Locus Solus

by Raymond Roussel

  Ethelfleda, who was delicate and empty-headed by nature, had, in addition, shown signs of instability since receiving a severe emotional shock during her childhood in the depths of India. Her father, a young colonel, had been killed there before her very eyes during an expedition, his throat crushed in the jaws of a tiger, whose sudden attack could not have been averted. The endless flood of vermilion pouring from the open carotid had ever afterward given Ethelfleda a neurotic horror of blood and, to some extent, of red-colored objects. Ever since then, unable to live in a red-papered room or to put on a red dress, she had been inclined toward eccentricity.

  Lord Alban Exley, who was as affectionate a son as he was an attentive husband, went everywhere with his old mother, whose precarious state of health gave him concern. With her and Ethelfleda he had spent the previous August in France, at the Hôtel de l’Europe, an enormous hotel overlooking one of the splendid beaches on the Normandy coast. Being an accomplished sportsman, and an enthusiast for riding and horsemanship, Alban had arranged for part of his stable to follow him there.

  One afternoon, preceding his wife who was finishing her preparations, he had just seated himself, reins in hand, in his spider — or light country phaeton. His young groom, Ambrose, was at the horse’s head, waiting for the moment to mount the cramped back seat when they set off.

  Soon Ethelfleda, embarrassed by her lateness, hurriedly appeared with her gloves still folded; in her hand, through tender conjugal care, she held a tea rose taken from a bouquet devoid of any tint approaching red, which her husband had given her that very morning as a present.

  An ancient octogenarian wearing the hotel livery, one Casimir, caught up with her and stopped her as she dashed out, to present her with an envelope. After sixty years in the service of the establishment, Casimir now held a sinecure and busied himself only with the sorting and delivery of letters.

  The address, in black, on the envelope presented by him showed the word “peeress” written in red ink above the name “Lady Alban Exley.”

  Since Alban’s father — also named Alban — had died one year before his bachelor elder brother, he had never been more than a lord by courtesy, and did not figure in the peerage. So, to distinguish between the two Ladies Alban Exley, people had recourse to the terms “Dowager” and “Peeress.”

  Now the letter in question came from a young woman reluctantly asking for financial aid and begging Ethelfleda, her childhood friend, to keep it a very close secret. The particular fear of confusion between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law had induced the signatory, in quest of some striking means of emphasis, to make partial use of red ink.

  As Ethelfleda had parasol and gloves in her left hand, to take the letter she stretched out her right hand, holding the rose — the stem of which lay against the envelope pressed by her thumb.

  When she saw the word which, of all words, served to designate her precisely and unequivocally, standing out in this dreaded color red, she was rooted to the spot in consternation and, unable to repress a nervous shudder, pricked her thumb upon a thorn which the florist had overlooked.

  To her horrified eyes, the blood spotting the stem and the paper increased her perturbation and, in a fit of repulsion, she instinctively opened her fingers to let the two reddened objects fall out of sight. But when its position had been altered by this movement, the large and clear half-moon of her thumbnail, whose whiteness was particularly conducive, cast into the pupil of her eye the reflection of a certain ancient lantern, famous throughout the country,

  It was at the end of the eighteenth century that a Norman, Guillaume Cassigneul, had founded the establishment in question, known as the Hôtel de l’Europe, which was still run by his descendants to this day.

  For its sign by day and night, he had a broad, high lantern hung over the entrance, bearing on its front, painted upon the glass, a map of Europe in which each land had its special tint — the attractive color red being reserved for the motherland.

  When the campaigns of the Empire came along, Cassigneul, filled with enthusiasm and very much taken up with his lantern, had each subjugated country, date by date, colored in a red identical to that of France — not excepting England, which he considered to have been reduced by the continental blockade. After the news of the entry into Moscow, Russia, in its turn, underwent the unifying operation and the whole of Europe was then won by the crimson of the sovereign state. Cassigneul was vaingloriously inspired by the monochrome of this frontierless part of the world, to rename his house, by the addition of a single word: Hôtel de l’Europe Française.

  In the hour of defeat he had to revert to the original title — but preserved the monocolored map intact as a precious and eloquent memento of Napoleon’s heyday.

  When the hotel was recently reconstructed, the legendary lamp had been carefully replaced in its old position, for its story had at all times been repeated from mouth to mouth and constituted an effective advertisement.

  Ethelfleda had noticed this provoking redness when she arrived, but had contented herself since then with averting her eyes each time she passed by.

  Now, it was by the light of a bright sunbeam which was shining through an immense glass canopy sheltering the threshold, that Europe was now reflected in the half-moon of her nail. Already badly shaken, the young woman remained hypnotized by this brilliant red spot, whose characteristic shape she could plainly distinguish despite the inversion of east and west.

  Motionless and distraught, she said in a flat voice (under the influence of her environment instinctively adopting French, which she spoke like her native tongue):

  “In the half-moon . . . all of Europe . . . red . . . all of it . . .”

  Casimir, who was hard of hearing on account of his age, did not hear her. Having noticed nothing unusual in what was happening, he set about picking up the letter and the tea rose. But the stiffness of his ancient back halted his fingers halfway and, in a loud, curt tone, enjoining haste, he summoned Lord Exley’s groom to take his place.

  Casimir, who in his remote youth had served as a “tiger” in the household of a Parisian dandy of the romantic age, had never broken himself of the habit, in addressing youthful flunkeys, of employing the long-disused term to which he had so often answered. So it was this single word “tiger” that he imperiously uttered on this occasion, as he stared at the young servant, with his finger extended toward the pavement.

  Leaving the horses’ head in obedience to the look and the gesture rather than the noun, which for him was devoid of meaning, the groom came to pick up the flower and the letter in order to hand them to Ethelfleda.

  But the latter, having heard and shuddered, from the depths of her distressing trance, at the word uttered with curt emphasis by Casimir, fancied it to be a cry of warning and was suddenly hallucinated — as her wild attitudes and words (in French as before) testified — by the vision of her father before her, grappling with the wild beast that had once slaughtered him.

  Added to the three unbalancing shocks that had followed one another so quickly, the last straw for the unhappy woman was the morbid and bloody reappearance of the very scene from which her mental frailty originated. She began to show signs of complete derangement, not recognizing Alban, who at once rushed up, out of his mind with worry, to lead her gently back to their apartment, while Ambrose returned to the front of the horses.

  From that day on her condition became steadily worse. In her delirium everything appeared to her decked out in a blood-red hue. She was taken in Paris and examined by a great specialist, who discovered the reason for the particular form taken by her insanity, when Alban had given him all the details. Encountering, at a moment of deep agitation, a situation which had long been sinister for certain specific reasons, the suggestive contours of the famous sunlit, crimson spot contained in a fingernail reflection had induced in Ethelfleda the gigantic vision of an actual Europe that was completely red. Having thus s
tarted on a perilous slope, she had foundered into madness several seconds later, of her own accord passing abruptly, by a series of expanding stages, to the point where the whole universe became red to her eyes. In conjunction with her erythrophobia, this absolute generalization of the color so painfully associated for her with the idea of blood, turned her life into a perpetual inferno. All treatment failed and the poor madwoman wasted away and died, undermined by the torments she was enduring.

  Alban was overwhelmed with grief, and when he considered how great a part the brightness and clarity of the hypnotic reflection had played in the tragedy, he execrated the tinning of fingernails, whose invention had, after all, been the chief cause of his bereavement.

  Now Ethelfleda, dead, once more performed the fatal and striking exit, in the course of which she had so suddenly lost her reason.

  When Canterel was informed of the relevant facts, he reconstructed everything with great exactitude. As the young woman’s nails had grown since her demise, he summoned the inventor-manicurist from London, sparing no expense. At his request the latter did the extra tinning required, this time without anesthesia — first on the right thumb, destined to be so much in the limelight, then, to avoid any unpleasing inconsistency, also on the other nine fingers. The professor arranged matters so that Alban should not witness the detail that had inspired so great an aversion in him since his misfortune.

  The widower lovingly kept the tea rose as a memento; its stem, still spotted with Ethelfleda’s blood, might have been washed, but the rose was too faded to appear. So Canterel had had a number of artificial copies made, each with a thorn in the correct place.

  Then some envelopes were procured, to be used one by one, identical to that of the fatal day, which was indelibly stained. On all of them the address was accurately copied out by hand. Each one, as it was used, was to have a blank letter inserted before sealing, to give it the exact thickness and stiffness required.

  Afterward, Alban was glad above all to see Ethelfleda in her right mind during the brief instants preceding the envelope’s delivery and never wearied of the short renewable scene presented to his eager gaze. He would play his own part in it himself, accompanied by two extras, one very old, the other a youth, to stand in for Casimir and the groom. An artificial sunbeam was projected onto the lantern by an electric lamp, which went unlit whenever the time of day and the clearness of the sky were both propitious, so that the sun itself lit the red map in a steady and satisfactory way. Before each session a small, delicate, flesh-tinted ascidian, flat and round, was glued afresh, by the whole of one of its two surfaces, to the fleshiest part of the first joint of Ethelfleda’s right thumb. At the appointed time, the thorn of one of the artificial tea roses punctured it without difficulty, making a red liquid flow out of it to counterfeit blood.

  As the stem of an artificial flower can hardly be washed, each rose was used only once — and the same went for each envelope, which after being stained red, was fit only to be thrown away.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  8. A young man named François-Charles Cortier — a mysterious suicide brought to Locus Solus under very special circumstances.

  The actions Canterel obtained from the corpse led to the discovery of a valuable handwritten confession, which made it possible for a much discussed tragedy, until then shrouded in obscurity, to be clearly reconstructed in imagination.

  Quite a long time ago, a literary gentleman named François-Jules Cortier, recently a widower and the father of two young children named François-Charles and Lydia, acquired a villa near Meaux, standing by itself in the center of an enormous garden — to live there the whole year round, deep in labors whose absorbing toil made calm surroundings necessary for him.

  In order to reflect credit upon himself, François-Jules was an advocate of the science of phrenology, for he was endowed with a remarkably prominent forehead of which he was proud. In his study there was a large black set of shelves filled with neat rows of skulls upon whose idiosyncrasies he could discourse knowledgeably.

  One January afternoon, as the writer was getting down to work, Lydia, who was then aged nine, came to ask him fondly to let her play at his side, pointing through the window to the thickly falling snowflakes which cloistered her indoors. She was holding a female barrister doll, a toy that was all the rage that year, being the concrete embodiment of a current topic — for it was that year that women appeared for the first time at the bar.

  François-Jules adored his daughter and had redoubled his affection toward her since parting reluctantly with François-Charles, who, at eleven, had recently been placed in a Paris lycée to follow a course of strenuous study.

  He said “Yes,” kissed the child and made her promise to be very well behaved.

  Lydia was anxious not to be a source of distraction, so she sat down on the floor behind the large, littered table on which her father was leaning his elbows, so that he was then unable to see her.

  As she played quietly with her doll she thought of the snow, and was moved to pity by the coldness of the porcelain face against her fingers. Quickly she laid the barrister doll on its back before the hearth where a great fire was blazing, just as though it were a human being frozen with the cold. But the heat soon melted the glue on the two glass eyes, which dropped almost simultaneously to the back of its head.

  In vexation the child seized the doll again, and held it up to her eyes to examine the effects of the accident at close range. The barrister was then silhouetted against the wall fitted with the black shelves, and all at once Lydia was involuntarily struck by the relationship, between the death’s heads on display and the pink artificial face, which was established by the emptiness of the eye sockets common to both.

  Delighted at finding a new game, she took one of the skulls and set herself the fascinating task of completing the observed resemblance, in one instance, by every means she could devise.

  As the austerity of the garb and the gravity of its profession de­manded, the female barrister’s hair was all crammed plainly back in a severe hairnet, without curls or chignon. In view of the secondary usage for which it was destined, the light net had been manufactured by some economical method too summary to achieve precision, and projected stiffly forward beneath the cap, lying against the bare forehead.

  The first thing to do, Lydia thought, was to copy these fine, interlacing lines upon the skull, since, from the point of view of the process of assimilation she had set herself, they derived considerable importance from their close proximity to the two empty sockets, wherein resided the basis of the analogy in question.

  The little girl, who practiced fine needlework under the direction of her governess, had a little embroidery box in her pocket. From it she took out a punch and, guiding its point forcefully with her hand, traced some short, thick strokes slanting in various directions across the skull’s frontal bone. Stitch by stitch, a sort of net was at last engraved over the whole area required, betraying the amusing clumsiness of a child in the imperfection of its strange zigzags.

  Now the skull needed a cap like that of the barrister.

  Beneath the desk there was a waste-paper basket overflowing with old English newspapers.

  François-Jules, who was of an enquiring and enthusiastic turn of mind, eager to sift all literatures thoroughly in their original, had made a deep study of many living and dead languages.

  Each day, throughout almost the whole preceding month, he had taken the Times, which at that time abounded in the most reliable commentaries on an event that deeply interested him. An English traveller, Dunstan Ashurst, had just returned to London after a lengthy Polar exploration which, in the absence of any further progress toward the north, had been noteworthy for the magnificent discovery of several new lands. In particular, while Ashurst had been reconnoitring on foot across the ice flow, far from his ice-bound ship, he had discovered in his hazardous path an island missing from all the c
harts.

  At the top of a hillock near the shore an iron coffer lay at the foot of a red mast planted there to signal its presence. Forced open, it surrendered only a large, ancient and obscure parchment, covered with strange handwritten characters. As soon as Ashurst had taken up his abode again in the English capital, he showed the document to some learned linguists who attempted to translate it.

  The antique parchment, written entirely in Old Norse runes with its date and signature still plain, was the work of the Norwegian navigator Gundersen, who had set out for the pole about the year 860 and had never come back. Since it was remarkable that anyone, at such a remote period, should have set foot upon the island with the red mast — perched at a latitude which had afterward required the efforts of several centuries to reach again — the whole world suddenly began to take an interest in the document, which was all the more apt to disseminate general excitement in that many of its lines were nearly effaced and gave ground for contradictory interpretations.

  All the newspapers of the globe dealt very fully with the abstruse topic of the day, particularly those across the Channel. Each day, in addition to the multiple renderings put forward by competent minds, the Times even managed to give some facsimile passages from the parchment. These were in the form — necessitated by the dimensions of the original text — of several very extended lines over the three columns invariably devoted to the celebrated topic, beneath a headline half a page wide. François-Jules, well-versed in the knowledge of Old Norse and runes, soon became passionately interested in the problem, and cut out all these faithful reproductions in order to carry them about with him and pore over them whenever he had a moment free — writing his remarks in ink on the back of each one, between whatever printed lines happened to be there, so as to avoid any confusion.