The Cavalier of the Apocalypse

by Susanne Alleyn

20

  Until Beaupr?au returned, Moreau was at loose ends, and insisted upon accompanying Aristide to try and find his master. Alfort was too far for a fiacre, so Moreau persuaded the coachman to lend them a pair of the second-best saddle horses. After scribbling a hasty note to Brasseur, telling him that he was continuing to pursue his idea, and despatching it with an errand boy who was idling at the nearest corner, Aristide set out with Moreau in the wan winter sunshine.

  After an hour's brisk riding outside the city, they descended a steep hill to Charenton, paid to be ferried across the Marne, and shortly found themselves in front of a great arched stone gateway with the words ROYAL VETERINARY SCHOOL carved above them. Beyond the gates, an imposing stone edifice from the days of Louis XIV stood behind an avenue of leafless trees.

  Aristide glanced back across the road at the village of Alfort and a retreating carter who had sullenly pointed the way to them and then quickly made a few ancient gestures against evil spirits. "You'd think, from their reaction," he said, "that we were entering the foulest of slaughterhouses set amidst a den of devil worshippers, not an institute of learning."

  "I never knew there were such schools for horse doctors," Moreau said, looking about him with lively interest. "What now, monsieur?"

  After a few inquiries, a student directed them to a lecture hall, where they slipped into the rear and waited for the instructor to conclude a talk on what was, apparently, common diseases of cattle. When the students had dispersed and the lecturer was gathering together his notes, Aristide stepped forward. "Monsieur Thierrot?"

  "Who are you?" the instructor said suspiciously.

  "My name's Ravel; we were told you might be able to help us. I need information, monsieur, about a man whose name I don't know. I believe he was a horse doctor but also a scholar-"

  "The correct term," Thierrot interrupted him, "is 'doctor of veterinary medicine,' if you please. Unless you mean some illiterate stablehand who attempts to treat peasants' nags for spavins."

  "Forgive me, a doctor of veterinary medicine. I hoped someone here would know of the man I mean. All I know is that he's a man of learning, knowledgeable about anatomy, who has perhaps lost his original livelihood for some reason. He evidently now earns his living preparing specimens as scientific curiosities-" He broke off as he realized the other man was nodding.

  "Not another word," Thierrot said, with the faintest suggestion of a smile. "I believe I know exactly whom you're talking about. Fragonard."

  "The painter?" Aristide said, startled, thinking of the cheap, popular engravings he had seen for sale at bookstalls along the Seine and at the Palais-Royal. But the dainty rococo images of pink-cheeked young ladies in lace-bedecked gowns, flirting in lush gardens with plump, perfectly coiffed gentlemen, seemed a world away from the horrid, flayed monkey's corpse in Beaupr?au's collection.

  "They're related. First cousins, I believe."

  "He was a student here? Did you know him?"

  "He was no student, monsieur; Honor? Fragonard was professor of anatomy here, and the school's first director. He came from the veterinary school at Lyon at Monsieur Bourgelat's request when we first began here, twenty years ago. Brilliant man. He didn't last long, though."

  "Why not, monsieur?" Moreau inquired.

  "Because he was mad," Thierrot said succinctly.

  Aristide raised an eyebrow. "Don't the countryfolk hereabout say that you're all mad?"

  "Oh, no, monsieur, I assure you we're men of science and quite sane, but Fragonard-well, as I said, the man was brilliant, but he was a brilliant madman. Not a case for the lunatic asylum, of course, but?call it eccentricity, immoderate single-mindedness, if you wish. Monsieur Bourgelat-he's the one who founded the school-and Fragonard didn't get along at all." He thrust the last of his notes and papers into a satchel. "Bourgelat wasn't even a physician, he was a lawyer. A normal sort of dabbler in science and letters, quite erudite, a member of the Academy of Sciences, even, but not one to ever get his hands dirty in a dissection room."

  "How did such a man found a school like this one?" Aristide said.

  "In the usual way. Influence."

  "But the greater part of the studies here would be in dissection, wouldn't it?"

  "Bourgelat was clever enough to obtain royal patronage, of course," Thierrot said, "and to impress influential people at court; while Fragonard was obsessed with his research, and had no patience for administration or for flattering courtiers. And since much of the work that Fragonard did wasn't even the normal sort of work that was expected of him, Bourgelat finally dismissed him."

  "Would it be possible to have a word with this Monsieur Bourgelat?"

  "Sorry, he died a few years ago. But if you want to know about Fragonard, you might as well talk to me. I was a student and assistant of his, for a while."

  "Why was he dismissed, if he was so brilliant?" Moreau said.

  "You want to know?" said Thierrot, glancing from Aristide to Moreau and back again. "I'll show you. Come with me, messieurs. Neither of you are students of medicine, I imagine?I hope you both have steady nerves?"

  He led the way outside and to another building on the grounds, one with exceptionally high, wide casement windows that ran the length of the walls. "Fragonard was, as I said, a professor of anatomy, both animal and human," he continued as he ushered them inside an airy, echoing two-story foyer and they climbed a broad flight of stairs to the first floor. "But he wasn't nearly as interested in lecturing as he was in dissecting and preparing specimens. You know, don't you, that most self-respecting doctors, at least all but the youngest and most broadminded ones, wouldn't dream of touching corpses of any kind? That an assistant performs the actual dissection during a lecture, while the professor oversees him and indicates the points of interest to the students? Well, Fragonard had such a passion for anatomy that he didn't care what anyone might think of him; his favorite place was the dissecting room."

  "Should that make him a madman?"

  "Wait and see," Thierrot said. They reached the top of the long flight and he unlocked the door on the landing. "This, messieurs, is our collection of anatomical specimens, known as the royal cabinet of curiosities. We have nearly three thousand pieces," he added, with a touch of pride. "Normal specimens, diseased specimens, freaks of nature. Many are genuine organs and tissue; a few are models in wax or plaster. Fragonard and his students, I among them, preserved most of these."

  "Lord save us," Moreau muttered, glancing about.

  Aristide stared. Glass cases, eight or nine feet high, crowded a huge room, high and wide as a church. In the case nearest to him, the bloated intestines of cattle or horses, inflated and dried, looked like monstrous sausages. All around them were kidneys, lungs, stomachs, and other organs he could not name, dried or pickled, displayed like a parody of a butcher shop. A life-size plaster model of a skinless horse, muscles neatly labeled, stood frozen in mid-step in another case. A few paces farther, row upon row of shelves held dozens of tall jars like those in Beaupr?au's study, in which mysterious objects floated in spirits or brine.

  " 'The royal cabinet of curiosities'?" he said. "I grant you it's fascinating, monsieur, but I doubt any king or queen would ever want to set foot within a mile of this place."

  "As I said," Thierrot continued, "Fragonard was devoted to preserving anatomical specimens for scientific study. And he was extraordinarily gifted at it. These pieces are invaluable to our students." He pointed to a young man in the next room, who was perched on a stool in front of a case and busily scribbling notes. "You're about to say that all of this makes Fragonard an accomplished man of science and a talented practitioner of the anatomical and medical arts, not a madman, doesn't it?"

  Aristide nodded. "I should think so."

  "He was both man of science and madman, messieurs; I assure you." He strode on through the display rooms, past the glass jars and a dozen mounted skeletons that Aristide realized, as they passed, were of deformed lambs, goats, and calves, some hideously misshapen,
some with two heads, some with one head and two conjoined bodies, others with extra limbs that splayed out at grotesque angles.

  "You see, despite his devotion to creating and preserving anatomical pieces, Fragonard wasn't satisfied with that. A scientific specimen is a useful object, and I daresay has its own sort of beauty for the student of medicine, but Fragonard felt compelled to create more than objects of study with his cadavers. I think, myself, that within him the soul of a physician warred continually with that of an artist."

  "An artist!" Aristide echoed him.

  "Yes, monsieur, an artist. Perhaps he took after his cousin more than we'd like to admit." Thierrot reached another set of high double doors and unlocked them. "Take a look in here, and tell me if you don't think the man who created these was at least a little mad." He threw open the doors and gestured Aristide inside.

  Beside him, Moreau muttered "Jesus Christ!" under his breath and crossed himself.

  Having already seen the monkey in Beaupr?au's collection, Aristide thought he was prepared for what was within, but he could not help taking a step backward at the sight of the thing that stood before him in a tall glass case. Like an angry guard at the gateway to the underworld, the creature-no, not an ape, it had once been human, a full-grown man-stood menacingly in his path, hairless head thrown slightly back, fixing him with a glassy, lidless, furious gaze.

  The dissected, dehydrated cadaver had been deliberately posed, with one fist clenched, the other raised to shoulder height and forever clutching a great ivory club that Aristide recognized belatedly as the jawbone of some large animal. "Samson," he whispered, recalling the tale of the biblical strongman who had wielded the jawbone of an ass as a weapon. This was no mere scientific specimen for study, he realized immediately, though he could not bring himself to say the word "sculpture."

  And yet it was, undoubtedly, a masterpiece of the anatomist's art, and more. The skin was gone; layers of dry muscle peeled delicately away from the shoulders, arms, and legs, revealing sinews and long bones beneath, all of it the dull, desiccated brownish yellow of dead leaves. Within the gaping chest cavity, the heart, the color of old blood, hung amid a nest of swollen, twisting blue and red vessels that snaked and branched off toward the limbs and up the neck to wreathe the skull.

  "He called them ?corch?s, stripped figures," Thierrot said softly, "like the ones you'll see in an anatomy book for studying musculature?"

  "I expect no one ever imagined that they'd exist anywhere but on an engraver's plate, though," Aristide said, feeling a slight tremor in his voice. "How did he do it?"

  "We soaked the cadavers in warm water," said Thierrot, "and drained and flayed them. Then, after dissection, he treated the flesh and some of the organs with a special preservative mixture he'd come up with himself, a sort of varnish made of resin, spirits, and so on; and finally they were posed in a brick oven with a slow fire, to dry out. He injected the larger blood vessels with colored wax, so you can tell the arteries from the veins."

  Aristide slowly stepped past the horrible figure and glanced about. More ?corch?s, animals both familiar and exotic, stood together as if in a menagerie: a goat with four horns, an African antelope, a strange, long-necked creature that seemed like something halfway between the pictures he had seen of both camels and giraffes. Their heads turned inquiringly toward him, their parched flesh seeming to spring away from their skeletons. The animal specimens were less unsettling, he thought, than the man with the jawbone. On a shelf behind them, a quartet of small figures resembling Beaupr?au's monkey stood posed at odd angles, their tiny skulls exploding outward in bony points, arms and legs raised frozen forever, locked in a grisly dance of death.

  He looked more closely and saw that these were not monkeys but human fetuses.

  Above and below on the shelves were more human specimens, preserved in the same fashion: detached arms and legs, illustrating every tendon and sinew that worked the muscles and joints; a delicate, treelike network of the nervous system; the head and shoulders of a man, teeth bared beneath nearly fleshless lips, blackish veins bulging all across it like an overgrowth of vines, the whole looking like a travesty of an antique marble bust.

  "Some are purely for study, of course," said Thierrot. "The limbs and busts and so on. But how are you to explain why he would mount others in such lifelike poses, unless he really imagined he was creating something approaching a work of art?"

  "Art's forbidden in the halls of science, is that it, monsieur?" Moreau said, with a feeble attempt at humor. Thierrot coughed.

  "When it's created from human remains? From the corpses of stillborn infants?"

  "He could still claim, I imagine, that all these figures are suitable for anatomical study," Aristide said.

  "Suitable, yes?but there was no need, shall we say, to set them dancing. As a student, I admired Fragonard's knowledge and his scholarship; but I cannot quite approve of its application. And he knew exactly what he was doing." Thierrot pointed at the nightmarish face of the full-sized figure. "Do you see how the glass eyes are placed-a little askew, wall-eyed? He told us he was setting them that way intentionally, to make the figure's gaze more disturbing to the viewer." He shook his head and gestured toward the last room. "In there, messieurs, you'll find the final piece in the royal cabinet of curiosities, and then perhaps you'll agree with me about Monsieur Fragonard."

  Not even the figure of the man with the jawbone could have prepared Aristide for what waited within. It was certain, he thought, staring, that the final and most astonishing ?corch? had never been produced for earnest medical study. Rather, it was a wild, feverish fantasy created to astound and terrify: a horse and rider, exposed tendons straining, the steed petrified in mid-stride as it galloped toward eternity.

  " 'And his name was Death-' " he could not help murmuring.

  As a touch of realism, or black humor, or both, the figure clutched a riding whip in one skeletal hand and, in the other, a pair of blue velvet ribbons that served as reins. And his own army of the damned surrounded him; half a dozen diminutive ?corch?s, the skinned, dissected carcasses of sheep, goats, and foals, and their miniature riders-more of the grotesque, shriveled human fetuses-marched in formation around the galloping horse.

  " '-and he rode a pale horse?' "

  "You have it in one, monsieur," said Thierrot. "Fragonard named this piece The Cavalier of the Apocalypse. Though usually it goes by the less sensational title of The Anatomized Cavalier," he added repressively.

  The Cavalier was very young, perhaps a boy. His fixed gaze stared out through the same eerie glass eyes as those of the fierce figure clutching the jawbone, but Aristide thought suddenly that his face, though nearly fleshless, bore a strange serenity in the midst of so much ghoulishness.

  War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death?the horsemen of the apocalypse. The Cavalier might have been any of them, or all of them together.

  Thierrot cleared his throat. "Most of our specimens were animals and stillborn babies, of course, owing to the difficulty of obtaining cadavers. When he did get a full-grown human cadaver?by whatever means?Fragonard tended to reserve it for something special, like the Cavalier. I have never seen him so excited as on the day when this cadaver arrived," he continued, "and we had chanced to have the horse in the dissecting room, in excellent condition, the day before. Have you seen enough, messieurs?"

  "Yes," said Aristide, "I've seen enough." He followed Thierrot back through the collection rooms and down the staircase, lost in thought.

  "So," Thierrot said, evidently eager to be off, "can I be of further service to you, monsieur?"

  "I wonder if you can tell me how I might speak with Monsieur Fragonard. He's still alive, isn't he?"

  "Oh, yes. Yes, I'm sure of it. I've heard a few rumors that he's still preparing models and ?corch?s to order for private collections, and apparently doing quite well for himself."

  "Any idea where we could find him?"

  "Well, he's no longer there, but you might ask at the house o
f Em?ry, the notary, in the village. Fragonard lodged with him for a few months after he was dismissed; many of his students didn't want to see him go, and they would slip out of the grounds to seek his advice. Perhaps Em?ry can tell you where he went."

  "Monsieur Ravel," Moreau said, after they had thanked Thierrot, "do you think, then, that we'll find Monsieur Alexis in the company of this Fragonard?"

  "Possibly," Aristide said absently. He stared down the avenue of trees at the village, without seeing it, as their saddle horses stamped and blew beside them in the icy air.

  The notary Em?ry, who proved to be an enthusiastic amateur student of medical and scientific matters, was eager to provide Aristide with the forwarding address that Fragonard had given him when he had left Alfort. "Rue de Bellefond; that's in the north of Paris," Moreau said, glancing at the address the notary wrote down for them.

  "Yes indeed," said Em?ry, beaming, "he said his new lodgings were in a house quite at the edge of the city, near the road to Mont-Martre, with outbuildings he could use as workshops. He seemed pleased with them. It's possible, you know, that being dismissed from the Veterinary School was actually a stroke of good fortune for him."

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