Werewolf of Paris (23 page)

At dinner, Aunt Louise never failed to bring up the question of Sophie, her neglected education, her work at the canteen, her freedom, “one might almost say promiscuity.”

And later, in the evening, when she prepared to return to her apartment, there was more quarreling because the family allowed Sophie to stay up so late. Barral de Montfort took his leave and accompanied Mme Hertzog. In the carriage she confided to him:

“You're too good for that crowd, even if you are Christian.”

He did not know whether to feel flattered or insulted.

“Ever since those artists have made bad morals fashionable, the world is fast degenerating. This war is only another proof of it.”

He murmured a polite agreement with her thesis.

“I recall,” she said, drawing in her chin with indignation, “when that fellow Courbet put his picture of a naked woman in the Salon. I was there when the Empress turned her back on it in horror. Of course all Paris was congregated in front of that picture. Since then there's been no stopping the dégringolade. Bad pictures, bad books, and the most shameless goings-on.”

He said, “Terrible,” with the proper inflection.

She looked at him severely. “I had good fun in my youth, without being improper.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her how.

“I suppose your generation would find me very prim.”

He would have liked to say: “Sophie is perhaps more prim than you, if you only knew her.”

When he had returned to his own apartment and removed his cape and sword, he sat down and thought of Sophie. Sophie's dress of tightly laced white velvet faintly tinted with lemon, her trailing skirt of white satin and frills, as if she had stepped out of the surf and a wave had dashed after her with a foaming white crest. And out of this calyx of whiteness, her beautifully curving shoulders and bosom as if of polished bronze, her bare brown arms, her dark laughing face, her hair in ebony ringlets.

It was his duty as well as his pleasure and privilege to write to her every night, and think of new ways to describe her waxy black eyebrows rising in decisive curvatures from her perfectly modeled brow. It was his duty to find new comparisons for her teeth, white like gardenia petals, or better still, like forest roots broken fresh and glistening from the ground. It was his nightly duty to write down all these things, interspersed with his professions of love, and mail the letter to her so that she would have it to read in the morning.

When the few dinner guests had departed and the baron had retired to his bureau where he generally slept, the baroness to her boudoir, then Sophie itched to do something. But what was there to do? If she went to Papa he would welcome her with a smile, caress her, talk inanities of the days when she was a little baby. If she went to Mamma she would be received with inquiries about her health, talk of clothes, and most certainly with a round scolding interjected at some point in the conversation.

The great apartment was quiet. The massive furniture gleamed, the brass fittings of scrolls and sphinxes glittered under the gaslight. Somewhere behind a door, she knew, a sleepy servant was yawning and waiting for her to depart so that he could extinguish the lights.

She picked up a few magazines from the drawing-room table, a few books from the library, and went off to her own room. She read until her eyes ached, and yet there was nothing to interest her. She undressed and read in bed, and put off until the last possible moment the turning off of the gas-light on the wall, the blowing out of the candle on her night-table.

At last she took her courage in both hands, reached out and turned off the jet. The continuous hissing noise of the escaping gas, a noise of which she had not been conscious until then, stopped. The great porcelain soot-catcher dropped its bursting whiteness and shrank into gray. The whole room was as if suddenly yanked out of the beautiful present and pulled back into the Dark Ages. The single candle cast yawning shadows. The corners of the room, swathed in darkness, retreated into a distant mysterious gloom. A little life still remained, huddled about the candle.

She blew that out. Darkness engulfed her. Even the Middle Ages vanished. She had retreated to the pitch-black of prehistoric times. She cast herself back among her pillows and prayed that sleep would come soon. But her nerves were too taut. She had to listen to a dozen incomprehensible noises and trace each one to its source. She had to dissect a score of vague shadows, hulking threatening shapes, and determine the reality of each. She suspected each new shadow that her peering eyes carved out of the general blackness and was not content with the reassurance that she had been wrong a hundred times before. She looked and looked until all the darkness of the room was alive with swirling shadowy figures, products of visual fatigue. And she told herself as much, but each new shape looked more real than the last. They were but waiting for her to close her eyes, to come plunging down on her. No, she would remain awake all night. She did not dare close her eyes in sleep.

In the same manner in which darkness concluded the day, death concluded life. She exhausted herself in sterile attempts to pierce the mystery of the tomb. What was it like to be dead? It was like this: Darkness. Intense darkness. And shadows among shadows. And a vast fear. No. It wasn't like that at all. It was like complete nothingness. Absolute blankness. But within this nothingness a something more horrible than the mind can imagine.

That was death. Lying underground in a coffin. Her imagination had already put her there a thousand times. In Père-Lachaise, in the Jewish portion of the cemetery, not far from the entrance, next to the mournful monument of Rachel, the tragédienne. There were the plots belonging to the Blumenbergs and the Hertzogs. She recalled the day Uncle Moïse, the husband of Aunt Louise Hertzog, had died. The cortége had gone through the rue du Repos. The street of rest. Strange name, fascinating and revolting at the same time.

She would lie there. Mother and Father would lie there. Perhaps she would lie there first. She could hear, in her ears, her father and mother crying. She could hear her mother saying: “So young! And just married!” And her husband Barral was there. She could hear him swearing vengeance.

When she had reached that thought, she decided that all her imaginings were really silly. Why should he be swearing vengeance, and against whom? But her heart still bled from her gruesome thoughts. Of course it was all too silly. How could she be married to Barral and be buried in the old family plot? She would be buried with him, of course. Wives did.

Somehow that was reassuring. To be buried with Barral. Besides, it showed that there was no truth in her imagination. No prophetic power. That picture of Barral swearing vengeance in the Cimetière Israélite of Père-Lachaise couldn't ever be true.

Then she thought: But Barral's parents, who lived in the country and were known to be but slightly pleased at their son's affair, might not let her, a Jewess, be buried in a Christian cemetery? And the whole story took on once again its threatening aspect and descended on her chest like a heavy stone.

In the morning there was not a shred left of her dreams. Daylight filtered in through the draperies of the window. She was lying in her lovely bed with its gilt cupids. Above her head was her familiar azure ciel-de-lit, spangled with gold stars and illuminated by a white moon stitched with silk.

Gone were the crazy dreams of cemeteries, of Barral swearing vengeance, all the stupid cobwebs with which darkness litters the brain. If she rose early, before her mother, she might have her mother's maid to help her dress and arrange her hair. And soon the mailman would come and bring her Barral's description of her loveliness on the previous evening and his assurance of eternal love. Such were the dreams of the day.

The nights might become even more horrible. The Germans might move their gun-emplacements to within a few miles of the ring of forts and drop their bombs into the very city. Then one had to go to bed without any light at all, or only the slightest illumination, and sleep was often impossible. The winter nights were cold and long. It required effort not to scream out in anguish. But then the day was all the more to be enjoyed. Every second must offer her a laugh, otherwise life would bring no compensation for the inevitable night.

Thus her days were full of laughter and her nights full of anguish. But, so she used to think, “I, at least, have the compensation of wealth. What do the poor do?” She had Barral. What did those poor girls do, who had no letters from Barral?

During her hours at the canteen, she thought of Barral. He would come and fetch her. She would see him from a distance. Either on foot or on horse, but always in a bright blue uniform with golden aiguillettes.

The men, too, saw him coming. They nudged each other and smiled. But there was one young man, neither very handsome nor ugly, with only great brown eyes to recommend him. Every day, Sophie noticed, while the others smiled, he remained sullen.

Once, when she bent to rinse a glass, she looked full into those sad eyes. There was something strangely moving in them. Something that brought her night-thoughts to mind. She looked away because she feared he might have seen into her eyes and that he might have read there the thoughts he had called up, her thoughts of terror and of death.

But again and again, at the canteen, when she thought he wasn't looking, she would glance at those eyes, wide open, under heavy brows. Almost always his glance shifted quickly toward hers and he caught her eye. Then she would look away. But a moment later she would look again. There was something compelling in his eyes. Something of that strange compulsion of an abyss. That invitation of the void, of great heights: Come, cast yourself down. Just let yourself go. How do you know it isn't sweeter than anything you have ever imagined or experienced in life? Why do you fear? Why do you fear what you do not know as yet? Come! Come!

Oh! The opium-sweet attraction of death!

She knew that attraction. How many times had she not revolved such thoughts in her mind, at night, when she had extinguished the gas and blown out the candle. During the day, when away from the canteen, she rarely thought of those eyes, but at night they haunted her. They were there before her in the darkness, and had that strange phosphorescent glow that the eyes of some animals have. Those eyes mingled with her night-thoughts. They were her companions during the long ugly night. They were with her in the Jewish cemetery at Père-Lachaise. She was not alone at night any longer. Those eyes had rescued her from her lonely nightmares.

She asked those eyes: What of the grave? What of the moldering bodies in the grave? And the eyes had an answer. The eyes said: Wherever you are, I will be with you. Nightandday. Life and death.

In the morning these thoughts were gone. She had Barral's letter, and as she planned what visits, what shopping she might do during the day, her light laughter resounded again and again. Even in his bureau, her father could hear her. He smiled and shook his head. “Gay little chick. How can one be so perpetually light-hearted? Especially our Sophie, who was, so to speak, born out of the grave. God bless her.”

But in the afternoon, when she entered the canteen, her eyes began to seek for him at once. If he was not there she was almost glad, but not quite. She found herself looking around expectantly, hoping to see him come in. Hoping with that tremor of mingled fear and desire. And while she smiled at the men as if she had not another thought in the world but pleasure, gaiety, amusement, she looked around.

He came. He always came. He sat alone and brooded. Brooded on the crazy fate that had made him half a man and half a beast. Sometimes he thought he would consult a doctor. It might be that there existed a cure for such cases as his. But no. His case was unique.

Besides, it was silly to think of such things. He could not go to a doctor. He did not dare. The number of his crimes barred that way forever. Perhaps if he were wounded, taken to a hospital, there might be a possibility of interrogating a physician.

He used to pause at the bookstalls and examine medical texts, but what he discovered was of little value. He learnt that his disease was known, that is to say, it had a name, but observers classed it either as a fraud or as a delusion, and as far as curing it goes, no one had any suggestions to offer except that the medieval method of burning was an unmerited cruelty.

He began to think that this rejection of the cure by fire was as superficial a decision as that which rejected his disease, and that there was, on the contrary, much to recommend the stake. He contemplated seriously the necessity of taking his life.

These thoughts had grown more frequent when he stepped by chance into the canteen where Sophie worked. He saw her and was at once in love with her. Thereafter he came every day. She represented to him all that he was not. All that he could never be. She was the epitome of that which he had lost and could never recover: the joie de vivre.

Then he began to notice that she was observing him. And one day when their eyes met he had the feeling that there was a bond between her and him. He shuddered to think of the filth from which he dared look up to her purity, and he vowed seriously that he would reform himself. He decided that hereafter he would gorge himself with human food during the day, so that his ghastly appetite of the night would diminish. But that first night, despite the gorging, he woke up from his sleep, his body tense, robbed of all desire for further rest, his skin aching to feel the freedom of the night air, his limbs yearning to touch the ground, his jaws to bite and rend. For a while he fought with himself to keep her image uppermost in his mind.

He panted through his opened mouth. And he felt his tongue, his tongue, the short and bulky tongue of man, begin to flatten and lengthen. “God help me!” he cried. But now that tongue was curling out of his mouth, was hanging over his teeth. Unable to resist any more, he sprang from his bed. He went to a corner of his room, muzzled under a piece of cloth, and dragged forth an arm, a human arm. The last of the two arms he had taken from La Belle Normande.