The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century

by Terry Hale

  Scarcely had I drawn aside the curtains than I discovered Flédermausse on the watch behind her window-panes.

  She could not see me. I opened the window softly, the window over the way softly opened too; then the lay-figure appeared to rise slowly and advance towards me; I did the same, and seizing my candle with one hand, with the other threw the casement wide open.

  The old woman and I were face to face; for, overwhelmed with astonishment, she had let the lay-figure fall from her hands. Our two looks crossed with an equal terror.

  She stretched forth a finger, I did the same; her lips moved, I moved mine; she heaved a deep sigh and leant upon her elbow, I rested in the same way.

  How frightful the enacting of this scene was I cannot describe; it was made up of delirium, bewilderment, madness. It was a struggle between two wills, two intelligences, two souls, one of which sought to crush the other; and in this struggle I had the advantage. The dead were on my side.

  After having for some seconds imitated all the movements of Flédermausse, I drew a cord from the folds of my petticoat and tied it to the iron stanchion of the signboard.

  The old woman watched me with open mouth. I passed the cord round my neck. Her tawny eyeballs glittered; her features became convulsed:

  ‘No, no!’ she cried, in a hissing tone; ‘no!’

  I proceeded with the impassability of a hangman.

  Then Flédermausse was seized with rage.

  ‘You’re mad! you’re mad!’ she cried, springing up and clutching wildly at the sill of the window; ‘you’re mad!’

  I gave her no time to continue. Suddenly blowing out my light, I stooped like a man preparing to make a vigorous spring, then seizing my lay-figure, slipped the cord about its neck and hurled it into the air.

  A terrible shriek resounded through the street; then all was silent again.

  Perspiration bathed my forehead. I listened a long time. At the end of an hour I heard far off – very far off – the cry of the watchman, announcing to the inhabitants of Nuremberg that midnight had struck.

  ‘Justice is at last done,’ I murmured to myself; ‘the three victims are avenged. Heaven forgive me!’

  This was five minutes after I had heard the last cry of the watchman, and when I had seen the old witch, drawn by the likeness of herself, a cord about her neck, hanging from the iron stanchion projecting from her house. I saw the thrill of death run through her limbs, and the moon, calm and silent, rose above the edge of the roof, and shed its cold pale rays upon her dishevelled head.

  As I had seen the poor young student of Heidelberg, I now saw Flédermausse.

  The next day all Nuremberg knew that ‘the Bat’ had hung herself. It was the last event of the kind in the Rue des Minnesängers.

  1 Flédermausse. Flitter-mouse, bat.

  2 Der Freischutz. Popular opera by Weber based on a story by the German Romantic writer Johann Apel (1771–1816).

  The Reincarnation of Doctor Roger

  Henri Rivière

  Towards the end of the month of October, 185—, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, a man in his forties, with a pleasant, animated face, was making his way down the boulevards in the direction of the Madeleine. His clothes were so unbecoming that they resembled those of an academic for whom personal appearance has become a matter of indifference. His tie, negligently knotted about his neck, floated aimlessly above the ruffs of his shirt. A black frock-coat, though new, was crumpled, the shoulders and tails exhibiting those horizontal creases which indicate a long stay in a trunk. His hat was no longer fashionable. Finally, a pair of fawn-coloured trousers fell unequally over the pair of light-weight shoes he was wearing despite the fact that it was extremely cold.

  The man’s pace speeded up or slackened without apparent rhyme or reason. His gaze was alternatively absent-minded or serious; his mouth displayed a smile which was a strange mixture of sadness and merriment. From time to time, he greeted houses and streets with a friendly nod, as if he was both surprised and delighted to see them again. Some of the passers-by produced the same effect on him. He walked up beside them, seemed to be on the point of making some remark, then stopped himself and shook his head, as if disappointed or displeased with himself. In fact, he looked just like a traveller returning to his home town after many years’ absence. He no longer knew anybody; but, as a result of chance resemblances, thought at each step he was crossing people with whom he had once been acquainted. At the moment he saw them, they looked exactly as they had done ten years previously. They often had the same air about them and were dressed exactly the same way as before. However, on reflection, he realised they could not possibly be the people he used to know, because they themselves should look ten years older.

  It was doubtful, though, whether the pedestrian in question came to such a natural conclusion himself because, nodding his head at the same time, he muttered:

  ‘These encounters, strange though they may be, can only serve to confirm my research. My system must be right – though even the best theory, if confronted with the evidence too abruptly, can seem a bit awry.’

  He carried on regardless to the Madeleine, where another such encounter filled him with fresh alarm. He was some ten feet or so from a tall, erect man of about fifty, with haughty, phlegmatic features, greying hair and whiskers, who was buttoned up in a frock-coat and wearing a ribbon in his button-hole. This gentleman was talking to a friend, on whose arm he was leaning, and carrying an overnight bag in his left hand. The excitement of our pedestrian was so great at the sight of this person that he went straight up to him and, without even offering a greeting, said with a mixture of stupefaction and anger:

  ‘Ah! M. Lannoy, if I am not mistaken!’

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ replied the man who had been so addressed. ‘Who pray are you?’

  ‘I am Doctor Roger Dannerch.’

  ‘Very well. How can I be of assistance to you?’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir,’ said Roger, in a completely different tone. ‘What I just did must have seemed completely ridiculous. I had forgotten,’ he added matter-of-factly, ‘that it couldn’t have been you, since you are dead.’

  ‘What do you mean that I’m dead?’

  ‘Yes, six years ago, and in rather wretched circumstances, since it occurred two months after you killed a man in a duel.’

  ‘I see,’ replied his interlocutor in a tone of pity tinged with disgust. ‘It is with this M. Lannoy that you wish to speak rather than with me.’

  ‘Oh no! You and M. Lannoy are undoubtedly one and the same person, but it would take me too long to explain it all to you. I know exactly what I mean, and that is what matters.’

  The friend accompanying the so-called M. Lannoy gently nudged him with his elbow.

  ‘Come on,’ said he, ‘let’s be on our way. It’s only a lunatic.’

  ‘Lunatic!’ exclaimed Roger, who seemed to be beside himself on hearing this epithet. ‘Lunatic! It’s easy to say that. In any case, it’s better to be a lunatic than to be deceived by your wife.’

  ‘Was that remark addressed at me?’ exclaimed the stranger, turning pale.

  ‘Take it how you like.’

  However, as soon as these words left his mouth, Roger was frightened and heartily repented having uttered them.

  ‘Sir,’ he stuttered,‘I beg you to accept my apologies. I withdraw that remark entirely. I sometimes say things like that at random, urged on by some inner prompting. But they are completely devoid of any meaning. This inner voice got the better of me just now. It was no more than that. I am sure that you are quite happily married and you have every reason to treat me as a lunatic.’

  ‘Sir,’ replied the stranger, ‘I must insist that you furnish me with some proofs of what you advance.’

  ‘But, as I have already informed you, I have none. I simply gave way to an ill-considered impulse. Intuition, even supposing a particular individual can be blessed with it in this manner, which is extremely rare, is no proof. I
didn’t even know you were married. I accept that you are not M. Lannoy. I have my own reasons to hold a different opinion on this subject, but I have neither the right nor the desire to impose my beliefs on you. Thus, I totally accept everything you have to say.’

  The singular manner by which Roger retracted his words at the same time as affirming them exasperated the stranger.

  ‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘I will no more tolerate a joke in questionable taste than an insult. You will give me satisfaction.’

  ‘I?’ said Roger.

  ‘If you are not utterly wanting in courage.’

  Unlike the moment when he had been called a lunatic, Roger had remained calm.

  ‘Very well! Let us fight. It is perhaps all for the best.’

  ‘Where may my seconds call upon you?’

  ‘I am staying at the Hôtel d’Anjou, Rue Louis-le-Grand.’

  ‘What time shall we say?’

  ‘Seven o’clock this evening, if that is convenient for you.’

  The two men bowed to each other and Roger, who had not thought to ask his adversary’s name, made for the Champs-Elysées. He no longer looked around with curiosity. He walked quickly, his hand in his pockets and his head lowered. His exaltation of a few minutes ago had subsided. The appearance of this man, who resembled M. Lannoy to such a striking degree, had dumbfounded him. Undoubtedly, some bloody adventure, in which he had been one of the protagonists, and which he had forgotten, or rather which he hadn’t dared to remember until then, had come back to him. It was not difficult to reconstruct what must have happened. Behind his impoliteness, behind his accusation that the stranger had killed another man in a duel, even behind the wretched nature of M. Lannoy’s subsequent death, there was a woman’s weakness, a husband’s vengeance, and all the attendant consequences. Presumably Roger must have been the confidant of the wife, the friend of the lover, or a comrade of the husband. If he had been overcome by such a violent burst of anger at hearing himself described as a lunatic, it was surely because his reason had become unbalanced; and if his reason had become unbalanced, it was either because, by some thoughtless act, he had been the cause of the catastrophe or had been somehow prevented from stopping events taking their course.

  Oppressed by the weight of these memories, such as they were, he was tormented for several minutes by visions of death. Perhaps he glimpsed the shades of his former friends beseeching him with outstretched hands. Then, slowly, the reality of the situation impressed itself on his thoughts, and he congratulated himself on his forthcoming duel with this double of the man whom he had hated so much – because, by some mysterious psychological process, the stranger whom he had accosted, curiously unaware of his reincarnation, and M. Lannoy had become in his mind one and the same person. Yes, he would run him through with his sword; make him pay for all the pain and regret that he had inflicted.

  Savouring his imminent triumph, Roger’s hatred subsided. His face, totally distraught until that moment, brightened, then became pensive again. Roger meditated. He had a facility for making logical connections between strange ideas, and these ideas, so familiar to him that he had forged his own system out of them, told him what the consequences of all this would be. Since chance, almost as soon as he set foot in Paris, had made him cross paths with M. Lannoy, and since it was quite possible, as he himself believed, that those who had died reappear in living form many years later, and with exactly the same features as when they were buried, none of this could be coincidental. Thus, it was quite permissible for him to think that his former friends, just like the man whom he had once hated, were to be found somewhere and that they would look exactly the same as they had done in the past. Life, after all, is no more than an endless story which is no sooner finished than it resumes again; one in which the actors, whether or not they seem to survive the dénouement, tragic or otherwise, mount the boards again the following night with the same passions and the same faces, to present a new play only to a different audience. Since he had chanced upon one of the actors in the drama of his own life, why shouldn’t all the others be close at hand, their lines carefully prepared? The wife of the man whose name he didn’t know, and the other man who was no doubt paying his attentions to her, could not possibly be unfamiliar to him. Without conscious effort, he recalled their names: Martial and Léonie. He pronounced these names aloud, first with trembling voice, then with an arrogant smile on his lips. This time he knew precisely what was going on and would be able to make a decisive intervention!

  He was suddenly afraid. What if fortune did not favour him in his duel the next day? What if he should be killed? Far from saving his friends, it would perhaps be he who brought about their ruin, his foolish words averted the husband, who would set a trap for them. There was only one way to help them: he had to warn them of the danger they were in. But how could he do that? He could hardly expect to bump into them accidentally and, even if they recognised each other, how could he be sure that they would trust him?

  He stopped, wiped his forehead, which was covered in sweat, and, his mood suddenly swinging from extreme agitation to one of tremendous calmness, he said to himself:

  Of course! I know exactly where they are! If I present them with the evidence, they must believe me!’

  For the first time since he had left the Madeleine, he took stock of where he was. He had walked along the Champs-Elysées, gone past the Arc de Triomphe, and turned into the Avenue de l’Impératrice. On his right, he noticed Doctor Vermond’s mental asylum, a large white building, which has since been demolished, and as he looked at it he smiled delicately and rather disdainfully to himself. However, catching sight of some people coming out of the building, he moved on with a certain haste, shooting the cuffs of his jacket, brushing his lapels, and composing his deportment into something suitably unruffled and aimless to pass through the gate of the Bois-de-Boulogne. By now, it was three o’clock in the afternoon and carriages and pedestrians littered the edge of the lake. Roger avoided the crowds and made his way round as quickly as possible to the least frequented side of the woods. Within a quarter of an hour, he had come to a little crossroads where five or six paths converged, some reserved for pedestrians, others accessible by coach. He noted, with satisfaction, that he could see in all directions and that the spot was deserted.

  ‘This is where they used to come,’ he said, ‘they should be here any time now.’

  He leaned against a tree and waited. The intense excitement of the morning’s events had subsided now and he acted with remarkable composure. He had no doubt that his secret hypotheses were completely accurate. Perhaps, though without being aware of it, he was reasoning on the basis of less metaphysical factors? Lannoy – as he called him, not knowing any other name to call him by – had looked as if he were about to go on a trip. The lovers, if they really existed, would naturally take advantage of his absence to see each other, and they might well decide to go for a walk in the afternoon. There was a genuine likelihood that they would choose these woods for their walk; and once in the woods they would undoubtedly prefer the side where they were least likely to meet anyone else. Roger began to feel somewhat melancholy. The sun was sinking down towards the horizon, piercing the foliage, which was still luxuriant for the time of year, with slanting rays of light. An incredibly thin veil of mist hovered in the air, and the only sound that could be heard was the far off rumble of carriages. The last radiant days of autumn do not invite the hope and happiness of spring; they suggest instead a sense of resignation. Roger forgot about the present and sought refuge in the past. Formerly, this was where his friends would arrange to meet him, where they would confide in him or asked him favours. Nearly always he had been the first to arrive, and, just like today, he had waited alone. Before long, a carriage stopped in one of the lanes. A man and a woman got out and, talking together, wandered off. The man had a proud and noble bearing; the woman was quite charming. The yellowing leaves which had fallen from the trees rustled under their feet. They passed right in front
of Roger; but they were so preoccupied with each other that they ignored him completely.

  It should also be added that he hid himself so as not to embarrass them. After a while, they turned round and came back again. It was definitely them. The man had Martial’s pale skin, his black eyes, his high forehead, and an impressive moustache. Equally, the woman had Léonie’s chestnut hair, her large, blue eyes, and the same fresh complexion. Martial was listening attentively to Léonie. What were they saying? All the sweet nothings of love! For the most part, they just gazed at each other, smiling, and squeezed each other’s hands; but, occasionally, they became pensive: there was a cloud on their beautiful horizon. Léonie was suffering from the instinctive fears suffered by every guilty woman, and these she confided, in a trembling voice, to her lover who, in order to dispel her anxieties, treated them as mere fancies, though they nonetheless caused him a few anxious moments too. There was a sense that this love which they had sworn to be eternal could be abruptly shattered at any moment.

  Such was the charming picture that Roger’s memory had drawn for him. Then, slowly, this mental image appeared before his very eyes.

  He thought he really could see Martial and Léonie; but he was afraid that if he spoke to them they would disappear like apparitions in a dream, and so he said nothing. They had crossed in front of him several times by now, blissfully at first, then more sadly. As they made their next circuit, the illusion became so strong that Roger made up his mind. It used to be his custom to go up to them and try to distract them from their unhappiness; but, on this occasion, he had taken no more than a few steps when his friends began to stare at him with astonishment, seeming not to recognise him.

  ‘My dear Martial,’ said Roger. ‘I’ve come especially to dispel your gloomy thoughts. I must say, though, you don’t look very glad to see me!’