by Louise Welsh
The house must have been uninhabited for perhaps thirty or forty years. The rigors of many winters had loosened the bricks from the cornices and over the moss-covered window-frames. Lizards passed across the facade like the first ripples of approaching disaster, furrowing the still solid but uncard-for structure.The flight of steps beyond was cleft by the frost and blocked with growths of nettles and brambles. It looked as if it led to death and desolation. But saddest of all were the curtainless windows, bare and misty, like blinded open eyes of a soulless body, some of them broken by little boys, and all revealing the mournful void within. The vast surrounding garden presented a scene of desolation. Its former flower bed could hardly be recognized beneath the mass of spreading weeds; its little walks had been devoured by voracious plants; its hedges were transformed into virgin forests; and the wild vegetation, suggesting a deserted cemetery, was shedding its last leaves under the damp shade of venerable trees, while the autumn wind wailed a sad lament.
Listening to the despairing cry that arose from all these objects, I lost the sense of my own existence and for some time my heart was troubled with a heavy fear, a growing distress, but an ardent compassion too, and I felt the need for understanding and sympathizing with all the misery and sorrow about me. When I finally decided to go, I perceived on the other side of the road, just where it forked, a kind of inn where one could get something to drink. I entered, determined to make the people who lived there talk to me.
I only found an old woman, who served me a glass of beer. She complained of the business on this out-of-the-way road along which scarcely two bicyclists passed each day. She told her own story in vague terms, saying that she was known as Mother Toussaint, that she had come from Vernon with her husband to take charge of this inn, that at first business had been fair, but that now things were going from bad to worse, and that she was a widow. But when she had unloosed this flood of words, and I began questioning her about the neighboring estate, she became circumspect and looked at me defiantly, as if she thought I wanted to wrest important secrets from her.
‘Ah, yes, La Sauvagière; the haunted house, as they call it around here. I know nothing about it, sir. It was before my time, for I shall only have been here thirty years this coming Easter, and what happened there occurred at least forty years ago. When we came here the house was in almost the same state you see it in now. Summers and winters pass, but nothing moves except the falling stones.’
‘But why don’t they sell it,’ I asked, ‘since it is for sale?’
‘Ah, why, why? How should I know? People say so many things.’
Somehow I finally inspired her with confidence, and then she burned with eagerness to tell me what people said. In the first place, she told me that no girl in the neighboring village dared to enter La Sauvagière after dark because rumor had it that a poor soul revisited the place at night. When I showed my astonishment that such a story could still be believed so near Paris, she shrugged her shoulders, and, though she at first tried to give the impression of being courageous, she eventually revealed her own unavowed terror.
‘But you see, sir, there are certain facts. Why isn’t it sold? I have seen people come who wanted to buy it, but they all went away quicker than they came, and not one of them has ever reappeared. One thing is certain – whoever risks visiting the house sees some extraordinary occurrences. Doors slam and then open noiselessly of their own accord, as if a terrible wind had blown them. Cries, groans, and sobs arise from the cellar, and if you insist on staying you hear a heartrending voice continually crying “Angeline!” with such grief that your very bones freeze. I repeat that it is a proved fact – no one will tell you different.’
I confess that I began to get excited myself, and felt a cold chill running under my skin.
‘And who is Angeline?’
Ah, sir, that would mean telling you everything. Anyway, I’ve told you all I know about it.’
However, she finally told me the whole story. Forty years ago, in 1858, when the Second Empire was at its height, a M. de G., who occupied a post in the Tuileries, lost his wife, by whom he had a ten-year-old daughter named Angeline, a miracle of beauty, and the living image of her mother. Two years later M. de G. married again, taking as his second wife another celebrated beauty, the widow of a general. It was alleged that after the second marriage a terrible jealousy between Angeline and her stepmother cropped up. The girl’s heart was broken to see her own mother so soon forgotten and so quickly replaced by this stranger. The wife was unbalanced by always having before her this living portrait of a woman whose memory she herself could never efface. La Sauvagière belonged to the new Mme. De G., and it was there, on seeing her husband passionately embrace his daughter one evening, that she jealously struck the child down. The poor little girl fell to the floor dead, her neck broken. What followed was terrible. To save the murderess the crazed father consented to bury the girl himself in the basement of the house. There the little body lay hidden for years, during which time they said she was visiting an aunt. Finally the howling of a dog who was scratching at the soil near where she was buried revealed the crime, but the authorities at the Tuileries suppressed it for fear of scandal. M. and Mme. De G. have died, but Angeline still comes back every night, answering the voice of lamentation that calls her from her mysterious hiding place in the dark beyond.
‘Nobody had lied to me,’ concluded Mother Toussaint. ‘It is all as true as that two and two make four.’
I listened to her in amazement, astounded at her tale, yet enthralled by the violent and sombre weirdness of the drama. This M. de G. – I had often heard him mentioned, and I had the impression that he had remarried and that some family sorrow had soon afterward darkened his life. Was this true? What a tender, tragic story it was – one that aroused all the human passions, to the point of madness. A crime of passion of the most terrifying nature – a little girl, beautiful as the day, killed by her stepmother, and then buried in the corner of a cellar by the father who adored her. It was too full of emotion and horror to be ture. I decided to make some more inquiries and talk the matter over further. But then I asked myself: To what purpose? Why not carry this fearful tale in my mind with the fresh bloom of popular imagination still upon it?
As I got on my bicycle again I cast one last look on La Sauvagière. Nigh was falling, and the distressful house looked at me with its empty troubled windows like the eyes of death, while the autumn wind lamented in the ancient trees.
*
Why did this story lodge in my head until it became an obsession, a veritable torment? In vain I told myself that legends like this circulated all through the countryside, and that this one really held no direct interest for me. But, in spite of myself, the dead child haunted me – that delicious, tragic Angeline whom an imploring voice has summoned every night for forty years through empty rooms in an abandoned house.
During the first two months of the winter I undertook some research. Such a disappearance, though not important in itself, obviously contained enough dramatic interest to have been mentioned in the newspapers of the time. I went through the files as the Bibliothèque Nationale without discovering anything. Then I inquired among people who were employed at the Tuileries at the time, but not one of them could give me a clear reply, and many of them contradicted each other. I had just about abandoned all hope of finding the truth, though I was never free from torment at the thought of the mystery, when one morning good fortune started me down a new path.
Every two or three weeks I used to pay a visit of friendliness, tenderness, and admiration to the aged poet, V., who died last April almost seventy years old. For many years paralysis had nailed him to an armchair in his little study on the rue d’Assas, and his window looked out on the Luxembourg Gardens. There he was living a gentle life of dreams, having always dwelt in the world of imagination, where he had constructed for himself his own ideal palace in which he had loved and suffered far from the world of reality. Who does not recall his lovable
face, his white hair, curly as a child’s, his pale blue eyes that had preserved the innocence of youth? It could not be said of him that he always lied. The truth is that he invented unceasingly, and you could never tell just where reality ended and dreams began. He was a thoroughly charming old man, removed for a long time from active life, and his conversation often stirred me like a discreet and vague revelation of the unknown.
On this particular day I was sitting near the window in his narrow room that a warm fire always heated. Outside it was trebly cold. The Luxembourg Gardens were covered with a vast white expanse of immaculate snow. I don’t know how I happened to mention the story of La Sauvagière, but it still preoccupied me. He listened with a tranquil smile behind which lurked a touch of sadness while I told him about the remarried father, the stepmother’s jealousy of the little girl who was the image of the first wife, and finally about the burial in the cellar. Silence ensued as his pale gaze lost itself in the distant white immensity of the Luxembourg, while a shadow of dreams emanating from his person seemed to surround him with a quivering aura.
‘I knew M. de G. intimately,’ he remarked slowly. ‘I knew his first wife, a woman of superhuman beauty; and I knew his second, a woman no less prodigiously endowed. I loved them both passionately, though I never said a word about it. I knew Angeline, and she was more beautiful still – men would have adored her on their knees. But things did not happen as you say.’
This stirred me profoundly. Had I at last found the unexpected truth of which I had despaired? Was I going oto know everything? At first I had no doubts whatever, and I said to him, ‘Ah, my friend, what a service you will do me. At last my poor mind can be pacified. Speak quickly. Tell me everything.’
But he did not hear me, and his gaze was still lost in the distance. At length he spoke in a dreamy voice, as if he were himself creating the people and things he talked about.
‘At the age of twelve Angeline possessed a soul in which all a woman’s love had already flowered with transports of joy and sorrow. She in was who became wildly jealous of the new wife whom she was every day in her father’s arms. She suffered as if from an act of frightful treason, for the new couple were not only insulting her mother, they were torturing her and tearing out her heart. Every night she heard her mother calling to her from her tomb, and one night, overcome by suffering and by the immensity of her love, this twelve-year-old girl plunged a knife into her own heart.’
I uttered a cry. ‘Good Lord, is it possible!’
‘What an unexpected horror it was the next day,’ he continued without listening to me, ‘when M. and Mme de G. found Angeline in her little bed with this knife buried to the hilt in her breast. They were on the point of departure for Italy, and there was no one in the house but an old servant who had brought up the child. Terrified that they might be accused of a crime, they called her to their aid and buried the little body under an orange tree in a corner of the greenhouse that stands behind their dwelling. There the remains were found when the old nurse told the story after the couple had died.’
Doubts assailed me, and I anxiously questioned him, asking whether he had not invented the tale.
‘Do you, too, really believe,’ I demanded, ‘that Angeline can return every night in response to the heartrending cry of that mysterious voice?’
This time he looked at me, and once more broke into an indulgent smile.
‘Return, my friend? Why, everyone returns. Why not allow the soul of that dear little dead girl to go on inhabiting the place where she loved and suffered? If you hear a voice calling out to her, it means that her life has not yet begun again; but it will begin again, you may be sure of that, for everything begins again, and nothing is lost, neither love nor beauty. Angeline! Angeline! And she will be born again among the sunshine and the flowers.’
This neither convinced nor calmed me. My old poet with the soul of a child had only brought me more trouble. Surely he was inventing, though, like all dreamers, perhaps he divined correctly.
‘That’s quite true, is it – all that you have told me?’ I finally dared to ask him with a laugh. He too became gay.
‘Why, of course it’s true. Isn’t the infinite always true?’
This was the last time I saw him, for I had to leave Paris shortly afterward. But I still remember him reflectively gazing upon the snow-covered Luxembourg, so tranquilly certain of his eternal dream, while for my part I was devoured by the eternal necessity of pinning down fugitive truth.
*
Eighteen months passed. I had had to travel, since great troubles and great joys had stirred my life. But invariably at certain times I would hear passing by me from afar the desolate cry of ‘Angeline! Angeline!’ And I would still tremble, assailed with doubt, tortured with necessity of knowing for sure. I could not forget, and uncertainty is my only hell.
I cannot say how it happened, but one beautiful June evening I found myself once more bicycling down the road past La Sauvagière. Had I actually wished to see it, or was it pure instinct that made me leave the main road? It was almost eight o’clock, but, since it was one of the longest days of the year, a triumphant sunset still blazed in a cloudless infinity of gold and azure. How light and delicious the air, what a sweet smell of trees and flowers, what tender gladness in the immense peace of the countryside.
Again, as on the first occasion, I was stupefied into leaping off my machine as I passed La Sauvagière. But I hesitated a minute. This was not the same piece of property. A lovely new garden glowed under the setting sun, the walls had ben rebuilt, and the house, which I could barely descry among the trees, seemed to have assumed the laughing gayety of youth. Was this the resurrection that my friend had announced? Had Angeline come to life in reply to the summons of that far-off voice?
I stood on the road, frozen with astonishment, until someone walking near me made me jump. It was Mother Toussaint, leading a cow from a neighboring pasture.
‘Those people there weren’t afraid,’ I said, pointing to the house.
She recognized me, and stopped her animal.
‘Ah, sir, there are people who would step on the toes of God Almighty. A year ago the present owner bought it; but he is a painter, – the painter B., – and, as you know, artists are capable of anything.’
As she led her cow away, she added over her shoulder, ‘Well, we’ll have to see how it turns out.’
This painter, the ingenious and delicate artist who had painted so many lovely Parisian ladies, I knew slightly. We used to shake hands whenever we met on the street, in the theatre, or at exhibitions. Suddenly I was seized by an irresistible desire to go in, to confess myself to him, and to beg him to tell me the truth about this Sauvagière place whose mystery had obsessed me. Without reasoning, without stopping to think of my dusty bicycling clothes that I had become accustomed to wearing everywhere, I wheeled my machine up to the mossy trunk of an old tree. In response to the clear ringing of a bell whose handle stuck out of the garden door, a servant appeared, to whom I gave my card, while he asked me to wait in the garden.
My surprise increased as I looked about me. The outside of the house had been repaired – no more lizards, no more loose bricks. The flight of steps, garnished with roses, had once more become a threshold of happy welcome. The living windows were laughing now, telling of happiness within behind their white curtains. The garden itself had been rid of its brambles and nettles, the flower bed had been reconstructed into a great odorous bouquet, and the old trees had been rejuvenated by the golden rain of the springtime sun.
When the servant appeared again he led me into a room, and told me that the gentleman of the house had gone to the near-by village, but that he would soon return. I would have waited for hours, and I kept my patience by looking over the room in which I found myself. It was luxuriously fitted out with thick carpets, cretonne portieres and hangings, a huge sofa, and deep armchairs. The tapestries were so ample that I was astonished at how quickly day disappeared. Soon night had almost entirel
y come. I do not know how long I had to wait, for I had been forgotten, and no one brought in a lamp. Seated here in the shadows, I set myself to living over again the whole tragic story, yielding to reverie. Had Angeline been murdered? Had she plunged a knife into her heart? And I confess that in this haunted house, now darkened once more, fear seized me – at first only lightly, to be sure, yet with a little tingle on the surface of my skin; but as time went on I was exasperated to find myself freezing from head to foot, and reduced to a state of real madness.
At first I seemed to hear vague noises somewhere. No doubt they came from the depths of the cellar – muffled cried, stifled sobs, the dull tread of a ghost. The noise mounted, drew nearer – the whole house seemed full of frightful distress. Suddenly, and with increasing volume, the terrible cry rang out, ‘Angeline! Angeline! Angeline!’ I thought I felt a cold breath passing across my face as a door opened sharply and Angeline entered. She walked across the room without seeing me, but I recognized her in the shaft of light that entered with her from the illuminated vestibule. This was indeed the little twelve-year-old dead girl, miraculously beautiful, her superb blonde hair flowing over her shoulders; and she was dressed in white – the pure white of the earth from which she arose every night. Silent and abstracted, she passed me and disappeared through another door as the cry rang out once more, further away this time, ‘Angeline! Angeline! Angeline!’ I stood rooted to the spot, my forehead damp with sweat, while every hair on my body vibrated with horror at this terrifying gust of mystery.