Werewolf of Paris (27 page)

Then he knew. His letter. He must write Sophie a letter. And he sat down and wrote. Wrote of his love and her beauty, and his pain and anguish, and his eternal fidelity. And early in the morning when he had posted his letter, he felt more his usual self.

Captain Barral de Montfort, disappointed in love, heartbroken, launched himself into his work with viciousness. The task of spying for the Versailles government was a delicate one. He found in its intricacies the necessary antidote to his misery.

Moreover, if he could not, true to his promise, take direct vengeance on Bertrand or on those other gossiping guardsmen of the 204th battalion, he could attack them from another side. And he was after their blood. The thought that they would suffer from his work spurred him on. These were the people whom his activity was going to destroy.

But though he went at his task with great energy, he did not fall to protect himself from suspicion. For example, though as a member of the staff he could have secured valuable information at the staff meetings, he deliberately avoided being present and secured his knowledge elsewhere. In that way no one could think he was snooping.

Cluseret, chief of staff,
*
noticing de Montfort's absence from the meetings, accused him of negligence and threatened to have him dismissed. He was generally taken to be merely a light-hearted officer, interested more in his uniform and in making an effective appearance on horseback than in war.

*
Several such stories are told of Courbet's willingness to prostitute his famous Realism for money. For example: that a famous Mussulman employed him to do a woman realistically depicted in the act of love. In this painting, said to be still extant, all unimportant details such as head, limbs, hips, breasts, etc., were omitted as having no bearing on the central theme.

*
Cluseret, famous soldier of fortune, fought under Garibaldi and later in the American Civil War on the side of the North. Lincoln promoted him to a generalship. He took part in the Franco-Prussian war and Commune, and being subsequently sentenced to death, he fled to Mexico, where he remained until the amnesty. He returned, entered politics and for some time served in the French legislature. He had talent as a painter.

Chapter Fourteen

I
have referred already to the Piepus affair. Although of itself unimportant except as background, it is so illustrative of the temper of the period that it may be of value to dwell on the matter for a while. Aymar Galliez, in his script, makes several references to the Piepus mysteries. And these having become famous in history, there is no difficulty in filling out his remarks and giving them the breath of life. And still another reason for going into the Piepus affair with some detail:

Aymar had been in Paris now a good eight months and still he had not once seen Bertrand. Moreover, for the last three months there had not been a single crime that he could confidently ascribe to Bertrand. Frequently he said to himself: “Bertrand is dead. Yes, he must be dead.” And how easy to be dead in such a period! The Germans had bombed Paris for a good long month. Hundreds had been killed. And in the relatively few battles in which the National Guard had played a part, military inefficiency had sacrificed thousands. “Bertrand is among those poor devils,” Aymar thought and was moved. He recalled the little baby of whom his aunt had been so fond. He recalled the boy. His soft hairy palms. His large brown eyes, liquid and appealing like those of a dog.

And then, suddenly, he came face to face with Bertrand. Aymar had pursued so many clues that he had come at last to consider himself a permanent spectator at all scenes of crime. His friendship with so many revolutionaries, serving in important offices, guaranteed him a degree of immunity in these nervous days, though occasionally he was taken for a spy and once came near being put in jail.

On the second of April, the short-lived government of the Hotel de Ville (the Commune) decreed the nationalization of all property held by “dead hand” (that is to say, the lands and buildings of religious institutions which are passed on by mortmain—and the police were ordered to search and list all such property and all organizations hitherto in possession thereof.

It is claimed that the prefect of police, Rigault,
*
was only anxious to secure important clerics as hostages, to exchange for Blanqui held by the Versailles government, but ostensibly the accusation was that such societies as the Jesuits, etc., had secreted large stores of guns and ammunitions, a political canard still effective today.

The notion that there must be something mysterious within the gray stone walls of a convent or monastery; some secret victim immured, praying to hard-hearted, hymn-chanting monks for liberty and finding only sneers beneath the brown cowls; or some delicate maiden hidden away where the walls will absorb her laments, a maiden forced to give in to the brutal lust of celibates who must outwardly conform to impossible vows; or else a treasure, or ghosts, or inexplicable apparitions accompanied by mysterious sounds—I say, such notions are centuries old and will not die.

The newspapers of the day, apparently having nothing better to do, revived these old tales. “The delegate to the ex-prefecture of police,” we are told by one sheet, “has evidence that the high clergy of Paris has betrayed France to Rome, that during the siege the clergy acted as spies for Germany.”

Among the churches searched for caches of guns and bullets was that of the Fathers and Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Piepus, two societies which owned adjoining buildings in the rue de Piepus. The story ran that eighteen hundred chassepots (a newly introduced rifle), were hidden there, along with the great “treasure of the Fathers.” On the seventh of April, the place was searched. Nothing was found. Nevertheless, one newspaper announced the discovery of “arms, munitions and aworkshop for the manufacture of bombs, with some bombs in construction.”

The public clamored for more news. On April 12th, a second search was made. But the mysterious underground chamber could not be found, though trenches were dug everywhere and the walls pierced in dozens of places.

At this juncture, with the legend about to perish, a fortunate stroke of a workman's pick uncovered human bones in the garden of the convent. Bombs and chassepots were forgotten before this more horrible discovery.

In line with this gruesome find, directly implicating the convent not only of violation of the law against burial outside of official cemeteries, but also of the suspicion, which grew stronger every moment, of wholesale murder, was another strange discovery. Up in the attic were three small rooms, clean, but iron-barred, and in each of these rooms a gray-haired woman, unable to speak intelligently, or muttering gibberish and voicing threats and loud shrieks. In short, three insane women. What were they doing there? How had they gotten there? There could be no doubt upon the matter. These poor women had formerly been beautiful girls, pensioners, no doubt, in the convent, and for expressing some opinion of their own or for refusing to obey some cruel order they had been shut up here so long that they had lost their reason.

Worse than this was to come. It was to be shown that there existed secret relations of a most sordid, but readily comprehensible nature, between the monks and the nuns. What this commerce was is easily guessed.

Among the possessions of the nuns was found a crib! Yes, a small baby crib! Worse still, in the cell allocated to Rev. Father Bousquet, superior-general of the brothers, who was, for the moment, absent from Paris, was found a treatise: a manual of
practical obstetrics!
Of all things. In addition, a chest of human bones! And upstairs in a kind of garret, iron instruments of strange and frightening shapes, and peculiar beds with ratchets and winches. And still a further discovery: in the crypt of the nun's chapel were found eighteen coffined cadavers in all states of decay.

The case was complete. The newspapers presented it with all the lugubrious details painted in vivid colors: “Why was poor Sister Bernadine shut up in a kind of cage, so small that if she dropped her needle she could not stoop to pick it up? What is the meaning and purpose of this iron crown, this racking bed, this corset of steel? These are parts of the arsenal of torture, necessary adjuncts to a branch house of the medieval Inquisition, flourishing in Paris of the nineteenth century.”

One paper recalled that ten years before a man had fallen asleep in the Piepus church, and remaining unnoticed, had been locked up for the night. Hours later, he was aroused in the dark by an indescribable moaning.

An observant reporter noticed that all the eighteen bodies were of women and that their bodies seemed disarranged in their coffins. The corpses were evidently recent. The abundant ash-blond hair of one woman was particularly striking. It was said that a wine dealer of the neighborhood recognized her as his daughter who had disappeared some years ago. “The gaping jaws of these human remains,” wrote the reporter, “when brought up to the light of day, take on surprisingly fantastic appearances. It seems as if these fleshless bones craved to speak, as if they yearned to recount the tragedies that had terminated their lives.” And filled with inspiration, the reporter himself wrote what these bodies could not utter: “See,” they (the cadavers) said, “see our poor heads, all bent either to the right or to the left. Is that not proof that we were buried before our bodies had stiffened in death?” He went on to describe ghastly midnight orgies held by the monks in the crypts, under the vacillating flare of torches. It was a tale of girls lured by promises of special religious festivals, the attendance of which brought safe-conduct to heaven.

However desirable this promissory note to future bliss might be, there was not one girl who wanted to call for payment, for many years to come. But the wine had been heavily drugged. The sacred wafer had been formed of flour mixed with the dust of dried soporific herbs. And the priests wreaked their horrible, perverted lust on the maidens who, dulled by the drugs, resisted only weakly, until the curtain of complete loss of consciousness descended upon them.

When the effect of the narcotic had dissipated, the feeling of life returned and the girls woke to find themselves in a dark, confined space of which the horrible nature gradually dawned on them, only to extinguish in the final blotting out of death. And there, in their premature graves, their bodies remained, along with the evidence of their final struggle: bodies contorted, jaws distended, fingers crooked, signs of their agony, their chests gulping for air, their hands seeking for freedom.

“But justice,” says our writer, “advances inexorably, majestically! However deeply hidden crime may be, it must some day come to light. Advance! All you good and kind-hearted citizens of Paris and gaze on these black deeds of the infamous clergy. Gaze! And either lie down in your coffins alive like Charles V, or rise up like Lazarus from your long sleep of laissez-faire. Here, before this charnel house, mount guard! And let this be your luminous pharos to guide mankind to the sublime association of harmonious,” etc., etc., etc.
*

Another journal grew expansive and rhetorical on the crib in the convent. What poor babies, products of the union of monk and nun, had here been lulled to sleep, separated by only a few feet, a few walls, from the altar of the Virgin? What became of these children? The aim of the monks was surely not to keep them alive, as living evidence of a disgraceful breach of holy vows. No, their intentions were only too plain. Alas! When the mothers, nuns cruelly deprived by a stupid religion of their right to parenthood, had grown fond of their offspring, and could look at the image of Mary and the infant Jesus, and understand something they never had known before: the tug of a baby's mouth at the nipple of the breast, a tug which reaches to the heart, then the monks tore the baby from the mother's bosom, slew it or cast it into some ditch. And if poor Sister Bernadine, or Celestine, went mad with grief, they locked her up in a cage in the garret, where her crazy lullabies, intermingled with frantic shrieks for her baby, died among the rafters of the roof.

Later the monks bethought themselves of a better system. They would study obstetrics and learn the art of aborting, and thus safeguard themselves against babies. The empty crib was put away. It was no longer necessary. Nuns and monks now could conceal their misdeeds behind permanent angelic smiles.

Decidedly a breath of folly was sweeping through Paris. The public flocked toruede Piepus. Aymar among others. Etienne Carjat, “employing the miraculous aid of electric light,” photographed the skeletons in the crypt. In shops a drawing of the secret funeral was exhibited for sale. Other convents were ransacked, other monasteries. More horrible discoveries! Chains fastened to walls, handcuffs, straitj ackets, etc., all evidently destined for the adoration of recalcitrant Venuses.

Of course, all Paris was not so stupid, but the unthinking mass, accustomed to playing the sounding board to the tune of the journalists, responding first to one sentiment and then to its opposite, was stirred profoundly by these romantic tales of horror.
*
At the Paris Medical School, many students must have known that a Bousquet, nephew of the superior-general of the Piepus brothers, had recently submitted his thesis on obstetrics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree, and he must have told his friends about the matter. But they chose to keep quiet. He, too, said nothing. It had become dangerous to speak out of turn. Dr Paillet, physician to the Sisters, had been arrested as “an accomplice in the crimes of Piepus.”

In the neighborhood there must have been many who recalled the annual theatrical representation given by the nuns of the birth of Christ and the visit of the Magi. And it could not have been difficult for them to realize that the crib was a part of the permanent stage properties. But they kept quiet. And they were justified. On the tenth of May a young lady who dared emit some skeptical reflections anent the origins of the skeletons in the crypt was arrested and locked up.