The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century

by Terry Hale

  While this was being accomplished, Hélène’s scaffold presented an even more dreadful scene. The executioner’s wife had vainly searched for the cutlass (perhaps you will remember that Hélène had fallen on it) but, just then, her scissors, which she still had with her, returned to mind. Seizing with one hand the rope that was tied around this wretched girl’s neck, she struck her six times with the other hand, dragging her over the eight wooden steps and the four made of stone, and stamping on her as each step struck the head of this already blood-drenched body. When she got to the bottom, the butchers had finished their first piece of work and the people killed the executioner’s wife.

  I can breathe at last and I think it is time we all did so. Happily, Hélène is now no longer at the Morimont, but in the kindly arms which have carried her to that house at the corner of the square, the house of the good surgeon Nicolas Jacquin, whose honourable family, two hundred years later, continues to practise this same profession in our two provinces of Burgundy. None of Hélène’s wounds was mortal, none proved dangerous. When she regained consciousness, her first words were those of the innocent entering heaven, because she imagined that she had fallen into the hands of God, to whom the secret of all thoughts is known.

  And at the same moment, Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit, still smiling, and listening out to the sound of the multitude returning home to its different districts, said: ‘At last, at last it is over; the people are going home happy, because that young girl is not dead.’

  Among the many miracles which marked that memorable date of May 12, we must not forget the circumstance which made it coincide, as I have said before, with the last sitting of the parliament. The two weeks which that illustrious company had free of their duties until the day when it should resume its work left the process of justice suspended, and the functions of the executioner without an occupant! This delay, which was usual enough between sentence and execution, but which the abrupt manner of the verdict seemed to have deliberately shortened, gave Hélène’s friends all the necessary time to have recourse to royal clemency in favour of an unhappy woman whose innocence had now been made manifest through prodigies of Heaven; for this was an age of simplicity and faith, when it was not imagined that the natural order of earthly things would be reversed against all likelihood without some secret purpose of Providence; and I am among those who would still hold these views to be sensible ones, in this period of intellectual refinement and vast social improvement which we have had the happiness to reach ever since philosophy deprived Providence of its moral influence over events on earth.

  The plea for clemency was in no time at all covered in innumerable signatures by all in Dijon who could lend it the recommendation of an honourable rank or an elevated piety; but it will be easily imagined that this avowal of compassion, carried to the throne by the elite of a population that was moved to tenderness, by itself offered only faint likelihood of success for hope and pity. Louis XIII was on the throne, and this young prince, whose only strength lay in being cruel, at the age of twenty-four manifested the inflexible and blood-thirsty severity which gave him the name of the JUST from his flatterers. What deplorable justice of kings which is only exhibited in history as a helping hand to executioners!

  Thus, in the chapel of the Bernardines, Hélène’s temporary reprieve was a time of prayers, a fortnight at death’s door, through which her mother’s joyful kisses alternated with dreads and terrors, for at the smallest sound she heard she feared they were coming to take Hélène away to kill her. Yet all the while Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit would say, whenever Hélène’s story indistinctly came to mind from time to time and she would remember her: ‘I gave you my firm promise that this innocent would not die!’ In the moments when the surgeon’s ministrations brought her back to life, Hélène’s first words had expressed the same trust in divine protection: ‘Something in my heart told me that the Lord would succour me!’ she said. But her spirit, worn down by so much grief, could scarce endure the prospect of these opposing outcomes with equanimity. Sometimes, abruptly she turned pale; a violent shaking would seize her limbs, which were still not yet healed from their wounds, and she would be heard to murmur as she pressed her lips on the cross of Jesus or on saintly relics: ‘My God! My God! Am I not to return to the Morimont, where I suffered so much pain? Am I not to be made to die? My God! Take pity on me! …’

  Then there arrived a despatch from Paris, undated, but which probably only arrived at the point when the law was about to take back its blood rights; for the charity of kings limps with an even slower gait than that of prayer. This despatch brought yet another miracle. Louis XIII had bestowed clemency.

  The ratification of these letters of pardon, ‘which released Hélène from her shame and gave her back her good reputation’, was pronounced by the Dijon parliament on 5 June 1625, on the advocacy of Maître Charles Fevret, the author of the Traité de l’Abus, which is well known to learned advocates. This Charles Fevret, whose greatest merit in the eyes of philologists is in having been the great grandfather of the gifted and scholarly Charles-Marie Fevret de Fontette, the publisher, or, to be more accurate, the author of one of the most precious monuments in our literary history: the Bibliothèque historique of Father Lelong, was himself taken to be a great orator in his day, and this reputation is unassailed if we are to measure eloquence by the abundance of harmonious phrases and the majestic grandeur of delivery. It is that Dictio togata of the senate and the Capitoline Hill which has an indefinable air of the patrician and the consul, and which is raised above the common language by its magnificent turn of phrase and solemn words, as the magistrates of the highest courts are distinguished from the common folk by their purple and their ermine. It is as if one hears in his prose an echo of the verses of Malherbe, and one can glimpse a prefiguring of Balzac, in their profusion of images and the richness of allusion. It is in this manner that he gives us a picture of poor Hélène, humbly on her knees before the parliament, kissing the edge of the sword of justice which heals the wounds it has made as did Achilles’ lance. Here is a very fine passage:

  ‘What a marvel of our time that a girl of this age should have tussled with death face to face, struggled with that towering force on the site of his most bloody executions, in the very field of his Morimont! And, for brevity’s sake, we can say that, armed only with the trust she had in God, she overcame ignominy and fear, the executioner and the blade, the rope and the scissors, strangulation and death! After this mortal triumph, what remains to her but gloriously to sing out that canticle which henceforth she shall take as hers: Exaltetur Dominus Deus meus, quoniam superexaltavit misericordia judicium. What can she do, as an everlasting memorial to her salvation, but hang the votive picture of her ordeal within the sanctuary of this temple of justice? What more fitting intention can she conceive for her state than to build an altar in her heart, where every day of her life she shall admire the powerful hand of her liberator, the means unknown to men whereby he broke the chains of her captivity and the nature of his providential favour in overseeing that everything was brought about for her liberation? …’

  I have selected this passage from among many others that are no less exceptional because it gives a concise account of everything which it remains to me to say about the life of Hélène Gillet. The destiny of meditation and prayer to which her lawyer seems here to call her to is the destiny which she made for herself. There is reason to believe that she did not re-enter the world, and perhaps that she did not leave the convent of the Bernardines until after the death of Sister Françoise of the Holy Spirit. We know that she did become a nun in a convent in Bresse and that she had recently died there, ‘with much moral edification’, according to the promises of her holy protectress when, in 1699, Father Bourrée of the Oratoire published his History of Mother Jeanne de Saint-Joseph, Madame Courcelle de Pourlans, the abbess of Notre-Dame du Tart. We can suppose, by setting the dates together, that she was at the time at least ninety years old.


  I have omitted or rather I have held back one very exceptional detail in order to conclude this long narration. It is this: that the letters of clemency for Hélène Gillet were granted in the council of Louis XIII ‘in honour of the happy marriage of the Queen of Great Britain, his very dear and much beloved sister, Henrietta-Maria of France’ and if you will permit me to recall once again the words of Charles Fevret, ‘while the king and his court were in the midst of days of happiness and festivity’. These days of festivity, whose happiness was so propitious for innocence, were in celebration of the wedding ceremony of Charles I, which concurred with the very day of Hélène’s execution on the Morimont square. Twenty-four years later, the head of Charles I fell at Whitehall under a more expert axe than that of Simon Grandjean, and the young girl of Bourg-en-Bresse had time to pray for the absolution of his soul for half a century. God’s purposes are impenetrable, and the heart of man is blind; but one does not need to have penetrated very far in this study of things bygone to recognise that there is something mysterious and symbolic at the heart of all these stories.

  And since the most ordinary tales require a moral, you will not forbid me, ladies and gentlemen, from attaching such a thing to this one, one of the most extraordinary and yet most true, which you have ever heard related. The moral is that it is high time that humankind rejected with one voice that impious justice which has insolently usurped God’s power over the work of death, the work that God reserved for himself when he struck all our kind with a sentence of death which belonged to him alone. Oh! You are great makers of revolutions! You have made revolutions against all the moral and political institutions of society! You have made revolutions against all the laws! You have made them against the most intimate thoughts of the mind, against its affections, against its beliefs and its faith! You have made them against thrones, against altars and against monuments, against stones, against inanimate things, against death, against the grave and the dust of ancestors. You have made no revolution against the scaffold, for never has a human feeling prevailed, never has a human emotion throbbed in your savage revolutions! And you speak of your enlightenment! And you have no fear of proposing yourselves as models of the most refined civilisation! Dare I ask you where this civilisation lies? Might it happen to be in that hideous ghoul which sharpens a triangle of steel to cut off heads? Come now, you are barbarians!

  As for you, my good friends, you are now to recall more pleasing stories, the ones that rocked us so gently by the banks of the Doubs river,2 in our carriages laden with fruits and flowers and young women, while the nearby rocks brought us long echoing sounds of the bagpipes. Or on hearing them today, for I shall not hide it from you that, more than once, words failed me as the poet said, in the telling of this one. But we live in a time of harsh thoughts and gloomy expectations when goodly people may have need, like the noble populace of the Morimont, to form advance alliance against the executioner; and had it not killed the executioner, which is also a crime, I would gladly propose that you raise a monument to its courage.

  It is wrong to kill anyone. It is wrong to kill those who kill. It is wrong to kill the executioner! The laws on murder must be killed! …

  1 Nodier refers here to Gabriel Peignot’s Histoire de Hélène Gillet (Dijon, 1829). Peignot’s study is largely based on the seventeenth-century sources Nodier refers to in the following sentence and elsewhere.

  2 The Doubs is a river to the south of Besançon near the Swiss border. Nodier was born in Besançon and the town and the surrounding region is never far from his thoughts.

  The Green Monster

  Gérard de Nerval

  I

  The Devil’s Castle

  Let me tell you about one of the oldest inhabitants of Paris; someone we used to call le diable Vauvert.

  From which the proverb derives: ‘C’est au diable Vauvert! Allez au diable Vauvert!’ (The devil Vauvert’s got it! Go ask the devil Vauvert!)

  In other words: why don’t you sod off!

  Delivery men generally say: ‘C’est au diable aux vers!’ – by which they mean at the other end of the earth.

  Or, to put it another way, the commission with which you wish to entrust them will not come cheap. But this is a bastardised and corrupt form, like so many commonly employed by the denizens of Paris.

  Le diable Vauvert is a typical resident of Paris, where he has lived for many centuries according to the historians. Sauval, Félibien, Sainte-Foix, and Dulaure recount his exploits at length.

  He would seem to have lived originally in the castle of Vauvert on a site now occupied by the somewhat riotous Carthusian Dance Hall on the far side of the Luxembourg, facing the allée de l’Observatoire, in the rue d’Enfer.

  This castle of unhappy memory was partially demolished and the ruins became an annex of the Carthusian monastery in which Jean de la Lune, nephew of the Antipope Benedict XIII, died in 1414. Jean de la Lune was suspected of having commerce with a certain devil who was, perhaps, the familiar spirit of the Vauvert castle. As every one knows, there is not a feudal edifice without its own familiar.

  The historians have not bequeathed us any precise knowledge about this remarkable period.

  The Vauvert devil only became a topic of conversation again during the reign of Louis XIII.

  For some time a tremendous racket had been heard every evening coming from a house built out of the rubble of the old monastery, a house which had remained unoccupied for a number of years.

  At this, the neighbours became extremely alarmed.

  They informed the lieutenant of police, who dispatched some constables.

  The astonishment of these men on hearing the chink of glasses accompanied by the sound of strident laughter can readily be imagined!

  At first, the constables imagined they had stumbled on a party of drunken counterfeiters; and, fearing from the noise coming from the house that they were dealing with a large gang, ran off to summon help.

  But when reinforcements arrived, they too decided that their number was insufficient; there was not a sergeant among them who dared lead his men into a den in which it sounded as if an entire army was celebrating.

  Finally, towards dawn, a large body of troops arrived; the house was entered. But the police found nothing there.

  The sun dispelled the shadows.

  The investigation continued throughout the day and the police eventually concluded that the sounds had come from the catacombs which, we all know, are located underneath this district.

  The police prepared to go down; but, while they were making their arrangements, night fell once more, and the noise recommenced louder than ever.

  This time there was no-one who dared go in again because it was obvious that there was nothing in the cellar except bottles and, therefore, it could only be the devil who was making them dance.

  The police contented themselves with manning the entrance to the street and asking the clergy for their prayers.

  The priests conducted a host of prayers; and holy water was even squirted through the cellar’s air vent with syringes.

  The noise continued as before.

  II

  The Sergeant

  For a whole week a crowd of Parisians, ever more restive and eager for news, obstructed the roads around this district.

  At last, the district sergeant, more courageous than the rest, offered to investigate the haunted cellar in exchange for a pension payable to a dressmaker by the name of Margot in the case of his demise.

  This worthy man’s love was greater than his credulity. He adored the dressmaker who, though she kitted herself out well, was also on the thrifty side – some would even say mean. She had no intention of marrying a mere sergeant whose only income was his small salary.

  But if he won a pension the sergeant would be a different proposition.

  Heartened by this prospect, the sergeant cried out that he believed in neither God nor the devil, and that he would track down the cause of the noise.

  ‘So you don�
��t you believe in ghosts?’ enquired one of his comrades.

  ‘I believe in the lieutenant of police and the mayor of Paris,’ he replied.

  In short, he overstated the case.

  Clenching his sabre between his teeth, and with a pistol in each hand, he ventured down the stairs.

  When he reached the bottom step, a most extraordinary spectacle awaited him.

  The bottles, performing the most graceful movements, were all engaged in an infernal saraband.

  The green seals represented gentlemen and the red seals represented women.

  There was even an orchestra set up on the bottle rack.

  The empty bottles sounded like wind instruments, the broken bottles like cymbals and triangles, and the cracked bottles made a noise not unlike the distinctive harmony of violins.

  The sergeant, who had downed several glasses of beer before setting out on his expedition, felt greatly reassured when he saw that the cellar contained only bottles and began to imitate their dance.

  Then, increasingly encouraged by the gaiety of the spectacle, he gathered in his arms what appeared to be an attractive long-necked bottle of white Bordeaux, carefully sealed in red, and pressed it amorously against his heart.

  Frenetic laughter arose from every side; the sergeant, amazed, let go of the bottle which broke into a thousand pieces.

  The dancing ceased, screams issued from every corner of the cellar, and the sergeant felt the hair on his head rise when he saw that the spilled wine seem to form a pool of blood.