The Vampire of Ropraz

by Jacques Chessex

  In February 1915 Favez escapes, crosses the frontier by way of the Vallorbe forest, to arrive in a France at war, where he joins the French army as a foreign volunteer. Three weeks later he is posted to the Foreign Legion. Inquiries by the Swiss authorities have been able to establish that the volunteer first-class Charles-Augustin Favez joined the battalion of the Foreign Legion as an infantryman in the section led by the Swiss corporal Frédéric Sauser, the author of some poems under the pen name of Blaise Cendrars. This Cendrars welcomes him warmly, and, despite Favez’s reticence, worms some confidences out of him for a book he intends to write one day on a mad eviscerator of young girls. He has even decided on the title already: Moravagine. A violator of young bodies, Favez, a violator of graves? No judgement is passed. The Legion and the War wipe slates clean.

  Cendrars, Favez and their comrades are thrown into the breach on the northern front between the Marne and the Somme; they fight in the mud at Notre Dame de Lorette, at Vimy, at Bois de la Vache, always pushing northwards, towards Champagne-Pouilleuse. On 28th September, 1915, at 19.30 hrs, along the Souain road, about 200 yards from the Navarin farm, after several assaults that are violently repulsed, the unit of Corporal Sauser-Cendrars and Favez is again thrown into the attack on the German trench nicknamed the “Kultur”. It is raining, it is muddy, and the Cendrars-Favez section comes under enemy fire. Blaise Cendrars’ right forearm is shattered; he is carried to the rear and it is amputated. In the same fighting Favez is killed, his body left lying on the battlefield, every trace of him finally lost.

  Until, that is, the Unknown Soldier is chosen by lot, on 21st November, 1920, from among eight coffins brought to the Fortress of Douaumont from all over the battle zones. The remains of a single anonymous hero above whom the eternal flame would burn beneath the glorious Arc de Triomphe.

  For – and here we meet again – recent research has suggested that the remains of the Unknown Soldier, subjected to DNA analysis, belong to a native of the canton of Vaud, Charles-Augustin Favez, a volunteer enlisted in the French army at war in February 1915, and killed before the Navarin farm on 28th September of the same year. And that the Unknown Soldier – honoured as a hero by the Head of State, by the Last Post, and by the salute to the flag on every fourteenth of July – that God himself has made, may be none other than a deranged man and dreaded ex-convict of Swiss origin and dark memory in the hallucinatory annals of the living dead. Of course the ministries involved have suppressed the results of these analyses, and the scandal has been hushed up. So only a few of us suspect that under the glorious Arc de Triomphe, beneath the Unknown Soldier’s eternal flame, lies Favez, the Vampire of Ropraz, sleeping lightly as he waits for other nights to be up and on the loose.

  1 The last execution in the canton of Vaud took place at Moudon, about seven miles from Ropraz, on 15th November, 1867. The poisoner Héli Freymond, murderer of his own wife among others, was beheaded in the public square before a perfectly contented crowd.

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2008 by

  Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  First published in French as Le vampire de Ropraz by

  Bernard Grasset, Paris in 2007

  Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland

  This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London (www.frenchbooknews.com)

  © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2007

  English translation © W. Donald Wilson, 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978-1-904-73850-3

  Typeset by Alma Books Ltd

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by

  CPI Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire