The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (29 page)

With a true story, the teller’s merit probably counts for little. If his imagination should intervene, the resulting embroidery is very apt to spoil the essential structure for me. Its overriding artifice lies in being hidden behind its subject. When one scrutinises, it must illuminate; when one questions, it must give proof. With this, emotion increases, like that of the spectator at some play of illusions, when his hand reaches out automatically to push away a spectre and, with a chill of horror, finds it upon a living body which quivers and cries out. But in this relation the story of Hélène Gillet would require a volume of written developments, and I have a capital reason to forego this, it having been done, and excellently so, by one of the most learned men of the time in which we are living.
¹
He has taken as his sources the documents in the eleventh volume of Richer and Renaudot’s old
Mercure françois
, those in the
Life of the Abbess of Notre-Dame of Tart
, Madame Courcelle de Pourlans, and from original manuscripts in the office of records and the town hall of Dijon. With the result that there is no better demonstration, no more exact dissection, nor anything more exhaustive in detail than these lively and colourful testimonies taken down by the recording clerk of the court of assizes. This book by my friend is, by the way, one which I can recommend to you.

This, then, is plainly what I promised you: a fireside tale, one of those narrations whose occasional longueurs you will forgive me once you become absorbed. A
true story of the fantastic
, composed and recited after my fashion with as few liberties as the imagination might take in its setting out of an extraordinary picture which it would never have ventured to invent. So stoke up those burning brands, rock the children in your arms lest they wake, close up the backgammon board, if you please, and gather your chairs around while I tell you what I still have to say before I begin.

What I must warn you of is this: well nigh all of the story of Hélène takes place upon a stage which revolts those of a delicate constitution even at the sight of it, and in order to write I have had to overcome the revulsion in my own heart. If you are inured by the dramas or the novels of our own day to impressions of a certain kind, you will be able to follow me now without any danger. If not, go over to the piano, and make a circle apart, or entertain yourselves with pleasing thoughts of homely sprites as you kindle sparks and showers of flame amid the blaze. You have been duly warned.

In 1624, the manorial lord or royal judge of Bourg-en-Bresse, at the foot of our dear mountains of the Jura and the Bugey, was a man named Pierre Gillet, a noble, upright and severe man of good repute. He had a daughter whose name was Hélène, twenty-two years old and worshipped for her beauty, admired for her wit and accomplishments, and respected for her piety and virtue. Hélène was scarcely ever seen but in church; yet for a wicked mind, the church itself is a place of wicked thoughts. She had the misfortune to be loved by one of those violent men who sacrifice everything to their passion, including the woman who is its object, when they are without hope of marrying or winning her, and I would tell you this man’s name had his story but told it to me. Lured to the house of a treacherous woman friend bent on her downfall, under the pretext of some act of Christian charity, there, like the victims of the Old Men of the Seven Mountains, she fell under the influence of a narcotic beverage. Heaven knows what dreams of perplexing and hitherto unexperienced sensuality she underwent in that time! The hapless woman was never able to recall them. In her innocence, she was ignorant of those pleasures which open the door to hell.

These happenings had left her only with a vague, remorseless melancholy, for no thought of wrongdoing intervened in her memories. Nevertheless the derisive whispers of passers-by, the coarse laughter of libertines, the keen, penetrating eyes of old women, sharpened by a bitter curiosity, and above all the desertion of her dearest everyday companions gradually alerted her to the knowledge that in the eyes of the world her reputation was cast down and that society rejected her. Before long there was but one friend left to her, and she hid her head in the arms of her mother to weep, because she had nothing to confess to her. The enigma of her misfortune had scarcely begun to be revealed to her mind when she was seized by the pangs of childbirth, or rather she fell into a long swoon caused by shame, despair and grief. This was yet another dream, an indistinct dream of which she preserved no more notion than of the first. Now both wife and mother, all that she had of this twofold title was the opprobrium of being it with neither the permission of religion nor that of the law. These two great blessings of nature, for which women give their all, had been for Hélène but arid sufferings whose horror nothing redeemed, not even the memory of a moment’s intoxication, not even the smile of an innocent creature awakening to life! She had never known a lover, nor did she come to know her child.

What occurred, while she was still stupefied by that slumbering of the senses which resembles death, but is not its like, a young man who had long awaited the time of the secret confinement, and had been there ever since daybreak, entered Hélène’s chamber, passing her exhausted mother and an old sleeping servant. He ran to the bed, for no cradle had been made ready, wrapped the newborn in the first linen that came to hand, deposited a hurried kiss upon the brow of she who lay there sick or dead, and then disappeared. Investigation proved without doubt that he was a student from the neighbourhood of Bourg, ‘lodging with a certain uncle of his’, and had been occupied for some months as tutor to Hélène’s young brothers. He was never to be found.

When Hélène woke and discovered all her wretchedness, she doubtless sought her child, who was there no longer. She dared not ask for the child, for it did not seem to her right that she should have one. And all of this accumulated in her mind with the fitfulness of a vision.

Nonetheless, as time went by she reappeared in the town and the church, accompanied by her mother, as she had done in the past. It was remarked only that she seemed unwell, that her belly had lost its firmness and that her features bore a strange expression of astonishment and terror. Like all powerful men, the châtelain of Bourg-en-Bresse had enemies; but this sweet and lovely Hélène had no enemies at all. For some days there were unpleasant conjectures seized upon and bruited abroad, but soon these were no longer spoken of. The investigation begun by the law in cognisance of these rumours among the people had been summarily halted for want of evidence. Hélène knew, however, that her unfortunate destiny had not run its course, and that Providence had more rigorous trials in store for her. But she resigned herself to this unwaveringly at the foot of altars, because she was blameless and had faith in God.

Now it happened that a soldier who was walking outside the town while waiting for his mistress, was struck by the behaviour of a crow which repeatedly swooped down to the base of a particular wall, disturbing and pecking at the ground with his beak and scattering the earth under its feet, then flying up again towards the branches carrying shreds of bloodied linen. It would then hop from limb to limb of the tree with neck outstretched and eyes fixed upon the spot to which it had already descended, before dropping down again like a stone to recommence its scrabblings. The soldier drew nearer, shooed it away with the back of his sabre, with the tip of his weapon widened the hole that the crow had begun to dig out, and lifted from it the corpse of a child swaddled in the rags of a chemise marked with the name of Hélène Gillet. Thereupon the tribunal reopened its inquiries and according to a judgement of 6 February 1625, Hélène Gillet was sentenced, as an infanticide, to have her head cut off, for we know that our poor Hélène was noble, and in those days it was believed that steel ennobled suffering. It has since become more a thing of the people.

Hélène’s lawyer appealed against this judgement to the Dijon parliament. For Hélène’s family took no steps, and the old châtelain even made it a deliberate prohibition that she should ever be spoken of to him again, so much could the severity of law and custom in this Roman heart prevail over the softest of natural inclinations. Two archers took her from Bourg-en-Bresse to the conciergerie of the Grand Duke’s palace, with no other companion but an unhappy woman who had not wished to leave her. I have scarcely any need to tell you that this was her mother.

It was not that Madame Gillet set much store by the effect of her tears on their lordships the judges of la Pournelle. Too little time had passed since her fruitless efforts with their lordships the judges of the tribunal. She did set store by one judge who, when he wills, revokes earthly judgements, and in whom the wretched have never placed their hope in vain; but this pious woman did not believe herself worthy of communication with God unless she had an intermediary. She had therefore recently taken herself to the convent of the Bernardines of Dijon, under the protection of the prayers of the community, and in particular of her noble kinswoman, Mother Jeanne de Saint-Joseph, who had given up the name of Courcelle de Pourlans to become the abbess of the holy monastery. It was a truly sublime spectacle, one made to draw down the benediction of the Lord, if ever our vain sorrows manage to reach him, to see these virgins prostrate upon the flagstones of the choir, plaintive and weeping as they implored his compassion for an unwed mother proclaimed by the law to be guilty of murdering her child, compelled as they were to give voice in their thoughts, so as to disarm the vengeance of Heaven, to the almost blasphemous words which designate who knows what hidden crimes. Madame Gillet was not on her knees like the rest, but stretched out face down on the ground, and one would have believed her dead had she not released a sob.

It must be said all the same, since no one would imagine it, that something was missing from the solemnity of this imposing ceremony. One of the nuns had failed to appear: Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit, who formerly in the world was called Madame de Longueval, and whose infirmities had now for many years prevented her from making her way down to the sanctuary. At this time she was more than ninety-two years old, if we are to believe the hagiographies, which have her die in 1633 at more than a hundred years old, in the odour of sanctity. Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit had fallen, in vulgar parlance, into that state of grace and innocence which leads the old back to the sweet unknowingness of children. All that she knew now of the things of ordinary life were those which related to the other life, for she was already living in that eternity into which her days had now passed, and, since her manner of speaking was already gradually marked by a knowledge of the future, the great minds of the day feared for her reason; but within the convent of the Bernardines her words were still accorded the status of revelations from on high. Why would not God have granted a glimpse of His mysterious plans to those souls tested by long exercise of virtue? As I narrate this tale now, I myself would ask nothing more than to believe this. Happily Hélène’s mother did believe it.

She left the sanctuary only to make her way up to the cell where Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit rested on a sack of straw, both her hands devoutly crossed over a crucifix. Since she thought that the sister was asleep, because she was still, Madame Gillet knelt down in a corner, holding her breath so as not to wake her. But it was not long before she heard her name being called. The hand of Sister Françoise groped towards her, for the saintly old woman was scarcely able to see. Madame Gillet took hold of it and respectfully pressed her lips against it. ‘Good, good,’ said Madame de Longueval, with an ineffable smile, ‘you are the mother of that poor child for whom our sisters prayed this morning. I make it known to you that she is a pure soul, chosen before the Lord, and that he has deigned to listen to the prayers of his servants, and that your child shall not die by the executioner’s hand, for Hélène is called to live out a long life of much edification.’ Having reached the end of these words, Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit seemed to forget that there was someone with her and returned to her customary meditations.

It was now – on Monday 12 May, the last session of their lordships’ parliament – that the report of the counsellor Jacob was being heard in the matter of the appeal of the Bourg sentence. The judgement was confirmed unanimously and in one detail made worse. The court ordered that the condemned woman should be led to her ordeal with a noose around her neck, in order to bear witness by this dishonour the enormity of her crime. The execution was to take place without delay and the unhappy Hélène was to be taken directly from the courtroom to the scaffold. Word of the outcome of the hearing soon reached the convent of the Bernardines. The sisters were to be seen without further ado filling the chapels, lighting all the candles, laying bare all the relics, beating their brows upon every altar and making a babel of prayers, lamentations and cries, as age and feeling dictated. Mother Jeanne de Saint-Joseph ran, in tears, from the nave to the choir, and from the choir to the cell of Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit, where Madame Gillet had fallen to her knees at the foot of the prie-Dieu with neither voice nor wailing nor tears. ‘I have told you nonetheless,’ Sister Françoise repeated, her serenity unaltered, ‘that this young girl will not die, and that long after us she will be praying for us on earth; for this is the will of Our Lord.’ Then she went back to her contemplation of the sky, as if it had opened up before her; and Mother Jeanne de Saint-Joseph looked for reasons to hope. As for Madame Gillet, her attention was no longer upon this scene; she no longer saw nor heard, nor felt.

Suddenly, however, she started up with a cry of horror, for she had just been stirred from her swoon by the blasts of the trumpet which called the soldiers to the dreadful sacrifice – and the very trumpet of judgement day will not grip the soul of the resurrected wrongdoer with a deeper dread. She raised herself up, her hands on the floor, listening with a mute and ghastly attention to the proclamation of her beloved Hélène’s death, and the proclamation was renewed as it drew nearer to the convent. Gradually other sounds mingled with it, that of the steady drumming of horses’ hooves which rang out over the cobblestones, rising from moment to moment, like a stormy gust of wind, above the hubbub of the multitude. ‘There she is! There she is!’ shouted a thousand voices which formed but one, and Madame Gillet once again lost consciousness, for she realised it was her daughter going by.