The Vampire of Ropraz (2 page)

The Vampire of Ropraz, the rapist, the bloodsucker of Tailles Wood, the bat of country graveyards… All Dracula’s team is abroad, galloping through the land. At the same time the case is spread by the press all over Europe and America, and newspapers from New York, Massachusetts, Boston, and of course from England and Scotland, the land of gothic fantasy, are delivered to the municipal clerk’s office in this village, the grisly fame of whose graveyard spreads shame and terror all around. It is strange to open these great dailies from so far away, and find huge headlines printed over four columns of frightful details: “VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ”.

It does not take long for the investigation to bog down and become sidetracked. It first makes for Vucherens, a nearby village, to interview the Caillet brothers, some rather sinister individuals with previous involvement in murder, extortion, theft and banditry. Six years earlier, at Écoteaux,
old man Caillet, his eldest son and the mother had murdered Budry, a dairyman. The father and son were sentenced to life and the mother to three years as an accessory. The father and mother had died early in their prison term. But the
Feuille d’Avis de Lausanne
recalled in its issue for 23rd February that, by a most curious coincidence, Rosa Gilliéron was the daughter of M. Émile Gilliéron, who had presided over the jury called upon to pass sentence for the Écoteaux crime.

Vengeance, then? A crazy vendetta by the two younger brothers, thirsting for blood? But the Vampire had acted alone. The two Caillets are depraved and violent, but not mentally deficient. Still, they had recently bought from the Mézières general store some shuttered lamps of the same type as the one found at Ropraz. And they are virtuosos with the knife. Where were they on the night of Thursday the 20th to the morning of the 21st? They are arrested, but then released. Their womenfolk, also the lowest of the low and equally fit for the gallows, provide them with alibis.

In the meantime, rumours grow. And so does the fear. People arm themselves more than ever; at night they bar themselves in, and denunciations are rife. Envy, base jealousy, pretenders rejected by Rosa or her stern father, individuals injured by the judge’s decisions, political hacks with noses out of joint at his success, solitary, timid individuals, the desperate and the compulsive, obsessed by the purity of the all too lovely girl… Another name is bandied about: that of a prominent inhabitant of Ropraz, whose second profession as an itinerant butcher working from farm to farm could suggest obscene, iniquitous uses of the knife. A cutter-up of pigs and sides of veal! He becomes the target of the most scurrilous insinuations. For an entire week suspicion falls on a medical student who had come, just at the end of February, to spend a few days with his family in Mézières. A budding surgeon, just think, with all those anatomy classes taught at our expense!

The student is grilled for two entire days on the premises of the
Sûreté
. A sheer waste of time.

“A tough nut, that one,” says Inspector Decosterd, who is leading the investigation. “Not easy to intimidate, these young doctors. Anyway, we’re keeping an eye on him. He says he’s going to be a surgeon. All the more reason not to lose sight of him for a single second…”

In the meantime, the Vampire is on the loose. He is reported in Vucherens, Ferlens and Montpreveyres, always appearing at night, evading the watch and the dogs, climbing on each occasion to the upper floor, where the daughter of the house or the maid sleeps.

“Look at the broken pane, that’s where he rested the ladder…”

“But he didn’t harm your daughter.”

“She woke up in time. She was dreaming, poor thing, and suddenly she started to scream. We barely had time to grab an axe and run upstairs.”

People are frightened, stupefied, curious.

“He didn’t touch her, the bastard, but he was there all the same, just look at the broken pane, and there, where the snow melted on the wood
floor. You have to think he was scared off by the cloves of garlic and the crucifix she was sleeping with!”

For everywhere folk have again taken out the Christ they’ve kept hidden since Catholic days. Now, in every village and hamlet, you can see braided garlic and the holy images repugnant to the monster of Ropraz hanging from the window frames and catches, from lintels, balconies, railings, even from secret doorways and in cellars. Crosses are erected again in this Protestant countryside where none have been seen for four centuries. On hills, beside country roads, the object abominated since Reformation days is erected again. The vampire fears the symbol of Christ? “There, that’ll make him think twice! And the dog is loose.”

Pastor Béranger and the mother parish of Mézières tolerate these superstitions. “With the Fribourg witches and their priests and deacons so near, right on the border, I’m used to that kind of nonsense.” Bérenger is a Huguenot. A soldier of Christ. As Rosa’s religious instructor, he was present when the body was pieced together again,
after it was brought back from the graveyard to the Grande Salle for a few hours to be washed and repaired. It was he, Bérenger, who blessed the remains, which were dressed once again in a fresh white gown before being reburied.

“But what about Mme Bérenger, and the little girl that helps in the manse, aren’t you afraid the monster will go after them, Pastor? He must want to avenge himself on you, you who were so kind to Rosa…”

“The man who loves God need not fear the spirit of darkness,” replies the pastor steadfastly.

And he climbs back onto the seat of the horse-drawn cart that he drives himself. Night is falling, a haunted night; for a long time his wheels can be heard crunching through the icy snow on the road lower down.

In the meantime he is up and abroad, the Vampire of Ropraz, a distant cousin, and so like him, of Drakul, master by moonlight of the crime-ravaged steeps of Walachia and Transylvania. The fearful resemblance of the Carpathians and the Vaudois foothills is in his favour, with their dark forests where he can hide and keep watch, sharpening his hunger and thirst, the one who devoured the pure Rosa.

Make no mistake about it, crouching in the bushes where he will lie low till the sun goes down, or in a hillside cave, in the crevice of some dark cliff, he heard the pastor’s cart as it rattled along the stony track. Later he is sure to
have seen the lamps extinguished in the windows of the château of Ussières, the lamps put out in the Cavin café, in the solid stone dwellings, in solitary farmhouses. Now the night belongs to him.

The wind has risen from the coomb. It chills the night, a damp, cold wind that keeps dogs in their kennels and hardens the ice on country roads… So many young virgins are sleeping their lily-sleep in so many dizzyingly warm beds. So many dead girls will spend their first night in the soil, beneath the covers of their fresh graves. It is time to be about, Dracula, master of the shadows, through town and country! You who know our every gesture, our stopping places, our hesitations, who will drink our daughters’ blood, ravish them, consume them, before dawn pushes you back into your inaccessible lair!

For since 20th February you would think there was no hill, no wood, no side road safe from the monster’s power. He is everywhere, the Vampire of Ropraz, prowling, watching, lurking; because of him fear swells, ingrained in solitary farms.
The dread of a shocking discovery haunting the more substantial properties, the obsession with sexual, expiatory violation engrafted in the flesh. The ancient guilt of bodies punished, offered to the Devil.

You were too lovely, Rosa, you must pay for your blinding purity!

For generations all has been perilous and evil in these lonely landscapes: the storm that swells the rivers, the lightning that sets roofs on fire, the drought that kills crops, bakes grass, shrinks and shrivels fruit, the rain that rots the harvest and furrows the ploughed field. People distrust tramps, beggars and itinerant preachers, all as light-fingered as gypsies. Travelling people, Bohemians, Romanies. Pedlars are driven off at pitchfork point. But now it is 20th February, now is the reign of the Vampire, the embodiment of every fear, violence and repressed hysteria, the compression into something intangible of the dreaded secrets of an evil world. Pastors denounce our pride and lies. Sunday sermons in Calvin’s churches remind us of the judgement
in store for our heedlessness. There is, above all, welling up from generations of tortured brooding, the assurance of punishment from on high suspended over our lives.

Now, in the Vampire’s grip, no hovel, great dwelling or tiny house, no shed, hut or bothy, can escape his cruel vigilance. The children from lonely houses no longer go to school, the postman no longer makes his daily round in hills or hamlets, and Dr Delay is protected by the game warden when he travels to see a distant patient. But have people even the right to fall sick in such dire times?

More than ever, mothers watch over their daughters. Before February the danger was boys, dances, lotteries, sing-songs, but now the monster is concealed among us, cunning, clever, all-knowing, about to lick his lips and drool over our slumbers before puncturing the throats and smooth bellies of our fiancées.

On Monday the 2nd of March, 1903, an indignant editorial appears in the
Revue de Lausanne
:

“THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ STILL ON LOOSE”.

The reactionary newspaper has blazoned across four columns:

These lines, like the articles now appearing in newspapers all over Switzerland, and more and more frequently in Europe, perfectly express the disquiet and impatience agitating public opinion and incensing town and country. On the one hand, the Vampire, thumbing his nose
at everyone, doing as he pleases, and making the hysteria mount. On the other, the impotence and inaction of the investigation. One gloomy question punctuating the article in the
Revue de Lausanne
sums it all up: “When can we expect the next infernal episode?”

March went by, and then April: veiled insinuations, false reports, an uneasy calm; nothing more has happened since the outrage in Ropraz. But rumours swell, names are bandied about, lawsuits for libel and slander are threatened. Factional disputes, family hatreds, obscure quarrels over wills or property boundaries: so much baseness that springs to life out of fear and suspicion.

In cutting up and sucking the corpse of Gilliéron’s dead daughter, the Vampire of Ropraz has set the judge’s followers at each other’s throats. At the beginning of March, one of his neighbours from La Moille du Perey, a prominent local personality and rich landowner, was rumoured to have made
Rosa pregnant. All the judge’s authority and Dr Delay’s testimony would be needed to silence a calumny that no one believed. Rosa had died pure from all suspicion, but the ugliness of the attack showed what malevolence was in the air.

Around the same time, a bachelor from Hermanches, Juste Fiaux Esquire, blind in one eye and a born loser, was arrested by the
Sûreté
. Throughout the summer of 1901, this Juste Fiaux had worked as a labourer on the Gilliéron farm, incessantly pestering young Rosa with his inappropriate advances, as is duly attested. She gently rebuffed him, and that was the end of it. But could the embittered Fiaux have avenged himself for the slight? This lead was soon dropped.

And what of that portly peripatetic butcher in Ropraz, whose name has been mentioned as an enemy of the council representative? He engaged a lawyer from Lausanne, Maître Spiro, a fearsome cross-examiner, and no one hereabouts wanted to be subjected to one of his celebrated onslaughts. Exit the peripatetic butcher, cattle dealer, large farmer, and parish councillor by occupation.

Others were less fortunate. The name came up of a schoolmaster who had been dismissed for an accusation of molestation that was never completely resolved; the fellow’s name was never cleared, even though the teacher took up new work as a public letter writer in Oron-la-Ville. There he wrote (or had written) the strangest kind of love letters – to ladies of Oron and Mézières, to young women all over the district, to Dr Delay’s daughter, to Rosa. The writer denied everything. Where was he from the night of the 20th to the morning of the 21st of February? He claimed to be unable to say, in order to protect a lady’s honour.

“And the day before?”

“I was working on my novel.”

“Did anyone see you at your desk?”

“I don’t make a spectacle of myself. Do you know what it means to write? A sacrifice. Yes, gentlemen, a much more terrible sacrifice than that of some innocent country girl’s remains!”

Inspector Décosterd and his colleagues in the
Sûreté
tapped their foreheads with their index
fingers. A writer! And a modern martyr too! The oddball was left to his ranting.

So things remain until school opens again after Easter, on Tuesday the 14th of April. The outrage takes place at Carrouge, almost five miles from Ropraz, where the road to Moudon goes uphill. In the area between the graveyard and the school that serves as a playground, the schoolmaster Aimé Jeunet, who teaches in Carrouge’s one-room school, smoking a little Fivaz cigar while he supervises playtime, has his attention drawn to a group of children enjoying a game of football with a strange ball. Going over to them quietly, Aimé Jeunet discovers to his stupefaction that the ball is a head, and that the head has lost its scalp and is covered in blood, with tufts of hair still adhering to the skull like some repulsive adornment. The teacher almost faints from horror, and the boys scatter. For Jeunet has recognized the head: “It’s Nadine!” he cries, staggering again and falling flat in the grass.