The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century

by Terry Hale

  At the bois, at the Opera and at the club, there was talk of it for a good fortnight, then no one gave it another thought. Paris has far more to do than worry about shooting stars; everyone misses it and it misses no one. It is good if you come, if you leave it is better, for you make room for another. Paris is not slow to tell women displicuit nasus tuus: your nose did not please. The Boisfleury girl’s nose was formed very well and did not yet displease, but Zerbinette’s, which was sweetly turned up like that of Roxelan, took only a month to make people forget it.

  Yet Dafné still had to be somewhere. She was not dead, that would have become known; her house, her horses and her carriages had not been put up for sale, and a creature so conspicuous as if she were a marble monument, like mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury née Mélanie Tripier, cannot just be erased in the middle of a civilized place. What was certain was that Dafné was no longer in Paris. A paramour to whom she had given an appointment, which she inevitably did not keep, had looked for her everywhere, even in the morgue, that terminus of desperate enquiries.

  We shall be cleverer than the young swain, and perhaps we shall find mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury, but to do this a journey must be undertaken, between one paragraph and the next in a quick transfer from Paris to Rome, following our trail to the villa Pandolfi.

  II

  Just a short carriage ride outside the city walls, the villa Pandolfi is one of those palaces bearing the most pronounced imprint of the dominant Italian taste of the middle of the seventeenth century. It is situated at the end of vast gardens which are constructed rather than planted, for an understanding of nature is an altogether modern sentiment, and it is only recently that people took it into their heads to put flowers, lawns and trees in parks. A gateway resembling a triumphal arch and flanked by columns in the rustic style with vermiculated bosses from which hang stone stalactites jostling with whiskers of grass, opens into an antique wall which must have enclosed some patrician villa under the Caesars. Beyond the ironwork of the gate, the visitor is presented with an alley of cypresses several hundred years old. Their trunks ribbed with massive veins like columns twisted together in a bundle by some giant’s hand, these cypresses have foliage with the appearance of bronze scoria and they form two immense curtains of a darkling green which lead the eyes towards the palace rising up at the end of this perspective. Swift water runs along the stone rivulets either side of the alley, after feeding the villa’s fountains and water cascades, and then, with a torrential gurgle, sweeps down into a grating. Between the cypresses, marble urns and somewhat mutilated antique statues produce splashes of white whose effect in the evening is quite disturbing, and which faintly recall the Turkish graves of the Great Field of the dead at Scutari. We begin this description at an hour when the sun was setting in a turquoise-blue sky streaked with slim violet clouds and shifting towards a lemon colour or on the verge of those orange hues which surround the dying day star. The pyramids of the cypresses loomed up starkly against this pale background, and through their dark foliage there glinted, here and there, fiery specks that sent out rays, while lower down everything was bathed in a cold blue shadow.

  The palace rose up on a great expanse of terrace with marble balustrades divided by acroteria supporting mythological statues writhing in the manner of Bernini and his school. Niches hollowed out in the supporting walls also contained crude figures unearthed in excavations by the former owners of the villa, and fragments of bas-reliefs were embedded in them.

  A marble staircase split the terrace, climbing between the two underpinnings across broad landings. From one corner of the balustrade, like a balcony carpet, there escaped a vast sheet of ivy which felicitously broke the horizontal lines of the architecture.

  At the top of the staircase, further back, rose the palace with its deeply jutting cornice, its great windows with their alternating v-shaped and triangular pediments, its peristyle with pilasters in the Corinthian manner fluted halfway up, and its facetted stylobate. To complete the overall effect of this ancient magnificence, just spread the rust of time, the blackish tones of rain and the green coatings of moss. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to what is meant in France by the words château or country house. It was more like a theatre set executed in stone instead of being painted on cloth. Everything was sacrificed for the sake of perspectival effect; the trees resembled stage wings, but this was a set like those by San-Quirico,1 who was so greatly admired by Stendhal: grandiose, solemn and designed by a true architectural talent.

  From the top of the terrace, the view spread out over the gardens, where yews and box trees cut in a peculiar fashion formed symmetrical compartments, were rounded out in spheres, lengthened into pyramids and assumed every kind of shape, except those of nature. This was the manner that is called French and which is really Italian, for it came to us from the other side of the mountains and developed in all its splendour under Louis XIV. In the middle of these flowerbeds, fountains could be seen that recalled the style of those adorning the Piazza Navona. Bearded, arched-backed tritons twisting their scaly legs, holding up nereids in their sinewy arms and blowing through their conch shells jets of water which drizzled down onto their loins of a discoloured green. In crannies, rocky grottoes taken over by climbing wall plants, sheltered groups of statuary: Acis and Galatea being threatened by Polyphemus with a huge stone, and Pluto abducting Proserpina on a chariot which is partly engulfed by the yawning rocks. This invention must have seemed the very acme of romantic style in its day. Two other fountains, set into the wall as part of the facade, poured out water through tragic and comic bronze masks in wide-mouthed rictus, into a porphyry cistern, and a Roman tomb whose defaced bas-relief represented a bacchanal.

  Beyond, above the walls, on the horizon’s edge, one could discern the solid contours of mount Soracte, sparkling with some patches of snow.

  Ill

  Night began to fall and in the darkness of the palace facade some of the windows shone with a reddish glow. Contrary to what one might have imagined, the villa was not uninhabited; surprisingly, it had other hosts besides the rats, spiders, bats and nocturnal terrors.

  Carriages drove down the alley of cypresses where their lanterns glittered like glowworms in the opaque shadow, and set down their masters at the terrace stairway. These new arrivals appeared to be invited guests, for they were all in black tails, white ties and straw-coloured gloves. They were nearly all young, but for two or three persons in whom birth, power and wealth replaced youth. Although they climbed the steps with a slower and heavier step they were no less certain of their ascent.

  The interior of the Pandolfi palace, despite efforts that had been made to introduce modern comforts, remained for all that joyless, gloomy, almost sinister.

  The reception apartments were on the ground floor and were made up of a suite of salons leading one into the other, with communicating doors, and from the first threshold to the last room, creating a long perspective similar to that of those mirrors set facing one another and conveying an infinite reflection. The smallest of these salons could easily have contained a whole house on the scale that architects build today. To fill them, the gargantuan life of former times was needed. All the more so if the candle stumps set in the huge chandeliers sufficed to make visible the faded tapestries, the richly scrolled Cordoba leathers, and the darkened frescoes which decorated those vast walls. At intervals, the rusted gold of an old frame held a mythological scene painted by some Bolognese after the Carracci family, thrusting out of the chaotic shadow the white flesh of a nymph or a goddess; antique lacquer cabinets sent out pink and blue gleams from their inlaid mother-of-pearl work; old gilt armchairs caught sparkling light on their carved reliefs; the figures couched on the casings of windows and doors and upholding the Pandolfi arms shone strangely in the light and their distorted spectral shadows were cast up to the ceding.

  Through these salons, where a few servants stood in sombre livery, pointing out the way, the guests passed like phantoms, and the silen
ce was so deep that one could hear their patent boots creak on the parquet’s inlaid wood or mosaic from one end of the rooms to the other.

  It was in the last room that the reception was being held. Powerful lamps set into huge Japanese vases, a chandelier with forty branches hanging from a ceiling representing Olympus at the end of a silken rope tied to Venus’s belt, wall lamps laden with candles and reflecting their light into mirrors of polished silver, created a veritable daylight illumination which made visible every detail of luxurious appointments in which modern comfort had made intelligent accommodation to the severities of former style.

  The lady of the noble Roman villa was none other, we must now confess, than mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury. An Englishman, back from India, possessing a great many lacks of rupees, surfeited with the somewhat sun-scorched charms of the nautch-girls, splenetic in the extreme and wearing around his eyes the golden spectacles of hepatitis, had found her as amusing as a monkey making faces at some carnival supper and had treated himself to ‘this droll litde item’. He had soon tired of her in the intimacy of an Italian journey and had set out again for Calcutta, leaving Dafné with a large sum of money, by way of consolation, magnificently installed in the Pandolfis’ villa, which he had bought from its last owner, who had become destitute and was compelled to this painful sacrifice of seeing a whore live in the palace of his forebears.

  Dafné had not yet completed her toilette; such creatures take forever, and some seven or eight guests waited with the rather stiff composure of men who are rivals, either de facto or at least in intent. The ones who were or had been in favour with the diva, behaved with magnanimity, while the others, for all their polite manners, maintained a cold, almost fierce demeanour. We will surprise no one with the information that they included a hereditary duke, a British peer of the realm, a Roman prince, a Russian grand duke, two marquis, a baron, who, if not the first baron in Christendom, belonged no less to a very illustrious family, and a charming little embassy attaché, all youthfulness and blondness and pinkness, who might well have been taken for the angel of diplomacy. Any salon might be honoured with such guests, and if they were here, it was because well-bred people are fond of bad company to make up for the boredom they are caused by the good kind.

  If you will allow, we shall leave these fine gentlemen busy leafing through albums, looking at stereoscopic pictures, inspecting the knick-knacks on the shelves, and exchanging polite observations about the legs of the prima ballerina, and we shall make our way into Dafné’s dressing-room. She was standing, dressed from head to toe, beside a vast marble table covered in flacons, brushes, pots, little steel implements and the whole panoply of modern beauty care. In front of her was spread out an array of glass screens, a triple cheval mirror, the triptych of coquettishness, which allowed her to look at herself full-length from any angle. Dafné’s outfit consisted in a gown of ice-green taffeta, its every seam trimmed with silver lace which likewise framed the neckline, and, sewn flat, formed squares, diamonds, circles and loops on the skirt. Silver strips of cloth matching the trimming of the gown, shone here and there among her red hair, which was waved and crimped and bristled up on her forehead, tied back at the nape and escaping in an enormous spray of spiralling tawny gold over her shoulders which, for all that they belonged to a creature so black of soul, were no less white.

  Although she had every reason to be pleased with her toilette, Dafné was not engaged in giving her triple cheval mirror the approving look which she did not stint herself whenever the edifice of her coiffure had turned out well and the train of her gown was sufficiently long.

  The dressing-room curtain had just fallen upon a mysterious visit. A woman dressed in black and hermetically veiled, had arrived noiselessly and left in the same way through secret passages of which she seemed to have foreknowledge, and which had enabled her to reach Dafné unknown to the servants.

  Women of this sort, dressed in black with faces masked by a grenadine veil, are often seen prowling around fashionable courtesans, whispering promises of caskets and purses of gold, of guaranteed incomes; but this one, in her costume the colour of darkness akin to a domino’s cape, had a genuine air of grandeur.

  However, when she had gone, Dafné opened an iron safe embedded in the wall and defended by every lock combination that could be created by the rivalrous Huret and Fichet, and she locked inside it a wallet swollen with banknotes, doubtless the price or the deposit of the bargain struck. Mademoiselle de Boisfleury had a serious look about her, something which seldom occurred, and as she directed her steps towards the salon, she murmured, as if to memorise, the following bizarre phrase: ‘Press the left eye of the sphinx on the right’. Before entering, doubtless feeling rather pale, she drew from her pocket a little ivory apple which split in half, took from it a pink-powdered puff and patted it over her cheeks.

  After the obligatory distribution of handshakes and kisses placed on the back of a well-shared hand, the object of manicurists’ attentions, Dafné gave her arm to the peer of the realm and they moved into the dining room; a high room decorated with a fresco darkened by time and representing the banquet of the gods, the work of some pupil of Jules Romain, if not of Jules Romain himself. This fresco, which dominated the whole room, cut into only by the door and a single window with ample brocade curtains, rested on a dado, where, against a mock-architectural background, Polidoro da Caravàggio2 had set bronze medallions enhanced by gold hatchings, which contained mythological scenes and attributes. These gods and goddesses in a state of Olympian nakedness underwent violent muscular contractions in order to hold out their goblets of Hebe’s nectar or take ambrosia, the food of immortals, upon great silver dishes. Their torsos, orange-hued, stood out from a sky whose blue had blackened, and their feet rested on wisps of white cloud, resembling marble splinters; all these gods of paganism to whom art had restored some manner of life, seemed to look disdainfully upon the over-modern mortals who laid their earthly dinner beneath their own celestial banquet where only paint was eaten. Juno, with her peacock between her legs and her head slightly turned over her shoulder, seemed to cast fierce glances upon mademoiselle Dafné de Boisfleury, who was placed directly opposite her. The severe wife of Jupiter has never liked nymphs whose behaviour was suspect.

  The table was set in the midst of this vast room, upon a Smyrna rug, for though the end of spring was close, the floor mosaic would have been cold underfoot for the guests. On her right Dafné had the peer of the realm, who wore his five and fifty years majestically, retaining the vigour of old men that the English preserve through high living and superior hygiene; on her left was Lothario, the young Roman prince. He was a thin, wiry young man, on the small side, pale complexion, his face ringed by a fine line of very black side whiskers which became joined to a small neat beard that was silky and lustrous as ebony and was not of many years standing. His eyes were a dark brown with yellow glints around the pupil, and his features overall presented that classical regularity which one often encounters in Italy, and which is so rare in our climes. Artists said that Prince Lothario bore a strong resemblance to the portrait of Cesare Borgia by Raphael, which is to be admired in the Borghese Gallery. One night during carnival, Lothario had disguised himself in the costume of the portrait, and one would have said that the Borgia had returned to earth; do not be prompted by this to picture a ferocious and fearsome physiognomy – Lothario appeared the gentlest of men, and his face had the charm of the son of Alexander VI.

  While preserving the obsequiousness which courtesans always maintain with regard to millions, even when the millions are white-haired, Dafné cultivated her neighbour on the left, Prince Lothario. She pointed out to him the wines he should drink and the best dishes to sample, leaning towards him almost tenderly, whispering in his ear things she could easily have said aloud, and at Lothario’s least witticism she would laugh fit to burst, displaying her lovely teeth right to the gums and throwing herself back in her chair, so as to show off the treasures of a most white and
well-furnished bosom, as our forebears were wont to say in their light and courtly manner; often she would rest her naked arm against Lothario’s sleeve, which would become whitened with powder. These days one gets covered in flour when next to nymphs as much as next to millers.

  The meal was refined and delicate. One eats now only at the table of these creatures, who must arouse every kind of indifference, those of the heart and those of the stomach. The champagne known as la veuve, the kind one mentions when one wants to go up in a waiter’s esteem, was chilling in decanters of Bohemian crystal, with a compartment set into the side of the vessel for the ice to lie without mixing with the wine. The most famous of fine Rhenish wines were poured from their long-necked bottles into emerald-green goblets, and Dafné, in full flow, told unbelievable anecdotes in a style which borrowed terms from three or four different kinds of slang; for she had been a model, a bit-part player in a small theatre, and had rubbed shoulders with the sporting world through her love life. The artist’s studio, the stage door, and the stable opened their lexicons of colourful idioms to her. It would seem it is a pleasure to see a pretty woman’s lips let fall not pearls or roses, but red mice and toads, because all these men of good family and the best education seemed to be much entertained by Dafné’s conversation. The peer of the realm, who did not always understand, although he was perfectly acquainted with the French of Racine, Fénelon and Voltaire, smiled gravely; the Russian grand duke, who was well versed in all these hackneyed phrases through his assiduous study of the yellow press, was ecstatic about mademoiselle de Boisfleury’s brilliant eloquence, pronouncing her quite incandescent that evening. As for the Roman prince Lothario, in whose honour this fireworks display was given, he appeared barely to notice. Parisian waggishness is lost on an Italian mind; a touch of passion would have worked better to seduce him. Despite his love for Dafné, the angel of diplomacy could not stop himself from acknowledging inwardly that the goddess of his heart used words which were hardly acceptable in any official circles, far less in the chancellery.