But then the old man killed him all the same..! Why? Why..? Is it because he found him with his daughter? Or was it because he no longer obeyed him? Perhaps both things were the cause..! But in what way did the other man not obey him? What did the old man want from this unfortunate young man that I had seen slaughtered with such unexpected fury?... As for the fiancé, he must have known what was going on as well, he, the one who ‘returned,’ because if there was one person who kept a cool head throughout this whole affair, it was him!
After killing Gabriel, old Norbert had the look of a madman! Christine vented a moaning as though she were rendering her very soul! But he, Jacques Cotentin, had gathered up the corpse and stuffed him into the workshop without any apparent emotion, and without saying a word…
And now, what could they have they done with the cadaver..? They haven’t buried it in the garden yet… perhaps that has to wait until tonight..! I will be spending the night in my skylight… I have the feeling that, tonight, I will see something interesting..! The two men have a preoccupied air! But I have divined what bothers them… “a red drop of blood is heavier than an enraged sea.” Lady Macbeth had tried that experiment long before my neighbours on the Isle de Saint-Louis…
That night… yes, that night still weighs heavily upon my memory, that oppressive night with its clouds of soot, its leaden rainwater. It seemed to rain burning tears and faint sulphuric lights. It was on this night that ‘the Virgin’ rose again, she appeared before me in her harmonious dolour.
It is of Christine that I speak. Why should I continue to call her ‘the Virgin?’ Because my eyes have seen! What have they seen? Do I know what my eyes have seen? Do they know? Any explanation will do… is it possible to hide a man inside a closet and still remain pure? It pleases me to think so..! I find Boubouroche sublime and more interesting than all the Sganarelles that laugh with the audience down in the pit of the theatre… I like the fact that this horrible tragedy – of which I am completely ignorant – has not diminished her divinity in my eyes..!
Listen! Listen well to this! I too have my tragedy – the reason for which I am equally ignorant – a drama that has grasped me in its invisible tentacles which, little by little, bit by bit, will end up sucking out all of my mind… a tragedy after which, if fate decrees, perhaps the scaffold awaits..! And yet, in spite of this I, too, am pure!
Lord God, let us not judge each other!... Let us fear the forms that things take when they brush against us, and let us no longer declaim aloud, with all the miserable pride of a creature that only has five senses at its disposal, “this is,” or “this is not.” Let us beware! Let us beware! The universe is all around us like an immense trap… those who came before me have already declared it a farce!
I will not go as far as that as long as I still believe in Christine. The night is so close and the sky so heavy, and so low, that the Isle seems more isolated from the city than ever before.
It is like living under a bell that suffocates me.
It is difficult for me to breathe…
All of a sudden, I hear a voice that fills the fearful, empty silence.
It is the first time that I have heard her voice at such a distance and, maybe, after all, I only imagine that I hear it..? No, it is she who pronounces these words… I could not have invented them… I mean that I have no reason to have invented them. They were very simple words. She said: “Goodbye, Gabriel!” She was not moving. She was out on the balcony. Solemnly, her voice filled the oppressive air, the sulphurous night… as before her passed the funeral procession… it was old Norbert and his nephew who carried the corpse, rolled in a blanket. The cabinet was left open behind them… so, I had guessed right… the corpse had still been there when I climbed upstairs into the atelier!
Well, this Christine must certainly be superhuman, then..! No! No!... You’re not a doll without a heart, my celestial creature..! Now that I hear your golden voice in this night of awful silence, your voice which says “goodbye,” to the bloody remains of one of the most beautiful of all the sons of men, I understand your statuesque impassiveness. Goodbye! You have resolved to meet again in the unknown, which promises you a union of souls, where the great God Pan of ancient times still reigns, clothed once more in the pelt of a leopard! O, pagan Christine..!
Therefore disappear – and I will also disappear from this earth, into the abyss where I look forward to my abominable defrocking.
I would like to be the cadaver you cry over… and descend with the procession into the garden…
You, you do not wish to witness any more; you stand there rigid in this jaundiced night, and you disappear while they plunge their shovels into the pit of shadows.
But nothing moves at the bottom of the pit of shadows… if they were digging a grave, I would see their gestures through the black…
The ground floor of the tower has always been a somewhat obscure and ill-defined place for me. Three narrow, arched doors that open onto the garden are never opened: they are all nailed shut. Two windows, one at each end, are blocked by shutters. Two or three times, while I have been watching, a light from inside would pass through all of these, like an immense electric spark, plainly visible through the interstices of the poorly joined shutters… and then everything would sink back into night…
This is where the nephew works when he has not withdrawn upstairs into the workshop with Christine and old Norbert… Without doubt he must be divulging the secrets of his experiments in radiography. Nowadays, there are no doctors or surgeons without electricity. I also know (from Madame Langlois’ gossip) that there is, on the right hand side of the ground floor, an immense stove, with all kinds of instruments, test tubes, glass balls (like the ones you see in the cinema, in the laboratories of old sorcerers).
And again, tonight, pouring through the blinds, I see something glowing…not a sparkling electric light… but rather the light of scorching flames, which seems to lick up the interior walls only to be extinguished at once… and then to flash abruptly and die out once more… in some bizarre, excessive conflagration: ignited, no doubt, by a jet of inflammable liquid…
And then, suddenly, above the rooftop, through the thick, yellow night…there seethes a vortex of smoke and clinker, dark, dense, funereal, which drifts in the direction it will eventually follow, then spreads across the island, letting its cinders fall on the deserted quays, enveloping us in a sinister veil and a disquieting, mournful atmosphere… in which a horrifying odour lingers..!
Ah, those imprudent fools!
V
You Come In Here, You Sit There, And You Cast Those Glances At Me...
Wednesday. – Very well! Christine did not die from despair! She is in my workshop, alive and well, I can assure you! It’s very kind of her to come here to reassure me... because, this time, she crossed my threshold on my account, as if she had guessed that her presence alone could calm my anguish, as if she knew that I know!
She has come, but how far does she want to go? How far does she want to go?
She is full of grace and her toilette is charming: she wears a new spring dress, which she surely has made for herself, with her artistic hands, without any forethought or memory of her present state of mourning!
The things a pretty girl can do with white and blue linen and a little cross stitch..!
Of course, when this dress was being made, it was not intended for me; but I cannot doubt that she has put it on for me!
If her heart really is in mourning, then this colourful dress is a disconcerting choice: what is Christine’s motive for playing the coquette with a monster?
I find myself clinging to this question intensely, so as not to lose my footing at this unexpected twist in this inexplicable adventure! And if I should abandon my question, I will lose everything and feel myself spinning in the bottom of a pit, horrified, happily, only to plunge down deeper for her sake, while she fixes me with her smiling eyes – because she would not have come here with her coquetry if she did not need something
from me – something from me, to do with her crime…
Let her do with me whatever she pleases! I am ready to take all the responsibility..!
I cannot allow the slightest danger to threaten this adorable child, whose slim, unadorned fingers toy with the pages of Verlaine.
Something must have happened to her (and to me, since I have been watching her pass by for more than two years, with the scornful bearing of an archduchess); something extraordinary must have happened to induce this graceful creature to come and sit facing me over my counter.
This crime they have committed, how I bless it… and the horrible odour that made me choke that night, up there by the skylight in my roof… that evil odour of a holocaust that will pursue me all my life… I do not smell it any more… because the scent of her has come to replace it!
Ah, the scent of her flesh, alive and naked under those little circles of linen and cross stitching!
Life is stronger than death!
Speak to me, my child, speak..!
Wait a moment, I will send my apprentice, who is prowling around at the bottom of the staircase, sniffing at the air like a seal, on an errand… then I shall close the door so that the entire street can’t walk in on us...for the whole street is now standing in front of my shop. This is a story that will keep all the old gossips of the Isle supplied with scandal..! The pointed snout of Mademoiselle Barescat peeps out between the portholes of her spectacles; the flat, round face of Mother Langlois reflects the sunset, which reaches down to a horizon bounded by the butcher’s shop. Behind the windowpanes, curtains rustle between scrabbling mittens…
“Sir, I come to you as a friend…”
I tried my best to smile.
“As a friend? But you don’t even know me!”
“Yes, sir, I know you..! First of all, you have been my neighbour for years and, as I am curious, I wanted to know who my neighbour is…”
“A poor bookbinder, miss.”
“A great poet, sir!”
I did not even bat an eyelid. My silence was something in the world that embarrassed her least. She leaned her ivory-white elbows (the sleeves of the linen blouse were very short) on the books that were spread around in front of her, her adorable head poised gently in the petals of her hands, that did not shame themselves with any jewels, and looking at me – looking at me – she declaimed:
“Dedicated to one who passes. – For the love of God, do not lower your eyebrows when you pass me by; let your gaze rest frozen in an immobile lake; for the flashes of your eyes, if you desired, could drink the blood of many a man. In the name of your youth, sweet love, do not leave me to weep..! I am an orphan, I am a child..! Nothing can hold me back..! Do not entice me into your fire..! Your love has rent me like a cloud torn apart by the storm.”
“That’s enough!” I interjected with an agitation that came close to an attack of hysteria… “Enough! Those are very poor verses. You must not forget that, although the bindings which covered them won the prize at the annual exhibition, the verses inside did not... which is only fair, because they were not signed with any famous name!”
“They were not signed at all,” she let these words fall, but appeared in no other way to be moved by the condition in which they found me, “but I guessed that they were yours!” I went terribly pale without daring to look at her. The intoxication of a moment ago gave way to a rage that suffocated me. Without doubt, this girl was making a mockery of me: and with such cool audacity! Finally, I was able to express myself, and glared at her:
“You are cruel..! Furthermore, I have always thought that you were too beautiful to be anything but cruelty incarnate, and perhaps you are not even aware of it – which can be your only excuse!”
“Carry on,” she said, slowly; I didn’t come here looking for compliments!”
“Then what did you come looking for?”...
Those terrible words, I wished that I could take them back. But I was like a maniac. And, as happens to very timid people when something grants them an unexpected, sudden amplification of their courage, I lost all sense of proportion. And very well, yes, I had written those verses, but for myself and for no-one else, and there is no-one in the world, not even her, who I would tolerate using them as a pretext to come in here and mock my loneliness and my distress..!
“You say that you know me,” I managed to go on, “and yet you have found nothing better to do, before coming in here, than to take what you suppose to be my vanity as an author for granted! If you even suspected the kind of disgust I feel for myself and for others, for all others, you would have refrained from learning by heart a nasty sonnet that I had long forgotten all about!”
She didn’t flinch, and when I had finished, she went on, in the softest tone, to recite more of my verse and even some of my prose, which is extremely difficult to come by: from where had she got it all? In what stall on the quayside could she have discovered those miserable opuscules? She knew all my works, my wretched, heartbreaking, blasphemous, tender, revolting works… better than I did... far better than I did... because the manner in which she recited them added a superior value and a greater meaning to the text… things that had never been apparent to me before…
Decidedly, Christine has a prodigious intelligence. I say this naïvely, and sincerely, because my writings are very difficult to understand, and that she might be the only person ever to have understood me. In any case, I am annihilated in the face of this revelation! For a long time I am unable to comprehend that this girl, who passes by without ever looking at me, has lived with my thoughts..!
But why has she waited so long to reveal this to me? What for? Why today rather than yesterday..?
Doubtless, she can read me like a book because, immediately, she responds with:
“Monsieur, a moment ago you asked me : ‘what did you come looking for?’ I came to ask you to do me a great service!... My father, my cousin, and I are going through an atrocious crisis at the moment,” (Ah, ah, my suspicion returns, there it is! She knows that I know! That I have seen! She feels the need to explain herself, she needs to abase herself in order to make the acquaintance of the neighbour on the other side of the street! What untruths am I going to hear now..?)
“Yes, atrocious!” she repeated (she lowered her head, and her eyes left me, and the room seemed filled with opaque shadows)… “We are ruined. Everything that my mother bequeathed us went a long time ago… and what little we have left is insignificant..! Sir, I see on the shelf behind you the Philosophical Studies of Balzac. Have you ever read The Quest of the Absolute? Yes, of course you have. I do not know if you are of the same opinion as me, but I think that this novel is, along with Louis Lambert, [3] Balzac’s most beautiful work, his noblest and also his most dramatic. The most terrifying thing about this book is the description of the fate of a prosperous bourgeois family that, little by little, is ruined by the idea of a genius, is it not? Nothing can stand against the sublime madness of the inventor, and the children are forced to witness the mental collapse of old Claës, like… do you understand me, monsieur? It’s just to say that, with regard to the watchmaker Norbert of the Isle Saint-Louis, there is a minor difference… the children of Balzac’s hero do not have faith in his genius, his wife no more than all the others (and for that she appears all the more pathetic in her devotion to him), while Norbert’s children – I speak to you of his pupil and of myself, monsieur – have the utmost faith in his idea and would not hesitate, if necessary, to put our father on the rack if he should falter!”...
“Good God!” I said… “you would do all this in the pursuit of perpetual motion?”
“For that and for other reasons, monsieur!”
“Oh, please don’t think me indiscreet in speaking of such a thing! I have heard talk of perpetual motion but, you will understand, I have not yet told you about the kind of gossip that gets exchanged in the back rooms of the shops in this quarter.”
Christine raised her head and smiled; once more, everything was al
l illuminated.
“I need to ask you something, seriously… we are reduced to the last straw... and I want to tell you exactly how we live… I’ve already proved to you that I know you much better than you would have imagined… I’ll prove to you now that I consider you to be my friend”… (her expression became extraordinarily grave)… “yes, I will speak to you as a friend, as if you were a brother…” (there it is! As I expected... like a brother... it’s always ‘as if you were a brother,’ that these women speak to me!)
“We are entirely at the mercy of our landlord… the Marquis de Coulteray… we owe him several months in rent... he could, if he saw fit, throw us out into the street tomorrow! If he does not see fit to do this, it is only on account of me... the Marquis de Coulteray is paying court to me!” ... (What’s that? Another one! And she comes here to tell me this!... It seems to me that this Madonna of the Isle de Saint-Louis is very well occupied between her fiancé, the corpse of her Gabriel, her Marquis and her brother: the master bookbinder of the Isle de Saint-Louis! O, Christine, you are becoming an ever more indecipherable enigma!)… “a very conventional court… at least until very recently… my presence in his house pleases him… he claims that it is a necessity… I spend a few hours every day in his mansion, on the pretext of carrying out a few menial tasks… polishing some pewter… or the ironwork on the old music stands… dusting the carvings for the antiphonaries. His library is unique… you’ll see!”
The Bloody Doll Page 4