Around five o’clock the terrible cortège arrived. The bodies were piled pell-mell in the tumbrel, and the heads pell-mell in a sack.

  I would take one or two heads at random and one or two bodies; the rest were flung into the common grave.

  The next day, the heads and bodies I had experimented on the day before were added to that day’s cortège. My brother almost always helped me with these experiments.

  In the midst of all this contact with death, my love for Solange increased day by day. For her part, the poor child loved me with all the strength of her heart.

  All too often I had thought of making her my wife, and all too often we had imagined the happiness of such a union; but, in order to become my wife, Solange would have to tell them her name, and her name – that of an émigré, an aristocrat, an outlaw – brought death with it.

  Her father had written to her several times to hasten her departure, but she had told him of our love. She had asked him to consent to our marriage, and he had granted it, so on that side there was no difficulty.

  However, amidst all these terrible trials, one trial, more terrible than the others, had been the occasion of profound sadness for both of us.

  This was the trial of Marie-Antoinette.

  Starting on 4th October, this trial was vigorously pursued; on 14th October, she had appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal; on the 16th, at four in the morning, she had been sentenced; the same day, at eleven, she had mounted the scaffold.

  That morning I received a letter from Solange, who wrote to tell me that she did not want to spend such a fateful day without seeing me.

  I arrived at around two in our small apartment in the Rue Taranne, and I found Solange in tears. I myself was deeply affected by this execution. The Queen had been so kind to me in my youth that I had kept a vivid memory of that kindness.

  Oh, I will always remember that day: it was a Wednesday; in Paris there was more than a sense of sadness, there was a feeling of terror.

  As for me, I felt strangely disheartened by something akin to the presentiment of a great misfortune. I had tried to give Solange new strength as she wept uncontrollably in my arms, but words of consolation had been hard to find, since there was no consolation in my heart.

  We spent the night together, as usual; our night was even more melancholy than our day. I remember that a dog locked in an apartment above ours howled until two in the morning.

  The next day, we made enquiries; his master had gone out and taken the key with him; in the street, he had been arrested and taken before the Revolutionary Tribunal; sentenced at three, he had been executed at four.

  We had to separate; Solange’s classes began at nine in the morning. Her boarding school was located near the Jardin des Plantes. I hesitated for a long time before letting her go. She herself found it difficult to leave me. But to stay away for two days would mean exposing herself to investigations that would always involve risk.

  I summoned a carriage and accompanied her to the corner of the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard; here I got out to let her continue on her way. Throughout the whole journey, we had held each other clasped in a wordless embrace, mingling our tears, which flowed down onto our lips, imbuing the sweetness of our kisses with their bitterness.

  I got out of the fiacre, but instead of going home, I remained rooted to the spot so as to keep the carriage bearing her away in view for longer. After twenty paces, the carriage halted and Solange put her head through the window as if she had guessed I was still there. I ran after her. I climbed back into the fiacre; I closed the windows. I pressed her once more into my arms. But nine o’clock was striking from Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. I wiped away her tears, I sealed her lips with a triple kiss and, jumping down from the carriage, I ran off.

  It seemed to me as if Solange were calling me back, but all those tears, all those hesitations might be noticed. As fate would have it, I was brave enough not to turn back.

  I returned home filled with despair. I spent the day writing to Solange; that evening, I sent her a whole packet.

  I had just posted my letter when I received one from her.

  She had been severely scolded; they had asked her a host of questions, and they had threatened to make her forfeit her next day off.

  This was the following Sunday, but Solange swore to me that, in any event, even if it meant quarrelling definitively with the headmistress, she would see me that day.

  I swore the same thing; it seemed to me that, if I went for a whole week without seeing her, as would happen if she did not make use of her next free day, I would go mad.

  An additional factor was this: Solange had voiced a certain anxiety. A letter she had found at the school waiting for her – a letter from her father – looked as if it had been opened.

  I slept badly, and the next day was even worse. I wrote to Solange as usual, and, as it was the day for my experiments, at around three o’clock I went to my brother’s to pick him up and take him to Clamart.

  My brother was not at home; I set off alone.

  The weather was awful; nature, filled with gloom, was shedding rain like tears – that cold, torrential rain that announces winter. From beginning to end of my road I could hear the town criers bellowing out in their hoarse voices the list of the day’s condemned; it was a long one; there were men, women and children. The bloody harvest was a rich one, and I would not be short of subjects for my evening session.

  The autumn days ended early. At four o’clock, I reached Clamart; it was almost night.

  The sight of this cemetery, with its huge freshly dug graves, its sparse trees rattling in the wind like skeletons, was grim and quite hideous!

  Wherever the earth had not been newly dug, there was grass, thistles or nettles. Each day the newly dug earth encroached a little more on the greenery.

  Amid all those swelling mounds in the ground, the day’s grave was gaping wide open, awaiting its prey; the unusually large number of victims had been planned for, and the grave was bigger than usual.

  I mechanically walked over to it. A pool of water had gathered at the bottom; poor cold and naked corpses, about to be thrown into the water that was as cold as they were!

  As I reached the edge of the grave, my foot slipped, and I almost fell in; my hair stood on end. I was soaked, and started to shiver as I headed towards my laboratory.

  It was, as I have said, a former chapel; I looked everywhere – why did I look? I don’t know why – but I looked everywhere to see if on the walls, or on what had once been the altar, any trace of religion was left; the walls were empty, the altar bare. At the place where the tabernacle had been – in other words, God, in other words, life – there was a skull stripped of its flesh and its hair – in other words, death, in other words, nothingness.

  I lit my candle; I placed it on the table I used for my experiments, laden as it was with those strangely shaped tools of my own invention, and I sat down, dreaming of… what? Of that poor queen whom I had seen so beautiful, so happy, so well loved; who, the day before, pursued by the shouts and curses of a whole people, had been led in a tumbrel to the scaffold, and who, this very moment, her head separated from her body, was sleeping in a pauper’s bier, she who had slept under the gilt wainscoting of the Tuileries, of Versailles and Saint-Cloud.

  While I was absorbed in these gloomy reflections, the rain fell twice as heavily, the wind swept by in great gusts, moaning and howling mournfully through the branches of the trees and the stalks of the grass that shuddered before its blast.

  This noise was soon augmented by a sound like that of a dismal clap of thunder, but this thunder, instead of rumbling in the clouds, reverberated along the ground, making it tremble.

  It was the rumbling of the red tumbrel, coming from the Place de la Révolution and entering Clamart.

  The door of the little chapel opened, and two men, streaming with water, came in carrying a sack.

  The one was the same Legros I had visited in prison, the other was a grave-digger.

  “Here you are, Monsieur Ledru,” the executioner’s assistant said. “Here are the goods you required – no need for you to hurry this evening; we’ll leave the whole pile with you; they’re going to be buried tomorrow; it’ll be daylight then. They’re not going to catch cold just because they’ve spent a night out in the open!”

  And with a hideous laugh those two mercenaries of death dumped their sack in the corner, near the former altar ahead of me on the left.

  Then they departed, without closing the door behind them. It started to bang against its frame, letting in gusts of wind which made the flame of my candle flicker as it rose wanly, almost seeming to expire up its blackened wick.

  I heard them unharness their horse, close the cemetery gate and go out, leaving the tumbrel full of corpses behind them.

  I had been sorely tempted to go with them, but I don’t know why – something kept me in my place, shuddering all over. I wasn’t scared, of course, but the noise of the wind, the rain lashing down, the creak of those trees twisting and turning, the whistling of those gusts of air that made my candle tremble, all of this poured a vague chill of fear onto my skull – a fear that, from the damp roots of my hair, gradually spread throughout my body.

  Suddenly, I seemed to hear a voice, gentle and pitiful at the same time, a voice from within the very walls of the chapel, uttering the name “Albert”.

  Ah, that certainly made me jump! “Albert”!… There was only one person in the whole world who called me that.

  My staring eyes gazed slowly round the little chapel – whose walls, despite its narrowness, my light was not strong enough to illuminate – and they came to rest on the sack propped up on the corner of the altar, the sack whose bloody, misshapen canvas indicated its dismal contents.

  Just as my eyes came to rest on the sack, the same voice, now weaker, but even more pitiful, repeated the same name:

  “Albert!”

  I started up, filled with a chill of dread: the voice seemed to have come from inside the sack.

  I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming or waking; then, tottering stiffly like a man of stone, my hands extended before me, I made my way over to the sack and plunged one of my hands into it.

  It seemed to me then that lips still warm kissed my hand.

  I had reached that degree of terror where the very excess of terror gives us new courage. I took that head and, returning to my chair, into which I collapsed, I placed it on the table.

  Ah, what a terrible cry I uttered! That head, whose lips seemed still warm and whose eyes were half closed, was the head of Solange!

  I thought I had gone mad.

  I cried out three times:

  “Solange! Solange! Solange!”

  At the third cry, those eyes reopened, gazed at me, dropped two tears and, darting a humid flame as if the soul were escaping from them, closed again, never to reopen.

  I rose to my feet, crazed, demented, beside myself; I tried to flee, but in rising I caught the table with my jacket flap; the table fell over, bringing down the candle, which was extinguished, and the head, which rolled to the ground, and also bringing me down with it, panic-stricken. Then, as I lay on the ground, I seemed to see this head rolling towards mine down the inclined flagstones: its lips touched mine, an icy shudder ran through my body;

  I heaved a groan and fainted.

  The next day, at six o’clock, the grave-diggers found me as cold as the flagstone on which I was lying.

  Solange, recognized as a result of her father’s letter, had been arrested that very day, sentenced that very day and executed that very day.

  That head which had spoken to me, those eyes which had gazed at me, those lips which had kissed my lips were the lips, eyes and head of Solange.

  And you know, Lenoir, continued Monsieur Ledru, turning to the Chevalier, it was on that occasion that I almost died.

  8

  The Cat, the Bailiff and the Skeleton

  The effect produced by Monsieur Ledru’s tale was dreadful; none of us even tried to contradict that impression, not even the doctor.

  The Chevalier Lenoir, when addressed by Monsieur Ledru, replied with a mere nod of agreement; the pale lady, who had raised herself for a moment on her sofa, had fallen back amid the cushions, and the only sign of life she gave was a sigh; the police superintendent, who could not think of any official means of expressing his feelings, didn’t breathe a word. As for me, I consigned all the details of the catastrophe to my memory, so I would be able to find them there, if one day I desired to relate them in turn; and as for Alliette and Father Moulle, the details of the adventure chimed in too much with their own ideas for them to try and refute them.

  On the contrary, Father Moulle was the first to break the silence and, to some degree summing up the general opinion, said:

  “I fully believe in what you have just told us, my dear Ledru, but how are you going to explain this phenomenon to yourself, in ‘material terms’ as they say?”

  “I can’t explain it,” said Monsieur Ledru. “I’m just relating it, that’s all.”

  “Yes, how do you explain it?” asked the doctor. “After all, however long life might persist, you can’t accept that after two hours a severed head might be able to speak, look around and act – can you?”

  “If I had managed to explain it to myself, my dear Doctor,” said Monsieur Ledru, “I would not have succumbed, as a result of that event, to such a terrible illness.”

  “But what about you, Doctor?” said the Chevalier Lenoir. “How do you explain it yourself? You can’t accept that Ledru has just told us a story made up in self-justification; his illness is a material fact too.”

  “Good Heavens! It’s not so difficult! It was a hallucination. Monsieur Ledru imagined he saw; Monsieur Ledru imagined he heard: it was exactly the same for him as if he had really seen and heard. The organs that transmit perception to the sensorium – in other words to the brain – can be upset by the circumstances that influence them; in this case, they are upset, and, as a result of this disturbance, they transmit false perceptions; you imagine you hear, and so you hear; you imagine you see, and so you see. The cold, the rain and the darkness had disturbed Monsieur Ledru’s sense organs, that’s all. A madman also sees and hears what he imagines he sees and hears; hallucination is a momentary madness, and you preserve the memory of it once it has disappeared. That’s all.”

  “But what if it doesn’t disappear?” asked Father Moulle.

  “Well, in that case the illness comes into the category of incurable illnesses, and you die of it.”

  “And have you sometimes treated those sorts of illness, Doctor?”

  “No, but I have known doctors who have treated them, including among others an English doctor who accompanied Walter Scott on his journey to France.”

  “And he told you?…”

  “Something similar to what our host has just told us – something that is perhaps even more extraordinary.”

  “And you can explain it in a materialist way?” asked Father Moulle.

  “Of course.”

  “And this phenomenon, related to you by the English doctor, is one you can relate to us in turn?”

  “Doubtless.”

  “Ah, go on, then, Doctor, tell us!”

  “Do I have to?”

  “You must!” cried everyone.

  “Very well,” said the doctor, and began:

  The doctor who accompanied Walter Scott to France was called Doctor Sympson: he was one of the most distinguished men of the Edinburgh medical school and was as a result acquainted with the most considerable persons in the city.

  Among these persons was a judge in the criminal court, whose name he did not tell me. The name was the only aspect of the whole business that he felt it best to keep secret.

  This judge, whom he habitually treated in his capacity as doctor, was visibly fading away without any apparent disruption in his health: he had succumbed to a deep melancholia. His family had, on different occasions, questioned the doctor, and the doctor in turn had questioned his friend, without getting anything out of him other than vague replies which had merely aroused his disquiet by proving that there was indeed a secret, but a secret that that his patient refused to disclose.

  Finally, one day, Doctor Sympson insisted so much on his friend’s confessing that he was indeed ill, that the latter took his hands with a sad smile and said:

  “Very well! Yes, I am ill, and my illness, dear Doctor, is all the more incurable in that it is all in my mind.”

  “What! All in your mind?”

  “Yes. I’m going mad.”

  “You’re going mad? And in what way, may I ask? You have a lucid gaze, a calm voice” (he took his hand) “and an excellent pulse.”

  “And that’s just what comprises the gravity of my state, dear Doctor: the fact that I can see it and judge it.”

  “But what does your madness consist of, then?”

  “Close the door, so that we are not disturbed, Doctor, and I’ll tell you.”

  The doctor closed the door, returned and sat down next to his friend.

  “Do your remember,” the judge said to him, “the last criminal trial in which I was called upon to pronounce a sentence?”

  “Yes, it was on a Scottish bandit who was sentenced by you to be hanged, and hanged he was.”

  “Precisely. Well, just as I was passing sentence, a flame darted from his eyes, and he shook his fist at me threateningly. I paid no attention. Similar threats are common from men who have just been sentenced.

  “But, the day after the execution, the hangman presented himself at my door, humbly begging me to forgive him for this visit, but declaring that he had thought it only right to warn me of one thing: the bandit had died uttering a kind of curse against me, and saying that, the next day at six o’clock, the time at which he had been executed, I would be hearing from him.