She placed her burning-hot hand upon mine: “I tell you: they are all one and the same person!”
Her immense eyes sought out mine... I did not dare to look at her, out of fear that she would notice the pity that she inspired in me!
“Milady! Milady! How can you say that? How can a woman like you, with intelligence like yours, say such a thing?... Milady, be on your guard! There is nothing more powerful in the world than the realm of the unknown. It is a domain in which even the soundest minds have lost their way. There are ideas, milady, with which one should not play!”
“By Jesus and Mary!” she cried, “do I have the look of someone who is playing games? I am speaking seriously. This is a fact. Georges-Marie-Vincent has never had an education. Only the first of the four, or shall we say of the five, counting the present Marquis, only Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome, who was one of the most debauched lords in the court of Louis XV, was educated. He was a scholar of sorts.”
“I know,” I said, “and he was a great debater, too. He stood his ground against Duclos. He simply shone at Holbach’s. He also wrote articles for the Great Encyclopaedia.”
“Then I am telling you nothing new,” she conceded. “He was raised by his uncle, the Bishop of Fréjus. Be that as it may, monsieur Masson, I must insist that the conversation you just had with Georges-Marie-Vincent would not have been possible if Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome had not received such an education!”
I was taken aback.
“All the same, Milady, allow me to tell you that Paul-Louis Courier did not spill his ink spot on the Longus manuscript at the time of Louis XV!”
She pursed her lips.
“So that is all that is needed to make you take me for a fool!” she let fall. “I simply want to tell you that, without this education, without the scraps of classical knowledge obtained through it, Georges-Marie-Vincent would not have the slightest interest in the treasures of the library in Florence.”
“Excuse me, milady... but if there is one thing in all that I have said to you that I must insist upon, it is the solid foundation of the Marquis’ classical education.”
“Is it really?”
Once again, her eyes glared... once again, she held my hand...
“Ah! If only you would be my friend... my friend!...”
I uttered a few words of devotion to her... Her sudden agitation had made me nervous... I regretted being left alone with her... I would even have been thankful if Sangor or Sing-Sing had appeared...
“Oh yes... I can feel it now... you... you do understand me... you do..! He knows that I am the most miserable being in the world, something that exists somewhere between life and death! Neither Saib Khan nor Christine wants to understand me..! Christine takes me for a madwoman... Saib Khan for a sick woman... and that he can resuscitate me... in spite of myself!... Ah! Why does he bring me back?... Why does he resuscitate me for this other?... Unless he is his accomplice... which is something I am beginning to believe... in a word... I have a horror of the life to which Saib Khan returns me, at the price of so many tortures. And yet, he has forbidden me to die!... Ah, my friend, my friend: have you ever been to the Chateau Coulteray? No, you have never visited it? It is the kind of chateau that they call ‘historical’... it’s down south... between Touraine and Sologne. The chapel there is a masterpiece, comparable with the church at Brou. But I pray you will believe me when I tell you that it was not for the ornate Gothic carvings that I went there... no... it was for what I found when I went down into the crypt... where the tombs of the Coulterays can be found. Monsieur Benedict Masson, the tomb of Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome is empty!... Empty, I tell you!... Don’t you understand?”
“In a word, no: I don’t! That I really do not understand!”
She seemed irritated by my insistence in not understanding:
“Empty! And it’s the last tomb of the Coulterays!... There are no others... There is no more death in the House of Coulteray...”
“But, Madame, what if they all died in foreign countries?”
“Evidently! Evidently!... But, I tell you again, the tomb is empty!...”
“That’s all very well... but the Revolution passed through there... and how many tombs were desecrated?...”
“That’s not true! That’s not true!... The Revolution had nothing to do with it... The day after they buried the corpse of Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome in the crypt, they found that the gravestone had been moved and that the tomb was empty..!”
“And then?”
“What do you mean: and then?... Don’t you know the history of the Coulterays?... I thought that you were well-informed about Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome... A moment ago you told me that he had written articles for the Great Encyclopaedia... actually, he wrote one article... only one... and do you know what it was about? Do you have any idea of its subject matter? Wait for me here, I’ll go and find it for you!”
She ran off, while I remained there, dazed by this dumbfounding conversation – which had shocked me with its absence of reasoning... As far as I was concerned the poor woman was, beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt, completely insane..!
She returned within a couple of minutes, breathless:
“Quickly! Quickly!” she hurled the words at me, “take this parcel home with you. Hide it somewhere..! Read it and you will know everything... Sing-Sing is on the stairs! Sangor’s coming!... Farewell!”
She dropped a small parcel, wrapped in some pages from a fashion magazine and tied with a black ribbon, onto the table in front of me... I slipped it into my coat and went home... I was convinced that, at last, I was going to find out what the other thing was all about...
XI
“Pray For Her!”
At ten o’clock that same evening, behind the closed shutters of my workshop, I was still reading... Now I know what the other thing is... It is something unimaginable in our epoch! Now I understand why she repeated, with such a haggard expression, “I am afraid of death,” she who also has such a fear of life... I understand the importance she attached to the phrase: “he has forbidden me to die!”
Someone knocks on my shutters... I hear the voice of Christine... What makes her dare to visit me at this hour… and what does she want? I open the door... She is accompanied by her fiancé, Jacques Cotentin, whom she introduces to me... They had been for a stroll around the quays on this warm evening in June, and, on the way back, had seen a light in my window and decided to drop in to say a brief ‘good evening’ to me as they passed by…
The two of them entered, as if they were visiting an old friend of the family.
I had never seen the prosector at such close quarters before, and could have gone on happily without meeting him, but the idea that Christine did not love him and had, morally at least, betrayed him with Gabriel, made the whole encounter more tolerable.
I noticed that he had big, myopic blue eyes; intelligent and pensive, in spite of his unkempt appearance. I don’t think he even realized that he was in my place. He looked like someone about to embark on a voyage to the moon, like a lot of scholars do – though, at his age, it was probably no more than posturing.
“Well, well,” said Christine, as she sat down, “she’s given you the parcel, hasn’t she? And you’ve read it. I have come on behalf of the Marquis, who has asked me to request that you either keep it here, in your house, or destroy it. You can do anything you like with it: but, whatever you do, do not return it to her. Those are the papers that have made the poor lady sick. Do you understand now how she has come by all her flights of imagination?”
“If I am not mistaken, it is from this book,” I said, putting my hand on an opuscule entitled: The Most Famous Brucolacs. “Brucolac is a word that the ancient Greeks used to designate what our modern superstition calls a vampire!” [7]
This work, published in Paris around the time of the Revolution, speaks, with an absolute solemnity, about a world of beings believed to be dead, but which in fact are not, who rise from their graves every
night to nourish themselves by drinking the blood of the living while they sleep... Some of these vampires, whose names are cited in the book, returned to their sepulchres completely glutted, and that is where a certain number of them were taken by surprise, especially in Hungary and southern Germany. Their skin was of a ruddy shade, their veins swollen with the blood they had sucked, and one had only to cut them open to see the blood that flowed as freshly as it would through the body of a young man of twenty years... Some of them never bothered to return to their graves, because they have a horror of them... evidently, these are the most dangerous of their kind because there is no way you can ever rid yourself of them... you would not know where to go looking for them... they blend in with the rest of the mortal population, whose lives they drain to the profit of their own which is, by this method, prolonged indefinitely. The only certain way to destroy a Brucolac is to cremate its remains, having beheaded it beforehand.
But how can you be sure that you’re dealing with a Brucolac unless you find it, ruddy-pink and in rude health, in its tomb..? The last name of a Brucolac that was mentioned in the little treatise was that of the Marquis Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome de Coulteray, whose life, in the final years of the reign of Louis XV, had ushered in a reign of terror for the fathers of pretty girls of marriageable age. These honest sons of the bourgeoisie had believed themselves to be rid of this monster on the day he died but, the next morning, they learned that Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome had broken out of his sepulchre, to which he never returned.
There were numerous testimonies from people who have claimed to have seen him after that day, prowling around outside their homes at night... Several girls and young women, who had been foolish enough to sleep with the windows of their bedrooms open, had been found the next morning in a state of absolute decline; and it had not taken them long to acquire the proof (with the discovery of a small puncture wound behind one of the ears of each victim) that the Brucolac had passed among them..! At the end of the little book, the conclusion was made that the fate of these young women was made more disastrous by the fact, known since classical antiquity, that the victims of vampires become vampires themselves after they die.
All of the treatises that I found in the parcel that she had tied with a black ribbon dealt with the same subject. They had titles like: The Horrible and Terrifying History of what happened in the Faubourg St. Marcel following the death of a wretched Brucolac; or Revenants, Phantoms and other entities who did not desire to leave this earth; or even How Vampires Feed; a Treatise on the lives of Brucolacs inside and outside sepulchres… and then, last but not least, there was the famous article by Chrysostome Coulteray, that had been published in the first edition of the Great Encyclopaedia, in which the author spoke of vampires with an assurance, and a wealth of scientific knowledge, that would have been terrifying if it hadn’t been so amusing...
Amongst other things, he wrote:
It is well known that the name ‘vampire’ is given to a dead man who returns from the grave to torment the living. He sucks their blood... Sometimes he will squeeze them around the throat as if to strangle them, to make the veins swell before he does so... any kind of attachment, any bond of affection, seems to be broken in the case of vampires, because they prefer to pursue their friends, their parents, and those closest to them! ... etcetera…
“So now, maybe, you’ll understand,” explained Christine with a sad smile, “why the Marquis would prefer the Marchioness to interest herself in reading matter from some other kind of genre? Now that you are aware of all of his concerns, you’ll understand why he begs you to keep all these things absolutely secret... more than anything else, he cannot tolerate being ridiculed!”
“Ridiculed? For what?”
“These days, a story about a vampire would delight the whole of Paris... If they heard, in the city, that the Marchioness believes that her husband spends his nights sucking her blood, they would no longer be bored in the salons... there would be enough gossip to satisfy all of Montmartre and the end of year reviews in the newspapers, believe you me..! That is why he keeps her under surveillance... One thoughtless word, uttered to the wrong person, and Georges-Marie-Vincent would have no option but to go into exile in Tibet.”
I said nothing, so she went on:
“Hasn’t she ever shown you the mark that she has on her neck? No?... Maybe that’s for the best at the moment... but I am quietly confident: the first blemish or spot that she gets on her shoulder, you’ll see it..! My friend, you are passing through the same stages that she inflicted on me... She will show you the little scratch through which she claims this vile Marquis drains her lifeblood... but you must promise not to laugh at her!”
“I will not, by my faith,” I answered, “doubtless, the Marquis has plenty of reasons to fear ridicule, but I see her as someone to be pitied, you can be sure of that.”
“You’re right!” replied Christine, holding forth in her most serious tone, “there’s nothing we can do now but pray for her!”
“Pray for her?” repeated a voice that, at least up until now, had remained unheard...
I was surprised at the scathing tone in which Monsieur sawbones had pronounced these words.
“So I take it you don’t believe in vampires, sir?”
“Sir,” answered Jacques Cotentin, “I believe everything, and I believe in nothing. We live in a time when yesterday’s miracle becomes tomorrow’s industry. In all fields we are faced with contradictory hypotheses. Science moves along with uncertainty through this chaos of question marks that constitutes our little universe. Are there one or several worlds? Edgar Poe, one of our greatest philosophers – I am speaking seriously, here – has proved, by means of a series of equations, that there are many other worlds, and, consequently, many other gods. Others have proved, no less successfully, that there is only one. The God of Socrates, or of Descartes, has little to do with the God postulated by Pascal, and above all, nothing to do with the God of Spinoza. Deism? Pantheism? Where is the truth?... And you ask me if there are such things as vampires? Or if it is possible that a single Coulteray could have lived for a hundred and fifty, or two hundred years: I know nothing of these things, monsieur,” he continued, in a voice at the same time professorial and hoarse with a chronic case of laryngitis, “but this is the entire mystery of life and death, which we have not yet penetrated, but we drive ourselves to despair in the hope of one day breaking its secret! Where does life begin?... Where does death begin..? Everywhere! Nowhere! There is no beginning, and no end! What do we see? What do we observe? What are we? Transformations, movements that recommence... which we might be entitled to call: the pulsations of the heart of God..! This is what experience has already taught us – a thing that we believe to be dead is only life in a state of sleep... One day, science might enable us to bottle life in the same way that we can bottle electricity in a Leyden jar: we will be able to bottle the elements of life that are dispersed in what we believe today to be death!... When that day comes, we will be able to recreate life!... We will be able to extract life from death in the same way as we, in principle at least, could extract radium from this table... While we wait, monsieur, there is nothing better I can advise than Pray for her! Pray for the Marchioness!... Pray for those who believe in nothing!... Pray for me and may Jesus, who is all goodness, as the little children repeat, take pity on the world...”
“Pray for me as well,” I said, turning towards Christine...
“Amen,” she let fall in the grave and religious tone she would normally only adopt when she went to mass at the church of Saint-Louis.
They both shook my hand… and then they left.
XII
The Man With The Red Forearms
Decidedly, he’s not of the common type, that fiancé of hers. The man has quite a mind! What he told me was fabulous! Christine, as I have come to know her now, ought not to be bored living between her father, the watchmaker trying to find perpetual motion, and her sawbones prosector who is sear
ching for something of the same order with his studies of the pulsations of the heart of God! And to think I had felt sorry for her! They must lead a moral life possessed of a singular intensity behind those four walls of theirs! Then again, I have not yet counted Gabriel into the equation!
No, I never stop thinking about him!
Gabriel – what can I possibly say here? – interests me in a quite different way from the Marchioness! His secret touches me more intimately! Naturally, I cannot separate the thought of Gabriel from that of Christine. Since Old Mother Langlois took me into her confidences, I have tried to catch them together... or, at least, to watch their chaste effusions from a distance!... But all of my watching has been in vain...
Only Gabriel appears at the point of Christine’s stylus, as the figure that she carves, with a loving touch, into that silver plaque of hers.
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