The Thousand and One Ghosts Read online

  If you are unaware of this fact, if you don’t know that this fine layer of verdant earth that seems so alluring rests on nothing, you can, if you set your foot over one of these cracks, quite easily disappear, just as people disappear on the Montanvert* between two walls of ice.

  The populace that inhabits these subterranean galleries has not only a separate existence, but also a separate character and physiognomy. Living in darkness as they do, these people have some of the instincts of nocturnal animals: like them, they are silent and ferocious. You often hear of an accident: a prop has collapsed, a rope has snapped, a man has been crushed. On the surface of the earth, this is taken to be a misfortune: thirty feet under, it is known to be a crime.

  The appearance of the quarrymen is in general sinister. In daylight, their eyes blink, and in the open air their voices are hoarse. They wear their hair flat, pressed down to the eyebrows; a beard which renews its acquaintance with the razor only every Sunday morning; a waistcoat from which emerge sleeves of coarse grey canvas, a leather apron turned white by contact with the stone and blue canvas trousers. On one of their shoulders lies a folded jacket, and on this jacket rests the handle of the pickaxe or twibill which, for six days of the week, digs out the stone.

  Whenever there’s any civil unrest, it is rare that the men we have just been trying to depict do not get involved. When the shout goes up at the Barrière d’Enfer, “Here come the men from the Montrouge quarry!”, the people living in nearby streets shake their heads and shut their doors.

  This was the scene that I had before me – that I gazed on during that twilit hour which, in September, separates day from night. Then, once night had fallen, I jumped back into the carriage, where none of my companions, to be sure, had seen what I had just seen. So it goes: many look, but few see.

  We reached Fontenay at about half-past eight; there was an excellent supper waiting for us, and after supper a walk in the garden.

  Sorrento is a forest of orange trees; Fontenay is a bouquet of roses. Each house has its rose bush winding up along the wall, its foot protected by a small plank fence. Once it reaches a certain height, the rose bush blossoms out into a gigantic fan; the passing breeze is perfumed and when, instead of a breeze, there is a real wind, it rains petals of roses, as it used to at the Corpus Christi celebrations, when the worship of God was still celebrated.

  From the end of the garden, we would have had an immense view, if it had been daylight. Only the lights scattered across the expanse indicated the villages of Sceaux, Bagneux, Châtillon and Montrouge; beyond that stretched out a great line of russet red, from which came a muffled noise like that of a living Leviathan; it was Paris breathing.

  Our hosts had to order us to bed, like children. Under that lovely sky with its beautiful scattering of stars, caressed by that perfumed breeze, we would have happily stayed out until daybreak.

  At five in the morning, we set off on our hunting expedition, guided by the son of our host, who had promised us mountains and marvels, and who, it has to be said, continued to boast of how fecund his land was with game animals, deploying a persistence that could have been put to better use.

  By midday, we had seen a rabbit and four partridges. The rabbit had been missed by my colleague on the right, one of the partridges had been missed by my colleague on the left and, of the other three partridges, two had been shot by me.

  By midday, at Brassoire, I would have already sent to the farm three or four hares and fifteen or twenty partridges.

  I love hunting, but I hate going for walks, especially walks across fields. And so, on the pretext of going off to explore a field of alfalfa situated on my extreme left and in which I was quite sure I would find nothing, I broke line and headed off by myself.

  What lay in this field – what I had spotted in my desire to beat a retreat (a desire that had already seized me a good two hours ago) – was a sunken lane which, concealing me from the eyes of the other hunters, would lead me back along the Sceaux road and straight to Fontenay-aux-Roses.

  I was not mistaken. As one o’clock was striking at the belfry of the parish church, I reached the outskirts of the village.

  I was following a wall which seemed to enclose a rather fine property when, as I reached the place where the Rue de Diane comes out onto the Grand-Rue, I saw coming towards me, from the direction of the church, a man who looked so strange that I came to a halt and instinctively cocked both barrels of my rifle, impelled by a mere sense of self-preservation.

  But the man – pale, his hair sticking up, his eyes popping out, his clothes in disarray and his hands spattered with blood – passed by me without seeing me. His stare was both fixed and lifeless. He was rushing ahead with the unstoppable momentum of a body bouncing uncontrollably down the steep sides of a mountain, and yet his breathless panting indicated more panic than fatigue.

  At the junction of the two roads, he left the Grand-Rue to dart into the Rue de Diane, where there was a door to the property surrounded by the wall I had been following for six or seven minutes. This door – on which my gaze came to rest that very same minute – was painted green, with the number 2 over it. The man’s hand stretched out towards the doorbell long before it could actually touch it; then he reached it, pulled it violently and almost immediately, spinning round, he sat down on one of the two bollards that serve as the outer fortifications of this door. There he remained, motionless, his arms hanging and his head sunk on his chest.

  I retraced my steps, fully convinced that this man must have been an actor in some unknown and terrible drama.

  Behind him, on both sides of the street, a few people on whom he had doubtless produced the same effect as on me had emerged from their houses and were looking at him with an astonishment that equalled mine.

  Following the violent ringing of the doorbell, a small door built into the wall near the main one opened, and a woman of between forty and forty-five appeared.

  “Oh, it’s you, Jacquemin,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Is the mayor at home?” asked the man she had addressed, in a hoarse voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, Mère Antoine, go and tell him I’ve killed my wife, and I’ve come to give myself up as a prisoner.”

  Mère Antoine uttered a scream which was echoed by two or three terror-stricken exclamations from the people close enough to hear this terrible confession.

  I myself took a step backwards – into the trunk of a lime tree, against which I leant for support.

  Everybody else within earshot of his voice had remained rooted to the spot.

  As for the murderer, he had slipped from the bollard to the ground, as if, after uttering those fateful words, his strength had abandoned him.

  Meanwhile, Mère Antoine had disappeared, leaving the small door open. It was clear that she gone to find her master and carry out the errand Jacquemin had given her.

  After five minutes, the man she had gone to fetch appeared on the doorstep.

  Two other men were following him.

  I can still remember the sight of that street.

  Jacquemin had slipped to the ground, as I have said. The mayor of Fontenay-aux-Roses, who had just been fetched by Mère Antoine, was standing over him, looking down on him from all his considerable height. In the opening of the door, the other two people – about whom we shall shortly have much more to say – jostled for space. I was leaning against the trunk of a lime tree planted in the Grand-Rue, but from this position I could see all down the Rue de Diane. On my left was a group comprising a man, a woman and a child, the child crying for his mother to take him in her arms. Behind this group a baker was sticking his head out of a first-floor window, talking to his apprentice downstairs, and asking him if that wasn’t Jacquemin, the quarryman, who had just come running by; then there finally appeared, on his doorstep, a blacksmith, his front all dark but his back lit up by the gleam of his forge, where an apprentice was continuing to draw the bellows.

  So much for the Grand-Rue.

  As for the Rue de Diane, apart from the main group that we have described, it was deserted. However, at the far end, two gendarmes had just appeared; they had been making their rounds through the plain asking to see people’s shooting permits; and, without suspecting the task that awaited them, they came marching slowly and calmly up to us.

  The clock struck a quarter past one.

  2

  The Impasse des Sergents

  As the last vibrations of the bell faded away, the first words of the mayor were heard.

  “Jacquemin,” he said, “I hope that Mère Antoine is crazy: she’s just brought me a message from you saying that your wife’s dead, and that it was you that killed her!”

  “That’s the plain truth, Monsieur le Maire,” replied Jacquemin. “You should have me taken off to jail and sentenced straight away.”

  And as he said these words, he tried to stand up, propping himself on the bollard with his elbow; but after struggling for a while, he slumped back down, as if the bones in his legs had been broken.

  “Come off it! You’re mad!” said the mayor.

  “Look at my hands,” he replied.

  And he lifted his two bloody hands, which with their clenched fingers looked like two talons.

  The left hand was indeed red to the wrist, and the right arm was red up to the elbow.

  Furthermore, on the right hand, a trickle of fresh blood was running down the thumb from a bite which the victim, in her struggle, had in all probability given her assassin.

  During this time, the two gendarmes had come up and, halting ten steps away from the main protagonist of this scene, g
azed down from their horses.

  The mayor gestured to them and they dismounted, throwing the bridles of their mounts to a young lad who was wearing a policeman’s cap and seemed to be a soldier’s son.

  Whereupon they went over to Jacquemin and hoisted him up under his arms.

  He yielded without the slightest resistance and with the inertia of a man possessed by a single thought.

  At the same moment, the police superintendent and the doctor arrived; they had just been alerted to the events.

  “Ah, come here, Monsieur Robert! Ah, come here, Monsieur Cousin!” said the mayor.

  Monsieur Robert was the doctor, and Monsieur Cousin was the police superintendent.

  “Come along; I was just going to send for you.”

  “Well now, let’s see then – what’s the problem?” asked the doctor, in the most jovial tone imaginable. “A little murder, I gather?”

  Jacquemin did not reply.

  “So then, Père Jacquemin,” the doctor continued, “is it true that you have killed your wife?”

  Jacquemin did not breathe a word.

  “At least, that’s what he’s just accused himself of,” said the mayor. “All the same, I’m still hoping it’s a passing hallucination and not a real crime that is making him say so.”

  “Jacquemin,” said the police superintendent, “answer. Is it true that you’ve killed your wife?”

  Same silence.

  “In any case, we’ll soon find out,” said Dr Robert. “Doesn’t he live in the Impasse des Sergents?”

  “Yes,” replied the two gendarmes.

  “Well then, Monsieur Ledru,” said the doctor, turning to the mayor, “let’s go to the Impasse des Sergents.”

  “I won’t go! I won’t go!” cried Jacquemin, tearing himself away from the gendarmes’ hands with such a violent movement that, if he had tried to flee, he would without a doubt have been a hundred paces away before anyone had dreamt of chasing after him.

  “But why won’t you go?” asked the mayor.

  “What do I need to go there for, since I’ve confessed everything and told you that I’ve killed her, killed her with this great two-handed sword that I took from the Artillery Museum last year? Take me to jail – there’s nothing for me to do back there – take me to jail!”

  The doctor and Monsieur Ledru looked at each other.

  “My friend,” said the police superintendent, who, like Monsieur Ledru, was still hoping that Jacquemin was suffering under some temporary derangement of mind. “My friend, it’s a matter of urgency that you show us the scene – and you need to be there to guide the officers of justice.”

  “Why does justice need to be guided?” asked Jacquemin. “You’ll find the body in the cellar, and, near the body, on a sack of plaster, the head – as for me, just take me off to jail.”

  “You must come!” said the police superintendent.

  “Oh my God! My God!” cried Jacquemin, prey to the most fearful terror. “Oh my God! My God! If only I’d known…”

  “Well, what would you have done then?” asked the police superintendent.

  “Well, I’d have killed myself.”

  Monsieur Ledru shook his head and threw a glance to the police superintendent as if to say, “There’s something behind all this.”

  “My friend,” he said, addressing the murderer, “come now, explain it all to me!”

  “To you, yes, whatever you want, Monsieur Ledru, anything, just ask away.”

  “How is it that you had the courage to commit the murder but don’t have the courage to go back and see your victim? Did something happen that you’re not telling us?”

  “Oh yes, something terrible!”

  “Well then, tell us about it!”

  “Oh no – you’d say it wasn’t true, you’d say I’m mad.”

  “Never mind that. What happened? Tell me.”

  “I will tell you – but just you.”

  He went over to Monsieur Ledru.

  The two gendarmes tried to hold him back, but the mayor gestured to them, and they let the prisoner go.

  In any case, if he had tried to escape, it would have been impossible: half the population of Fontenay-aux-Roses was now crowding the Rue de Diane and the Grand-Rue.

  Jacquemin, as I have said, went over and spoke into Monsieur Ledru’s ear.

  “Do you think, Monsieur Ledru,” Jacquemin asked in a low voice, “do you think that a head can speak once it’s been separated from its body?”

  Monsieur Ledru uttered an exclamation that sounded like a cry, and paled visibly.

  “Do you think so? Tell me!” repeated Jacquemin. Monsieur Ledru pulled himself together.

  “Yes,” he said, “I think so.”

  “Well… well… she spoke!”

  “Who?”

  “The head… Jeanne’s head.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that her eyes were open. I’m saying that she moved her lips. I’m saying she looked at me. I’m saying that when she looked at me she said, ‘You wretch!’”

  As he said these words, which he had intended for Monsieur Ledru alone, and which could nonetheless be heard by everyone present, Jacquemin was a terrifying sight.

  “Oh, that’s a good one!” said the doctor with a laugh. “She spoke… a severed head spoke – well, well, well!”

  Jacquemin turned round.

  “She did speak, I’m telling you!” he retorted.

  “Well,” said the police superintendent, “that’s another reason for us to go to the scene where the crime was committed. Gendarmes, bring the prisoner along.”

  Jacquemin howled and writhed.

  “No!” he cried. “You can cut me into pieces if you want to, but I won’t go!”

  “Come, my friend,” said Monsieur Ledru. “If it is true that you have committed the terrible crime you accuse yourself of, this will already be an act of expiation. In any case,” he added in low tones to him, “resistance is useless: if you won’t come of your own free will, they’ll take you there by force.”

  “Oh!” said Jacquemin. “In that case, I’ll come. But promise me one thing, Monsieur Ledru.”

  “What’s that?”

  “During all the time we are in the cellar, you won’t leave me?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll let me hold your hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well then,” he said. “Let’s go!”

  And, taking a checked handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped his sweat-drenched forehead.

  Everyone set off for the Impasse des Sergents.

  The police superintendent and doctor walked ahead of the rest, then Jacquemin and the two gendarmes.

  Behind them came Monsieur Ledru and the two men who had appeared at his door when he did.

  And behind them swept the entire population, like a surging and noisy torrent, with me being carried along with it.

  After a walk of about a minute or so, we reached the Impasse des Sergents. This was a small alleyway on the left of the Grand-Rue which led down to a big dilapidated wooden gate, divided into two great halves with a little door cut into one of the two halves.

  This little door was hanging from a single hinge.

  Everything at first sight seemed calm in this house; a rose bush was flowering at the gate, and near the rose bush, on a stone bench, a big ginger cat was warming itself blissfully in the sunshine.

  On catching sight of all these people and hearing all the noise, it took fright, ran off and disappeared through the cellar window.