The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (31 page)

‘What a marvel of our time that a girl of this age should have tussled with death face to face, struggled with that towering force on the site of his most bloody executions, in the very field of his Morimont! And, for brevity’s sake, we can say that, armed only with the trust she had in God, she overcame ignominy and fear, the executioner and the blade, the rope and the scissors, strangulation and death! After this mortal triumph, what remains to her but gloriously to sing out that canticle which henceforth she shall take as hers:
Exaltetur Dominus Deus meus, quoniam superexaltavit misericordia judicium
. What can she do, as an everlasting memorial to her salvation, but hang the votive picture of her ordeal within the sanctuary of this temple of justice? What more fitting intention can she conceive for her state than to build an altar in her heart, where every day of her life she shall admire the powerful hand of her liberator, the means unknown to men whereby he broke the chains of her captivity and the nature of his providential favour in overseeing that everything was brought about for her liberation? …’

I have selected this passage from among many others that are no less exceptional because it gives a concise account of everything which it remains to me to say about the life of Hélène Gillet. The destiny of meditation and prayer to which her lawyer seems here to call her to is the destiny which she made for herself. There is reason to believe that she did not re-enter the world, and perhaps that she did not leave the convent of the Bernardines until after the death of Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit. We know that she did become a nun in a convent in Bresse and that she had recently died there, ‘with much moral edification’, according to the promises of her holy protectress when, in 1699, Father Bourrée of the Oratoire published his
History of Mother Jeanne de Saint-Joseph
, Madame Courcelle de Pourlans, the abbess of Notre-Dame du Tart. We can suppose, by setting the dates together, that she was at the time at least ninety years old.

I have omitted or rather I have held back one very exceptional detail in order to conclude this long narration. It is this: that the letters of clemency for Hélène Gillet were granted in the council of Louis XIII ‘in honour of the happy marriage of the Queen of Great Britain, his very dear and much beloved sister, Henrietta-Maria of France’ and if you will permit me to recall once again the words of Charles Fevret, ‘while the king and his court were in the midst of days of happiness and festivity’. These days of
festivity
, whose happiness was so propitious for innocence, were in celebration of the wedding ceremony of Charles I, which concurred with the very day of Hélène’s execution on the Morimont square. Twenty-four years later, the head of Charles I fell at Whitehall under a more expert axe than that of Simon Grandjean, and the young girl of Bourg-en-Bresse had time to pray for the absolution of his soul for half a century. God’s purposes are impenetrable, and the heart of man is blind; but one does not need to have penetrated very far in this study of things bygone to recognise that there is something mysterious and symbolic at the heart of all these stories.

And since the most ordinary tales require a moral, you will not forbid me, ladies and gentlemen, from attaching such a thing to this one, one of the most extraordinary and yet most true, which you have ever heard related. The moral is that it is high time that humankind rejected with one voice that impious justice which has insolently usurped God’s power over the work of death, the work that God reserved for himself when he struck all our kind with a sentence of death which belonged to him alone. Oh! You are great makers of revolutions! You have made revolutions against all the moral and political institutions of society! You have made revolutions against all the laws! You have made them against the most intimate thoughts of the mind, against its affections, against its beliefs and its faith! You have made them against thrones, against altars and against monuments, against stones, against inanimate things, against death, against the grave and the dust of ancestors. You have made no revolution against the scaffold, for never has a human feeling prevailed, never has a human emotion throbbed in your savage revolutions! And you speak of your enlightenment! And you have no fear of proposing yourselves as models of the most refined civilisation! Dare I ask you where this civilisation lies? Might it happen to be in that hideous ghoul which sharpens a triangle of steel to cut off heads? Come now, you are barbarians!

As for you, my good friends, you are now to recall more pleasing stories, the ones that rocked us so gently by the banks of the Doubs river,
²
in our carriages laden with fruits and flowers and young women, while the nearby rocks brought us long echoing sounds of the bagpipes. Or on hearing them today, for I shall not hide it from you that, more than once, words failed me as the poet said, in the telling of this one. But we live in a time of harsh thoughts and gloomy expectations when goodly people may have need, like the noble populace of the Morimont, to form advance alliance against the executioner; and had it not killed the executioner, which is also a crime, I would gladly propose that you raise a monument to its courage.

It is wrong to kill anyone. It is wrong to kill those who kill. It is wrong to kill the executioner! The laws on murder must be killed! …

  
1
   Nodier refers here to Gabriel Peignot’s
Histoire de Hélène Gillet
(Dijon, 1829). Peignot’s study is largely based on the seventeenth-century sources Nodier refers to in the following sentence and elsewhere.

  
2
   
The Doubs
is a river to the south of Besançon near the Swiss border. Nodier was born in Besançon and the town and the surrounding region is never far from his thoughts.

Let me tell you about one of the oldest inhabitants of Paris; someone we used to call
le diable Vauvert
.

From which the proverb derives: ‘C’est au diable Vauvert! Allez au diable Vauvert!’ (
The devil Vauvert’s got it! Go ask the devil Vauvert!
)

In other words: why don’t you sod off!

Delivery men generally say: ‘C’est au diable aux vers!’ – by which they mean at the other end of the earth.

Or, to put it another way, the commission with which you wish to entrust them will not come cheap. But this is a bastardised and corrupt form, like so many commonly employed by the denizens of Paris.

Le diable Vauvert
is a typical resident of Paris, where he has lived for many centuries according to the historians. Sauval, Félibien, Sainte-Foix, and Dulaure recount his exploits at length.

He would seem to have lived originally in the castle of Vauvert on a site now occupied by the somewhat riotous Carthusian Dance Hall on the far side of the Luxembourg, facing the allée de l’Observatoire, in the rue d’Enfer.

This castle of unhappy memory was partially demolished and the ruins became an annex of the Carthusian monastery in which Jean de la Lune, nephew of the Antipope Benedict XIII, died in 1414. Jean de la Lune was suspected of having commerce with a certain devil who was, perhaps, the familiar spirit of the Vauvert castle. As every one knows, there is not a feudal edifice without its own familiar.

The historians have not bequeathed us any precise knowledge about this remarkable period.

The Vauvert devil only became a topic of conversation again during the reign of Louis XIII.

For some time a tremendous racket had been heard every evening coming from a house built out of the rubble of the old monastery, a house which had remained unoccupied for a number of years.

At this, the neighbours became extremely alarmed.

They informed the lieutenant of police, who dispatched some constables.

The astonishment of these men on hearing the chink of glasses accompanied by the sound of strident laughter can readily be imagined!

At first, the constables imagined they had stumbled on a party of drunken counterfeiters; and, fearing from the noise coming from the house that they were dealing with a large gang, ran off to summon help.

But when reinforcements arrived, they too decided that their number was insufficient; there was not a sergeant among them who dared lead his men into a den in which it sounded as if an entire army was celebrating.

Finally, towards dawn, a large body of troops arrived; the house was entered. But the police found nothing there.

The sun dispelled the shadows.

The investigation continued throughout the day and the police eventually concluded that the sounds had come from the catacombs which, we all know, are located underneath this district.

The police prepared to go down; but, while they were making their arrangements, night fell once more, and the noise recommenced louder than ever.

This time there was no-one who dared go in again because it was obvious that there was nothing in the cellar except bottles and, therefore, it could only be the devil who was making them dance.

The police contented themselves with manning the entrance to the street and asking the clergy for their prayers.

The priests conducted a host of prayers; and holy water was even squirted through the cellar’s air vent with syringes.

The noise continued as before.

For a whole week a crowd of Parisians, ever more restive and eager for news, obstructed the roads around this district.

At last, the district sergeant, more courageous than the rest, offered to investigate the haunted cellar in exchange for a pension payable to a dressmaker by the name of Margot in the case of his demise.

This worthy man’s love was greater than his credulity. He adored the dressmaker who, though she kitted herself out well, was also on the thrifty side – some would even say mean. She had no intention of marrying a mere sergeant whose only income was his small salary.

But if he won a pension the sergeant would be a different proposition.

Heartened by this prospect, the sergeant cried out that he believed in neither God nor the devil, and that he would track down the cause of the noise.

‘So you don’t you believe in ghosts?’ enquired one of his comrades.

‘I believe in the lieutenant of police and the mayor of Paris,’ he replied.

In short, he overstated the case.

Clenching his sabre between his teeth, and with a pistol in each hand, he ventured down the stairs.

When he reached the bottom step, a most extraordinary spectacle awaited him.

The bottles, performing the most graceful movements, were all engaged in an infernal saraband.

The green seals represented gentlemen and the red seals represented women.

There was even an orchestra set up on the bottle rack.

The empty bottles sounded like wind instruments, the broken bottles like cymbals and triangles, and the cracked bottles made a noise not unlike the distinctive harmony of violins.

The sergeant, who had downed several glasses of beer before setting out on his expedition, felt greatly reassured when he saw that the cellar contained only bottles and began to imitate their dance.

Then, increasingly encouraged by the gaiety of the spectacle, he gathered in his arms what appeared to be an attractive long-necked bottle of white Bordeaux, carefully sealed in red, and pressed it amorously against his heart.

Frenetic laughter arose from every side; the sergeant, amazed, let go of the bottle which broke into a thousand pieces.

The dancing ceased, screams issued from every corner of the cellar, and the sergeant felt the hair on his head rise when he saw that the spilled wine seem to form a pool of blood.

The body of a naked woman lay at his feet, her blonde hair spilling over the ground, bathed in the liquid.

The sergeant would not have been afraid of the devil in person, but this sight filled him with horror; and realising that he would have to give an account of his mission, he seized hold of a bottle with a green seal which seemed to be laughing derisively in front of him and shouted: ‘At least I’ve apprehended one of them!’

Tremendous mocking laughter answered him.

Meanwhile, he had climbed the stairs and, waving the bottle at his comrades, he cried out:

‘Here’s your hobgoblin! You must feel proper fools’ – he employed a coarser expression – ‘for not daring to raid a wine-cellar!’

His sarcasm was galling. The constables pressed into the cellar, where they found a single broken bottle of Bordeaux. All the other bottles were in their places.

The constables lamented the fate of the broken bottle; but, with new-found courage, they each hastened to leave with a bottle in their hand.

They were then allowed to drink them.

The district sergeant said: ‘As for me, I shall keep mine for the day of my marriage.’

He was duly granted that privilege and he married the dressmaker.

And you will no doubt imagine that they had a brood of children.

They had but one.

On the day of his marriage, which took place at La Rapée,
¹
the sergeant placed the famous bottle with the green seal between him and his wife, allowing nobody else to taste it.

The bottle was as green as parsley, the wine as red as blood.

Nine months later, the dressmaker gave birth to a little green monster with red horns on his forehead.

So go on, all you young ladies, go and amuse yourselves at the Carthusian Dance Hall on the site of the castle of Vauvert!

Nonetheless the child grew, if not in virtue at least in size. Two things puzzled his parents: his green colour and a caudal appendix that seemed at first to be merely an extension of his coccyx, but which gradually took on the appearance of a veritable tail.

The parents consulted specialists, who declared that it would be impossible to perform an amputation without endangering the child’s life. They added that it was a very rare affliction, though one which was noted by Herodotus and Pliny the Younger. At that time no one could have foreseen Fourier’s system.
²