The Vampire of Ropraz

by Jacques Chessex

  “The man who loves God need not fear the spirit of darkness,” replies the pastor steadfastly.

  And he climbs back onto the seat of the horse-drawn cart that he drives himself. Night is falling, a haunted night; for a long time his wheels can be heard crunching through the icy snow on the road lower down.

  5

  In the meantime he is up and abroad, the Vampire of Ropraz, a distant cousin, and so like him, of Drakul, master by moonlight of the crime-ravaged steeps of Walachia and Transylvania. The fearful resemblance of the Carpathians and the Vaudois foothills is in his favour, with their dark forests where he can hide and keep watch, sharpening his hunger and thirst, the one who devoured the pure Rosa.

  Make no mistake about it, crouching in the bushes where he will lie low till the sun goes down, or in a hillside cave, in the crevice of some dark cliff, he heard the pastor’s cart as it rattled along the stony track. Later he is sure to have seen the lamps extinguished in the windows of the château of Ussières, the lamps put out in the Cavin café, in the solid stone dwellings, in solitary farmhouses. Now the night belongs to him.

  The wind has risen from the coomb. It chills the night, a damp, cold wind that keeps dogs in their kennels and hardens the ice on country roads… So many young virgins are sleeping their lily-sleep in so many dizzyingly warm beds. So many dead girls will spend their first night in the soil, beneath the covers of their fresh graves. It is time to be about, Dracula, master of the shadows, through town and country! You who know our every gesture, our stopping places, our hesitations, who will drink our daughters’ blood, ravish them, consume them, before dawn pushes you back into your inaccessible lair!

  For since 20th February you would think there was no hill, no wood, no side road safe from the monster’s power. He is everywhere, the Vampire of Ropraz, prowling, watching, lurking; because of him fear swells, ingrained in solitary farms. The dread of a shocking discovery haunting the more substantial properties, the obsession with sexual, expiatory violation engrafted in the flesh. The ancient guilt of bodies punished, offered to the Devil.

  You were too lovely, Rosa, you must pay for your blinding purity!

  For generations all has been perilous and evil in these lonely landscapes: the storm that swells the rivers, the lightning that sets roofs on fire, the drought that kills crops, bakes grass, shrinks and shrivels fruit, the rain that rots the harvest and furrows the ploughed field. People distrust tramps, beggars and itinerant preachers, all as light-fingered as gypsies. Travelling people, Bohemians, Romanies. Pedlars are driven off at pitchfork point. But now it is 20th February, now is the reign of the Vampire, the embodiment of every fear, violence and repressed hysteria, the compression into something intangible of the dreaded secrets of an evil world. Pastors denounce our pride and lies. Sunday sermons in Calvin’s churches remind us of the judgement in store for our heedlessness. There is, above all, welling up from generations of tortured brooding, the assurance of punishment from on high suspended over our lives.

  Now, in the Vampire’s grip, no hovel, great dwelling or tiny house, no shed, hut or bothy, can escape his cruel vigilance. The children from lonely houses no longer go to school, the postman no longer makes his daily round in hills or hamlets, and Dr Delay is protected by the game warden when he travels to see a distant patient. But have people even the right to fall sick in such dire times?

  More than ever, mothers watch over their daughters. Before February the danger was boys, dances, lotteries, sing-songs, but now the monster is concealed among us, cunning, clever, all-knowing, about to lick his lips and drool over our slumbers before puncturing the throats and smooth bellies of our fiancées.

  On Monday the 2nd of March, 1903, an indignant editorial appears in the Revue de Lausanne:

  “THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ STILL ON LOOSE”.

  The reactionary newspaper has blazoned across four columns:It is unacceptable, all the same, that our police, normally so expeditious, are still unable to find any clue that would enable them to confront the odious criminal who is sowing terror throughout our countryside, soon to turn his attention to our towns and public occasions. Will the abominable violation of the remains of young Rosa Gilliéron, whose eminent father is the judge and councillor Émile Gilliéron of Ropraz, remain unpunished for much longer? Is the Vampire thumbing his nose at public order and the peace of an entire countryside, of which he will soon be master?

  These lines, like the articles now appearing in newspapers all over Switzerland, and more and more frequently in Europe, perfectly express the disquiet and impatience agitating public opinion and incensing town and country. On the one hand, the Vampire, thumbing his nose at everyone, doing as he pleases, and making the hysteria mount. On the other, the impotence and inaction of the investigation. One gloomy question punctuating the article in the Revue de Lausanne sums it all up: “When can we expect the next infernal episode?”

  6

  March went by, and then April: veiled insinuations, false reports, an uneasy calm; nothing more has happened since the outrage in Ropraz. But rumours swell, names are bandied about, lawsuits for libel and slander are threatened. Factional disputes, family hatreds, obscure quarrels over wills or property boundaries: so much baseness that springs to life out of fear and suspicion.

  In cutting up and sucking the corpse of Gilliéron’s dead daughter, the Vampire of Ropraz has set the judge’s followers at each other’s throats. At the beginning of March, one of his neighbours from La Moille du Perey, a prominent local personality and rich landowner, was rumoured to have made Rosa pregnant. All the judge’s authority and Dr Delay’s testimony would be needed to silence a calumny that no one believed. Rosa had died pure from all suspicion, but the ugliness of the attack showed what malevolence was in the air.

  Around the same time, a bachelor from Hermanches, Juste Fiaux Esquire, blind in one eye and a born loser, was arrested by the Sûreté. Throughout the summer of 1901, this Juste Fiaux had worked as a labourer on the Gilliéron farm, incessantly pestering young Rosa with his inappropriate advances, as is duly attested. She gently rebuffed him, and that was the end of it. But could the embittered Fiaux have avenged himself for the slight? This lead was soon dropped.

  And what of that portly peripatetic butcher in Ropraz, whose name has been mentioned as an enemy of the council representative? He engaged a lawyer from Lausanne, Maître Spiro, a fearsome cross-examiner, and no one hereabouts wanted to be subjected to one of his celebrated onslaughts. Exit the peripatetic butcher, cattle dealer, large farmer, and parish councillor by occupation.

  Others were less fortunate. The name came up of a schoolmaster who had been dismissed for an accusation of molestation that was never completely resolved; the fellow’s name was never cleared, even though the teacher took up new work as a public letter writer in Oron-la-Ville. There he wrote (or had written) the strangest kind of love letters – to ladies of Oron and Mézières, to young women all over the district, to Dr Delay’s daughter, to Rosa. The writer denied everything. Where was he from the night of the 20th to the morning of the 21st of February? He claimed to be unable to say, in order to protect a lady’s honour.

  “And the day before?”

  “I was working on my novel.”

  “Did anyone see you at your desk?”

  “I don’t make a spectacle of myself. Do you know what it means to write? A sacrifice. Yes, gentlemen, a much more terrible sacrifice than that of some innocent country girl’s remains!”

  Inspector Décosterd and his colleagues in the Sûreté tapped their foreheads with their index fingers. A writer! And a modern martyr too! The oddball was left to his ranting.

  So things remain until school opens again after Easter, on Tuesday the 14th of April. The outrage takes place at Carrouge, almost five miles from Ropraz, where the road to Moudon goes uphill. In the area between the graveyard and the school that serves as a playground, the schoolmaster Aimé Jeunet, who teaches in Carrouge’s one-room school, smoking a little Fivaz cigar
while he supervises playtime, has his attention drawn to a group of children enjoying a game of football with a strange ball. Going over to them quietly, Aimé Jeunet discovers to his stupefaction that the ball is a head, and that the head has lost its scalp and is covered in blood, with tufts of hair still adhering to the skull like some repulsive adornment. The teacher almost faints from horror, and the boys scatter. For Jeunet has recognized the head: “It’s Nadine!” he cries, staggering again and falling flat in the grass.

  Over the next hour the grim ritual is rediscovered in all its horror. The open grave, the coffin lid unscrewed and, once again, the corpse violated, with traces of sperm and saliva around the navel and on the thighs. And the rest of the body defiled and bloodied: this time the girl’s genital area has been removed, her head entirely severed from the trunk. Then the head was scalped, as can be seen from the cuts in the bone, the encrusted blood and the long tuft of black hair that lies gleaming on the sunlit path.

  What had happened at Carrouge?

  Three years earlier a village family had taken in an orphan who had survived tuberculosis of the bone. But one leg remained crippled, and Nadine Jordan had a limp. She was given light housework to do to earn her keep. She was pretty, conscientious and fresh-faced; the boys began to court her despite her stiff leg and her still childish figure. She was well proportioned, with an attractive bust and long shining black hair: the schoolmaster himself, M. Jeunet, was not indifferent to her charms… But a hard winter gives no quarter. The preceding December her tuberculosis became active again, a nasty fever gained the upper hand, and death soon followed: Nadine Jordan died a few days before Easter, on Thursday the 9th of April. She would be buried on Saturday the 11th. As in Rosa Gilliéron’s case it was Pastor Bérenger – Carrouge is not far from Mézières – who officiated at the burial, speaking of Nadine’s brief existence as a courageous, spotless young girl, and reciting the prayer for the dead.

  This time there was no snow to preserve the Vampire’s tracks. There was this severed skull covered in black blood, and a long handful of hair, still pearled with red, lying in the grass of the graveyard, behind the church and the school.

  7

  Spring seems to arouse the Vampire’s ardour. Scarcely have Nadine Jordan’s tortured body and scalp been discovered at Carrouge, when the Jorat is again stunned by a third macabre affair.

  This time it happens at Ferlens, a village to the east of Carrouge, on the road to Lake Bret. A young woman of twenty-three has just died of tuberculosis, and her husband, Jacques Beaupierre, has granted her last wish to be buried with her head resting on the little rubber cushion that helped her endure her suffering. A strange wish, and a promise piously kept: Justine Beaupierre is buried on Tuesday the 21st of March, her head resting, inside her coffin, on the absurd but serviceable object.

  Imagine Beaupierre’s horror, on his first visit to the graveyard, when he sees the aforesaid cushion, orange-coloured and very easy to spot in the nine o’clock light, on the path leading to his wife’s grave!

  Once again, an open grave, a gaping coffin, a burial gown torn away, the young woman’s throat pierced and slashed, her breasts sliced off and partly eaten. Dried sperm and traces of saliva like animal slaver, as Jacques Beaupierre would later describe it, around the navel and in the creases of the groin. The belly is sliced open with a long, neat cut; the pubic area and genitalia have been excised and removed. Pieces of them, chewed and spat out, hair, tender flesh and cartilage, will be found in the boxwood coppice that runs along the graveyard fence. Just as scraps of the pubic area and hair were found in the dark Crochet hedge in Ropraz, after the February outrage.

  “The colour of Justine Beaupierre’s eyes?”

  “Brown, darkish in shade.”

  “Colour of her hair?”

  “Dark brown.”

  “The complexion of the aforesaid?”

  “Pale and clear.”

  “The height of the aforesaid?”

  “Medium, well formed. Well-developed breasts. Narrow hips.”

  “Build of the aforesaid?”

  “Slender and willowy. Ninety pounds at most.”

  You would think that the Vampire of Ropraz keeps to one type of woman, always the same, and that he selects his sacrificial victim well in advance. Where does he get his information? How does he know that a dark, slim girl is dying, and in what precise location? Does he have a list of the young patients near death in all the clinics, sanatoria, isolation wards and nursing homes in the country? Has he an accomplice in the Moudon hospital? And the times of the funerals: how does he know the very day, the very hour, that such and such a young woman is to be laid to rest in such and such a village?

  People begin to suspect churchwardens and undertakers, and the one in Ferlens, old Cordey, is grilled by the investigators. Thanks be to God, he is saved by the bottle. At the time of the Beaupierre crime, Jérémie Cordey was still dead drunk, thanks to the tips he had been given the previous day.

  Justine Beaupierre is reburied. Once again a new gown for the massacred corpse, and once again Pastor Béranger, not fearing to compare these dreadful events with the Ten Plagues of Egypt, with the merited punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. “What crime are we paying for, miserable creatures that we are? Thou knowest, O Lord, and we know too, if only we look deep into our hearts. None is innocent before the Lord. It is only after we have examined all our sins, and decided to repent, to change the direction of our lives, that Thou, O Lord, wilt restore peace to our towns and villages. As Thou hast, in Thy goodness, bestowed peace upon our hearts benighted by so much error.”

  There, it has been said: God will destroy the Vampire once we have surrendered to Him. A biblical vow, commensurate with the obsession with sin engrafted in the bodies of Calvinists in their wasteland. Their souls in despair at the steep ascent to a heaven that is out of reach. Béranger knows his people well. However, especially after night has fallen, everyone thinks of the three lovely bodies, bloody and cut to pieces deep in their fresh beds of soil in the three lonely little graveyards, and they know that the monster will have the last word in this vale of bitter tears and richly deserved darkness that God has granted us.

  8

  The Beaupierre crime in the Ferlens graveyard, in its rehearsal of the ritual, had surpassed the worst imaginings. Would there ever be an end to this butchery?

  A new incident at Ferlens, the “Café du Nord affair”, as it was instantly baptized, might have given the impression that the guilty party had been caught.

  The owner of the Café du Nord, M. Georges Pasche, had been complaining since winter that in the cowshed adjoining his farm and café – which together formed a single, sizeable building – his cows and heifers were being subjected to unnatural practices. Indeed, that winter, and all through the spring, the vulvas, anuses and recta of several animals had been injured by the introduction of a penis of large proportions, a stick or pick handle, or some other pointed instrument, for the membranes and recta of the young females were found to be punctured or torn, very often bleeding, at morning milking time, and the orifices of several animals were still smeared with sperm.

  At first Georges Pasche kept watch, not daring to reveal what was happening for fear people would accuse him of dealings with the Vampire of Ropraz. But as it continued, and even grew worse, Pasche finally offered two five-franc pieces – heavy silver coins of the Federation and a substantial sum in this countryside at the time – to whoever would denounce the guilty party or help to surprise him. It is Monday the 11th of May, 1903.

  Nothing more was needed, just two days after the reward was announced, for the little serving girl from the café to catch Favez, the farmhand, in the cowshed in the middle of the night, standing on a stool with his trousers around his ankles, busily having his way with a hobbled heifer. The little serving girl held up the lantern: “This time I’ve got you, my lad!” Pasche comes running when he hears the fray, and old Madame Pasche, and of course the Pasche children, all in thei
r nightshirts in the cowshed, which reeks and fumes with heavy smells, steam and brandished oil lamps. The labourer is forcibly dressed, tied up and shut in the cellar, to wait for the police from Mézières to lift him into their van at dawn, and lock him up in the prison in Oron, the chief town of the district.

  The full name of the unfortunate fellow is Charles-Augustin Favez. He is twenty-one years old, but looks twice that: strangely deformed, receding brow, alcoholic, perverted, taciturn. And he pleasures himself on our animals! Maybe he haunts graveyards too? What if Favez were the guilty one, Favez at Rosa’s grave, Favez at Carrouge, Favez at Ferlens too! Of course it is Favez, sadist that he is. Favez is the monster. He is the Vampire of Ropraz. With no human victim, he perforates cows and heifers as he waits for other dead young women to come his way. Or maybe living ones, who knows? Warm little quails in their innocent slumbers, schoolgirls, girls in catechism class or young mothers for him to lie on top of and rub his foul snout against.

  On that Thursday, the 14th of May, a single cry goes up from the Jorat and from farther abroad across the whole countryside: “They’ve caught the Vampire! He’s the Vampire!” Yes, that’s him all right, worse than the legendary wolf or bear, the one who desecrated the bodies of three young dead women in Ropraz, Carrouge and Ferlens, the one who spread terror among us, and who now will be judged, the one for whom the ultimate punishment must be brought back. That morning, in the countryside and villages, everyone is talking about the death penalty, even though it was abolished thirty-six years ago.1 Only the death penalty is appropriate, in the firmly held opinion of the entire population, for such abominable offences.

  But who is he, this lover of dead girls, this abuser of cattle and author of so many terrible crimes?