Meanwhile, the snow fell. It piled up higher every day against the walls of crystal forming an immense greenhouse for the numerous galleries in which the inhabitants were camped. The priests had reserved the inner sanctuary, in the middle of which was the altar, for themselves.
On the altar was the idol, encircled with flamboyant light. It was a statue made of some unknown dark red metal, which burned any profane hand that chanced to touch it, like red-hot iron. It was a monstrous statue, similar to the ancient Moloch, which only rejoiced in cruel sacrifices. Every day, a human creature was immolated to it. The face of the god seemed to brighten with a diabolical smile on seeing that liquid fire, blood, flow over the well-washed slabs.
The daily sacrifice seemed increasingly futile, however, as well as the moaning prayers that the heard of frightened incessantly directed toward the vault. There was no sign of an end to the scourge. The presages drawn from the wind and the water indicated the direst of futures. Vainly, at all hours, the candle-flames were interrogated. Instead of rising up like a single vertical sword, they divided into two branches of sinister signification. And it was in vain that, in order to know the secrets of the gods, the priests went to sleep every night with magical leaves of gold under their tongues.
It was finally necessary to have recourse to the great incantation. Already, the transparent walls were bending under the pressure, and the great crystal vault was increasing its curvature as it gradually subsided.
The inhabitants, on their knees, redoubled their supplications. And when evening came, the priests emerged from the sanctuary, in dalmatics with heavy folds, coiffed in blue linen tiaras. They made a ritual tour of the galleries, first from east to west and then from west to east. Then they went to sit down on their chairs of sculpted wood.
Then, amid feverish expectation, thirteen young girls were seen to advance, chose from among the most beautiful. They danced before the mute idol, to awaken its pity. And when they were weary, and an adorable sweat had perfumed the secret of their young flesh like an incense, they all came to stand in line in front of the idol’s altar, and servants gave them crowns of flowers. They knelt down on the steps, and the high priest came forward, holding in his hand the large sword of ritual immolations. Resigned and smiling, he cut their throats one after another over the large golden bowls, into which their crimson blood flowed.
All the people ran forward, trampling the suave bodies underfoot, in order to drink the redemptive blood. When the golden bowls had been drained to the last drop, a monstrous intoxication surged from that living beverage—and suddenly, from a thousand mouths, like a supreme and desperate appeal, a frightful clamor made the crystal walls tremble.
Under that formidable pressure, the vault of the temple split, and the thick white layer gradually slid into the interior. Scarcely had the first fragments of snow touched the statue, however, than the entire temple exploded like a powder-keg, burying the priests, the people and the god beneath its debris.
The Spell
For Henri Duvernois6
When Marthe got married, I thought that I would go mad with sorrow. I loved her so uniquely that I had never thought of confessing it to her. It seemed to me to be such a natural thing that she would one day be mine. I any case, I would never have supposed that she might marry my friend Pierre, that jovial fellow whose nature was so different from hers. In the evening, in the garden, when I told her my dreams, she listened to me pensively. As soon as she spoke, the mystery of her profound voice oppressed me like a charm. What good was there in pronouncing unnecessary words? Had she not understood me? I didn’t even think about Pierre. When the three of us were together, we only had conversations of cheerful banality. But it was Pierre whom she married.
The news reached me in the old family house in which I sometimes like to isolate myself, a few leagues south of Paris. After the initial amazement, I wanted to protest, to claim what I regarded as my right. I wrote to her. I went to see her. She welcomed me absent-mindedly, with an affectionate astonishment, and pronounced the eternal question: “Why didn’t you say so?” I had no more to say thereafter. I went to shut myself away, as a dead man seeks his tomb, in the old solitary house, resolved never to see Marthe or anyone else again. And it was then that, little by little, like a malefactor who slowly forces a door and penetrated with muffled footsteps, the idea gradually insinuated itself into my skull.
When I was a child, I had grim hatreds. An overly rigorous sense of justice made me condemn without appeal all those who had displeased me. My powerlessness exaggerated my fury. In the evening, before going to sleep, I would evoke my enemies, in a setting of despotic power. Slaves would make them kneel down, and when I had reproached them for their crimes, executioners would subject them to slow torture.
It is both a joy and a calamity to retain a puerile soul all one’s life. Poets need that perpetual freshness of impression to evoke and express the phantoms of their imagination forcefully, but ordinary men who possess the fatal gift suffer from a perpetual discord between their true soul and experience. They cannot get used to the world that surrounds them. They create another, where they live with the naïve illusion of external command.
Those who devote themselves in solitude to the practice of magic are like that. They imagine that it is sufficient to lock themselves in their rooms, surround themselves with pentacles and say, ardently: I wish! I wish! Bizarre encounters have sometimes lent credence to this folly. To be sure, guilty as those practices may be, who among us would not, at decisive moments, have sold his soul to the Devil to obtain what he desperately desires?
I had an entire library of occultism at my disposal, bequeathed by an uncle who was slightly mad. After the initial crisis of despair, idleness and, doubtless, a mysterious impulsion, inspired me to reopen the books that I had often leafed through.
A demon emerging from the pages whispered the accursed advice. My dolor had given way to hatred. As in the times of my childhood, I wanted the person who had taken my happiness dead. Nocturnal visions revealed the enchantment of the myth of Faust—and a few days later, in my solitude, I began the ceremonies of the spell.
I had a photograph of Pierre and a few meager souvenirs, in which, according to magical concepts, his person ought to have left effluvia that would permit me to establish a subtle link between us. I enclosed all the letters of his that I had in a block of wax. I shaped the block of wax into a rough resemblance, sufficient for the evocation.
One moonless night, I took the statuette, hidden in a black veil, to a crossroads in the forest where some wretch had once been hanged. Having bathed it in holy water, which I had stolen from the church, I baptized it in my enemy’s name according to the formulae, and made the sign of the cross in reverse.
After that, every evening, for thirteen days—thirteen being the number of love and death—in the remote room where I had deposited the image, I performed the incantations. I cursed him by the seven planets, by the swords and by the wheels. I called down upon him the fury of the gnomes, the sylphs, the undines and the salamanders, in order that all the elements should be conjured. And every time, I slowly plunged a needle into the body of wax, imagining that I was plunging it into the body of flesh—until, on the last day, I traversed the middle of the breast with a gesture of hatred, in order to kill my enemy’s heart. Meanwhile, I repeated in a monotonous and obstinate voice: “I want him to die. That is what I want.”
I went to bed that evening with the obscure impression that I had just committed a murder. At the same time, bizarrely enough, the very excess of my fury caused me to understand its vanity. As if liberated by the gesture, I began to smile sporadically at what appeared to me, after the fact, to have been childish.
The next day, I burned the block of wax and the letters. A long excursion on horseback dissipated the magical fumes that had confused my brain. Nothing remained to me but the impression of having at least wounded my dolor.
A few days later, I left for Paris, determined to
make a new start. I was young. Life still retained a few compensations and joys for me.
On arrival, I found Marthe’s letter, which informed me of her husband’s death.
In the profound distress into which that unexpected event had thrown her, she had immediately thought of my friendship. I sensed, moreover, more painful astonishment than true sorrow in her words. As I had expected, the marriage could only have been a serious formality for her. She had only experienced the conventional affection that, for many souls—the unfortunate ones!—is the equivalent of love. I searched the letter in vain for a great cry of despair.
The essential thing, however, was the detail of the event. Pierre had died on the evening of the day when I had plunged the needle into the heart of wax. The unfortunate fellow, she told me, had suffered for some time from stabbing pains in his limbs, without any other symptom. The physicians, when summoned, had diagnosed an embolism.
I married Marthe, after a suitable delay, as soon as I was able. It has not been easy for me to make her forget her loss. Have I forgotten him myself? What does it matter? She loves me, and I am happy, in a fashion that I thought impossible, and which still seems so to me, in spite of its reality, however profound that might be. The rest is nothing but chimeras.
If I sometimes feel a slight frisson in thinking about the death that I desired, I reassure myself by telling myself that there is nothing in life but chance and coincidence. The madness of a recluse cannot have any influence over external events.
And if I’m mistaken, if I’m guilty and must one day expiate my sin, I will, at any rate, have gained royally from the exchange. The demons may come and carry me away with their black wings. My eternal memory will make the inferno a paradise.
The Green Jar
After a comfortable dinner, as we were lighting cigars, plunged in profound armchairs, someone pronounced the word “occultism,” and our conversation turned toward strange things.
The room was discreetly lit. A warm breeze coming from the neighboring trees caused a widow and some vague drapery to stir. When the first cigar had been smoked a young man leaning back on the cushions gave an exact definition of an astral body; another recounted that he had seen the shade of Éliphas Lévi appear at a séance of initiates. Then the conversation embarked on the perpetuation of human consciousness after death.
A slight frisson ran through the room, and eyes were seen to widen. Someone said: “I had a dream and I’ll tell you about it. Perhaps it will interest you.”
The second cigar was extinguished, as befits a well-constructed story. Everyone lit up again, and leaned forward to listen.
I’ve been occupied for twenty years in the patient study of the human soul. I’ve observed the last convulsions of agonized individuals on cold mornings under grey skies. I’ve seen invalids die and I’ve noted all the essential lines that the spasm of death inscribes on faces. I’ve spent nights examining the disconcerting mystery of human life, holding brains shrunk by alcohol in my hand, beneath a magnifying glass and my weary eyes, and following like a voyager the frightful circumvolutions and furrows along which the sad or luminous demons that are our thoughts follow their routes. But I don’t know whether consciousness, the soul of the soul, quits the body or dies with it, nor what happens to us when the shreds of flesh that separate the nudity of our terrified soul’s livid eyes from the livid eyes or nothingness come apart.
What I don’t know, nobody knows. Who can say whether lamentable secrets are hidden beneath that untearable veil? Our ideas of glory and our vain desire to exist are nothing in comparison to the implacable logic that must regulate the universe. Perhaps the sublime formula, the doctrine of the future life and infinity, before which all poets and believers kneel, perhaps the dogma of the tabernacle, in a logic superior to all our illusions, is only a burst of obscene and grotesque laughter on the part of the absolute.
Lying peacefully in my bed, as tranquil as on days when I ought not to dream, I suddenly found myself transported into what appeared to me to the entrance hall of a pharmacy. I saw the pharmacist and his wife in the rear of the shop, though the communicating door, sitting down to a meal. I’m recounting things exactly as they appeared to me, with the incoherence of the dream, for the sake of absolute veracity. Also at table was the pharmacist’s son, and a few friends or relatives, among whom was a domesticated rattlesnake. The presence of that animal did not seem to astonish anyone, except for the schoolmaster, who was not there anyway. For my own part, I would not have wanted to seem unacquainted with the customs of the house, but no one paid any attention to me.
I seemed to be perceived all the details that surrounded me as if through a mist: glass jars and porcelain pots with gilded labels; the pharmacy door and that of the dining-room. I felt a sort of slothfulness impeding my movements; in addition, I felt vague pains in my abdominal region, and I attributed these pains, by some connection I cannot specify, to the effort I was making to reflect. The play of my mental faculties was reduced to an impression of hindrance. I was conscious that my soul, astonished by some modification of my body, lacked the familiar usage of its organs and sensations.
They were finishing dessert; the pharmacist had just read aloud the last article in the Beacon of the Future; the question of municipal councilors had been discussed and a little music plated. The rattlesnake had recited a fable. In sum, everyone was greatly amused.
After a rather ridiculous family scene, in which the pharmacist bewailed in Alexandrine verse the death of his aunt, a victim of her zeal in caring for someone gravely ill with cholera, a few people took their leave. Then the pharmacist, advancing into the foreground of the scene—which is to say, toward me—calmly took off his skull-cap revealed a blue-painted cranium on which the maxims of Hippocrates were inscribed in golden letters. At the same time, he exclaimed: “Gentlemen, I’m a pharmacist, and I will never deny pharmacy; I swear it by the anatomical specimens that you see in this jar.”
I heard muffled laughter around me, but I leaned vainly in all directions to see the anatomical specimens and the jar. My gestures, In this regard, seemed unusual to me. I thought I could feel my limbs sliding over one another with a viscous motion. At the same time, I breathed in an insipid odor of alcohol.
In view of the strangeness of my sensations, the painful thought suddenly occurred to me that I was doubtless dead, and that nothing remained of my body, destroyed by the universal movement of things, but some part in which my entire soul had taken refuge. In a melancholy fashion, I thought that perhaps it was my skull that had survived me. I was not too unhappy, telling myself that I might possibly be able to recover the subtle calm of yesteryear in some monk’s cell.
Then I thought that perhaps it was my hand that had survived me. “Oh! What if my hand alone remains intact, and, living on behalf of my vanished flesh, it is trying to console my soul for the loss of its sad body? That’s why I no longer have lips permitting me to recite to the woman I know too well that sonnets that her imperial beauty dictates to me! That why I’ve seen the light go out in my eyes, of which she is no longer the dearest glory. But perhaps my hand might take the place of the dead lips, and of the extinct eyes. I only need, to console myself, to be able still to trace the tender letters of her name!”
Meanwhile, the pharmacist was telling his guests about a procedure he had witnessed a few days earlier. The subject had died of one of those maladies whose exceedingly rare name evokes profound mutilations and terror-blackened visages. The body had been embalmed, then reduced to ashes, according to the instructions of the deceased. During the embalming, however, the pharmacist had been able to procure the dead man’s entrails. Everything else had disappeared.
“You see that green jar in the shop window, next to the door? The guts I mentioned just now have been put in eau-de-vie. The spectacle reminds me of the fragility of our nature, and I think, with a certain annoyance, that I shall die one day, even though I’m a pharmacist.”
He pointed at the jar. All eyes
went to the entrails, and I had the frightful sensation that it was me they were looking at.
At that moment, undoubtedly, my soul, upset by the seal of my hallucinations, must have protruded from the formless folds of that flesh that was imprisoning it, two eyes with a gaze encircled by terror, for one member of the audience remarked:
“The glitter of the liquid is causing bizarre reflections in the jar. One might truly think that those guts were staring at us.”
The Story of the Diligence
How can I relate this adventure, and how can anyone believe it? The inhabitants of the New World are hungry for new sensations, and do not recoil from any folly to render their lives more intense. Among all the mysterious stories with which the memory of humankind enriches itself with every passing moment, that of the Lyons Courier7 had had a particular impact on the child-like minds of my two friends Rex and Jim Corbett, and one day, they decided to re-enact, in the same conditions as before, so far as was possible, at least—the fatal journey.
The secret having been rigorously kept, we found ourselves one evening in a specially-constructed garage on the main road, where the diligence was waiting for us. What a marvelous evocation! Everything was similar—and it had not been an easy task to bring together all the documents permitting that exact moment of the past to live again. But with money and patience, one can realize prodigies. The carriage and the awning were identical. The box of dispatches was fixed behind the vehicle. There were four horses, harnessed two-by-two according to models carefully studied in the engravings of the time. They carried small silvery bells. The postillion and the coachman, perched on the imperial in authentic costumes, were my two friends, and I was the only passenger. Their wigs were powdered. There were trunks and bales under the awning. What fantastic old trunks, retrieved from fabulous second-hand dealers!
The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait Page 3