The subject matter of the Guignol plays seldom varied. Their single acts were filled with girls being thrown into lighthouse lamps…faces singed by vitriol or pressed forcibly down upon red hot stoves…naked ladies nailed to crosses and carved up by gypsies…a variety of surgical operations…mad old crones who put out the eyes of young maidens with knitting needles…chunks of flesh ripped from victims’ necks by men with hooks for hands…bodies dissolved in acid baths…hands chopped off; also arms, legs, heads…women raped and strangled…all done in a hyper-realistic manner with ingenious trick props and the Guignol’s own secretly formulated blood—a thick, suety, red gruel which was actually capable of congealing before your eyes and which was kept continually hot in a big cauldron backstage.
Some actors—but especially actresses—made spectacular careers at the Guignol. You may know of Maxa? She was after my time, actually, but she was supposed to have been a beautiful woman, generously endowed by Nature, and they say it was impossible to find one square inch of her lovely body that had not received some variety of stage violence in one play or another. The legend is that she died ten thousand times, in sixty separate and distinct ways, each more hideous than the last; and that she writhed in the assaults of brutal rapine on no less than three thousand theatrical occasions. For the remainder of her life she could not speak above a whisper: the years of screaming had torn her throat to shreds.
At any rate, the evening following my first meeting with Sellig, César and I were seated in this unique little theatre with two young ladies we had escorted there; they were uncommonly pretty but uncommonly common—in point of fact, they were barely on the safe side of respectability’s border, being inhabitants of that peculiar demimonde, that shadow world where several professions—actress, model, barmaid, bawd—mingle and merge and overlap and often coexist. But we were young, César and I, and this was, after all, Paris. Their names, they told us, were Clothilde and Mathilde—and I was never quite sure which was which. Soon after our arrival, the lights dimmed and the Guignol curtain was raised.
The first offering on the programme was a dull, shrill little boudoir farce that concerned itself with broken corset laces and men hiding under the bed and popping out of closets. It seemed to amuse our feminine companions well enough, but the applause in the house was desultory, I thought, a mere form…this fluttering nonsense was not what the patrons had come for, was not the sort of fare on which the Guignol had built its reputation. It was an hors d’oeuvre. The entrée followed.
It was called, if memory serves, La Septième Porte, and was nothing more than an opportunity for Bluebeard—played by an actor wearing an elaborately ugly make-up—to open six of his legendary seven doors for his new young wife (displaying, among other things, realistically mouldering cadavers and a torture chamber in full operation). Remaining faithful to the legend, Bluebeard warns his wife never to open the seventh door. Left alone on stage, she of course cannot resist the tug of curiosity—she opens the door, letting loose a shackled swarm of shrieking, livid, rag-bedecked but not entirely unattractive harpies, whose white bodies, through their shredded clothing, are crisscrossed with crimson welts. They tell her they are Bluebeard’s ex-wives, kept perpetually in a pitch-dark dungeon, in a state near to starvation, and periodically tortured by the vilest means imaginable. Why? the new wife asks. Bluebeard enters, a black whip in his hand. For the sin of curiosity, he replies—they, like you, could not resist the lure of the seventh door! The other wives chain the girl to them, and cringing under the crack of Bluebeard’s whip, they crawl back into the darkness of the dungeon. Bluebeard locks the seventh door and soliloquizes: Diogenes had an easy task, to find an honest man; but my travail is tenfold—for where is she, does she live, the wife who does not pry and snoop, who does not pilfer her husband’s pockets, steam open his letters, and when he is late returning home, demand to know what wench he has been tumbling?
The lights had been dimming slowly until now only Bluebeard was illuminated, and at this point he turned to the audience and addressed the women therein. “Mesdames et Mademoiselles!” he declaimed. “Écoute! En garde! Voici la septième porte—Hear me! Beware! Behold the seventh door!” By a stage trick the door was transformed into a mirror. The curtain fell to riotous applause.
Recounted badly, La Septième Porte seems a trumpery entertainment, a mere excuse for scenes of horror—and so it was. But there was a strength, a power to the portrayal of Bluebeard; that ugly devil up there on the shabby little stage was like an icy flame, and when he’d turned to the house and delivered that closing line, there had been such force of personality, such demonic zeal, such hatred and scorn, such monumental threat, that I could feel my young companion shrink against me and shudder.
“Come, come, ma petite,” I said, “it’s only a play.”
“Je le déteste,” she said.
“You detest him? Who, Bluebeard?”
“Laval.”
My French was sketchy at that time, and her English almost nonexistent, but as we made our slow way up the aisle, I managed to glean that the actor’s name was Laval, and that she had at one time had some offstage congress with him, congress of an intimate nature, I gathered. I could not help asking why, since she disliked him so. (I was naïf then, you see, and knew little of women; it was somewhat later in life I learned that many of them find evil and even ugliness irresistible.) In answer to my question, she only shrugged and delivered a platitude: “Les affaires sont les affaires—Business is business.”
Sellig was waiting for us in the foyer. His height, and his great beauty of face, made him stand out. Our two pretty companions took to him at once, for his attractive exterior was supplemented by waves of charm.
“Did you enjoy the programme?” he asked of me.
I did not know exactly what to reply. “Enjoy?…Let us say I found it fascinating, M’sieu’ Sellig.”
“It did not strike you as tawdry? Cheap? Vulgar?”
“All those, yes. But at the same time, exciting, as sometimes only the tawdry, the cheap, the vulgar can be.”
“You may be right. I have not watched a Guignol production for several years. Although, surely, the acting…”
We were entering a carriage, all five of us. I said, “The acting was unbelievably bad—with one exception.”
“Really? And the exception?”
“The actor who played Bluebeard in a piece called La Septième Porte. His name is—” I turned to my companion again.
“Laval,” she said, and the sound became a viscous thing.
“Ah yes,” said Sellig. “Laval. The name is not entirely unknown to me. Shall we go to Maxime’s?”
We did, and experienced a most enjoyable evening. Sellig’s fame and personal magnetism won us the best table and the most efficient service. He told a variety of amusing—but never coarse—anecdotes about theatrical life, and did so without committing that all-too-common actor’s offense of dominating the conversation. One anecdote concerned the theatre we had just left:
“I suppose César has told the story of the Guignol doctor. No? Ah then, it seems that at one point it was thought a capital idea to hire a house physician—to tend to swooning patrons and so on, you know. This was done, but it was unsuccessful. On the first night of the physician’s tour of duty, a male spectator found one particular bit of stage torture too much for him, and he fainted. The house physician was summoned. He could not be found. Finally, the ushers revived the unconscious man without benefit of medical assistance, and naturally they apologized profusely and explained they had not been able to find the doctor. ‘I know,’ the man said, rather sheepishly, ‘I am the doctor.’ ”
At the end of the evening, César and I escorted our respective (but not precisely respectable) ladies to their dwellings, where more pleasure was found. Sellig went home alone. I felt sorry for him, and there was a moment when it crossed my mind that perhaps he was one of those men who have no need of women—the theatrical profession is thickly inhabited b
y such men—but César privately assured me that Sellig had a mistress, a lovely and gracious widow named Lise, for Sellig’s tastes were exceedingly refined and his image unblemished by descents into the dimly lit world of the sporting house. My own tastes, though acute, were not so elevated, and thus I enjoyed myself immensely that night.
Ignorance, they say, is bliss. I did not know that my ardent companion’s warmth would turn unalterably cold in the space of a single night.
IV
Face of Evil
The commissaire de police had never seen anything like it. He spoke poor English, but I was able to glean his meaning without too much difficulty. “It is how you say…”
“Horrible?”
“Ah, oui, mais…étrange, incroyable…”
“Unique?”
“Si! Uniquement monstrueux! Uniquement dégoûtant!”
Uniquely disgusting. Yes, it was that. It was that, certainly.
“The manner, M’sieu’…the method…the—”
“Mutilation.”
“Oui, la mutilation…est irrégulière, anormale…”
We were in the morgue—not that newish Medico-Legal Institute of the University on the banks of the Seine, but the old morgue, that wretched, ugly place on the quai de l’Archevêché. She—Clothilde, my petite amie of the previous night—had been foully murdered; killed with knives; her prettiness destroyed; her very womanhood destroyed, extracted bloodily but with surgical precision. I stood in the morgue with the commissaire, César, Sellig, and the other girl, Mathilde. Covering the corpse with its anonymous sheet, the commissaire said, “It resembles, does it not, the work of your English killer…Jacques?”
“Jack,” I said. “Jack the Ripper.”
“Ah oui.” He looked down upon the covered body. “Mais pourquoi?”
“Yes,” I said hoarsely. “Why indeed?…”
“La cause…la raison…le motif,” he said; and then delivered himself of a small, eloquent, Gallic shrug. “Inconnu.”
Motive unknown. He had stated it succinctly. A girl of the streets, a fille de joie, struck down, mutilated, her femaleness cancelled out. Who did it? Inconnu. And why? Inconnu.
“Merci, messieurs, mademoiselle…” The commissaire thanked us and we left the cold repository of Paris’s unclaimed dead. All four of us—it had been “all five of us” just the night before—were strained, silent. The girl Mathilde was weeping. We, the men, felt not grief exactly—how could we, for one we had known so briefly, so imperfectly?—but a kind of embarrassment. Perhaps that is the most common reaction produced by the presence of death: embarrassment. Death is a kind of nakedness, a kind of indecency, a kind of faux pas. Unless we have known the dead person well enough to experience true loss, or unless we have wronged the dead person enough to experience guilt, the only emotion we can experience is embarrassment. I must confess my own embarrassment was tinged with guilt. It was I, you see, who had used her, such a short time before. And now she would never be used again. Her warm lips were cold; her knowing fingers, still; her cajoling voice, silent; the very stronghold and temple of her treasure was destroyed.
In the street, I felt I had to make some utterance. “To think,” I said, “that her last evening was spent at the Guignol!”
Sellig smiled sympathetically. “My friend,” he said, “the Grand Guignol is not only a shabby little theatre in Montmartre alley. This”—his gesture took in the world—“this is the Grandest Guignol of all.”
I nodded. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Do not be too much alone,” he advised me. “Come to the Théâtre tonight. We are playing Cinna.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But I have a strange urge to revisit the Guignol…”
César seemed shocked or puzzled, but Sellig understood. “Yes,” he said, “that is perhaps a good thought.” We parted—Sellig to his rooms, César with the weeping girl, I to my hotel.
I have an odd infirmity—perhaps it is not so odd, and perhaps it is no infirmity at all—but great shock or disappointment or despair do not rob me of sleep as they rob the sleep of others. On the contrary, they rob me of energy, they drug me, they send me into the merciful solace of sleep like a powerful anodyne. And so, that afternoon, I slept. But it was a sleep invaded by dreams…dreams of gross torture and mutilation, of blood, and of the dead Clothilde—alive again for the duration of a nap—repeating over and over again a single statement.
I awoke covered with perspiration, and with that statement gone just beyond the reach of my mind. Try as I did, I could not recall it. I dashed cold water in my face to clear my head, and although I had no appetite, I rang for service and had some food brought me in my suite. Then, the theatre hour approaching, I dressed and made my way toward Montmartre and the rue Chaptal.
The Guignol’s chef-d’oeuvre that evening was a bit of white supremacy propaganda called Chinoiserie. (“The yellow menace” was just beginning to become a popular prejudice.) A white girl played by a buxom but ungifted actress was sold as a slave to a lecherous Chinese mandarin, and after being duly ravished by him and established as his most favored concubine, fell into the clutches of the beautiful but jealous Chinese woman who had hitherto occupied that honored post. The Woman Scorned, taking advantage of the temporary absence of her lord, seized the opportunity to strip her rival naked and subject her to the first installment of The Death of a Thousand Slices, when her plans were thwarted by the appearance of a handsome French lieutenant who freed the white girl and offered her the chance to turn the tables on the Asian witch. The liberated victim, after first frightening her tormentress with threats of the Thousand Slices, proved a credit to her race by contenting herself with a plume. Although I had been told that l’épisode du chatouillement—the tickling scene—was famed far and wide, going on for several minutes of shrieking hysterics until the tickled lady writhed herself out of her clothing, I left before its conclusion. The piece was unbearably boring, though it was no worse than the previous evening’s offering. The reason for its tediousness was simple: Laval did not appear in the play. On my way out of the theatre, I inquired of an usher about the actor’s absence. “Ah, the great Laval,” he said, with shuddering admiration. “It is his—do you say ‘night away’?”
“Night off…”
“Oui. His night off. He appears on alternate nights, M’sieu’…”
Feeling somehow cheated, I decided to return the following night. I did so; in fact, I made it a point to visit the Guignol every night that week on which Laval was playing. I saw him in several little plays—shockers in which he starred as the monsters of history and legend—and in each, his art was lit by black fire and was the more admirable since he did not rely upon a succession of fantastic make-ups—in each, he wore the same grotesque make-up (save for the false facial hair) he had worn as Bluebeard; I assumed it was his trademark. The plays—which were of his own authorship, I discovered—included L’Inquisiteur, in which he played Torquemada, the merciless heretic-burner (convincing flames on the stage) and L’Empoisonneur, in which he played the insane, incestuous Cesare Borgia. There were many more, among them a contemporary story, L’Éventreur, in which he played the currently notorious Jack the Ripper, knifing pretty young harlots with extreme realism until the stage was scarlet with sham blood. In this, there was one of those typically Lavalesque flashes, an infernally inspired cri de coeur, when The Ripper, remorseful, sunken in shame, enraged at his destiny, surfeited with killings but unable to stop, tore a rhymed couplet from the bottom of his soul and flung it like a live thing into the house:
La vie est un corridor noir
D’impuissance et de désespoir!
That’s not very much in English—“Life is a black corridor of impotence and despair”—but in the original, and when hurled with the ferocity of Laval, it was Kean’s Hamlet, Irving’s Macbeth, Salvini’s Othello, all fused into a single theatrical moment.
And, in that moment, there was another fusion—a fusion, in my own mind, of two voices. One was that
of the commissaire de police—“It resembles, does it not, the work of your English killer…Jacques?” The other was the voice of the dead Clothilde, repeating a phrase she had first uttered in life, and then, after her death, in that fugitive dream—“Je le déteste.”
As the curtain fell, to tumultuous applause, I sent my card backstage, thus informing Laval that “un admirateur” wished to buy him a drink. Might we meet at L’Oubliette? The response was long in coming, insultingly long, but at last it did come and it was affirmative. I left at once for L’Oubliette.
Forty minutes later, after I had consumed half a bottle of red wine, Laval entered. The waitress brought him to my table and we shook hands.
I was shocked, for, as I looked into his face, I immediately realized that Laval never wore evil make-up on the Guignol stage.
He had no need of it.
V
An Intimate Knowledge of Horrors
Looking about, Laval said, “L’Oubliette,” and sat down. “The filthy place is aptly named. Do you know what an oubliette is, M’sieu’?”
“No,” I said; “I wish my French were as excellent as your English.”
“But surely you know our word, oublier?”
“My French-English lexicon,” I replied, “says it means ‘to forget, to omit, to leave.’ ”
He nodded. “That is correct. In the old days, a variety of secret dungeon was called an oubliette. It was subterranean. It had no door, no window. It could be entered only by way of a trapdoor at the top. The trapdoor was too high to reach, even by climbing, since the walls sloped in the wrong direction and were eternally thick with slime. There was no bed, no chair, no table, no light, and very little air. Prisoners were dropped down into such dungeons to be—literally—forgotten. They seldom left alive. Infrequently, when a prisoner was fortunate enough to be freed by a change in administration, he was found to have become blind—from years in the dark. And almost always, of course, insane.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 141