The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century

by Terry Hale

  IV

  Yet anyone observing mademoiselle de Boisfleury with calm eyes would have easily perceived that her bacchanalian posture was cool and that there was something constrained and nervous in her efforts to lend gaiety to her guests. Despite the animation of the meal, her rouge had faded and a hint of moisture dampened her temples. Her eyes, which she strove to make provocative and voluptuous, sometimes flashed with a look of alarm. Happily for her, the guests, warmed by the wine and the good cheer, paid no heed to this secret anguish which shot through the mirth, the shaky puns and preposterous tall tales.

  Seeing the mediocre impression she was making on Lothario, Dafné said to herself: ‘Time to move on to the melancholy pose,’ and as if wearied by the part she was playing, she struck an attitude which she knew would suit him; an elbow on the table, a hand at the temple, fingers in her hair and eyes on the ceiling, which gave her gaze a softened, lustrous light. She was really beautiful like this. Lothario, who had been bored by Dafné’s turbulence, turned more indulgent eyes upon her and addressed her with flattering phrases.

  There, Dafné told herself, it’s always worthwhile putting on one of those Academy of Fine Arts expressions. This homesick-Mignon look never fails to do the trick.

  Coffee was served, and Havana cigars from the best vueltas were offered to the guests in a rhinoceros horn minutely carved with the painstaking art of Chinese craftsmen. Bluish rings soon rose up towards the ceiling to meet with the clouds of Olympus, threatening to provoke the goddesses’ sneezes. The antique Venus breathed in the scent of incense; the modern Venus has to make do with the smell of tobacco. As the evening wore on two or three of these gentlemen had left. Those who remained were fearful of leaving the field free to a rival by going. Although more than once Dafné had let the conversation drop like someone desirous of being alone, the young ambassadorial attaché could not make up his mind to withdraw. No one else remained in the salon but himself and Prince Lothario, upon whom mademoiselle de Boisfleury cast languishing looks. At last, he got up and took his leave with an air of glumness. Lothario was getting ready to follow him when Dafné took his hand nervously and spoke very quickly in an undertone: ‘Go and collect your overcoat from the antechamber and send your carriage away.’ This order did not seem to surprise the prince overmuch, and he duly set about obeying it.

  During the few minutes that it took him to carry out her command, Dafné, scarcely able to contain her agitation, murmured: ‘Lothario is young, handsome and wealthy. I should very much like to break my word. I should have as much to gain as with the other piece of business; yes, except that the dark woman would have me murdered just as she has promised or she would give me a poison pellet the some poodle.’

  She had got thus far with her monologue when Lothario returned. At once, with a rapidity which would have done justice to a great actress, her features assumed a tender, loving and intoxicated expression, and in words mingled with flute-like sighs and melting looks she was able to persuade the young prince that she had long since adored him, ever since that day when she had met him in the Cascina Gardens in Florence and that she was wretched indeed that she, a poor fallen woman, had such high hopes, loving one so pure and noble, who could have nought but scorn for her.

  Even when one disbelieves them, it is always pleasant to hear such things, especially if they come from the lips of a pretty woman, ready to prove her remorse with a fresh misdemeanour and to shed for your sake the white robe of innocence that she has donned in order to please you. At this moment Dafné was charming, either because the prince’s beauty genuinely moved her, or because the prospect of a perilous action gave her features a depth of expression to which they were unaccustomed.

  Lothario had reassured her as best he could, saying that love, like a flame or like wine in the barrel, suffered from no impurity, and that one needed no more than be in love to become straightaway like lovely little angels. This facile and faintly Jesuitical sermon seemed to be to Dafné’s liking, and the prince put his arm around her supple waist, like Othello leading Desdemona away.

  Making a pretence of delicate lungs, Dafné faked a little cough, and, she who once had seasoned pipes in her day as the Judith to a painter’s Holophernes, said: ‘The smoke from those cigars makes me dizzy and breathless; if we were to go into my bedchamber, the air would be clearer!’

  They therefore took themselves to Dafné’s bedchamber. A vast room with a very high ceiling, upholstered in Bohemian leather with tawny gold scrollings, adorned with a few pictures by masters whose sombre hues stood out oddly in their wide frames of new gold, furnished with a great bed carved in the Renaissance manner and fauteuils like high gothic chairs. This room bore the lugubrious aspect of the bedroom of Thisbe in the fifth act of Angelo, Tyrant of Padua.3 In it, Dafné had staged the decor of melodrama. It amused her to be afraid at night when she went to bed.

  In one corner sat a wide divan or rather a sofa in the form of an ancient couch, set off at each end by a sphinx whose hind quarters served as a prop for cushions and provided an armrest.

  Lothario was sitting on this divan and, with arms entwined about her, was pulling Dafné to him, she making only feeble resistance, her bosom heaving beneath its silver lace. The chamber was illuminated only by a triple lamp discovered at Pompeii. Dafné turned her back to the lamp and her figure was bathed in shadow; had the light struck her at that moment, Lothario would have found nothing natural in the young woman’s livid paleness and the frantic expression in her eyes. With a gesture affecting bashful rebellion, Dafné disengaged herself from the prince’s embrace and, as if she were quaking with emotion, rested her trembling hand upon the head of the sphinx on the right, her fingers groping for its left eye. When she found it, she pressed deeply into the pupil, as if on the button of a bell, just as she had been ordered by the woman dressed in black, who filled her with such profound terror.

  Upon this pressure, the bottom of the divan opened up like a trap door in the theatre, precipitating Lothario into a dark pit which sent up a violent gust of damp air, then closed again immediately with a mechanical response so precise that no-one could possibly have suspected that a man had been sitting there three seconds earlier.

  Her eyes lifeless, her arms drooping, chilled with horror, Dafné gazed in stupefaction at the sofa, a couch of love transformed into a tomb, and where just before a young man full of life and longings had been smiling at her. Wild terrors besieged her; there was ringing in her ears and her blood pounded in her temples, and she seemed to hear muffled moans at a great depth beneath the floor.

  She took a few steps towards the door, fearing lest another trap door should open in the parquet and send her to join Lothario at the bottom of the abyss: ‘That would be a nice trick,’ she told herself; but nothing gave way under her feet. Gladly, she reached the threshold of her chamber, entered her dressing room, emptied the safe, taking all the valuables locked inside it and the box containing her jewels, then, with the help of Victoire, her damned soul, her fanatically devoted lady’s maid, she donned a travelling dress, wrapped herself in a dark cloak and took her seat in the coupé which she had had harnessed.

  This departure caused no surprise among any of the servants, most of whom, moreover, had already gone to bed. Madame would often go out at midnight and not return till morning.

  V

  When he had felt the sofa give way beneath him, Lothario’s flailing hand had instinctively clutched at the velvet cushion against which he was leaning. The cushion had gone down with him on his fall and prevented it from being fatal by softening it. That dreadful sensation of dropping abruptly into the blackness of a depth unplumbed lasted perhaps for three or four seconds which seemed like centuries to the young Roman prince. It was halted with a violent shock. Fortunately at this point the ground, made up of rubbish, was not hard, and Lothario, stunned for an instant, soon regained his senses. He touched his person, took a deep breath, stretched out his arms and legs and convinced himself that nothing was broken.
Once this was confirmed, he decided he had to take cognizance of this place, a somewhat difficult matter in that darkness which was denser and more black and opaque than that of the well of the pit. Lothario was a smoker, and it occurred to him very fittingly that he must have in his pocket one of those boxes of wax matches which come from Marseilles and have spread across the whole world; he groped among his clothes and felt the slim outline of the box. He struck a match against the sandpaper and in the flickering light it gave he made a quick inspection of the ground beneath his fall. Three or four skeletons under the garments of another century, now in rags or crumpled in on vanished forms, displayed their angular shapes. A few traces of gold shone among this blackened detritus, and one of the corpses, still wearing his hat, made a sepulchrally sarcastic grimace with his fleshless countenance, his lipless teeth and his empty sockets. This resembled that ghastly etching by Goya titled: Nada y nadie.4 This vision, more dreadful than all the monstrosities of nightmare, was extinguished with the match which began to burn Lothario’s fingers.

  ‘It seems,’ the prince, now returned to darkness, told himself, ‘that I am at the bottom of a rather well furnished dungeon, but what interest did that whore have in springing open her mechanical sofa beneath me? It would be bad business for courtesans to destroy their lovers. I have made her no legacy nor have I done her any offence. Of what use was my death to her? Dafné is only the tool in this; she was the one who released the spring, but the push came from elsewhere. But let us get on with our investigations without all this philosophising over causes and effects.’ And he struck another match on the box, its weak light serving more to make the darkness visible than to illuminate it. Nonetheless, Lothario faintly made out reticular walls, and the beginning of vaulting whose enormous arches became lost in a dark mist, and when he stooped down he saw on the ground a few fragments of marble, a few little cubes of coloured stone, suggesting an old mosaic that had disintegrated with time. Beyond any doubt, the villa Pandolfi had its foundation in an ancient building from the days of the Caesars, which had vanished beneath the rising soil and was found again when the earth was disturbed for the villa’s foundations. The architect had probably contrived this connection between the old palace and the new one, but the staircase whose torn-away traces could still be seen had been destroyed and turned into the pit of the dungeon. Lothario was able to recognise these details by means of a third little candle. But how could he get out of this cavern, how could he find the way out, if there was one, through the darkness which his supply of matches would not be enough to dispel? Perhaps he had only escaped a quick death in order to endure the agonies of a slow one, and, driven by hunger, to eat at the flesh of his own arms in the night. This was not a cheerful prospect, and although Lothario was as brave as any man on earth, when he thought of it he could feel his flesh creep.

  Suddenly he thought he heard a faint noise – was it a drop of water oozing from the vault, the slithering of a reptile, the sound of bats’ wings, the scurrying of one of those foul crawling creatures which inhabit the darkness? It was none of these. A swishing of silk that became increasingly distinct announced the approach of a woman, and soon a beam of light issuing from the greenish lens of a dark lantern shone in the shadow, like the gaze of some one-eyed owl.

  ‘Is this Dafné coming to see if I’ve cracked my skull or spilled my guts,’ Lothario wondered as he laid himself out over the skeletons. ‘I’m curious to see her reaction when I say: “Hello, my dear.”’

  The mysterious woman came up to Lothario, directed her lantern’s beam on this body which she was convinced was a corpse and which had a corpse’s lifelessness; she bent down and placed her hand on the prince’s chest as if to take something which she knew to be there. But the dead man suddenly came back to life, seized her wrist in a vice-like grip and with the other hand wrenched the lantern from her, its reversed light illuminating a face that was not Dafné’s. It was a pale countenance with regular features and black eyebrows, of a sinister beauty which at that instant seemed petrified with fright.

  ‘Ah! it is you, stepmother,’ said Prince Lothario, without any sign of surprise, ‘I was wondering whether you had anything to do with this nice piece of machination. It bears all the marks of your talent for melodramatic villainy – thoroughly medieval. You were born in the wrong era, dear Violanta, and you would have held your own quite admirably at the Borgia court. How sweet that here in the nineteenth century we can have a Negroni princess, like Lucretia, who will lure nice young men to suffer for you and make them take a seat on custom-made sofas that turn into dungeons. I like that touch; I’ll pass it on to a playwright.’

  ‘My hatred is deep enough to deserve respect,’ Violanta retorted. ‘A truce on mockery. I wanted to kill you and I failed in the attempt, so kill me, that is fair play.’

  ‘Put your mind at rest, madame, you will not leave here alive. The over-scrupulous would perhaps protest that you are a woman, but monsters have no sex and we crush a female viper with the same revulsion as we crush the male. You hate me, but I hate you in return, and I assure you that my antipathy is both rational and instinctive. You deceived my father who, seduced by your deadly beauty, gave in to weakness and married you, and you entered the bed where my mother had died, already carrying in your belly the child who was born seven months later and yet at full term, the son of the tenor Ambrosio with whom you became infatuated at the Senigallia fair. I have here in this pouch of which you wished to relieve me along with my life, the singer’s love letters, sold to me by a Corsican servant ill-treated by you. These letters prove that your child has no right to the prince’s inheritance, even after my death. Had I published them, I would have revealed not only your shame but that of my father; I did not, but I was most pleased to have the blade of this weapon pointing at your heart. With you, there is no avoiding indelicate methods; you have moreover several times attempted to poison me so that the vast fortune of Prince Donati might come to your child alone. For this purpose, you masked your face with glass and laboured over the flame to study the ancient Italian art of poisons. You rediscovered the one that is white as the dust of Carrara marble, which improves the taste of wine and which was served at Pope Alexander’s suppers, that perfume of Ruggieri’s with which the gloves of Jeanne d’Albret were impregnated, and that aqua tofana, true water of the Styx, whose secret is happily lost.5 For a while I lived on eggs brought to me from the country by my good and faithful wet nurse Mariuccia, and with the help of my teacher, the abbé Bolonini, an expert chemist, I sought the recipes of antidotes. No poison can touch me, not even yours; I am like Mithridates, king of Pontus. Seeing that poison did not succeed, you had recourse to the blade and your hired assassins set about me in repeated attacks on the streets of Rome at night. Fortunately, I am a first-rate swordsman and I fished out the Medici bastard’s coat of mail from the well where Lorenzaccio had cast it – a little rusty perhaps, but still very supple and solid, for it saved me from three dagger wounds.6 Since these methods got you nowhere, you counted on your beauty and played the part of Phaedra better than madame Ristori ever did, trying to lure me into your arms the better to smother me. But despite having no Aricia, I remained duller and colder and more deplorable than Hyppolytus himself, and my dear stepmother knew not that joy of dragging her stepson into incestuous complicity. There now, I have stated my grievances unadorned. I shall say nothing of the trap door through which you tried to have me disappear a little while ago. Until my father’s death I kept my counsel, no stain of mud should be upon the shield of the Donati, but I do not baulk at blood-shed. This crimson purifies, and as the proud Spanish proverb says: “Honour is washed clean only by the flow of blood”.’

  During this speech, which was uttered with phlegmatic sarcasm, Violanta looked at Lothario not knowing whether he spoke in mockery or with seriousness, but implacable hatred shone in the eyes of the prince. His long resentment would now be satisfied, and the hour of legitimate vengeance had at last arrived. As he spoke, without le
tting go of Violanta’s wrist, he had set the dark lantern upon a stone, and with his free hand, he rifled his pocket to find a stiletto.

  Violanta, her eyes on Lothario’s every movement, jerked away from him so brusquely that the prince let go, then she started running with a sound of strident mocking laughter. Lothario picked up the lantern, thinking he might quickly lose sight of Violanta in these underground realms whose byways were unknown to him, and he shed its beams of light upon the fugitive, taking up pursuit through narrow corridor’s whose green-slimed walls oozed dampness. He had almost reached her when abruptly she disappeared as if engulfed by the ground; a ghastly cry, a cry of agony and utter anguish echoed as if from the depths of the earth. Lothario stopped, and casting down the light of the dark lantern, he saw the mouth of a well whose unguarded edge allowed but a narrow passage between the corridors wall and the maw of the abyss. Violanta had thought that the prince, pursuing her, would fall into the chasm which she herself would skirt by going around the edge, but her foot had slipped, and in the course of her fall, at a depth of some twenty feet, her hands had clutched in desperation at some jutting stone. Stooping down with the lantern, at the bottom of the well Lothario could discern an utterly damned countenance, livid, the eyes bloodshot, the mouth purple, staring at him with an appalling expression of impotent hatred. The prince took pity on this woman whom only a moment ago he had wanted to stab. Death by stiletto was readily admissible, but not this dreadful anguish of dangling by the nails above that black, viscous water whose depths were unknown and which lay stagnant, never struck by light, like some stream of the Erebus. Since there was no rope to throw to her, he took off his dress-coat and thrust it into the well holding it by one sleeve. But there was still a gap of seven or eight feet before it could reach Violanta. Soon, a dull sound echoed out and water splashed all around the sides, then a great silence prevailed. Lothario put his tailcoat back on and went on his way circumspectly, for the earth’s swallowing up of Violanta had provoked a fitting mistrust. Like Dante in his walk through Hell, he only lifted one foot after having made quite sure of the other.