He had just downed his soup when the men who had finished their day’s work came in.

  On catching sight of him, they halted on the threshold and, calling the manager over, declared to his face that if this man continued to take his meals at his establishment, they would desert him one and all.

  The manager asked what this man had done to incur such general reprobation.

  They told him he was the man who had given Henri IV a slap on the face.

  “In that case, get out!” said the manager, advancing on him. “And I hope what you’ve eaten poisons you!”

  There was even less prospect of putting up a fight in the restaurant than there had been in the tavern. The accursed workman rose to his feet, threatening his comrades, who fell back as he advanced – not because of the threats he had uttered, but because of the profanation he had perpetrated. He left, his heart filled with rage, and wandered round the streets of Saint-Denis for part of the evening, swearing and blaspheming. Then, at around ten, he made his way back to the room he was staying in.

  Quite contrary to the customs of the house, the doors were locked. He knocked. The landlord appeared at a window. As it was a dark night, he could not recognize who it was that had knocked.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The workman gave his name.

  “Ah!” said the landlord. “So you’re the one that gave a slap on the face to Henri IV. Wait a minute.”

  “Wait? What for?” asked the workman impatiently. Just then, a small bundle fell at his feet.

  “What’s this?” asked the workman.

  “All the belongings you had here.”

  “What? All my belongings?”

  “Yes, you can go and sleep wherever you want; I have absolutely no desire to see my house collapse about my ears.”

  The workman furiously picked up a cobblestone and flung it at the door.

  “Just you wait,” said the landlord. “I’ll go and wake up your mates, and then we’ll see what’s what.”

  The workman realized he could expect only the worst. He went away, and, having found an open door a hundred or so steps away, he entered a barn.

  In this barn, there was some straw; he lay down on the straw and went to sleep.

  At a quarter to midnight, he felt as if someone was touching his shoulder. He woke up, and saw in front of him a white shape that looked like a woman, motioning him to follow her.

  He thought it must be one of those unfortunate women who have always got a bed for the night and pleasure to offer anyone who can pay for his bed and his pleasure; and as he had money on him, and as he preferred to spend the night with a roof over his head, sleeping in a bed, to spending it in a barn lying on straw, he got up and followed the woman.

  She moved for a while along the walls on the left side of the Grande-Rue, then crossed over and took an alley on the right, still motioning the workman to follow her.

  The latter, used to these nocturnal manoeuvres, and having some experience of the alleys where women of this type tend to live, raised no objection and followed her into the alley.

  The alley led to the open fields; he thought that this woman must live in an isolated house, and continued to follow her.

  After a hundred paces, they crossed through a gap in the wall; but suddenly, lifting up his eyes, he saw before him the old abbey of Saint-Denis, with its gigantic bell tower and its windows, faintly illuminated by the fire within, near which the guardian was keeping watch.

  He turned to glance towards the woman; she had disappeared. He was in the cemetery.

  He tried to head back through the gap in the wall. But on this dark breach, menacing, its arm held out towards him, he thought he could see the spectre of Henri IV.

  The spectre took one step forwards, and the workman one step backwards.

  At the fourth or fifth step, the ground yawned under his feet, and he fell backwards into the open grave.

  Then it seemed to him that he could see rising around him all those kings, the predecessors and descendants of Henri IV; it seemed to him that some of them were lifting against him their sceptres, and others their hands of justice,* crying, “Woe to the sacrilegious man!” Then it seemed to him that, at the touch of those hands of justice and those sceptres as heavy as lead and burning like fire, he felt his limbs being broken one after the other.

  It was just at that moment that midnight struck and the watchman heard his moans.

  I did what I could to reassure this wretched man, but he had lost his wits, and, after three days’ delirium, he died, crying, “Mercy!”

  “I beg your pardon,” said the doctor, “but I don’t altogether understand what your story really proves. The accident that befell your workman demonstrates that – with his head preoccupied by what had happened to him during the day, either while waking or in a state of somnambulism – he began wandering round in the night; and as he wandered around, he entered the cemetery, and as he was gazing up into the air, instead of looking at his feet, he fell into the open grave, where he naturally broke an arm and a leg in his fall. Now you mentioned a prediction that came true, and I can’t find the least little bit of prediction in any of this.”

  “Wait, Doctor,” said the Chevalier. “The story I have just told and which, you’re quite right to point out, is merely a set of facts, leads directly to the prediction I am about to relate to you – and this is a mystery.

  “Here is the story…”

  Around 20th January 1794, after the demolition of the tomb of François I, they opened the sepulchre of the Countess of Flanders, the daughter of Philippe le Long.

  These two graves were the last still to be excavated; all the vaults had fallen in, all the sepulchres were empty, all the bones had been taken off to the charnel house. One last sepulchre had remained uninvestigated: it was that of the Cardinal de Retz,* who was supposedly buried in Saint-Denis.

  All the vaults had been closed up, or more or less all – those of the Valois, and those of all the kings called Charles. The only one left was the vault of the Bourbons, which was to be closed the next day.

  The watchman spent his last night in the church where there was nothing left to keep watch over, so permission had been granted him to sleep, and he took advantage of this permission.

  At midnight, he was awoken by the noise of the organ and the sound of chanting. He came to, rubbed his eyes and turned to look at the choir, which is where the chants were coming from.

  Then, to his astonishment, he saw the choir stalls graced by the presence of the monks of Saint-Denis; he saw an archbishop officiating at the altar; he saw the mortuary chapel all lit with tapers and, beneath the roof of the mortuary chapel, the great golden pall which usually bedecks only the bodies of kings.

  He had awoken just as the Mass had finished and the burial ceremony was beginning.

  The sceptre, the crown and the hand of justice placed on a red velvet cushion, were handed over to the heralds, who presented them to three princes.

  Thereupon there advanced, gliding rather than walking, and without the noise of their steps arousing the slightest echo in the chapel, the gentlemen of the chamber, who took the body and bore it into the vault of the Bourbons, the only one still open, whereas all the others had been closed.

  Then, the King of Arms went down into the vault, and when he had gone down, he cried to the other heralds to come and perform their office.

  There were five of them all together – the King of Arms and the heralds.

  From the bottom of the vault, the King of Arms called the first herald, who went down bearing the spurs; then the second, who went down bearing the gauntlets; then the third, who went down bearing the tunic; then the fourth, who went down carrying the crested armet; then the fifth, who went down carrying the coat of arms.

  Then he called the first valet tranchant,* who brought the banner; the captains of the Swiss mercenaries, the captains of the archers of the guard and of the two hundred gentlemen of the household; the Master of the Horse, who brought the royal sword; the First Chamberlain, who brought the banner of France; the High Steward, before whom all the stewards passed, flinging down their white wands of office into the vault and saluting the three princes bearing the crown, the sceptre and the hand of justice as they passed by in procession; and the three princes, who brought in their turn the sceptre, the hand of justice and the crown.

  Then the King of Arms cried aloud, three times:

  “The King is dead; long live the King! The King is dead; long live the King! The King is dead; long live the King!”

  A herald, who had remained in the choir, repeated the threefold cry.

  Finally, the High Steward broke his wand of office to signal that the royal house was broken, and that the officers of the King could petition for new positions.

  Then the trumpets sounded and the organ came to life.

  Then, as the trumpets were sounding ever more faintly, and the organ’s rumblings diminished, the light of the candles became more wan, the bodies of those assembled faded and, at a last distant blast from the organ, at the last sound of the trumpet, everything vanished. The next day, the watchman, in floods of tears, told the story of the royal burial he had seen, and at which he, poor man, had been the sole spectator. He predicted that these mutilated tombs would be restored and that, despite the decrees of the Convention and the work of the guillotine, France would see a new monarchy, and Saint-Denis new kings.

  This prediction earned the poor devil a spell in prison and almost the scaffold. Thirty years later – 20th September 1824 – behind the same column where he had seen his vision, he told me, pulling me by the tail of my coat:

  “Well, Monsieur Lenoir! When I told you our poor kings would come back one day to Saint-Denis, was I wrong?”

  And indeed, on that day Louis XVIII was buried with the same ceremony as the watchman had seen being performed thirty years previously.

  “Explain that, Doctor!”

  10

  L’Artifaille

  Either because he was convinced or, as is more probable, because it seemed to him difficult to refute a man as convinced as the Chevalier Lenoir, the doctor said nothing.

  The doctor’s silence left the field free for other commentators; Father Moulle eagerly entered the fray.

  “All of that confirms me in my system of thinking,” he said.

  “And what is your system of thinking?” asked the doctor, delighted to be able to resume his polemic against less hardy jousters than Monsieur Ledru and the Chevalier Lenoir.

  “We live between two invisible worlds, one of them inhabited by the spirits of hell, the other by the spirits of heaven; at the time of our birth, two genii – one good, the other evil – come and take up their places at our sides, accompany us all our lives long, the one inspiring us to do good and the other evil; at the hour of our death the winner has us in his power. Thus our bodies become either the prey of a demon or the dwelling of an angel; in the case of poor Solange, the good genius had triumphed, and it was he who was bidding you farewell, Ledru, through the mute lips of the young martyr; in the case of the brigand sentenced by the Scottish judge, it was the demon who had been victorious in the field, and it was he who came successively to the judge in the shape of a cat, the uniform of a bailiff and the appearance of a skeleton; finally, in the last case, it was the angel of the monarchy who took vengeance on the sacrilegious man for the terrible profanation of the tombs and who, like Christ manifesting himself to the humble, showed the future restoration of the monarchy to a poor watchman of the tombs with as much pomp as if the fantastical ceremony had been performed before the eyes of all the future dignitaries of the court of Louis XVIII.”

  “But in the end, Father Moulle,” said the doctor, “all systems are based on a certain conviction.”

  “Of course.”

  “But this conviction needs to rest on facts if it is to be real.”

  “And mine does rest on facts.”

  “On facts that were related to you by someone in whom you have full confidence?”

  “On facts that happened to me myself.”

  “Ah, Father Moulle – let’s hear those facts.”

  “Gladly…”

  I was born in that part of the inheritance of the ancient kings that is today called the département of the Aisne, and that used to be called the Île-de-France; my father and my mother lived in a small village situated in the middle of the Forest of Villers-Cotterêts called Fleury. Before my birth, my parents had already had five children, three boys and two girls, who had all died. As a result, when my mother found herself pregnant with me, she vowed that I would wear white until the age of seven, and my father promised a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame-de-Liesse.*

  These two vows are not rare in the provinces, and they were directly related, since white is the colour of the Virgin, and Notre-Dame-de-Liesse is none other than the Virgin Mary.

  Unfortunately, my father died during my mother’s pregnancy, but my mother, who was a pious woman, resolved nonetheless to perform the double vow in all its rigour; as soon as I was born, I was dressed in white from top to toe, and as soon as she was up and about again my mother undertook the holy pilgrimage on foot, as had been promised.

  Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, luckily, was only fifteen or sixteen leagues distant from the village of Fleury; my mother had to make only three stops before reaching her destination.

  There she performed her devotions, and received from the priest’s hands a silver medal, which she hung round my neck.

  Thanks to this double vow, I was exempt from all the accidents of youth, and when I had attained the age of reason, either as a result of the religious education I had received, or through the influence of the medal, I felt myself drawn to the Church. After my studies in the seminary at Soissons, I was ordained priest in 1780, and was sent as a curate to Étampes.

  As chance would have it, of the four churches in Étampes, I was attached to the one under the patronage of Our Lady.

  This church is one of the marvellous monuments which the Romanesque period bequeathed to the Middle Ages. Founded by Robert the Strong,* it was completed only in the twelfth century; it still has admirable stained-glass windows which, when it was newly built, must have harmonized wonderfully with the painting and gilding that decorated its columns and crowned its capitals. While still a child, I had really loved the marvellous efflorescence of granite that faith raised up from the ground, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, to cover the soil of France, that eldest daughter of Rome, with a forest of churches – only to come to halt when faith died in people’s hearts, killed off by the poison of Luther and Calvin.

  As a child, I had played in the ruins of Saint-Jean de Soissons; my eyes had gazed their fill on the fantastic designs of all those mouldings, which look like petrified flowers, so that, when I saw Notre-Dame d’Étampes, I was happy that chance, or rather Providence, had given to me such a dwelling, like a beautiful nest for a swallow or a fine vessel for a halcyon.

  My happiest times were those that I spent in the church. I don’t mean to imply that it was a purely religious feeling that kept me there: no, it was a feeling of well-being, comparable to that of the bird that has been confined in a pneumatic machine where the air is being pumped out to create a vacuum, but is then released, and restored to space and liberty. My own space was that which extended from the porch to the apse; my liberty was that of dreaming, two hours at a time, kneeling on a tomb or leaning against a pillar. What did I dream of? Certainly not of any theological quibbles – no, it was rather of that eternal struggle between good and evil that has torn man apart since the day he first sinned; it was of those lovely white-winged angels and those hideous red-faced demons who, every time a ray of sunlight shone in, sparkled on the stained-glass windows, the former resplendent in the blaze of heaven, the latter glowing fierily in the flames of hell. All in all, Notre-Dame was my home; there I could live, think and pray. The little presbytery they had given me was merely my pied-à-terre, where I ate and slept, nothing more.

  And often I would leave my beloved Notre-Dame only at midnight or at one in the morning.

  This was common knowledge. When I wasn’t in the presbytery, I was in Notre-Dame. They would come and fetch me – they knew they’d find me there.

  Of the noises of the world, very few reached me, wrapped as I was in this sanctuary of religion and, especially, of poetry.

  However, among these noises there was one which was of concern to everyone, great and small, clergy and laity. The area around Étampes was being laid waste by the exploits of a successor or rather a rival of Cartouche and Poulailler,* who seemed perfectly well qualified to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors when it came to sheer boldness.

  This bandit, who would attack anything, but especially the churches, was called L’Artifaille.

  Something which made me pay a more particular attention to the exploits of this brigand was the fact that his wife, who lived in the lower town in Étampes, was one of my most assiduous penitents. She was a noble and worthy woman, for whom the criminal way of life into which her husband had fallen was an occasion for remorse and who, feeling that she was responsible before God as his wife, spent her life in prayers and confessions, hoping, by her deeds of holiness, to mitigate her husband’s impiety.

  As for him, as I’ve just told you, he was a bandit who feared neither God nor devil, claiming as he did that society was badly organized, and that he had been sent to earth to improve it – and that, thanks to him, a balance between people’s different fortunes would be re-established: he was merely the precursor of a sect that would one day appear, and would preach what he himself practised, namely the common ownership of property.

  Twenty times he had been captured and put in prison, but almost always, on the second or third night, the prison had been found empty; since no one could explain these escapes, they said he had found the magical herb that can cut through iron.