French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (19 page)

At ten thirty-five the papers were apprised that he had gone into mourning, and his words of sorrow were scattered on the winds in a thousand copies—the card announcing the sad news having been judiciously designed and executed a long time in advance.

The same thing was true of the black marble slab destined for the ‘Columbarium’,
*
which showed a phoenix beating its wings amidst the flames, and, on the orders of the deceased, the following terrifying inscription:

To blow away the cobwebs, Lalbarie
fils
went for a bicycle ride, lunched copiously, received a few mourners, made his ritual devotions at the Bourse, executed, towards evening, some profitable placements, and spent the night on the town, as a token of his extreme grief.

The next day a sumptuous funeral carriage loaded with flowers, and followed by an unprayerful crowd, bore the remains of the deceased to the Crematorium.

‘Ha! You will rise again!’ said the amiable Dieudonné to himself, who entered alone into the terrible inner sanctum, with the two men whose job it was to commit his father to the furnace. ‘We shall see if you rise again!’…

The bier had been fashioned out of thin planks, according to the correct administrative norms, so it would combust instantly once introduced into the oven that was heated to seven-hundred degrees; it rested on a mechanical trolley, whose two sprung-metal handles, thrust with force, hurl the dead into the furnace, and then return with a squeal, in a diastole–systole movement lasting twenty-five seconds.

So things stood, and Dieudonné had reached this climactic moment of filial grief,
when a sound was heard, coming from inside the coffin…

Oh, a vague and muffled sound, to be sure, like a corpse come alive and stirring in its shroud. The coffin seemed to shudder, even…

At that very instant the oven door, manoeuvred with precision, opened wide.

The three faces, reddened by the atrocious flame, looked at each other.

‘It’s the body deliquescing,’ said Dieudonné placidly.

But the two men hesitated still.

‘Well get on with it, in heaven’s name!’ screamed the parricide suddenly. ‘I tell you it’s the body deliquescing.’ And he thrust a bundle of banknotes into the hand of the man nearest him.

The handles leaped forward, and leaped back…

The door slammed shut, but not quite fast enough, it seems, because Dieudonné, planted square in front of it, thought he saw, in the instantaneous combustion of the coffin, his father, with a petrified face and his arms stretched out.

M
ONSIEUR
T
ERTULLIEN
had just reached his fiftieth year; his hair was still admirably black, his business successful, and his influence growing daily, when he had the misfortune to lose his wife.

This was a terrible blow. It would have been sheer perversity to imagine a more pleasing companion.

She was twenty years younger than her husband, with the most winning looks and a character to go with it, so sweet that she never let an occasion pass without dazzling.

The magnanimous Tertullien had married her, even though she didn’t have a penny to her name. In this he was like most merchants who get tired of celibacy, but who are too busy to set about seducing exigent virgins.

He married her ‘between two cheeses’, as he liked to remark skittishly. For he was in fact a wholesale cheese merchant, and he had undertaken the solemn act of matrimony between a memorable delivery of Cheshire and an exceptional delivery of Parmesan.

But the union, I regret to say, was not blessed with offspring, and this cast a shadow over the gracious picture.

Who was to blame? It was a weighty matter, still undecided among the fruiterers and grocers in the neighbourhood. A hare-lipped butcher’s wife who had been passed over by the handsome Tertullien accused him openly of impotence, overriding the objections of a spotty mattress-seller who claimed to have empirical evidence.

The pharmacist, however, declared it was too early to form an opinion, and the benevolent crowd of concierges, quite uninterested in the matter, approved the circumspection of this thoughtful man.

The crowd of them laid down the law as follows, saying that Paris wasn’t built in a day, that all’s well that ends well, that you spread your relish thinly if it’s to go a long way, etc., etc., and that in consequence there was every reason to suppose that the happy event would arrive, which would add the finishing touch to the dazzling prosperity of the cheeseman.

They might have been speaking of the Heir Apparent.

News of this sudden death, which cut down so many legitimate hopes, was met with real sorrow.

Unless Tertullien were to remarry rapidly—a hypothesis that in his grief the cheese merchant did not entertain for an instant—the future of his business, the work of his own hands and by now so richly endowed, though it had started from nothing, would falter, and his clientèle pass into the hands of a younger rival!

The perspective, indeed, looked black, and it must have added a tinge of bitterness to the regrets of the grieving spouse, who seemed on the point of plunging headlong into a gulf of despair.

I do not know to what extent anxieties about not having an heir for his cheese business exercised him, but I myself was witness to his bellowing grief and the unrepeatable anathemas he cast upon himself for having to process behind Clémentine as she was borne to her grave, and in short order too, though he could not bring himself to set a date.

Ten years of business dealings with him had enabled me to observe at length the character of this amiable man, and there was a trait in particular that I noted, admirable but little known.

He lived in terror of being made a cuckold. All his ancestors had been, dating back two or three hundred years, and the tenderness he had for his wife was based essentially on the unshakable certainty that he was safe on that front, and her honesty entire.

His
gratitude
had about it something deeply unusual and touching. The more I thought about it, it came to seem almost tragic; and I sometimes wondered if Clémentine’s notorious sterility was not in some peculiar way brought about by Tertullien himself, whose doubts concerning
his own identity
—and a sublime fear of cuckolding himself—prevented him from impregnating her.

But it was all too perfect, too far above the common herd, and the banal thing occurred that was bound to occur.

Clémentine had given up her soul to the Lord, and the unfortunate widower had given way, vigorously, to the groanings and bellowings of grief, as nature will have it.

When he had paid this first tribute—to employ one of his own favourite expressions—and before the whole crowded business of the funeral which he dreaded, he desired to put some order into the papers and relics of his beloved.

And it was thus that his destiny, like a cruel stepmother, struck him; the ridiculed standard of the Tertulliens was raised above his head.

In a secret drawer deep in a private desk, which the most jealous husband would never dream of suspecting, he found a whole correspondence, whose volume and variety held him absolutely riveted.

All his friends and acquaintances were represented. With the exception of myself, all had been cherished by his wife.

His own employees—he found letters from his own employees written on pink paper—had been simultaneously gratified.

He now knew with certainty that the dear departed had betrayed him night and day; at any time, and practically everywhere. In his bed, in his cellar, in his attic, in his shop, under the very eye of the Gruyère, and in the effluvia of the Roquefort or the Camembert.

I need hardly add that throughout the whole unedifying correspondence he himself was scarcely spared. He was unremittingly mocked from the first line to the last.

An employee from the post-office, renowned for the sharpness of his wit, ridiculed his business in the most disobliging way, and went as far as to make some allusions, and to give some
bits of advice
, that are quite unpublishable.

But there was something else—extraordinary, excessive, fabulous—enough to send a shudder through the constellation of the Goat.

Next to this mortifying bundle was an endless series of little wooden sticks. These astonished and baffled him, at first. But then, with the wisdom of a subtle Apache with his ear to the warpath, the light flooded in upon him, when he realized that the number of sticks tallied exactly with the number of admirers encouraged by his faithless spouse, and that each of them was scored with a multitude of nicks made by a penknife, much in the manner of a baker’s account book.

Clearly, this Clémentine was an orderly woman, who kept her account books up to date.

Crushed and humiliated, the husband asked, quite naturally, to be left alone with his dead spouse, and shut himself in with her for two or three hours, like a man who wants to give himself up unconstrainedly to his grief.

A few weeks later Tertullien held a sumptuous dinner to celebrate the feast of the Epiphany.

Twenty carefully selected male guests gathered around his table. There was a quite unparalleled spread. Exquisite, abundant, unexpected. It semed like the farewell feast given by an opulent prince who is about to abdicate.

A few of the guests, however, felt a tinge of unease at the funereal aspect of the decor, a product of the now somewhat sombre imagination of the cheese merchant, borrowed from some half-remembered melodrama.
*

The walls, even the ceiling, were draped in black, the tablecloth was black, the lighting came from black candles burning in black candelabra. Everything was black.

The man from the post-office, completely unmanned, wanted to leave. A jolly pig-breeder stopped him, saying that no one was to ‘let the side down’, and that he himself found it all ‘a good joke’.

After a moment’s hesitation, the others resolved to spit in the eye of death. Soon enough, the bottles began to go round, and the meal became quite riotous. By the time the champagne came out the pun reigned supreme and the smutty stories were beginning, when a gigantic cake was brought in.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Tertullien, rising, ‘we must lift our glasses, if you will, to the memory of our dear departed. Each one of you knew and loved her heart. You cannot have forgotten, can you? Her kind and tender heart. I would ask all of you therefore to let yourselves be infused—in a quite
particular way
—with her memory, before we cut into this cake which she would have liked so dearly to share with you.’

Having never been the lover of the cheese merchant’s wife, probably because I had never met her, I was not invited to this dinner, and I never found out who got the lucky sixpence.

But I do know that Tertullien got into trouble with the law, for having inserted, into the swollen sides of this almond cake, the
heart
of his wife, the little, putrefying heart of the delicious Clémentine.

B
EFORE
quitting the Pyrenees, I wanted to see my friend Roger Fresselou, who has lived for years and years in Le Castérat, a small village in the Ariège.
*

It was a long, hard journey. After six days of tough walking and steep climbing, aching and exhausted, I arrived at Le Castérat as night was falling. Picture in your mind thirty or so houses clustering on a narrow plateau surrounded on all sides by black mountains with snowy summits. To begin with the view is majestic, especially when the mist softens somewhat the closed horizon, turning it milky and covering it with gold dust. But this feeling soon vanishes, and faced with these lofty walls of rock, it is replaced by an invasive and dreary sadness, and by a horrid sense of imprisonment.

The village is at such an altitude that the trees are stunted and the only bird is the heavy ptarmigan with his feathery claws. Only a few meagre rhododendrons survive in this stony soil, and the dwarf thistle which opens its large yellow flowers with their pointed and wounding spines only in the noonday sun. On the slopes below the plateau, to the north, grows short, greyish grass, grazed over in summer by cows and sheep and goats, whose bells tinkle incessantly, like the tinkling of the priest’s bell in our native countryside, that sounds in the evening as he bears viaticum to the sick. Nothing is sadder, and nothing is less flower-like, than the rare species that scrape a living out of this mean and joyless corner of nature; poor stunted plants with whiteish, hairy leaves, and coarse corollas that have the discoloured, clouded look of dead pupils. Winter with its snowfalls, and all the surrounding gulfs filled with snow, cuts the village off from the rest of the world, from the rest of life. The herds move down to the low valleys, the sturdy men of the village seek work or adventure elsewhere, sometimes far away; the post doesn’t even get through… For months and months there comes no news from the other side of the impassable snows. No one living is left, merely the half-alive, the
old men, and the women and children who go to earth in their houses, like marmots in their holes. They only come out on Sundays, to hear mass in church, which is made up of a little square tower, its stone fissured, with a kind of lean-to up against its side, shaped like a barn. Oh! The sound of that bell muffled by the snow!