseuil. Four travelers were grouped in it. A stream of dust extended behind it.
Was there anything there to justify the slightest cry of alarm? No, thought the majority. Yes, thought the Bourseuilians, when they recognized, by its red color, the double phaeton whose speed had driven them to revolt three years before. It was necessary to see the employment of that machine, which they had condemned, as a challenge on Monsieur d’Outremort’s part. That spoiled their pleasure. They refused, however, to admit that the arrogant vehicle would come to them on a day like this. At the bottom of the hill it would turn, follow the departmental highway, and disappear, along with the four lackeys charged with making this miserable protest.
Senator Collin-Barnard, the president, got up in order to redirect attention to the statue with a tirade-but all eyes were following the descent of that insulting automobile—and the stone Houlon seemed to be following it too. It arrived at the bottom of the rocky decline. At that moment, the Sun illuminated its sides with an unusual reflected gleam.
Monsieur d’Outremort, still unrecognized, watched from the height of his turret.
The car did not turn on to the highway as everyone had presumed; it took the narrow road that transformed into the main street. It would arrive, therefore, in Bourseuil, and speedily! Perhaps it was the Marquis himself, with partisans, who was coming to sneer at the proletariat? Who were the impertinent aristos bringing the machine down?
A dusty whirlwind approached. The four travelers were hidden from the sight of the crowd. They were astonished by the muteness of its progress; previously, the motor had rattled. They had been astonished by the rapidity of its progress previously…but…
Ha! Everyt
hing became abruptly clear in their minds.
The automobile was charging the crowd!
There was a convulsive movement in the main street, a prompt consolidation of the assembly to either side, forming two ranks. In the blink of an eye, an open pathway opened up through the mass of compressed humanity. For whatever reason, it yielded passage to the seigneurial procession, as in times of old when resounding carriages had jolted along the King’s highway. Look out! Look out! Stand aside! Get out of the way!
The automobile plunged into the vacant space. A meteor! And not a single blast of the horn! Not a single warning shout from the driver! Not a single gesture from the four individuals masked with goggles and swathed in capes, who were maintaining a frightful tranquility!
The bolide brushed the mob to the right, then swerved toward the mob to the left, then swung back to the right, and so on—and atrocious clamors accompanied each of the car’s sinuosities, while people fell down in sheaves to either side…because it was mowing them down with large scythes disposed at shin-level, as in the military chariots of Antiquity.
Like a momentary lightning-bolt, launched at top speed, it ran in this manner through the ditch of flesh, lurching from one bank to the other and leaving horrible butchery in its wake.
Blood ran in the gutters like water in a rainstorm.
In this manner, it reached the crammed square, and there, rather than following the alleyway they made for it in a straight line, it turned sharply and plowed straight into the midst of the audience.
The Doctored Man Page 2
