The Bloody Doll: The Sublime Adventure of Benedict Masson

prosecution

I

Behind The Curtains

Benedict Masson owned a small shop on a corner of one of the more remote, peaceful and decaying streets of the Isle de Saint-Louis in the middle of the river Seine. He was a master bookbinder by trade but, as a sideline to his vocation, he also ran a small stationery business, offering picture postcards for sale. The outmoded quarter of the city in which he lived seemed, like a small provincial town hidden in the centre of the capital, to be defended from the eternal, bacchanalian debauch that one might call Parisian life by the belt of water that surrounded it.

This street, the name of which has long since been changed (it used to be called the rue du Saint-Sacrament-en-L’Isle), rested in the shadows of several old mansions that, at times, during the last two centuries, had served as meeting places for all the great minds of Paris. It was here that there opened (or should that really be half-opened?) half a dozen shops, a few market stalls, and a modest watchmaker’s workshop. All of them traded in the exorbitant pretence that, on this street, one could maintain the barest semblance of a living. It was in this same insignificant street, inhabited by our bookbinder, in this quarter of the city that seemed to have existed only in its own memories that there began one of the most prodigious adventures of our epoch or, indeed, of any epoch: the most sublime adventure! Sublime is what the adventure of Benedict Masson certainly was, because it marked an important Date (worthy of a capital D!) in the history of humanity; but that sublime adventure was, at the same time, full of horror… and Paris, the city that experienced all that horror, still shudders at the memory of it all.

In order to make a proper judgement, we shall have to follow this story back to its origin. So let’s cross the Pont Marie and look around us. If we admit that life is not solely to be explained in terms of its most vigorous phases, we can envisage the truth of the idea that here, on the Isle de Saint-Louis, more than in any other district of the city, there has always been an intense kind of life, albeit one strictly limited to the intellectual domain. Without even evoking the distant shadows of Voltaire and Madame Du Châtelet, painters, poets, and writers have elected to dwell here since time immemorial. George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Daubigny, Corot, Daumier all pitched their tents for a short time. On the corner of the rue Le Regrattier (the Street of the Peddler), which used to be called the rue de la Femme-sans-Tête (the Street of the Headless Woman), in the depths of a niche, there stands the statue of a mutilated virgin that has witnessed the entire parade of these Pleaides of the Romantic movement. Our Benedict Masson, who was not only an artistic bookbinder, but also a poet – and a strange poet at that, at times prey to strange disorders – claimed to live in the same house where, once, the author of the Flowers of Evil had lived and suffered.

Naturally he conceived, in his humility as a fellow writer of verse, a singular pride in this.

But we will never get to know Benedict Masson very well unless we enter his life. Like all those who believe themselves to be driven by some demon of superiority, it delighted him to lavish all his attention upon an existence which, around the time of these events (that took place when Benedict was thirty-five years old), apparently had been spent in dull monotony. I emphasize the term apparently because many might contend that the ‘Memoirs’ he recorded, day by day, had been drawn up with the sole purpose of making the reader believe in the innocence of a monster who lived in perpetual fear that his crimes would be discovered.

Indeed, those who have believed this may have had some conceivable excuse and perhaps many good reasons to do so, but were they right to do so? We shall see, presently. For my part, I have always been struck by the tone of sincerity that one finds in the memoirs of Benedict Masson, and especially in their more emotionally disordered passages.

On the date that preoccupies us, we are at the end of May. It has been a hot day; the spring this year has been one of the earliest that has been witnessed in Paris for a long time. It is nine in the evening; in this corner of the deserted street, slowly drowning in shadows, the last noise that is heard is the slamming shut of the door to the shop owned by Mademoiselle Barescat, a haberdasher, that she locks after closing the shutters…

The only lights still shining onto the street came out of two windows; one belonged to the bookbinder, the other to the watchmaker.

The shop belonging to Benedict Masson faced onto the front of the property owned by old Norbert, who was rarely seen leaving his workshop, except on Sunday to go to mass at the church of Saint-Louis-en-l’lsle, in the company of his daughter and his nephew.

The rest of the time, he remained hidden behind his green serge curtains, bent over his tools and instruments, labouring most mysteriously over the timepieces which, in that part of the city at least, had made him something of a celebrity. He had invented a kind of regulator mechanism that should have made him a fortune but which, for the moment, had attracted nothing but the disdain of businessmen. From that moment he seemed simply to labour for art’s sake, in pursuit of some chimera or other, that had led many others before him to lose their reason.

His fellow watchmakers, with whom he had long since severed all contact, spoke of him with a kind of dismayed condescension; the more knowledgeable among them spoke of a new kind of ‘mechanical escapement,’ an exception to all the known laws of mechanics, thanks to which the unfortunate fool had claimed to have achieved perpetual motion. What more could be said about that?

In the meantime, on display in his shop window was a singularly curious example of the watchmaker’s craft, with external gears arrayed in hitherto unknown configurations.

It had, among other bizarre components, square wheels.

However, the inhabitants of the Isle claimed that it had been in motion for years, and that it had never been rewound.

Mademoiselle Barescat, the haberdasher, would swear hands in the fire, to the certainty of this. In short, in the spaces between the Pont Marie and the Pont Saint-Louis, which connected the Isle to the city, old Norbert was seen as a slightly diabolical character.

That evening, from behind his own drawn curtains, Benedict Masson only had eyes for the watchmaker’s workshop, and we might as well say at once that it was not the apparition of old Norbert’s labours that made him forget his vocation. The watchmaker’s daughter had entered the workshop.

Now let us skim through the somewhat disordered memoirs of Benedict Masson. We will be informed immediately about a great many things.

There she is, wrote Benedict in his memoirs, "there she is, as I had always imagined her, the one for whom I would squander my entire life; there is the one whom God has created for a virile heart that is avid for beauty and mystery. In truth, there is nothing more beautiful or mysterious in the world than this girl, called Christine. There is nothing more serene in the world. What could there be that is more mysterious, more serene, deeper and more unfathomable? These breaking waves in their fury excite me, but I am horrified at the sight of a calm sea. The calm eyes of this Christine frighten me and draw me in. I could lose myself in such eyes, they are an abyss.

"But there are fools who don’t understand any of this… Who could understand Christine? Not that old scatterbrain of a watchmaker she calls ‘Father,’ that’s for sure, always bending over his square wheels, who has probably not even noticed his daughter for years; and certainly not Jacques, that imbecile cousin and fiancé of hers – he is a phenomenon at the Medical School: an exceptional character, it seems, who is some kind of instructor, a prosector who demonstrates the techniques for the dissection of cadavers to the Faculty. A high-class butcher, a gallant young man, who would be hung, drawn and quartered for the sake of his beloved; who passes all the time that he does not devote to the operating theatre in gazing at her, but never really sees her! There are many more like him, who watch her just because she is beautiful; but I am the only one who sees her for what she really is: I, Benedict Masson!

"This girl has nothing in common with the flapping brood of today: she has the stature and the grace of an Archduchess, a haughty air that is perhaps a little too apparent, the neckline of a goddess, over which her hair is curled and coiled with tints of copper. When she suspends the hat that she has just taken off on a coat-hanger, at that moment, the curve of her body and the movement of her arm give her the image of a Capitoline statue. Comparisons fail me here, because I have never seen a more beautiful Diana anywhere. Just to watch how her legs, her elegant legs, move – the very thought of which sets my entire existence aflame – just to watch the way she walks makes me long to kiss her footprints.

"As for the face, it is a perfect oval; but fortunately the nose has a slight curvature to it that diminishes the coldness of that perfect symmetry; the mouth is an image of angelic purity, the lips not too full. Here is a living ideal of beauty, this beautiful girl, who is a sculptress, who gives lessons in modelling for a living and who should need no other model than herself. But all of this is there for the whole world to see. What the world cannot see is that there is, in the abyss of her calm and fatal gaze, in the depths of those eyes of hers – I tell you – an immense bewilderment, prodigious and unceasing: that she, who was built for Mount Olympus, should have been left to rot in the pit of that miserable little shop on the Isle de Saint-Louis, somewhere between a watchmaker and a sawbones! Nevertheless, she seems truly to love her father and her cousin, whom they say she will marry some day (and, that being said, I hope, on the last day possible: preferably never). Ah! Misery! How does it not drive her to suicide? It is because she embodies both beauty and virtue at the same time. She is as magnificent as a pagan statue, wiser than an image from a missal! Ah, there is nothing more that can be said! She is the Madonna of the Isle de Saint-Louis, some might have you believe..! Well, then, listen to this! This is what I saw this evening…

"Old Norbert, his daughter and his nephew do not live in the same street as I do. They don’t live in their shop. They live in a small tower that is separated from the shop by a garden. I have never been inside the place. With the exception of a cleaning woman who goes there in the morning, nobody ever enters there. However, I have found a way to see into the tower. Yes, that night, as soon as the gaslights were snuffed out in the street, I climbed up a stepladder into the attic of the house in which I live and, peeping through a skylight, I found that I could see inside!

The tower has two floors… the second floor has been transformed into a sort of atelier, with huge windows, which is accessed from the outside by a wooden staircase. The watchmaker and his nephew go to bed on the first floor, Christine sleeps in the atelier. I watched her in the clear, dazzling moonlight. For over an hour, Christine leaned against the banister which runs all along the edge of the tower, forming a balcony. What a vision for a poet and a lover! Suddenly, she quit the balcony, and with a furtive step, descended part of the staircase. There she stopped, and listened at the door of the apartment of her father and her fiancé. Finally, she climbed back up the staircase, taking great care to muffle her footsteps; she entered the workshop, headed towards an enormous antique cabinet that took up most of the floor, took a key out of her pocket, and opened its door. And I saw that out of the cabinet there came a man, whom she kissed. And then I saw no more because, swiftly, she shut the patio window and closed the curtains.

II

Where Benedict Masson Discovers That There Are More Surprises In Store

The kind of night that I then passed is easy to imagine! In Christine’s eyes, I had seen a great many things, but could not have foreseen that: a man hidden in an antique cabinet!

Decidedly I will never be more than a mere poet, which is the poorest thing that exists in this world. You were everything to me, my love; for you my soul languished – for you alone: an isle of green in the sea – a fountain and an altar garlanded in fruits and enchanted flowers! – But I had not expected to see that: the man in the cabinet! – Now the golden cup is shattered! Let the death bell toll! Yet another saintly soul floats upon the black tide!… One more lost at sea!… Ah, the daughters of Satan!

Very well, I can tell you, that insomniac night was not only filled with despair, and rage against my inborn stupidity, but also with a species of diabolical joy, and perhaps you will immediately comprehend this complex sentiment in its entirety. I adored Christine, not just as an angel, for whom I will mourn for my entire life, but as a woman, as the most beautiful of all women… and therein lay my torture: because this woman, I knew, would never want to be with me, would never love me, would never allow me to touch her; but, that being understood, the ache of this absolute truth was doubled in its atrocity by the idea that the sawbones student across the way, the model dissector-prosector, the carpenter of surgery, would capture this divine jewel and, some fine morning, slip a ring on her finger, then go in search of the mayor to witness the marriage certificate.

I could have killed the man in the closet, I could have cut him down like a dog, if the opportunity had presented itself; but, all the same, I feel less hatred for him than for that other one, because at least he avenges me… and how!

And it is at this point that I’ll tell you why I have no hope of living by Christine’s side, in three words: I am ugly!

It’s not that the cousin is handsome, either: he is mediocre, which is something, in my eyes, that is much worse… This Jacques – I have watched him closely as he passes by my window – is rather thick- set, a little short, twenty-eight years old, myopic, with a pale forehead, that’s too high, prominent cheekbones, a wholesome mouth, that’s too big, surrounded by a short blonde beard which appears to be as thin and soft as the hair of a little child; when he takes off his hat, he reveals a skull that has already been denuded of much of its hair by his studies. Behold, your hero! He’s not much but, in the end, he is not a monster and, with his title from the Faculty, he will make a tolerable husband of sorts – but I… I am a monster..! I am a terrible deformity. What makes me say terrible? Because all women run away from me!

Is there anything in this world that could be more terrible than that? Never have my arms embraced a woman! They could not!

The idea that I could embrace them, the mere idea horrifies them! Everything is as I say… I exaggerate nothing..! Ah!

Misery! Misery! as someone once said: A life of fire boils in my veins! Every woman appears to me to be the gift of an entire world… I hear a thousand nightingales. At the banquet of life, I could devour all of the elephants of Hindustan and use the spire of the Cathedral of Strasbourg for a toothpick! Life is the supreme Good! But I… I cannot live..!

Why should this awful sheath surround my brain? Why this asymmetry between the two sides of my face… (my face! )... why this sinister overhanging of the eyebrows, this abrupt projection of the inferior mandible? Why all this chaos? ‘The Man who Laughs’ [1] was very happy in comparison. At least he was laughing! He laughed for others..! But as for me, what am I for the others? Neither the man who laughs, nor the one who cries! My face is a dreadful enigma.

Am I going to confess to something that might drag me down, further than I wanted to go..?

By my faith! In the state of mind that I’m in tonight, what do I have to fear? What do I have to dread? The worst could be upon me, the most extraordinary adventure could come to me, and still it would not surpass all that has happened tonight..! I have no more than a single reason to live: to look at Christine! But since I saw her kissing a man she keeps hidden in a cabinet, as the sailors say: God help me! It has not been for a very long time that I have viewed myself to be as ugly as this. A mere matter of two years ago, I imagined to myself that my apparition was not necessarily an object of terror for everyone. I knew all-too-well, alas, that I would never be pleasing to women, but I still had my illusions… A refugee in my ivory tower, standing in front of my mirror, I took to describing my ugliness as sublime. I studied my profile, my three-quarter face, I sometimes pulled faces, I tried different ways of styling my hair, I searched for models of ugliness with which it would not be disgraceful to be compared…at length, I came to tell myself, for example, that I was not a great deal uglier than Verlaine…who had been loved, and who knew what love was, absolute love – assuming that one can believe him when he writes:

‘Ah! those heydays of a joy inexpressible, when we joined our mouths!… how blue were the skies, how high our hopes grew! – The skies turned black: then, defeated, hope flew,’ etc. [2]

Ah, the voice of Verlaine! Peace upon his ashes: he is my ideal, the greatest poet..!

Still, I thought to myself: if he had been loved, it had nothing to do with his appearance, that’s for sure! It can be postulated, therefore, that there are women who allow themselves to be seduced, in dreaming, by the dream of a poet, who hides a divine liqueur in a crude vase that was created, one cruel day, by an ironic and unmotherly nature.

The whole thing depended on having the opportunity to make myself understood! Here’s how I went about creating this opportunity...

At the last annual exhibition of master bookbinders, I had achieved a great success. My Romantic bindings had obtained a first prize. Shortly afterwards, I placed a column in the newspapers, advertising for female students. I did not have to wait for long. The next day, a young girl presented herself on my doorstep: one Mademoiselle Henriette Havard.

Charming and obviously highly intelligent, she told me that, since she had lost both her parents, she was dependent on an elderly aunt, and wanted to earn her own living. She proposed to become both my student and my employee. The business was concluded quickly. I owned a little villa in the suburbs of Paris, on the edge of a wood, a few yards away from a pond in a quite lonely, deserted place. That being said, I like solitude, and I imagined without difficulty that I would like it even more in the company of this pretty girl. It was there, moreover, that I worked all summer. I made an appointment to meet Henriette there the next day.

That night, while we spoke, I had hidden my face in the half-light. I realized that, the following day, in the countryside, she would be able to see it in the full light of day. She saw it all right, but I never saw her again!... I waited for her for three days. She had given me the address of her aunt. I went to see this aunt and asked her for news of her niece, but she answered me in a tone, bordering on indifference, that she had not seen her either. I did not insist. I did not want to give the impression that I was any more worried than she was.

In the meantime, another female student came to introduce herself, a certain Madame Claire Thomassin, a widow, who was still young and very pretty. She stayed with me for one day… This time, about forty-eight hours later, a gentleman, about fifty years old, came asking questions about Madame Claire. I replied that I had heard no news of her since she left my house. He became very sad.

Well, I had another four female students in total… One stayed for five days, two others no more than twenty-four hours, and the last one stayed for three weeks. With her, I actually believed that the miracle would be accomplished: but, at the last moment, she vanished like all the others.

In this last case, I wanted to feel that my conscience was clear, so I carried out an investigation… I could not find out, and, in fact, no-one could find what had become of her! This time, I do not deny that an immense, cold anguish began to take hold of me… I dared not go any further with my enquiry, fearing to learn that the other three had also disappeared! Three had disappeared, as far as I knew, and that was enough..!

That women flee from me because I am so ugly, I could understand; but the reason they flee me as far as the end of the world, that they flee until they disappear, that they flee as far as suicide, was beyond me! Can you imagine that? Can you imagine where these hypotheses might lead..? Put yourself in my place! It’s horrible..! Even if, for that reason, or for another six reasons, they were all suicides, their corpses would have been found; but no trace of them has been found, either dead or alive!

Dear God! I speak as if I were certain of the fate of the three others..! Well, yes: deep down, I believe that the same mystery connects all six of them…the same mystery of death..! And luckily, no-one suspects this as much as I do..!

Luckily..! This is so immense and so absurd that I don’t want to think about it any more..! I have found that a good way to forget about it is to immerse myself in the vision and the love of Christine..! And now…

Now, my eyes do not stray from the watchmaker’s front door… It is Sunday today, she will come out soon, when it’s time to go to mass, walking in between her father and the sawbones student… There she is! With her grand airs of an archduchess, the face of the Madonna, and the serene gaze.

Sawbones student carries her hymn book… Ah, I too would happily go to confession for her..! But today I do not follow them..! I remain hidden behind my curtains… I shall wait, I shall watch, and surely I shall see that man from last night come out of his hiding place! I will see her secret lover! And then we shall decide what to do!

I have been waiting for him for a half hour and still nothing has happened. Today is Sunday, and the shop presents a closed wooden front. All of the shutters have been fastened, even the one that covers the glass door. And the door does not open..! What is he waiting for..? The street is deserted, quite deserted… and he can only escape through that door. This part of the building, inhabited by this strange family, is constructed in such a way that it offers no other exit than the one that I am watching. In truth, they live there as if locked inside, as if in a prison, and the garden