“This man runs into death as if towards deliverance,” the scientist thought to himself. “That is, above all, what his statements prove! If he could prove that he had committed these crimes, then that is precisely what he would do! Being unable to do this, he is provoking the fury of the judges and the public, whom he despises, against himself by means of that insolence of his. At the same time, he is taking revenge in advance for the miscarriage of justice that will deliver him to the executioner by declaring ‘I am innocent!’ That would be quite justified, if he did not add: ‘I defy you to prove me guilty!’ Everything Benedict Masson says is quite true. In the meantime, they have not found any trace of the other six victims; and, as for the seventh, he was not wrong when he said words to the effect of ‘just because a man cuts a woman into pieces and burns her in his stove, it does not prove that he killed her.’” [18]
Jacques Cotentin kept these speculations to himself. He did not like pointless discussions. He knew that he would not be able to change a solitary mind about the fact of a guilt that was ‘obvious for all the world to see.’ More than anything else, he was careful not to reveal the profundity of these thoughts to Christine: because she had seen too much to doubt, for even a second, that Benedict Masson was anything better than an abominable criminal.
In the meantime, the old watchmaker’s daughter received a short message from Coulteray: “Farewell, Christine... it’s all over!”
The incredible tragedy that had befallen her at Corbillères, the physical and moral prostration that had followed in its wake, had made her forget this second tragedy – an event no less sombre and macabre than what was happening in this particular corner of France – which, after all, had been the reason for her visit to Benedict Masson’s abode.
Jacques Cotentin, for his part, fearing for a while for Christine’s life and sanity, had given no further thought to the Marchioness and her desperate entreaties.
In the end, the primary exigencies of the trial, the painful cross-examinations that burdened Christine with the most awful memories, had caused her to relegate it all to the shadowy realms of her mind, as if it had come to torment her by chance, this spectral adventure at the bottom of which lay the struggles of this poor lady, so dreadfully pale, that the terrible Marquis had brought back from India.
A sorrow present to the mind is selfish; it demands all your care, and does not allow you to take a good look around you until you have begun to heal its wounds... Finally, it cannot be forgotten that, on the whole, the misfortunes of the Marchioness of Coulteray had yet to be substantiated. Even though it is true that the discovery of the trocar had produced an effect, it still remained to be proved that she had not exaggerated its importance or disavowed her own role in the affair.
Whatever it turned out to be, during the bloody upheaval of the Corbillères affair, the trocar, that Christine had carried in her handbag to show to Benedict had vanished. To where? When? How?
Doubtless, at the moment that Christine, almost carried away by her terror and the wind, ran headlong into the marshes.
The bag might have come open, and the surgical pistol could easily have dropped out.
These were questions that Christine and Jacques did not ask until that brief, mournful message from the Marchioness reached them.
The memory of little Annie burning in Benedict Masson’s stove had utterly erased everything that did not relate directly, or seem to relate directly, to the crimes committed at Corbillères. Christine had not mentioned the strange trocar to anyone.
Still, it had not been found by anyone during the investigations of the judicial police, who scoured Corbillères and its marshes in their entirety in the search for the remains of the six missing victims. If the agents of the Sûreté générale [19] had discovered such a curious object, they certainly would have reported it.
“Let’s go to her,” said Christine abruptly to Jacques, “we have waited for too long! I might have already caused the death of this unfortunate lady with all my scepticism, pride and arrogance! If we still have a chance to save her, let’s not allow it to slip away! I am already full of remorse... I thought I was so clever, when really I’m just criminally thoughtless!
The coolness with which I judge people and things, the vaunted equilibrium of my mind, is nothing but an armature over a stupidity that terrifies me! Are you ever calm? Yes, but only in the eyes of fools! I have always seen your mind disturbed... nothing ever appears to be impossible to you! I was astonished that you didn’t laugh at me the first time I spoke of the disease of vampirism that raged through the Coulteray mansion... when I, in a tone that would have made every Joseph Prudhomme on earth envy me, said ‘Science,’ you replied: ‘Mystery!’ I looked upon my father as a monomaniac, but really he’s a genius; and I have loved Gabriel without believing I do... I might still love him without believing it!”
“Oh, Christine!” Jacques protested, with an infinite sadness.
“I’m sorry, Jacques, but I don’t want to hide anything from you! You’ve all been on your knees too often in my presence! I have seen the Marquis on his knees! I have seen Benedict Masson on his knees! What I did not see, I who thought I knew everything and could divine everyone, is that those two were monsters! Jacques, let’s go to Coulteray as fast as we can!”
“But you’re still too weak, Christine!”
“That is a good reason for a visit to the countryside. We can say that the doctors have ordered me take a rest in Touraine, with its warm, temperate climate, which will remedy my recent troubles. No-one will be surprised by my absence and the judges can’t object to it. In any case, the investigation is almost finished. They won’t find the six other victims because he turned them into smoke! When I think that he dedicated verses to me... and wept all over my hands! Will you come with me, Jacques?”
“You know very well that I’ll do anything you ask me to... and, besides, you’re right: our presence down there might be of some use!”
“May Heaven hear your words, but alas, what she wrote to us was: ‘Farewell, it’s all over!’”
“It wasn’t all over, Christine, as long as she was able to write.”
“Very well, tell my father. Will Gabriel suffer in your absence?”
“No, I can leave him now... I can be away for as long as I like... as long as your father stays to look after him.”
“Oh, he won’t leave him! Didn’t you notice that he hardly ever left him to come to see me... only occasionally... and briefly, too! No being in the world has been cared for like Gabriel has! Poor, dear papa! Gabriel is an important part of his life... and also of yours, Jacques!”
“No – my life is all yours, Christine!”
“Let’s be on our way, then. Let’s get out of this district, this isle, where I still seem to hear that wretch prowling around after me... with his frightful, melancholic grin and his verses... his verses that he whispered to me in a liturgical tone: ‘For the love of God, do not lower your eyebrows when you pass me by; let your gaze rest frozen in an immobile lake,’ etc., and others like it, that filled me with comfort under my statuesque exterior... because, at heart, I am a sentimentalist... yes, truly, someone like Jenny the working girl [20] – only it’s not flowers that I need, it’s poems!”
“Don’t ridicule yourself! Don’t ridicule yourself, Christine... you are a sentimentalist... but one is only as great as one’s feelings... and one’s kindness... and you have been very kind!”
“Yes, kind to you; kind to him; kind to everyone – and yet I make you all suffer! Ah, do you know what I want to do?” She let out a great cry that ended in a sob.
He took her away that same evening. Yes, he had to get her out of Paris. He resolved that, as soon as they reached Touraine, that he would look after her as if she were no more than a child, among fields full of flowers, in the sweet radiance of summer as it came to an end.
It was with a barely-suppressed sensation of joy that he read, in an evening newspaper, when they arrived in Tours, of the de
ath that morning of Bessie-Anne-Elizabeth, the Marchioness of Coulteray...
XXIII
The Chateau Of Coulteray
His joy did not last for long. Christine, from whom he could not hide the news, wanted to leave immediately for Coulteray. All of her listlessness had disappeared:
“If it’s on account of a fault of mine that she is dead,” she said, “if she has died because I would not listen to her, I will avenge her! I owe her that much! I feel that her ghost will never forgive me, except on that one condition!”
She was in a state of agitation that only ceased in the early hours of the morning, when she and Jacques set off in a motor car which would reach Coulteray at ten o’clock in the morning.
“We must remain calm,” she said, “because we need to take him by surprise, he must not suspect a thing.”
Everything that Jacques tried to tell her meant nothing. She no longer heard him. All of her thoughts were directed against the Marquis. She could not put ten words together all the way to Coulteray.
In other circumstances, this trip would have been an enchanting one for the two lovers. This is what Jacques told himself; but, for one reason or another, Christine always seemed to elude him at the very moment he felt that he was closest to her.
Nature had never been as beautiful, or as sweet. It was nearly the end of September. A golden sun spread its vaporous tenderness over the vale of the Loire. Corot could not have painted it better. Jacques held Christine’s hand: it felt icy cold. In this agreeable and joyous landscape, he could think of nothing but life. She thought only of the death towards which they hurtled at eighty kilometres per hour.
When they arrived at Coulteray, the bells of the little village church and the chapel up at the chateau tolled a funeral knell.
“It looks like they’re going to bury her today,” said Christine, her eyes wet with tears, “oh, I would like to see her one last time: I know what I’m going to whisper in her ear... as long as we can get there before the ceremony!”
As for Jacques, it was becoming impossible for him to put on a show of unity with these sad thoughts. He would have liked to have taken the charm of the hour away from the dead woman.
The vision of the little village on the side of a hill, appearing out of the verdure; the sun reflected in its white walls and pointed roofs, its fields and vineyards, in the beautiful stretch of diamantine river that, a few kilometres further away, emptied itself, or rather lost itself, in the Loire; this beautiful sky, this fluidity in the atmosphere, the welcoming smiles on the faces of the people they met by the roadside, in the doorways of the small cottages, who made no attempt to conceal their domestic contentment – none of this had prepared him to have to listen to this lugubrious litany in bronze, repeated by two bells, which seemed only to have been cast to announce weddings and baptisms.
The village was deserted. The motor car travelled along its main street, past the Fairy Grotto Inn, without encountering a solitary living soul. One might suppose it had been abandoned.
The car crossed the red-brick bridge, from where the serpentine route led them under the branches of a grove of trees towards the hill on top of which lay the chateau.
Works of architecture from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were abundant in this landscape and they enhanced its beauty... No traveller could have stopped here without admiring the imposing ruins, or the magnificent fragments, of the ancient chateaus of Châtelier, or of Guerche, Roche-Corbon, Isle-Bouchard, Montbazon, Chinon, Amboise, Loches, or of Azay-le-Rideau. The Chateau of Coulteray was by no means out of place in this collection.
It was no less remarkable on account of the architecture of its defences, its battlements, it moats and towers; but also for the friezes and bas-reliefs that had been carved delicately on its facade. There was a legend that affirmed that it was Diane de Poitiers that had done much of the work that embellished this redoubtable building and that Catherine de Medici [21] had it transformed into a comfortable manor house. For the rest, even the Middle Ages would have seemed a merry epoch in this charming landscape.
“Poor Bessie-Anne-Elizabeth, née Clavendish, must have been terminally ill if she couldn’t be cured here!” said Jacques to himself.
At the door to the chateau’s outer circle of walls or, rather, to what was left of the outer walls (stones, climbing plants and flowers), they descended from the motor car. A crowd had gathered in the courtyard. All of the people from the surrounding countryside were there. They had come to observe the funeral rites partly out of curiosity, and partly out of superstition...they are very superstitious in the land around Coulteray, probably more so than in the rest of Touraine; and certainly as superstitious as they are in Brittany, though in a different manner.
They had not come to see the dead woman, but to look at ‘the Empouse,’ [22] which is what they usually called the Marquis among themselves. Without believing in it very much, they could not completely refute the legend that had been handed down to frighten them when they were infants: they were no scholars.
The dark adventures of Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome, who had broken out of his tomb in order to roam the night, devouring the living, had lately been replaced, to the advantage of the little boys of Coulteray, by stories of werewolves that came from overseas.
When the castellans were away, the sacristan allowed tourists to visit the crypt in the chapel. He never failed to tell the visitors the story, some two centuries old, of his empty tomb.
“Do you believe in it?” – asked one smiling visitor.
“Why, of course!” replied the sacristan, “one can believe in it without believing it!”
What could be more easy-going than the Tourainian character – with its petulant common sense, its unpredictability, its fine wit, its mocking philosophy, its scepticism and its wild imagination? What could be more interesting than this marvellous, supple genius that, at the very moment it is taken seriously, passes without any apparent effort from buffoonery to the gravest of subjects, from senselessness to the most serious of thoughts, sometimes with a most unexpected audacity?
All this is much more than an inutilious digression, as we stand at the door of the Chateau of Coulteray, waiting for the moment when the tomb is closed on the waxen figure of Bessie-Anne-Elizabeth Clavendish, wife of the last of the Coulterays, Georges-Marie-Vincent, who is none other than Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome, the folkloric vampire, and just a few hours before an extraordinary turn of events that will turn the countryside upside down...
Let us not forget that we are in a part of the country where we have just driven past an inn called the Fairy Grotto, whose sign is a dolmen, frequented by these most amicable gnomes. Not far from this dolmen there is another one, of gigantic proportions, known as Gargantua’s Palace. No more than a few kilometres away from this stone, the ovoid grove of Saint Nicholas can still be seen. It is a mound of barbarian stones, belonging to the ancient Celtic times, where the wizard Orfon piled up immense riches and took great pleasure in using them to make a raucous noise every Christmas Eve.
All of this superstition is genial, pleasing and poetic; it is proper to a land in which one feels fortunate to be living, and recalls nothing of the terrors of Breton folklore. In the end, though, the mores of the country are still bound by certain customs, and certain festival days, with which even the greatest unbelievers would take care not to meddle. With this point in mind, we should not be surprised by what is about to happen.
First of all, we can render no better approximate account of the moral condition – from this point of view – of the population of Coulteray, than by reporting very briefly the way in which they, on various occasions, were treated by the Marquis. We have already said that he was born in a foreign country. He did not come to Coulteray until he was in his prime and, when he appeared, it was a great event – a truly joyous occasion.
Georges-Marie-Vincent seemed to embody the perfect kind of country gentleman of Touraine; he was a bon vivant, a colourful character, who en
thusiastically entered this society built around traditional festivities. He was not in any way too proud. He gave rustic festivals, where he would dance with all the girls, and he paid for memorable banquets at the Fairy Grotto during the major annual feasts.
‘The Empouse,’ as they continued to call him among themselves, according to an amusing tradition, was very popular. Everyone loved him. They would say: “Isn’t our Empouse in good health, may the Devil preserve him for another two or three hundred years!”
Then he went away again, returning to foreign lands.
Nothing was heard from, or about him for many years. When he came back, he had not changed at all. He was still the same stout fellow, with the same ruddy face, the same good humour, the same energy. The peasants, in the meantime, had all grown old.
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