The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (43 page)

The Sainte-Radegonde family, had retreated to the provinces ten years earlier, leaving the old family abode to this distant cousin, who besides only lived in it five or six months of the year, since de Burdhe for a long time now had spent his winters in the East, either at Smyrna, or Cairo, or on the banks of the Nile, for which he confessed a great predilection. He invariably quit Paris at the end of November, and the old building, which has now disappeared, would only re-open the shutters of its high French windows in the first days of April. De Burdhe did not go out much, scarcely keeping up with the two or three exceptional grand openings which take Paris by storm every spring; but, whenever some sensational acrobat, male or female, was announced in one of the pleasure palaces, like Olympia or the Folies-Bergère, it would sometimes happen that de Burdhe would turn up every day for a week, and this strange fixation was no little matter of amazement to me; then he would suddenly plunge back into silence and seclusion, and if I ran into him (this would be no more than once in a while) it would only be among the riverbank antiquarians, the dealers in rare gems on the rue de Lille and the rue de l’Université, or the coin dealers of rue Bonaparte, sitting, magnifying glass in hand, rapt before some sixteenth-century intaglio or the kind of obscene cameo that was a collector’s item.

In the mysterious hôtel Sainte-Radegonde, he himself possessed an entire secret collection of hard gems, whose existence was famed among the dealers and enthusiasts; but he never allowed me in to view these riches, honouring me only with his fabulous iris blooms, of which he had brought back unknown varieties from the East, their flowers utterly monstrous, in disconcerting shapes and colours, more like the orchids of doom than self-respecting horticultural specimens.

Besides, everything about this man was strange and disturbing; his pallor, his hair hennaed like that of an oriental, the almost feline suppleness of his body in movement, everything about him, including the prodigious youthfulness of his forty years, for all the weariness apparent in his features, everything about the mysterious de Burdhe made one uneasy; and passers-by in the street would instinctively turn and look at this supple and slender stranger whose face was so weary and whose eyes were so pale, so palely blue with the hardness of hard gems.

They shone, those eyes, alternately with steel and lapis between brows and lashes that seemed daubed with kohl, and when they stared they had a troubling insistence. This creature was at once repulsive and attractive; the melting softness of his tiny ever-gelid hands slid away through one’s fingers like a grass snake, and the slippery yet caressing grip of these fluid cold fingers left a very singular sense of malaise. He talked little of himself, said not a word about how he spent his time and his evenings, paraded no mistress, lived without friends and received no one whatever. His only connections were dealers and collectors like himself. A profound and wilfully deepened mystery shrouded his life, and outside of conversations about art and literature which he loved with passion, though with an almost exclusive fondness for the fantastic and bizarre, an unhealthy admiration for Edgar Allan Poe, Swinburne and Thomas de Quincey, he never opened his mouth, except to complain about bouts of lassitude and inexplicable fatigue which suddenly would knock him flat, and just as he was going out, would force him to lie down and remain inert for hours on end with his limbs gone limp, vanquished by some manner of torpid slumber from which he would awaken exhausted. It sometimes happened that he would sleep for forty hours in two days; he would wake up only at mealtimes to take some sustenance and almost immediately fall back into that invincible torpor. It left him with a certain fear, as he sensed in this abnormal drowsiness some brain lesion, or nervous depression, a danger in short. He had certainly been to doctors, but no treatment had got the better of these slumbers and morbid lethargies; he put them down to the use of opium to which he had become accustomed in the East; he had broken from it in the end, but the heavy influence of opiate poisoning still oppressed him and after so many years he still carried in his veins the dull intoxication that kief smokers feel, probably accounting for the steely blueness of his eyes and that unalterable pallor.

He had, they say, brought back from that baleful East, from the souks of Tunis and the caravanserais of Smyrna, an entire treasury of ancient jewels, precious carpets and rare weapons; but I was never allowed in to view these marvels, and on the few occasions when I went to his house, he received me in a room akin to a small parlour, with a very high ceiling and panelled throughout in white wood; some Debucourt
¹
engravings and two or three licentious etchings had the effect of freezing this starkly libertine and coldly frivolous atmosphere forever in the last century.

I was not to penetrate the mystery of this bizarre interior with its orientalism and antiquarianism until many years later, eighteen months after the demolition of the old family hôtel, when the property was taken over under compulsory purchase and de Burdhe came to live in the area of the Champ-de-Mars, in the then so gloomy and now noisy avenue de La Bourdonnais, all white with masonry and blocks of apartments to rent. There, at the end of a little garden, in conditions resembling those of the Sainte-Radegonde hôtel, he had found a small detached house long without a tenant and whose abandoned look had charmed him almost at once. It was a small edifice dating from 1840, in a poor Louis XV style, its roofs guilloched with skylights and its plaster wreaths crumbling in a small suburban garden where only sunflowers grew, around it a hundred metres of enclosure and waste ground. It was this solitude which had decided him.

He moved at the height of the summer, taking advantage of an empty Paris to transport his strange household contents with the greatest ease. In October, on my return from Germany I found him settled in, but the door of this new home was opened no wider than that of the previous one. On the contrary, de Burdhe struck me as more reticent, more stubbornly silent than ever. He had replaced his old valet with a big mournful-faced fellow of the seminarist type, of dubious demeanour, with the quick, darting little eyes of a Paris thug; aberrant iris blooms now replaced the sunflowers, and two crazed porcelain chimerae in a washed-out bluish green stood guard at the top of the front steps; these were the only changes noticeable from the outside. De Burdhe now fought against his terrible need for sleep by tramping about wildly, on out and out forced marches prolonged late into the night through the city’s avenues or along the riverbanks of this deserted district; in vain had I reminded him of the dangers of these nocturnal walks: ‘I have seen plenty of those in the East,’ he would answer with a shrug; ‘nothing can happen to me, nothing; and the fact is I like the look of cut-throat types, the modern frightfulness of those wide avenues.’ And, his eyes faintly sparkling, there would then be an almost loving description of some wanly glowing streetlamp, a shady street corner or a stationary cab halted on a verge and reflected in the water; but he would stop abruptly as if he had said too much, and nothing was more sadly eloquent than these sudden silences. De Burdhe was passionately fond of the night. Did it come about that on one of these perilous outings de Burdhe fell victim to some prowler’s assault? Or was it that his new servant plotted with anonymous assassins and opened the house on the avenue de La Bourdonnais to them? But the mystery which shrouded his whole life became even thicker around his death. This was a tragic and enigmatic end, with a simultaneous whiff of crime and the supernatural; and on the December morning when that unpleasant sacristan’s face, which I could not tolerate, appeared at my house, quite distraught, to tell me that
something had happened to monsieur
, begging me to come at once, I had an immediate foreboding that I was going to encounter some appalling thing at close quarters. I took only the time to leap out of bed and dress, then I followed this man.

There was no disarray in the first two rooms we passed through. The same cold parlour as in the Sainte-Radegonde hôtel, this time hung with an English wallpaper supplied by Morice; then a dining room whose walls were painted, its only ornament some large porcelain peacocks. The third room was worthy of attention, and the servant had stopped on the threshold; an old Louis XIV tapestry was hung all around it: this showed, in a colonnaded and terraced garden, warriors dressed in Roman costume with goddesses wearing the decorated tunics of the time, but a strange discolouration had blackened the faces and the flesh, oddly lightening the fabric, so much that on the reddened sky, in the midst of the blue-grey water of fountains, there were no longer nymphs and gods, but demons with the faces of negroes who stared out with their white eyes. A very low, very wide bed spread its gold-flower-patterned mauve silk curtains almost floor length, a monstrous Buddha stood guard at the foot and a tall Empire cheval mirror reflected it back. The bed was still undisturbed, and in the air thick with incense and benzoin a Turkish night lamp burned. The mute servant lifted back a hanging.

There, in a recess all draped with oriental silks, on a tumble of cushions lay de Burdhe, already stiff; he was in evening dress with a huge white iris in his buttonhole; he had fallen backwards, his knees raised above his torso, and his bloodless head, the nostrils already pinched, had rolled to one side, emphasising the line of the jawbone and the Adam’s apple. The fall must have been violent, and yet his clothes were quite uncrumpled; his shirtfront was only slightly open. One of his clenched hands gripped the silver chain of a superb thurible. Not a drop of blood: just, on the neck, on that part where the flesh is softest and whitest, a purple bruise turning a yellowish brown, like a bite or the suction of a long slow kiss.

The fragrance of the adjacent room was heavy around the corpse, clinging even more strongly; here it was compounded by smells of pepper and sandalwood, as some bluish smoke still rose from the thurible. In the midst of what practice, the rites of what unknown religion had death surprised de Burdhe? A huge spray of black irises and anthuriums reared malevolently out of a silver vase, and upon a manner of small Hindu altar, cluttered with ciboria and glass tulips, loomed a strange statuette, some kind of androgynous goddess with thin arms, full torso and tapering hips, fiendish and charming, in pure black onyx; she was totally naked. Two encrusted emeralds shone under her eyelids; but between her slender thighs, below the bulge of her belly, in place of her sex, was a sniggering, threatening little death’s head.

Now chance had it that de Burdhe’s will left me the contents of his bedroom, including the hangings and all the paraphernalia of the little shrine where his unexpected corpse, decorous in its black attire and the buttonhole blossoming a huge white iris, had previously caused me such fright. Not much caring to bring home the tapestries and furniture of such a dwelling, with the evil spell they seemed to bear, I sent everything to the auction rooms, keeping only the Buddha from the bedroom, the little Hindu altar and the androgynous idol of the adjacent room for Arthur Wing, who was both a collector and a dealer and had come running to me almost straight away; but in the to-ings and fro-ings of the house clearance a manuscript fell into my hands, a manuscript entirely written by de Burdhe, although in diverse hands. However obscure these revelations may be, they will perhaps shed new light upon this disconcerting and troubling figure, de Burdhe. I transcribed them just as they were in the incoherent muddle of dates, but necessarily eliminating some whose writing was too bold to be printed.

On the first page there was a truncated extract from Swinburne:

There is a feverish famine in my veins …

Sin, is it sin whereby men’s souls are thrust

Into the pit? yet had I a good trust

        To save my soul before it slipped therein,

Trod under by the fire-shod feet of lust …

        Into sad hell where all sweet love hath end,

All but the pain that never finisheth.
²

11 April 1875
– The obscenity of mouths and nostrils, the ignominious cupidity of the smiles of women met in the street, the cunning baseness and the whole
hyena
aspect of wild beasts, ready to bite, of traders in their shops and walkers on the pavements, how long I have suffered from them! I suffered from them even as a child whenever I would chance to go down to the pantry and, not understanding, overhear the talk of the servants savaging my family.

This hostility of all humanity, this dumb hatred of a race of lynxes, I was to encounter again later on at boarding school, and did not I myself, who loathe and detest all base instincts, was not I instinctively violent and foul, like that self-gratifying murderous mob, the rioting mob that throws the city’s constables into the Seine and a hundred years ago cried out:
A la lanterne!
just as nowadays they clamour:
In the water! In the water!

30 October 1875
– There is true beauty only in the faces of statues; their immobility is more alive than the grimaces of our physiognomies. What a divine breath animates them, and what intensity of gaze in their empty eyes!

I have spent the whole day at the Louvre and the marble gaze of Antinous pursues me.
³
With what softness and warmth that is both knowing and deep his long dead eyes did rest upon me! At one moment I thought I saw glimmers of green. If this bust belonged to me, I should have emeralds set into its eyes.

24 February 1877
– Today I committed an ignoble act: I went to a journalist whom I scarcely know to find a way of being able to watch an execution, and yet blood is repugnant to me, and when I am at the dentist and I hear a cry in the adjoining room I almost faint and lose consciousness.

Pitzer promised me a ticket. No, decidedly, I shall not go to this execution.

10 May 1877
– I have just been to see the most lovely collection of stones. What pure profiles, what sweetness of line and pose in the tiniest of cameos! The Greeks have more grace, an extraordinary happy serenity which could well be the temperament of divinity, but the Roman intaglios have an uncommonly intense fire. There was one ring setting which had an adolescent head crowned with laurels, some young Caesar, his expression exhausted and sensual, both weary and desiring, of whom I shall dream for many a night … Dream! Indeed, it would be better to live and all I do is dream.