Haunted Castles (8 page)

W
e were both of an age (said Lord Terry), very young, twenty-three or four, and Paris in those days was a grand place to be young in. The Eiffel Tower was a youngster then, too, our age exactly, for this was still the first decade of the century, you see. Gauguin had been dead only six years, Lautrec only eight, and although that Parisian Orpheus, Jacques Offenbach, had died almost thirty years before, his music and his gay spirit still ruled the city, and jolly
parisiennes
still danced the can-can with bare derrières to the rhythm of his
Galop Infernal
. The air was heady with a wonderful mixture of
ancien régime
elegance (the days of which were numbered and which would soon be dispelled forever by the War) combined with a forward-looking curiosity and excitement about the new century. Best of both worlds, you might say. The year, to be exact about it, was 1909.

It's easy to remember because in that very year both Coquelin brothers—the actors, you know—died. The elder, more famous brother, Constant-Benoît, who created the role of Cyrano, died first, and the younger, Alexandre Honoré, died scarcely a fortnight later. Here's a curious tidbit about Coquelin's Cyrano which you may want to use in your book: he played the first act wearing a long false nose, the second act with a shorter nose, and at the end of the play, wore no false nose at all—the really odd thing being that the audience never noticed it! Sir Cedric told me that just before he died. Hardwicke, you know. Where was I? Oh, yes. It was through a friend of the Coquelin family—a minor
comédien
named César Baudouin—that I first came to know Paris and, consequently, Sébastien Sellig.

He was appearing at the Théâtre Français, in Racine's
Britannicus
. He played the young Nero. And he played him with such style and fervor and godlike grace that one could
feel
the audience's sympathies being drawn toward Nero as to a magnet. I saw him afterward, in his dressing room, where he was removing his make-up. César introduced us.

He was a man of surpassing beauty: a face like the Apollo Belvedere, with classic features, a tumble of black curls, large brown eyes, and sensuous lips. I did not compliment him on his good looks, of course, for the world had only recently become unsafe for even the most innocent admiration between men, Oscar Wilde having died in Paris just nine years before. I did compliment him on his performance, and on the rush of sympathy which I've already remarked.

“Thank you,” he said, in English, which he spoke very well. “It was unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate?”

“The audience's sympathies should have remained with Britannicus. By drawing them to myself—quite inadvertently, I assure you—I upset the balance, reversed Racine's intentions, and thoroughly destroyed the play.”

“But,” observed César lightly, “you achieved a personal triumph.”

“Yes,” said Sellig. “At irreparable cost. It will not happen again, dear César, you may be sure of that. Next time I play Nero, I shall do so without violating Racine.”

César, being a professional, took exception. “You can't be blamed for your charm, Sébastien,” he insisted.

Sellig wiped off the last streak of paint from his face and began to draw on his street clothes. “An actor who cannot control his charm,” he said, “is like an actor who cannot control his voice or his limbs. He is worthless.” Then he smiled, charmingly. “But we mustn't talk shop in front of your friend. So very rude. Come, I shall take you to an enchanting little place for supper.”

It was a small, dark place called L'Oubliette. The three of us ate an enormous and very good omelette, with crusty bread and a bottle of white wine. Sellig talked of the differences between France's classic poetic dramatist, Racine, and England's, Shakespeare. “Racine is like”—he lifted the bottle and refilled our glasses—“well, he is like a very fine vintage white. Delicate, serene, cool, subtle. So subtle that the excellence is not immediately enjoyed by uninitiated palates. Time is required, familiarity, a return and another return and yet another.”

As an Englishman, I was prepared to defend our bard, so I asked, a little belligerently: “And Shakespeare?”

“Ah, Shakespeare!” smiled Sellig. “
Passionel, tumultueux!
He is like a mulled red, hot and bubbling from the fire, dark and rich with biting spices and sweet honey! The senses are smitten, one is overwhelmed, one becomes drunk, one reels, one spins . . . it can be a most agreeable sensation.”

He drank from his glass. “Think of tonight's play. It depicts the first atrocity in a life of atrocities. It ends as Nero murders his brother. Later, he was to murder his mother, two wives, a trusted tutor, close friends, and untold thousands of Christians who died horribly in his arenas. But we see none of this. If Shakespeare had written the play, it would have
begun
with the death of Britannicus. It would then have shown us each new outrage, the entire chronicle of Nero's decline and fall and ignoble end.
Enfin
, it would have been
Macbeth
.”

I had heard of a little club where the girls danced in shockingly indecorous costumes, and I was eager to go. César allowed himself to be persuaded to take me there, and I invited Sellig to accompany us. He declined, pleading fatigue and a heavy day ahead of him. “Then perhaps,” I said, “you will come with us tomorrow evening? It may not tempt a gentleman of your lofty theatrical tastes, but I'm determined to see a show at this Grand Guignol which César has told me of. Quite bloody and outrageous, I understand—rather like Shakespeare.” Sellig laughed at my little joke. “Will you come? Or perhaps you have a performance . . .”

“I do have a performance,” he said, “so I cannot join you until later. Suppose we plan to meet there, in the foyer, directly after the last curtain?”

“Will you be there in time?” I asked. “The Guignol shows are short, I hear.”

“I will be there,” said Sellig, and we parted.

L
e Théâtre du Grand Guignol, as you probably know, had been established just a dozen or so years before, in 1896, on the Rue Chaptal, in a tiny building that had once been a chapel. Father Didon, a Dominican, had preached there, and in the many incarnations the building was to go through in later years it was to retain its churchly appearance. Right up to the day of its demolition in 1962, I'm told, it remained exactly as it had always been: quaint, small, huddled inconspicuously in a cobble-stone nook at the end of a Montmartre alley; inside, black-raftered, with gothic tracery writhing along the portals and fleurs-de-lis on the walls, with carved cherubs and a pair of seven-foot angels—dim with the patina of a century—smiling benignly down on the less than three hundred seats and loges . . . which, you know, looked not like conventional seats and loges but like church pews and confessionals. After the good Father Didon was no longer active, his chapel became the shop of a dealer specializing in religious art; still later, it was transformed into a studio for the academic painter, Rochegrosse; and so on, until, in '96, a man named Méténier—who had formerly been secretary to a
commissaire de
police
—rechristened it the Théâtre du Grand Guignol and made of it the famous carnival of horror. Méténier died the following year, aptly enough, and Max Maurey took it over. I met Maurey briefly—he was still operating the theatre in 1909, the year of my little story.

The subject matter of the Guignol plays seldom varied. Their single acts were filled with girls being thrown into lighthouse lamps . . . faces singed by vitriol or pressed forcibly down upon red hot stoves . . . naked ladies nailed to crosses and carved up by gypsies . . . a variety of surgical operations . . . mad old crones who put out the eyes of young maidens with knitting needles . . . chunks of flesh ripped from victims' necks by men with hooks for hands . . . bodies dissolved in acid baths . . . hands chopped off; also arms, legs, heads . . . women raped and strangled . . . all done in a hyper-realistic manner with ingenious trick props and the Guignol's own secretly formulated blood—a thick, suety, red gruel which was actually capable of congealing before your eyes and which was kept continually hot in a big cauldron backstage.

Some actors—but especially actresses—made spectacular careers at the Guignol. You may know of Maxa? She was after my time, actually, but she was supposed to have been a beautiful woman, generously endowed by Nature, and they say it was impossible to find one square inch of her lovely body that had not received some variety of stage violence in one play or another. The legend is that she died ten thousand times, in sixty separate and distinct ways, each more hideous than the last; and that she writhed in the assaults of brutal rapine on no less than three thousand theatrical occasions. For the remainder of her life she could not speak above a whisper: the years of screaming had torn her throat to shreds.

At any rate, the evening following my first meeting with Sellig, César and I were seated in this unique little theatre with two young ladies we had escorted there; they were uncommonly pretty but uncommonly common—in point of fact, they were barely on the safe side of respectability's border, being inhabitants of that peculiar demimonde, that shadow world where several professions—actress, model, barmaid, bawd—mingle and merge and overlap and often coexist. But we were young, César and I, and this was, after all, Paris. Their names, they told us, were Clothilde and Mathilde—and I was never quite sure which was which. Soon after our arrival, the lights dimmed and the Guignol curtain was raised.

The first offering on the programme was a dull, shrill little boudoir farce that concerned itself with broken corset laces and men hiding under the bed and popping out of closets. It seemed to amuse our feminine companions well enough, but the applause in the house was desultory, I thought, a mere form . . . this fluttering nonsense was not what the patrons had come for, was not the sort of fare on which the Guignol had built its reputation. It was an hors d'oeuvre. The entrée followed:

It was called, if memory serves,
La Septième Porte
, and was nothing more than an opportunity for Bluebeard—played by an actor wearing an elaborately ugly make-up—to open six of his legendary seven doors for his new young wife (displaying, among other things, realistically mouldering cadavers and a torture chamber in full operation). Remaining faithful to the legend, Bluebeard warns his wife never to open the seventh door. Left alone on stage, she of course cannot resist the tug of curiosity—she opens the door, letting loose a shackled swarm of shrieking, livid, rag-bedecked but not entirely unattractive harpies, whose white bodies, through their shredded clothing, are crisscrossed with crimson welts. They tell her they are Bluebeard's ex-wives, kept perpetually in a pitch-dark dungeon, in a state near to starvation, and periodically tortured by the vilest means imaginable. Why? the new wife asks. Bluebeard enters, a black whip in his hand. For the sin of curiosity, he replies—they, like you, could not resist the lure of the seventh door! The other wives chain the girl to them, and cringing under the crack of Bluebeard's whip, they crawl back into the darkness of the dungeon. Bluebeard locks the seventh door and soliloquizes: Diogenes had an easy task, to find an honest man; but my travail is tenfold—for where is she, does she live, the wife who does not pry and snoop, who does not pilfer her husband's pockets, steam open his letters, and when he is late returning home, demand to know what wench he has been tumbling?

The lights had been dimming slowly until now only Bluebeard was illumined, and at this point he turned to the audience and addressed the women therein. “
Mesdames et Mademoiselles!
” he declaimed. “
Écoute! En garde! Voici la septième porte
—Hear me! Beware! Behold the seventh door!” By a stage trick the door was transformed into a mirror. The curtain fell to riotous applause.

Recounted baldly,
La Septième Porte
seems a trumpery entertainment, a mere excuse for scenes of horror—and so it was. But there was a strength, a power to the portrayal of Bluebeard; that ugly devil up there on the shabby little stage was like an icy flame, and when he'd turned to the house and delivered that closing line, there had been such force of personality, such demonic zeal, such hatred and scorn, such monumental threat, that I could feel my young companion shrink against me and shudder.

“Come, come,
ma petite
,” I said, “it's only a play.”

“
Je le déteste
,” she said.

“You detest him? Who, Bluebeard?”

“Laval.”

My French was sketchy at that time, and her English almost nonexistent, but as we made our slow way up the aisle, I managed to glean that the actor's name was Laval, and that she had at one time had some offstage congress with him, congress of an intimate nature, I gathered. I could not help asking
why
, since she disliked him so. (I was naïf then, you see, and knew little of women; it was somewhat later in life I learned that many of them find evil and even ugliness irresistible). In answer to my question, she only shrugged and delivered a platitude: “
Les affaires sont les affaires
—Business is business.”

Sellig was waiting for us in the foyer. His height, and his great beauty of face, made him stand out. Our two pretty companions took to him at once, for his attractive exterior was supplemented by waves of charm.

“Did you enjoy the programme?” he asked of me.

I did not know exactly what to reply. “Enjoy? . . . Let us say I found it fascinating, M'sieu' Sellig.”

“It did not strike you as tawdry? cheap? vulgar?”

“All those, yes. But at the same time, exciting, as sometimes only the tawdry, the cheap, the vulgar, can be.”

“You may be right. I have not watched a Guignol production for several years. Although, surely, the acting . . .”

We were entering a carriage, all five of us. I said, “The acting was unbelievably bad—with one exception.”

“Really? And the exception?”

“The actor who played Bluebeard in a piece called
La Septième Porte
. His name is—” I turned to my companion again.

“Laval,” she said, and the sound became a viscous thing.

“Ah yes,” said Sellig. “Laval. The name is not entirely unknown to me. Shall we go to Maxime's?”

We did, and experienced a most enjoyable evening. Sellig's fame and personal magnetism won us the best table and the most efficient service. He told a variety of amusing—but never coarse—anecdotes about theatrical life, and did so without committing that all-too-common actor's offense of dominating the conversation. One anecdote concerned the theatre we had just left:

“I suppose César has told the story of the Guignol doctor. No? Ah then, it seems that at one point it was thought a capital idea to hire a house physician—to tend to swooning patrons and so on, you know. This was done, but it was unsuccessful. On the first night of the physician's tour of duty, a male spectator found one particular bit of stage torture too much for him, and he fainted. The house physician was summoned. He could not be found. Finally, the ushers revived the unconscious man without benefit of medical assistance, and naturally they apologized profusely and explained they had not been able to find the doctor. ‘I know,' the man said, rather sheepishly, ‘
I
am the doctor.'”

At the end of the evening, César and I escorted our respective (but not precisely respectable) young ladies to their dwellings, where more pleasure was found. Sellig went home alone. I felt sorry for him, and there was a moment when it crossed my mind that perhaps he was one of those men who have no need of women—the theatrical profession is thickly inhabited by such men—but César privately assured me that Sellig had a mistress, a lovely and gracious widow named Lise, for Sellig's tastes were exceedingly refined and his image unblemished by descents into the dimly lit world of the sporting house. My own tastes, though acute, were not so elevated, and thus I enjoyed myself immensely that night.

Ignorance, they say, is bliss. I did not know that my ardent companion's warmth would turn unalterably cold in the space of a single night.