Werewolf of Paris (9 page)

“Well?” he urged.

“I remember that when I was a little girl my grandmother used to tell me stories of the forests and the monsters that live there. The headless horseman who strikes those who see him with insanity; the tree where the Swedish hirelings hung five men. Their souls are now in that tree and that is why it will never die, until Judgment Day. The white deer who comes one night every year to look for a mate, who must be a pure young girl.”

“Children shouldn't be told such stories,” was Aymar's comment.

“Sometimes, so my grandmother used to say, men come to the village fair who have never been seen before and never will be seen again. They are men from the sea and are looking for prey to drag down into their underwater dwellings. They can be recognized by the fact that the hems of their clothes are always slightly moist and their hands are often webbed. Their teeth are sharp and pointed. Sometimes they are wolves from the mountains. Then they can be recognized by the hair that grows on the palms of their hands.”

In the silence that followed her reminiscences, she added: “Bertrand has hair on the palms of his hands.”

The cold spring with its constant rains and chill had proven too much for Mme Didier, whose health had been undermined by the vexations of the last few years. The death of her husband, the terrible days of '48 when she discovered Aymar wounded in a hospital, and this last event, the treachery of Father Pitamont and the misfortune of Josephine, which she had had to add to her burdens.

One day she had been out tending to various purchases. The morning had been so beautiful. There was a touch of spring in the air and the sky was delightfully blue, with that fresh clear blue that comes only after a long, hard winter, when all nature seems to have been purged of its vileness. But in a brief hour while she was in a shop looking over materials, the weather took a sudden turn for the worse. The sky became overcast, a cold wind arose and soon sheets of rain were sweeping diagonally across the streets. The flawless morning had turned into a dismal afternoon.

Upon coming out of the store, Mme Didier first noticed how bad the weather really was. She ordered a cab, but none could be found empty. She waited inside, hoping every moment that the rain would abate, but it seemed only to grow fiercer. The stuffy air of the shop, traversed by cold drafts at every opening of the door, soon affected her. She felt hot and cold by turns. Her throat had a soft painful lump in it. She wanted to get home quickly and have Françoise prepare her a hot tisane while she went to bed. That always fixed her up.

She determined at last to brave the weather to the boulevard beyond where she would either get a cab or take refuge in a café and there drink something hot. Pulling the collar of her astrakhan coat firmly around her neck, she walked out, head bowed against the driving rain. Two steps beyond the door and she had slipped and fallen into a puddle of water. In a trice she was soaked through and through. Kind people helped her up, and found a fiacre for her, so that she was soon home.

For days she lingered between life and death. At last her peasant strength, not totally rubbed off by her long existence in the city, came to her rescue and she grew better. During all of her illness she had yearned wistfully for a sight of the baby. But she had feared that she might infect it in some way and had therefore refused to permit it to be brought into the room. Françoise and Aymar, forbidden now to go near the baby, had to bring her long reports of its doings, reports which they secured from Josephine. The house was divided into two camps which communicated from a distance.

There came a day when she could feel that her illness was definitely behind her. It was a pleasant and true spring day, not such a treacherous one as had brought on her illness. The windows were flung open and the curtains moved in a gentle breeze.

“Today,” she told Françoise and Aymar, “I shall have Bertrand brought in here.”

“It will do you good to see him,” said Françoise with tears in her eyes. “And shall I, too, be allowed to see him, now that you are so well?”

“Of course, of course, my good Françoise. Beast that I am, I had forgotten completely that I deprived you of him. Come, kiss me quick and say that you forgive me. Now go run quick and fetch him.”

At that moment they became aware of a strange noise. A choking, howling, sobbing sound, indescribable in words. Mme Didier and Françoise looked at each other in surprise. Then Françoise dashed out. Aymar asked:

“What the deuce is that?” The noise grew louder, deeper, more resonant and less choked.

Josephine came running back with Françoise. “Madame,” she cried out, “it's Bertrand! He must be dreadfully ill. Oh, do send for a doctor quick!”

“The doctor will be here soon,” Françoise replied. “That must be he at the door now.” She ran to admit Dr Robyot, who had come to pay his daily visit to Mme Didier.

“I don't approve of dogs in the houses of my patients,” were his first words, commenting on the sad howls that filled the apartment.

“Oui, monsieur,” said Françoise, trembling in every limb, and ushered him in to Madame's bedchamber.

“Ah, well, the patient is looking exceptionally well today,” he said cheerfully, taking Madame's pulse in his hand. “You should get up a little now and exercise a bit. But not too much.”

“I am not the patient today,” said Mme Didier seriously, “but Madame Caillet's baby, who seems to be suffering terribly. Don't you hear him?”

The doctor, quite surprised to discover that these dismal sounds came from a baby and not a dog, left at once for the rear chambers with Josephine and returned a short while later. “I can find nothing wrong with the little lad. On the contrary, he seems fit in every way. A little fright or hysteria, perhaps. Did anyone scare him?”

“No,” Josephine asserted. “I know because I am the only one who has been seeing him since Madame here has been ill.”

“Well, I'll write out a prescription for a soothing dose that will quiet him. And when he wakes up, I suspect he will have quite forgotten about his fright.”

“But that noise is absolutely terrifying, monsieur le docteur,” said Mme Didier.

“He'll stop just as soon as he gets some of this,” the doctor replied. “Meanwhile, you had better have the doors shut so that you will not be disturbed. Remember, you must be very careful. You have been seriously ill, don't forget that.”

All doors were thereupon shut tight and only a faint sound managed still to penetrate into Mme Didier's chamber. Soon even that stopped, for Josephine had returned with the necessary concoction and the baby had fallen into a deep and silent slumber.

Mme Didier arose and sat near the window in an easy chair opposite Aymar. She put her thin hand with its pale, silky skin traversed by blue veins on his knee and said: “You've been a good son to me, Aymar. It's good to be sitting across from you.”

He wanted to say: “Nonsense,” gruffly, as befitted the occasion, but the words were caught in a lump in his throat. After a while he managed to say: “Now take good care of yourself and don't be off buying silly materials in bad weather anymore.”

In the evening he sat by her bedside and she recalled to him the pranks he used to play when he came out during summers to their country home. A faint noise, growing louder, began to disturb him. Evidently the baby had awakened and began to cry again. Good that all the intervening doors were shut. His aunt was apparently unconscious of the renewed howling of the child. Wishing to make sure that her mind should not stray from her mood of reminiscing, he put leading questions to her:

“I have a dim recollection of something about a hedgehog; what was that?”

“Oh, that was very funny,” she began briskly, and took his hand in hers. “You had always wanted a hedgehog and we would not let you keep one. Then one summer when we came back, we found the house overrun with cockroaches. That was when we had that lazy caretaker and his drunken wife. Do you remember them?”

“Not very well,” he said. “Was I four years old then?”

“Within a month or two of five, I think. Oh, yes, I recall now distinctly when you had your fifth birthday. It was that very summer. But let me tell you about the hedgehog. You had been bothering your mother for a pet hedgehog. God only knows where you conceived the notion. Anyhow when we came out to our house and found the place just crawling away with bugs, you claimed that hedgehogs would eat them all up. Of course we didn't believe you, but you were so insistent. But if we hadn't sent it out into the garden again, I think the cockroaches would have eaten
it
up, for certainly it never touched a single one of them. Yes, I remember, too, that…”

His mind was so busy listening to the weird howling of the baby that for a moment he was unaware that his aunt had suddenly ceased talking. Then he wondered quickly: Had she finally heard it too? It was a ghastly sound, more like the baying of a moonstruck dog on a lonely farm than the crying of a human baby. No, she hadn't heard, she was asleep. He had scarcely thought this when a great fear came over him. A fear so mad that he rose in horror from his chair. His hand, which his aunt had been holding, slipped readily out of her grasp. He stood thus for a second not knowing what to do, then he ran out.

In the hall near the kitchen he came upon Josephine. “I was just going to give him another dose when he stopped all of himself. He's all right now. I don't know what to make of it, monsieur. I only hope he didn't wake Madame from her sleep.”

“No,” he said dully. “Madame is dead.”

Chapter Five

I
n his unofficial defense of Sergeant Bertrand, Aymar Galliez devotes very little space to a matter which, had his intentions been otherwise, he would have undoubtedly expanded to greater length.

It appears that during the worst days of her illness, his aunt had called in her
notaire
and drawn up her will. Therein she left all her property to her nephew Aymar, with two provisos, firstly, that he was to continue to take care of Françoise and Josephine and the little Bertrand. The other proviso was that he study for the Church and prepare himself to take orders.

The scene of the reading of the will is easy to reconstruct. Mme Didier's notary was Le Pelletier, a man as yet unknown but soon destined to make himself widely hated and loved. He was indeed acquainted with Aymar, whom he had encountered in various radical groups.
*
Le Pelletier was outwardly a man of little prepossession, short, swarthy, he was as if crumpled up, soiled and thrown into the gutter by some vindictive force. He was an argument for that often repeated but unproven statement that revolutionaries are furnished by those whom fate has mistreated, the failures in life and love. Le Pelletier devoted little of his time to his profession and most of it to the Bibliothèque Nationale where he was gathering material for his two-volume history and eulogy of the Reign of Terror, a work which when published, at a time when the French Revolution was highly unpopular, aroused wide comment and procured for him the glory of a prison sentence.

After he had finished reading the will to Aymar, he leaned forward and leered: “So you will be a priest, hm?”

Aymar was shocked. “How could my aunt have been so cruel?” were his first words. “She knew my tastes.”

Maître Le Pelletier rubbed his permanently furrowed forehead and suggested slyly: “There might be ways of getting around it.”

“How?” said Aymar keenly.

“Time limit, for example,” Le Pelletier opined.

“Time limit?”

“Yes. What good is a will that sets no time limit? You may, for example, draw out your studies for the priesthood until doomsday. And if you should come to die and wish to make a will of your own, who can stop you? You were simply unable to fulfill the demands of your aunt in your natural lifetime, and you may dispose of your fortune as you choose.”

“This is annoying,” Aymar complained. “I hate such deceit. Especially a deceit which I shall have to practice for years. It's a consolation to know that I shan't live very long.”

“Come, pull yourself together,” Le Pelletier urged. “After all, what does it amount to? You'll soon forget all about it. The only thing you cannot do is marry. But even for that there might be a way, and that might be the best course at that. You simply declare that you cannot follow the provisions of your aunt's will and thereupon you inherit as next of kin with no will to saddle you.”

Aymar was thinking what his friends who knew his former violent pronouncements against clericalism would say when they discovered that he had joined the clergy. He wouldn't be there then, but he would carry the shame to his dying day.

“You don't have me to thank that the will isn't worse than it is,” said M Le Pelletier. “True to my profession I warned your aunt that it was useless to make out a will that specified no forfeiture for violation of its provisions. She refused to consider the possibility that you might not care to follow her last wishes. ‘He will do what I want him to do,' she asserted. The whole thing was most irregular and charming. You are really free to do as you please.”

Le Pelletier's words stung Aymar as if they had been meant as reproaches. With the funeral still vivid in his mind, he found his eyes wet with tears at the thought that his good aunt had been unwilling to provide for any punishment. But how could he, who was turning more and more to the uncompromising radicalism of Blanqui, force himself into a seminary? It was unthinkable!

No, not so unthinkable at that. He recollected that but recently as he was reading an article by Blanqui in which the latter attacked the mysticism promulgated by the clergy, claiming that they did so only in order to maintain the lower classes the better in subjection to their masters, he had been annoyed. “You don't know everything,” he had exclaimed and flung the paper away.