The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (13 page)

‘If only you knew how unworthy I am of all this! My Lord God, must I tell him everything? Bertholin, if you only knew you would drive me out of house and home!’

Bertholin was petrified.

‘Listen to me! Was it you who were responsible for my crime? Look!!!’

With these words she tore off her shawl and her pleated dress which concealed her pregnancy.

‘Look carefully! Do I have to tell you the nature of my shame!’

‘What abomination is this? You! Pregnant! Apolline? How could you have so abused my generosity?

‘This then is the girl that from the goodness of my heart I chose to marry! A nobody whom I would have raised on to a plinth! A common prostitute!’

‘No, no! Not that! never that!’ cried Apolline, grovelling at his feet. ‘In God’s name, listen to me! Then kill me if you wish, but in God’s name first hear the truth!’

‘Out of my sight, you shameless …’

‘God knows my innocence and your guilt. I was pure when I met you.’

‘You vile creature!’

‘And I was pure when you asked me to marry you. You are the one responsible for this. Listen to me!

‘The evening before you left, you asked me for a rendezvous upstairs in my apartment which I granted you. At nine o’clock someone knocked on my door. I opened it in the dark: I was sure it was you, Bertholin. The villain imitated your voice and completely took me in. I gave in after a long struggle, believing the man to be you. He raped me!’

‘Stop lying, Apolline!’

‘Believe me! In the name of Jesus and on the grave of my mother, believe me!

‘Enough of your lies!’

‘This is how you treat me! I thought I was surrendering my honour to you! It is all your fault.’

‘You lie!’

‘You must have lost my letter. It could only have been one of your friends.’

‘I will not listen to any more of this! Get out of my sight! Do you take me for an idiot? What a narrow escape I’ve had! Throwing myself at the feet of a common whore! Get out of my sight I say before I kick you down the stairs! Go on, get out before I kill you!’

Apolline lay on the floor groaning.

Bertholin grabbed hold of her by the feet and dragged her to the door. Then he in turn went out.

Nothing is more demoralising than injustice, nothing gives rise to more bitterness and hatred in the heart. Bertholin seemed unjust to Apolline, Apolline seemed culpable to Bertholin, as indeed she would to anyone. All that is needed to make the purest look guilty is a singular set of circumstances. It is only on the basis of the probable and the apparent that men bereft of a sixth sense are able to sit in judgment over other men. Crimes may be compared with sealed jury returns. The judge guesses the verdict by the shape of the bundle. But if, during sentencing, he declares it null and void, and consigns the bundle to the waves, and if the bundle then breaks open during its fall against a rock, at that momentl all is plainly revealed, laid out on a reef just beyond the reach of the water. The bungling of the court becomes patently obvious; the mob jeers sarcastically. Meanwhile, the judge stands on his dignity, and in a ludicrously pontifical tone declares: ‘Judicial infallibility!’

Overwhelmed by a mortal sadness, Apolline wasted away day after day in silence.

She, whom a few months earlier had been so beautiful, became thin, consumptive, a ghost, only going out after nightfall in order to avoid the gaze of scandal-mongers.

The neighbourhood would have taken her for dead if, from time to time, she had not played a dilapidated piano, which also served as a table, a sad relic of her former opulence. It was even remarked, and the words noted down, that she seemed to prefer one stanza, which she chanted languorously, more than any other.

It’s time this torture reached an end!

Its evil’s turned my heart to stone:

I hate God, nature, my best friend,

My loathsome dreams I now disown! …

Before this wheel can sign my death

And make a broken corpse of me,

I’ll dedicate my soul’s last breath

To Satan for eternity …

This refrain of itself clearly indicates Apolline’s mental condition, and how suffering and misfortune can pervert the noblest soul. Sweet, good, devoted, loving and religious as she was, her breast harboured only rancour and her mouth was filled with venom. She loathed everything, and even abjured her very creator. She avenged herself by abandoning the God who had forsaken her. When a human being has been as ill-treated as this, one should expect nothing from their lips except a mocking, Satanic peal of laughter; the whole of life, provokes only their pity and disgust; the more a thing is sacred and holy, the more it is revered by all and sundry, the greater their joy in profaning it and treading it in the mud. For such wretches blasphemy is a pleasure.

As her term approached its conclusion, her misery knew no bounds. For eight months she had eked out an existence on the meagre sum given her by Bertholin. It was all gone. In the evenings she was forced to pull up wild plants from the side of deserted roads, but this food, fit only for donkeys, quite unsuitable for someone of delicate constitution, had so weakened her that by the end of the ninth month she hardly had the strength to leave her room. Her fast, which was almost complete, made her dizzy, and caused an inflammation of the brain which occasionally plunged her into madness. She began to contemplate suicide. She suffered from terrible stomach cramps, sometimes taking the form of epileptic fits. When she felt the first pains of childbirth, nothing had passed her lips for two entire days. Stretched on her sick bed, devoured by hunger, she gnawed the leather binding of an old book, utterly deprived of her senses …

*

At the sight of her baby, her madness returned with renewed vigour. Lumbering to her feet, she would kiss him and strike him with her hand for no reason; she offered him her empty breasts; threw him across the floor; began to cry; lay down over him.

Finally, wrapping him in a cloth and holding him under her arm like a package, she dragged herself down to the street.

It was dark.

At two o’clock in the morning, Herman Busembaum, a smallholder from Vaugirard, was perched on his cart whistling a carol as he made his way down the Rue du Four to the market. As he passed one of the dark, filthy alleys that run into the main thoroughfare, he heard the wailing of a new-born infant. He stopped whistling, gasped to himself in his heavy Provençal accent, and listened. The cries seemed to emerge from a nearby drain. He jumped down from his cart, put his ear to the opening, and drew back in fright.

He immediately dashed off to alert the guards at the Abbaye prison of this strange event. The senior officer happened to be present, taking the details of two prostitutes who had just been arrested for stabbing one of their clients. Quickly putting himself at the head of a patrol, Herman Busembaum guided the corporal who carried the lantern. When they arrived at the drain a few moments later, a profound silence reigned except for the sound of rushing water. The soldier, a born joker, started to mock Busembaum for his preternatural auditory powers, which he put down to fear; the senior officer was equally ready to deliver a dressing down to the oaf who had caused him an unnecessary journey; when the wails recommenced louder than before. The patrol flinched; and the sound even rocked the bells of the Capuchin convent. The NCO who carried the lantern approached the sewer outlet and glimpsed a white object near the front from which the wailing was emerging. One of the soldiers pulled it out with his bayonet. Then Busembaum and the commanding officer played at Pharaoh’s daughter and unwrapped the linen to reveal a new-born baby.

‘By all the gods, that’s one conscript who has escaped the glasshouse!’ exclaimed the patrol.

‘Poor little thing,’ repeated the tender-hearted old Busembaum.

‘Some children would be better off born without parents,’ muttered the nice corporal.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the perspicacious officer, assuming the pose of a caliph, ‘a crime has been committed. Let us investigate!’ He began by examining the baby, who showed no signs of injury.

To the grand satisfaction of the army, after a conscientious examination, which the Academy of Sciences could have only ratified, the baby was pronounced by majority vote to be either masculine or neuter. A smile crept across Busembaum’s lips.

‘What do you intend to do with the little imp?’ he asked the officer in charge. ‘My wife’s expecting again at the moment. She’s already lost two, this will be her third. Why don’t you let me give her this one right now as a substitute. She’ll look after it well enough, and later on we can see about adopting it.’

Even as he was lifting up the baby to put it in the cart, it stiffened and died. At that moment, the senior officer noticed a trail of blood going up the street and he ordered the patrol to follow it. Although a long way apart, it was not difficult to follow the spots. They lost track of them at the intersection with the Rue Beurrière, but they found them again in the alley which leads into Rue du Vieux-Colombier; then they pursued them all the way along the Rue Cassette until, at last, they ended in front of a door.

‘This is the place, men,’ said the officer. He hammered furiously on the door.

‘Open, in the name of the Law,’ repeated the corporal, banging on the door with the butt of his musket.

The terrified concierge promptly obeyed:

‘In the name of God, what’s all this about?’

‘Lead the way. We intend to search the premises. Wait! Here’s some more blood. Follow me.’

They climbed the stairs by the entrance. The trail ended by a door at the end of the corridor on the top floor.

‘Who lives here?’

‘A nice, quiet young lady.’

‘Open, in the name of the Law. Corporal, break down this door!’

The door gave way almost at once, and the patrol eagerly peered into the room where, by the glimmer of a lantern, a girl, pale and wasted, lay on the floor bathed in a pool of blood.

They raised her to her feet. She was still warm.

On her return, Apolline, overwhelmed with weakness after her long expedition and exhausted by such a considerable loss of blood, had collapsed.

She was carried on a stretcher to the Maternity Hospital, which is commonly known as
La Bourbe
.
⁸

All over Paris the next day the only subject of gossip was a child thrown down a sewer. The town crier marched ceremoniously across the city, bawling and selling for a sou the precise details of the horrible infanticide committed in the Faubourg Saint-Germain evidently by some wealthy lady.

This event caused a great stir amongst the bourgeoisie, who were always avid for a public trial and who only wanted to get to the bottom of the story. Vindictive to the core, they were already enjoying the rare spectacle of a girl descended from the nobility in the dock and then on the scaffold.

At the hospital, it was feared at first that Apolline would not recover. But at the behest of the lawyers – who were afraid that death would deliver a verdict in their absence and so rob them, and the executioner, of their fees – she was given such careful treatment that by the end of about a week she was beginning to recover her strength and had even regained consciousness.

She was very surprised and upset to find herself in a hospital ward. Just like a drunkard coming round in the morning with absolutely no memory of the follies committed in his cups, she had not the slightest recollection of what she had done or what had happened. Her questions received only the vaguest of answers.

When her health was fully restored, she was told that she was being transferred to La Force prison.

‘La Force!’ she exclaimed. ‘Whatever for?’

‘On a charge of infanticide.’

‘I? You must all be mad!’

‘Did you not throw your child down a sewer!’

Speechless, Apolline pressed her hands against her womb and, as if suddenly waking from a dream, collapsed in a dead faint on the flagstones.

When she regained her senses, she was alone in a narrow and gloomy cell.

There were delays in bringing her case to trial. Eventually, after four months of proximity with all that is most foul and stench-ridden in the mire of civilisation, she made her first appearance in the court of Assizes. Her scandalous crime attracted a great crowd of the curious anxious to see the beautiful but unnatural mother of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Indeed, the reputation of her beauty was matched only by that of her ferocity. The windows of the print shops were decked out with fictitious portraits of the charming Apolline just as authentic as those of Héloïse or Joan of Arc: one recalled Madame de la Vallière, another Charlotte Corday, a third Josephine. But the public, quite content to be fooled at any price, was well satisfied. The palace was as packed as if the entire legal fraternity had taken it into their heads to act out a mystery play in the foyer. A general murmur of disappointment arose when the ushers announced that the judges had ordered the public to be excluded from the proceedings.

Before long, Apolline was brought into court. Her grace and youth, her sad and disingenuous manner, the softness of her voice and her erect bearing all made a strong impression on the blasé courtroom.

In order not to implicate Bertholin, she had declared that a man, a complete stranger to her, had slipped into her room one night and raped her. As for the crime with which she was charged, she admitted that she might have committed it, but she had no particular memory of having done so; furthermore, having deprived herself of food or water for several days before her labours had begun, she must have been in a state of complete insanity.

Of the five doctors called in to testify as to her mental state at the time she gave birth, only one supported the plea of insanity, the other four denying it.

At the moment when the public prosecutor, M. de l’Argentière, rose to his feet and began to intone the case against her, Apolline, suddenly remembering where she had heard his voice before, turned her eyes on him, uttered a piercing shriek and fainted.

Never was a prosecutor’s arraignment more violent and inhuman. There was nothing that M. de l’Argentière did not twist round in order to damn the accused all the more thoroughly. In his rage he went so far as to compare her with Saturn devouring his children and concluded by demanding her head.