The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  “Robespierre,” said Father Louis, “somehow he’d last the longest. He’d not dance with the wooden widow till July of ’94.” Time enough, I knew, for him to orchestrate the Red Terror, in the final six weeks of which the papers of Paris listed no fewer than 1,400 executions. “It’s true,” said the priest, “I watched, we watched as men, women, and children were killed. Even a dog, taught to growl upon hearing the word ‘Republican,’ was guillotined along with his aged master.”

  And the corpses of suicides, offered Madeleine, reticently, even they were subjected to the Blade, lest self-murder become too popular a means of avoiding justice.

  Through all this, of course, power was bounced about like a ball. From the Crown to the various Committees—of Vigilance, of General Security, et cetera—to the Commune, to the Tribunals; then, in ’95, to the Directory; in ’99, to the Consulate; and, in the early years of this century, to a tiny man from a faraway island, Corsica, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. And I’ll stop there, adding only that fifteen years ago, or thereabouts, there was installed, as we know, a king, Louis XVIII, brother of the executed Louis Capet. And so historians will debate, for centuries to come, what it was all worth. They will surely disagree, but none, I suspect, will conclude that it was not worth something.

  …Ah, but I’ve spoken at length of things of concern to the world, perhaps, but not of concern to us here. For we are not of the world. Or are we?…Though we may be peripheral, said Sebastiana, we are not insignificant.

  …I’ll return now to the day in question, 21 January 1793. “A great day,” said Father Louis.

  “Why?” I countered. “Simply because the King was killed?”

  “Mais non,” said he, “that was the day we discovered Asmodei.” He said they’d only had to follow the King’s corpse to the Marguerite cemetery and there—

  No, Louis, said the succubus, it was the Madeleine cemetery—a name I’d remember. It was there they shoved the King’s body into a too-small coffin and pitched the whole of it into a mass grave. She added, disgustedly, For a few sous, the sexton would let citizens toss a shovelful of lime down onto the King’s coffin.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said the priest.

  I am. And it was not Capet’s corpse that led us to Asmodei; it was his head, which took a quite different route, remember?

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “I remember now: Tussaud.”

  Yes, said Madeleine. Tussaud.

  …Marie Grosholtz, by name; later, Madame Tussaud.

  A mania for des choses en cire rose up during the Revolution. A medical man turned impresario, one Dr. Curtius, exhibited wax busts of celebrities and criminals at his Cabinet de Cire on the boulevard du Temple. His young assistant, not quite pretty but uncommonly ambitious, at first modeled for Curtius; she soon progressed to making casts. As Curtius was close to the Maestro—as Sanson was sometimes known—he received tips as to the who, what, and where of the executions. Upon receipt of such a tip, Curtius would dispatch Marie. She’d follow the tumbril from the scaffold to the Madeleine or some other cemetery, and there, working fast behind or sometimes within a tomb, sometimes en plein air, Marie would fashion the death masks on the heads themselves; from these would come the actual casts.

  “La Tussaud was called the Carcass Waxer,” said Father Louis, adding, admiringly, “and she was a hardworking girl!” Marie was commonly seen all during the Terror running after the tumbril, burdened with her baskets full of tongs, needles, linens, and wax, her dark cloak riding the wind behind her like wings. Securing the head, she’d carefully wipe the blood and reddened bran from it—bran lined the executioners’ baskets to absorb the hot blood—smear the head with linseed oil and litharge, and wait for the mask to harden. The deed done, she’d toss the head back into its grave as though it were a fish too small to keep.

  I believe it was in the very, very early hours of the morning, perhaps it was not yet light, when the elementals told me of Tussaud. I do not know where we were, though we must have been near Valence. I know only that our words were underscored by the murmur of water: everywhere the river rose.

  “Asmodei,” continued Father Louis, “saw profit in the Terror, as did so many others.”

  Yes, said Madeleine, and he had connections. Owing to his formidable charms, or lies skillfully told, or brute force, there was nowhere off-limits to Asmodei. No one dared resist or refuse him.

  I didn’t know what the elementals were getting at, and I said as much.

  “Well,” said the priest, slowly, “let us just say that had the King’s coffin been opened that day at the cemetery…”

  “No,” said I. “Asmodei did not…”

  “It was just the head, witch,” said Father Louis, “and it was only for a few hours.”

  Just long enough for Marie to make her cast.

  Hearing this, I was horrified, but not surprised; though in truth I had no difficulty imagining Asmodei absconding with the severed head of the King.

  It seems Asmodei served as middleman, contracted to Curtius. For a fee, he’d somehow hand the desired heads over to Marie. This was no mean feat when the targeted head had so recently worn a crown.

  “Sanson was in on the deal,” said Father Louis. “So too was his driver. Just beyond the square, not far from the scaffold, the driver handed off to Asmodei a double-thick bag of burlap. Asmodei gave him, in exchange, a second head in an identical bag—heads, of course, were easily come by then—lest the sexton or the citizens waiting graveside grow suspicious, or want to see the royal head.”

  “But it would not be the head of Capet,” I observed.

  No, said Madeleine, it would not. It would be an indistinguishable mass of blood and bran and matted hair. And no Christian or Citizen was then, that day, going to get too close to the severed head of the King, for there was still about it an aura of mystery and fear…Hadn’t we all been taught that our kings were somehow linked to God, that they ruled by a right divinely accorded?

  “I see,” said I.

  Father Louis laughed. “Capet’s head was pitched into its grave later that day, like a ball into its goal.”

  “Just thrown in?” I asked. “Beside the body and the false head?”

  “Now there’s a fine question, witch! For all I know the King of the French was buried with two heads!” The priest found this very funny; Madeleine less so. I found it not funny at all.

  “And you witnessed all this?” I asked.

  “Yes, and we were rather surprised by it, by the bald commerce of it all, if you will; and by the arrogance, the confidence of the man who brokered the deal: your Asmodei.”

  “My Asmodei?” I repeated. “Hardly.”

  True, said Madeleine. I’ve never known a man who belonged so much to himself and so little to others. Sebastiana, try as she might, will never—

  “Yes,” interrupted Father Louis, “that’s when we first saw Asmodei. I knew immediately that he was a man worth watching.”

  And I knew right away he was no mere man, so beautiful he was, and so—

  “Yes, well,” said Father Louis, preempting Madeleine. “…We followed the corpse, its two parts; and when we saw Asmodei approach the driver and hand off the second head…Well, of course, we trailed the King’s head, for the disposition of his corpse would offer up no secrets—there’d be no rites read, no ceremony; and that, of course, was the greatest insult of all!”

  “You followed the head,” I echoed. “To Tussaud?”

  “Yes,” said Father Louis, “but she was not yet Tussaud; she was still the gore-girl, Marie. In time, after the Terror, she’d head to England and I believe I’ve heard tell of some attraction of her own, her own Cabinet de Cire. But then, as I say, she was merely Marie.”

  It was not her we were interested in, said the succubus. Nor was it the King’s head.

  “No,” agreed the priest. “It was Asmodei. We trailed him all over Paris for days after that. To countless executions. To brothels and pubs and various garrets, all rep
ellent, which he kept throughout the city.”

  And eventually he led us to the Bal des Zephyrs, and to Sebastiana.

  “Et voilà,” said the satisfied priest, “here we all are.”

  38

  Knights of the Dagger

  SOME TIME LATER, the elementals gone, I had Étienne stop at an open-air market near Montélimar, and I treated myself to a block of the chocolate for which that place is justly famed. There, I was also able to procure nearly all I needed to concoct a batch of the vinum sabbati according to a recipe rather loosely recorded in Sebastiana’s Book. Not only was the recipe “loosely recorded,” but it seemed every ingredient was known by two, sometimes three names: the familiar, the Latinate, and the Frenchified forms, say, of some herb first discovered and named on the Italian peninsula. And yes, I knew that the slightest misstep in the making of the wine might render poisonous what ought to have been potable. Regardless, in a day-lit room that rented hourly, entered from the back of a roadside inn, in a riverside village that had few sights to see, I set up a laboratory of sorts and set to work.

  I was dreadfully tired now, and had to wheedle from the priest permission to stop—my goal was a nap, facilitated by the distillation of that wondrous brew that would take me from myself. Perhaps I ought not to admit that I desired to lose myself, for however long, let the wine relieve me of my thoughts and fears, but it is true: I wanted the peace of sleep, perhaps too the distraction of drunkenness, for I sought desperately to look away from certain facts:

  This journey of mine, this “mission,” was about to end. How or where, exactly, I’d no idea; but it would end very soon. On the morrow, I would work the Craft at the crossroads. Work it by the dark light of a new moon. To revivify and then let die a centuries-old succubus. And then what? I’d be on my own, setting sail for who knew where—and as a man, no less! Sailing to a new life across the sea. A new life lived in a new land…as a new man…with a new language.

  Oui, I needed a drink.

  And I had one all right. Truth to tell, I got terribly…inebriated; not on the quantity of drink I took, but rather, I think, on its low quality. (Witch, beware the wine! It is potent, and unpredictable; sometimes a salve, sometimes strong enough to envenom the very soul! It can slake thirsts you did not know you suffered, show you things you did not know you sought…. Still, I wonder just where I erred: I am suspicious of a certain mushroom I’d had to root for, pig-like, behind the inn.)

  I would sleep for a short while on a narrow cot in the dark, dank room, my door locked against intruders. The place stank of risen water; and various bands around its mossy walls showed how high the river had risen in recent seasons. I would sleep surrounded by the residual roots and powders and yes, animal parts (I won’t elaborate) that I’d used to distill the wine, not to mention the glass vials and pestles and shallow plates I’d had to procure for the practical aspects of the Craft. I would sleep several hours, but it would be a sleep beset with dreams. Dreadful dreams. Of death.

  This dream was borne of a mind awash in images “shown” to me by the elementals, for as we’d ambled on, beyond Vienne, they’d spoken of Paris and the Terror, of events not recorded in any encyclopedia…. They spoke of things macabre.

  Deep in the darkness of sleep I sensed…motion. A jaunty, bobbing motion. And then there came a slow, suffusing light: twilight, augmented by lit torches whose acrid smoke I could smell. My eyes burned, teared against that dreamed smoke and…Ah, but to say “my” eyes is inaccurate, for I saw with…

  What I saw through were not “my” eyes at all but rather the eyes of a severed head raised high, a pike stuck into the hollow of its splintered spine.

  Madeleine had told me, apropos of the massacres, that the soul remains resident in the head much longer than in the body. Many were the people near the scaffolds who witnessed severed heads speaking and screaming, which acts calmed to the chattering of teeth, and death. She told me too that the vision of a severed head—for they can see for a short while—is locked; it is a fixed vantage point, and so it was in the dream.

  I, or rather it was on the march with the mob. By torchlight I saw other heads atop other pikes. Right before me, dripping blood and flapping like a fleshy bird on the wing, there was skewered the heart of a calf, or some such animal; the sign appended to it read, “The Heart of an Aristocrat.”…An aristocrat. The head through which I saw was that of an aristocratic woman: I knew it from the weight of the wig—intact, mockingly returned to its place when the Blade had fallen—which I could sense.

  There appeared before me in the dream the ill-lit, grimy, dirt-darkened facade of a low building, its doors and windows grilled: a prison.

  So it was the prison massacres I would witness, as the elementals had. (Yes, the elementals had spoken of the massacres, at length and in gruesome detail.)…I knew this, knew it even as I dreamed.

  Summer’s end, 1792. By then the Parisians were a population habituated to gore. The guillotine had been in use since April, when Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, doctor and deputy, would-be social reformer, had introduced the Great Blade to ensure égalité, to balance the classes—albeit in death—when previously only condemned nobles had been granted so expedient an end.

  The doctor had demonstrated his device first on a bale of hay, then a sheep, then a corpse, and finally a criminal. And oh what a hit it had been! Soon fashionable women took to wearing tiny, jeweled guillotines in their wigs, or pendant from their ears or necks, each complete with working blade. Small guillotines of mahogany sat as centerpieces on one’s dining table, with blades used to slice cheese or fruit or dolls, the latter beheaded over dessert, their raspberry blood let to drip over chocolate tortes. Every white handkerchief had to show a crimson stain, testament to one’s having witnessed at close range the Blade’s work.

  Pamphlets were published daily, listing the day’s schedule of executions, or the winners in the “St. Guillotine lottery.” As for the well-connected condemned, alone in their quite comfortable cells—one paid for one’s keep and was kept accordingly—they received amatory notes and gifts from unknown suitors; bouquets were passed to them, bouquets of marguerites and, of course, les immortelles. Yes, the rich were spared the company of the masses and lived well in their decorated cells, their favorite furnishings from home arrayed about them. Many were allowed to come and go at will during daylight hours, careful always to grease the palms of their jailers as they did so. Visitors were received at all hours. And, not surprisingly, with so much of what remained of Society in jail, there was born a new species of salon. At Port-Libre (the former Port-Royal), for example, invited inmates gathered to hear recitations from imprisoned poets, improvisations by actors adaptable to any stage; at night’s end, songs from the instruments of the skilled would wend their way through the vaulted corridors, lulling the condemned to sleep.

  In the prisons, those who were deemed particularly dangerous, or who were otherwise reviled, rich or not, might find themselves in the close company of murderers, thieves, or, as was the case with Madame Roland, “fallen women.” In addition to the constant attendance on death, which was everyone’s lot, Madame Roland was made to witness certain scenes that were, due to its architecture, unique to her then home, the prison of St. Pélagie. That place, with its two wings running parallel to each other, the one housing women, the other men, saw enacted on its deep sills the most lewd theatricals imaginable, with the men doing to the men what the women might wish to do to them, and vice versa, with the women putting to purpose upon one another props quite crudely fashioned. It was a sort of inverted intercourse, and sex, its very essence, spread as a perfumed steam between the two cell blocks…. One imagines the Minister’s wife standing by shamefaced while her cell mates “acted,” or looked eagerly and excitedly on.

  Clearly, few understood the political climate of the day; the politics of revolution were new to everyone. The least show of support or allegiance could, in time would be reason enough for condemnation, and summary dispatch to th
e scaffold.

  There were myriad reasons to murder. It was sport disguised as justice. It was vengeance in the name of liberty. And liberty, it was said, was “a bitch that begged to be taken on a bed of cadavers.”…Death’s connoisseurs took their seats at the end of the Jardin des Tuileries—the best place to watch the Blade work in the Place de la Révolution—often picnicking with their families, their children curled at their feet or running about, stopping only to watch the heads fall. Of course, many of these connoisseurs would later find themselves atop the scaffold, watched in their turn.

  All that long summer Paris had been awash in blood. Figuratively, but literally too, citizens complained of the stench, for in some faubourgs the gutters overran with gore. Many died of diseases borne on that slow scarlet stream.

  It was all unaccountably base. Noble in its way—the Revolution—and yet unaccountably base.

  That summer—’92—the prisons were overcrowded. More than one thousand citizens had been arrested on the flimsiest of warrants. Among this number were the refractory, or nonjuring priests—those who would not swear an oath of loyalty to the Revolution above all else. Arrested too were those who’d served the Royals in any way, ranging from the most lowly servants in the royal household to the royal governess, Madame de Tourzel, and the Queen’s confidante, the Princesse de Lamballe. Those nobles who stayed behind as their friends and relations fled became play pieces in a game the object of which was to arrest as many members of an ancien régime family as one could. The family members were then sent to separate prisons in an attempt to render all the more poignant their reunion atop the scaffold. These executions were much anticipated. Madeleine was present at one where Malesherbes was made to watch as the Blade took first his daughter, then his granddaughter, then his son-in-law, and finally his sister and her two secretaries; only then was the old man graced with the Blade.