French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (22 page)

There on the cushions was a naked body, the corpse of a little girl, stretched out and horribly stiff, her limbs all twisted and convulsed, like those of a torture victim.

To call for help, call my servants, call everyone—that was my first impulse. But once I had got over the first flush of horror, I decided it were better that I should examine things by myself first of all, and
with no witnesses. I even took care to triple-lock the door to the summer-house.

It was indeed a little girl, with the slender figure of a young boy. At her throat were marks of strangulation; and on her chest and belly were long, thin, deep incisions, made with fingernails, or with cutting and pointed claws. Her swollen face had turned black. On a chair lay her pauper’s clothes, a wretched little dress, frayed at the edges and all muddy, and a ragged petticoat, folded almost punctiliously. On the marble-topped bathroom table I saw a bit of paté and two green apples, one of which had been nibbled, as if by mice. And an empty bottle of champagne.

Nothing was altered in the other rooms, which I scanned one after the other. Each piece of furniture, each object, was in its usual place.

Rapidly, feverishly, and in no logical order, my mind started racing:

‘Should I alert the police, the law?… Never… The magistrates would come and I would not know what to say to them… Accuse Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin?… Obviously the man had given me a false name, and there was no point in going to Montrouge to find out he had never lived there… What then?… They would not believe me… They would think I’d invented it… They would never believe that this man had committed an atrocious crime almost on my doorstep, in a strange house that belonged to me, without my seeing or hearing anything… Tell us another!… You can’t tweak the nose of the Law like that… And then, suspicious, with hyena-looks, they would examine me, and of course I would fall into the snare laid by their insidious and sinister questions… They would ransack my whole life, looking for clues… Fragonard would be held against me, Fragonard would scream out the grossness of my pleasures and the shame of my routine lusts… They would want to know the names of every woman who had come here, and of all those who had not… And then I would be calumnied by the servants I had dismissed, by the grain merchant I had boycotted, by the baker I had accused of using false measures, by the butcher whose poisoned meat I had sent back… all of them would be ready, under the protection of the Law, to sully me with their vengeance and their rancour!… And finally the day would come when my hesitation and reticence and embarrassment in response to their questionings would be taken as a confession of my guilt, and they would charge me with murder… No!… There
must be no judges, no gendarmes, no policemen here!… Nothing… Nothing but a little earth to cover this poor little corpse, and a bit of moss over the earth, and silence, silence, silence… on all of this!…
*

I took the frayed and muddied dress, the ragged petticoat, and in them I wrapped the little body of the unknown girl, like a shroud… Afterwards, once I had ascertained that everything in the summer-house was hermetically closed and sealed against the indiscreet or accidental curiosity of my servant, I went out. I wandered around the summer-house for the whole day, waiting for nightfall.

That evening was the village fête. I sent off my servants, and when I was alone, completely alone, I set myself to burying the little girl in the grounds, deep in the earth at the foot of a beech tree…

Yes! Silence, silence, silence, and earth, earth, earth, over all that!…

Yesterday, in the Parc Monceau, I spotted Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin. He still had the same slack, grey skin, the same dead expression, the same greenish-blond wig. He was following a little flower-girl, who was selling sunflowers to passers-by. Near me, a municipal policeman was waddling along, ogling a girl… But the stupidity of his face made me turn on my heel… I foresaw nothing but complications, the Whats?… and the Hows?…

‘Ye gods! Let them work it all out,’ I said to myself. ‘It’s none of my business…’

With a light step, I fled in the opposite direction to the municipal policeman, to Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin, and to the little flower-seller… that someone else may have to bury in his grounds, under a beech tree, and at night!…

T
HE
Guignard spouses, married for love, longed passionately for a son. As if the little soul who was so desired had hastened to fulfil their wishes, he arrived prematurely. His mother died in childbirth and, unable to bear the loss, his father hanged himself.

* * * * * * * * * *

Constant Guignard had an exemplary but an unhappy childhood. He spent his time at school doing detentions he didn’t deserve, receiving thrashings meant for others, and being ill on the days when all the important exams were held. He completed his studies with the reputation of a cockroach and a dunce. When it came to the Baccalaureate, he did his neighbour’s Latin translation for him. His neighbour passed, but Guignard was expelled from the exam for copying.

* * *

Such inauspicious beginnings in life would have turned a lesser nature vicious. But Constant Guignard had a soul of the higher type, and convinced that happiness is the reward of virtue, he resolved to conquer his ill-fortune by sheer force of heroism.

He entered a house of commerce, which burned down the next day. As the fire raged, he noticed the distress of his employer, and plunged into the flames to retrieve the safe. His hair burned and his limbs suppurated, but he managed, at peril of his life, to break the safe and take the contents out.

But the fire consumed them in his hands. When he emerged from the furnace, two constables grabbed him by the collar. A month later he was condemned to five years imprisonment for having tried to steal, at the opportune moment offered by the fire, a fortune that was quite safe where it was in a fireproof strongbox.

* * *

A riot broke out in the high-security prison where he was held. In his attempt to come to the rescue of a warder being attacked, he tripped him accidentally and left him to be massacred by the rebels. So they sent him to Cayenne
*
for twenty years.

Driven by the knowledge of his innocence, he escaped, made his way back to France under an assumed name, and truly believed he had shaken off ill-fortune, and once more set about doing good.

* * *

One day, during a fair, he saw a runaway horse dragging a cab straight towards the edge of the rampart. He flung himself at the head of the horse, got his wrist twisted, his leg broken, and had several ribs stove in, but he managed to prevent the dreadful fall. Except that the horse turned round and charged into the middle of the crowd, crushing an old man, two women, and three children. There had been no one in the cab.

* * *

Wearied by these acts of heroism, Constant Guignard took instead to doing good quietly, humbly devoting himself to alleviating everyday hardships. But the money he gave to families in need was spent by the husbands on drink; the woollens he distributed to poor workers, used to the cold, made them catch pneumonia; a stray dog he rescued gave rabies to six people in the neighbourhood; the military substitute
*
he purchased to get an interesting young man out of the army sold passkeys to the enemy.

* * *

Constant Guignard came to believe that money did more harm than good, and rather than spreading wide his philanthropy, he decided to concentrate it on a single person. So he adopted a young orphan girl, not in any way beautiful, but graced with the most loveable nature, and he looked after her with all the tenderness of a father. Alas! He was so good, so devoted, and so kindly towards her, that one evening she flung herself at his feet, declaring that she was in love with him. He tried to make her understand that he had always considered her as his daughter, and that it would be a crime were he to succumb to the temptation she presented. He made her understand, in his fatherly way, that what she took to be love was in fact the awakening of her
senses, and he promised her that, taking note of this sign of nature, he would not delay in seeking a husband worthy of her. The next day he found her lying against his door, a knife in her heart.

* * *

With that, Constant Guignard decided to give up his missionary role, and swore that from now on he would seek satisfaction simply in trying to prevent evil.

Some time after this, he was apprised by accident of a crime that one of his friends was going to commit. He could have denounced him to the police; but he preferred to try and prevent the crime, and save the criminal. So he became closely involved with the planning, understood all the details, and waited for the precise moment when, having set everything up, he would scupper the whole plan. But the rascal he was trying to save saw through his game, and managed to outwit him, in such wise that the crime was perpetrated, the criminal got away, and Constant Guignard was arrested.

* * *

The public prosecutor’s requisition against Constant Guignard was a masterpiece of logic. He recalled the defendant’s whole life, his miserable childhood, with its punishments and expulsions, the audacity of his first attempted theft, his despicable treachery in the prison riot, his escape from Cayenne, his return to France under an assumed name. From this moment on, the orator rose to the greatest possible heights of legal eloquence. He scourged the hypocritical virtue of the man, who was a corrupter of decent families, who for his own pleasure had sent honest husbands out to drink his money; this false do-gooder who contrived, by giving presents, to attain an unmerited popularity, this monster hidden in the habit of a philanthropist. He dwelt in detail upon the refined perversity of a wretch who rescued rabid dogs only to let them loose on society, of a demon who, in love with evil for its own sake, was prepared to injure himself in order to stop a runaway horse, and why? For the unspeakable pleasure of seeing the animal plunge into the crowd, crushing to death old men, women, and children. Such a man would stop at nothing! And there were certainly other crimes to his name as yet unknown. All the evidence pointed to the fact that he was the accomplice of the mercenary who had betrayed France. And as for the orphan he had raised, and who had been found
one morning dead at his door, who else but he could have murdered her? This crime was undoubtedly the bloody end to one of those family dramas made up of shame, debauchery, and filth, the like of which was hard to contemplate. After such a list, it was scarcely necessary to dwell on this latest crime. In this case, and despite the impudent denials of the accused, the evidence was incontrovertible. It was necessary, therefore, to condemn this man with the full rigour of the law. The punishment was just, and no punishment could be heavy enough. The defendant was not only a great criminal, he was one of those geniuses of crime, one of those monsters of malice and hypocrisy that make one doubt the existence of virtue and despair of humanity.

Before such a crushing indictment, Constant Guignard’s lawyer had no alternative but to plead that his client was mad. He did his best, spoke learnedly of the
compulsion to evil
, portrayed his client as an irresponsible monomaniac, as a kind of unconscious Papavoine,
*
and concluded by saying that such behaviour was more appropriately treated in the asylum at Charenton
*
than on the Place de la Roquette.
*

The verdict was unanimous: Constant Guignard was sentenced to death.

* * *

Men of virtue, driven wild by their hatred of crime, went into transports of joy, and cried hurrah.

* * *

The death of Constance Guignard, like his life, was exemplary but unhappy. He mounted the scaffold without fear and without pretence, his face as calm as his conscience, and with a martyr’s serenity about him which onlookers took to be the indifference of a brute. At the final moment, aware that his executioner was poor and with a family, he whispered to him that he had left him his entire fortune. The executioner was so moved by this that it took him three attempts to sever his benefactor’s neck.

* * *

Three months after this, one of Constant Guignard’s friends, returning from a long journey, learned of the honest man’s sad end. Knowing only the man’s merits, he set about trying to repair as best he could the injustice meted out by fate. He purchased a permanent concession,
ordered a fine marble tombstone, and composed an epitaph for his friend. The next day he died of a stroke. Nevertheless, the expenses had been paid in advance, so the guillotined man got his sepulchre. But the stone-carver employed to execute the epitaph took it upon him to correct a letter that had been badly written on the manuscript. And the poor virtuous man, misjudged in his lifetime, lies in death with the following epitaph for all eternity:

Here lies Constant Guignard

A Zero

H
IS
name was Deshoulières and he didn’t like it.