Werewolf of Paris (19 page)

Early in the morning the general was ready for the coachman who called promptly. Off they drove at a rapid pace through the dark, silent streets, where only a few trucks piled with cabbages and carrots were distributing the scanty rations of the siege-period. The drivers nodded on their seats, while the patient donkeys and horses trotted on philosophically. Behind, a woman or a boy snored, muffled in many shawls against the morning chill. It was a shrunken picture of a scene the general had often witnessed when coming home from some late festivity, but at the end of a night, never at the beginning of a day.

The general sat erect, dry-eyed. He was fulfilling a vow, the execution of which, by the demands it placed upon him, was already helping him bear his load of grief. As he drove on, it suddenly occurred to him that he was making a strange man a party to his vow. A man who would henceforth suffer the same punishment he had meted out to himself. This idea, which would never have occurred to him in his former days, was now so insistent that he was driven to act. He called out to the coachman to stop. Then he stepped out and hoisted himself upon the box.

“Drive on,” he said.

The coachman, nonplussed, lifted the reins and let them slap down on the backs of his beasts. The night wind rushed past the two men. The general sat bolt upright. The coachman stiffened out of his natural droop.

“What is your name?” the general asked kindly.

“Jean Robert, at your service.”

“Are you married?” the general pursued.

“Yes, your excellency.”

“Any children?”

“Five, your excellency.”

“Girls?”

“Two.”

“Do you love them?”

“Ah, well, you see, monsieur, they're mine.”

“Of course.”

“And then they cost a pretty sum.”

“They do that,” the general confirmed and nodded his head.

“When they're tiny then of course they cost nothing for a while, but when you figure in the midwife…”

“To be sure.”

“They've got little mouths but big bellies and they're always hungry.”

“Strange, isn't it?” the general asked politely.

“Still, when they grow up and become men and women and marry, then you naturally expect them to take you in and take care of you in your old age.”

“No good child forgets that duty,” said the general sternly.

The coachman answered quickly: “I didn't forget my old folks, I can tell you that, but children nowadays are not what they used to be. No respect for their elders any more. And the newspapers full of crime stories.”

“Yes, the good old days,” said the general and sighed. “By the way,” he said, as if the thought that had been occupying his mind all the while had only just occurred to him, “it's a shame that you should have to get up so early to drive me out to the cemetery. Hereafter I shall get up an hour earlier and walk.”

The driver's face fell. His voice revealed his disappointment.

“Oh, not at all, your excellency. I am only too glad, too happy…”

“That's all right, my good man,” said the general and patted the coachman on the thigh. “You've a kind heart. But I have no business depriving you of the company of your children in the morning, simply because I have lost mine. I shall walk.” He sighed.

They jogged along through the darkness for a while in total silence.

“So it's over,” said the coachman, and he too sighed.

“What do you mean?” the general asked.

“I mean it's finished.”

“What's finished?”

“The good job, of which I had promised myself so much.”

“I don't understand.”

“We are paid very little, sir,” the coachman explained. “And here I had a little extra work every day, at an hour when no one else would have required me. Moreover, I arranged all the necessary details and promised the caretaker some money for opening the gates at this early hour.”

The general fell into a reverie.

As the carriage halted before the locked gate of the cemetery, the general, spurred by a sudden determination, handed the coachman his well-stuffed portefeuille.

“Here. In that you will find a good year's wages. Take it. It is yours. And I shall feel free to walk every morning and bear my grief alone.”

The driver could not think of any other way to express his thanks than to get down on his knees and, with a choking voice cut by strangling sobs, mumble words that were incomprehensible.

“Come, my friend,” said the general, to whom the scene was distasteful, “rise and let us be attending to business.”

“Holà! Holà!” the coachman screamed.

“What's the matter?”

“I must wake up the attendant who sleeps in the lodge there. He promised to open the door for us.”

“No, no. That won't do. Why should his sleep be disturbed? Besides, it is unseemly to shout in this place. Give me your hand and we shall soon be over the gate.” To facilitate the climb, which was not inconsiderable, the coachman backed his vehicle against the gate.

The hour was now a little short of six. A morning mist, whitish-gray and luminescent, announced a chill dawn. The wet, leafless trees rained onto the cobblestoned walks. The two men had hardly dropped onto the other side when a dog rushed past them, took the high fence at one bound, resting for a second on the upper bars, and was gone.

“What was that?” the general asked, startled.

“The caretaker's dog, I think,” said Jean Robert.

“My nerves are bad,” said the general. They walked down the path through the wall of fog, in which the white tombstones seemed to be only concreter portions of the general mist, roughly carved into the shape of figures hunched against the chill.

The feet of the walkers left the hard cobblestones and crunched along the pebbles of a narrower path—that crunch the only friendly sound in the dismal atmosphere. But even that friendly noise too often repeated grew ominous at last, took on an alarming note, seemed a threat. And from being the only sound in the cemetery, it came to be the only sound in the world. Crunch,
Crunch!
Crunch! The rhythms of the two walkers now agreed and reenforced each other, now broke and disagreed into a quarrel of crunches and then caught again, like dancers twirling in a complicated figure, like lovers kissing and bickering.

The general's ears were filled with the sound, his heart, his body, his mind were fastened on nothing but that crunching, crunching until his eyes caught sight of the grave of his child, a grave in strange disarray.

His eyes sought to penetrate the mist. His feet hastened on. O Lord! O God! Have pity on me! The white coffin lay on one side, the cover was wrenched off and broken. Of the body of his little girl there were left only horribly mangled remains, scattered over the ground. In the distance sounded the early cannonade of the besieging Prussian troops firing on the fort of Mont-Valérien.

Two hours later the caretaker discovered the terrible scene on his morning round. His dog, an old and silent beast that rarely barked, had run ahead and was excitedly growling and sniffing at the body of a man, General Darimon, and at the scattered remains of the body buried the previous day.

The police, notified, were at once busy on the case. Both the general's position in society and the gruesomeness of the crime demanded immediate attention. The general had been conveyed home where he lay in high fever unable to answer any questions, but the notorious cleverness of the Paris police rose to the occasion. In less than three hours, an officer and four men had set out, armed with a warrant, to a small street near the Porte Saint-Martin. They halted in front of a low two-story house of unappealing exterior. A central archway gave access to a dark staircase. Having posted his men, the officer, though timid by nature, felt compelled by his leadership to mount the steps, which he did, his pistol cocked. He took the further frequent precaution of stopping at almost every step and shouting out at the top of his voice: “In the name of the law!”

Finally he stood on a landing and knocked at the door that faced him. A slatternly woman with two small children clinging to her skirts and one held in the crook of her arm opened the door. With her free hand she brushed strands of black hair away from her dark, not unhandsome face. Then with a snarl of scorn on her mouth, she spoke:

“He's under the bed, the coward!”

The officer, his timidity turned to courage, even to actual bravado, before this display of greater timidity than his own, whistled to his men, who came bounding up at once.

“Drag him out!” and pointed to a large, unmade bed heaped high with feather mattresses and pillows.

What they dragged forth was obviously a man mad with terror. Clutched in his hand was a heavy billfold of red leather, bearing an elaborate coat of arms worked out in gold thread.

“Hm,” said the officer and snatched the case.

Four thousand francs in bills on the Banque de France.

“Well, well,” the officer laughed and said gaily, teasing the man who had now dropped on his knees.

“Yours, of course?”

“Mine!” cried the coachman wildly. “Mine, mine. Oh, don't take it away. We need it so badly. It's mine, I swear before all the saints of heaven. Don't you see how poor we are?”

“Of course it's yours, my friend. And did you think we'd be so cruel as to separate it from you? No, you must come, both together. Allons, mon cher croque-mort! En route!” The men prodded the coachman from his kneeling position.

Jean Robert threw a glance of despair at his wife: “And you, even you.”

She turned her head away. “Take him away. The thief! The dirty dog! I slaved for him to the bone and bore him five children, because I loved him, because I thought he'd never steal again.”

“Steal again,” said the officer and whistled. “So that's it, eh? When?”

“He was in prison at Besangon for three years,” she said. “Oh, how he swore by all the saints of heaven that he would never steal again if I but took him back! God, why was I fool enough to believe him? Now get out, all of you!”

After a visit to the Permanence, where his name and address, etc., were taken down, the coachman, Jean Robert, was led a short distance away, around great somber walls, wet with cold rain, to the Depot, where the prefecture of police was busy night and day. There Robert was left in a little cell to attempt to puzzle out the curious fate that had overtaken him. Rich suddenly and now poorer than ever. He had small success with his problem. But he did recall a thought given to him long ago by the priest who used to visit him in the prison at Besangon. There, when Robert would complain that he had played only a small share in the crime for which his associates had nevertheless received shorter sentences, this old healer of souls used to say: “My son, a guilty man must often bear the punishment that belongs to some other criminal. And so great is the sin of this world that sometimes even an innocent person must suffer; and so great is the virtue of this world that sometimes a sinful person will enjoy his life in peace. But these are exceptions. In general it is the great group of guilty people who suffer for the guilt of their kinds, while the great group of innocent are rewarded. The few exceptions must not blind us to the rule. And that rule is: if you transgress no moral law, you need never fear retribution.”

So often had this kind and benevolent priest assured him of this fact that Robert had memorized the words if not the import. Now, however, he saw their meaning: If you violate no law, if you commit not the slightest infraction of rules, you are absolutely safe. It is the borderline people, those who have been neither great criminals nor great saints, who have reason to complain of the severity of justice, for it often strikes them harder than they deserve. “My son,” the priest used to warn Robert, “avoid even the appearance of sin.”

Robert was forcibly reminded of this caution when an officer came to lead him before the juge d'instruction, in a small chamber nearby. A few benches, a special chair for himself, a greffier busy writing: “Par devant nous, Gustave Le Verrier, juge d'instruction, sont comparus: Jean Robert, cocher attaché aux services des pompes funèbres,” etc., although Gustave Le Verrier, the examining judge, was as yet nowhere to be seen.

When he came, however, there was no escaping seeing him. He was immense. He was mountainous. His ample robes swayed about his body with the grand freedom and magnificent folds of stage curtains. His enormous roseate face, with its light beard through which the pink of his flesh shone, was wreathed in smiles. He looked upon the prisoner with such benevolence that the sun of hope rose in his dark interior.

“Quel temps, quel temps affreux,” he muttered, but in a booming voice, and sought the prisoner's eyes for confirmation.

And when Robert did not know what to do or say, the judge leaned forward, his gigantic face came nearer to Robert, its cavernous mouth, lined with lustrous teeth and rosy gums on which the saliva sparkled, seemed to exhale an immense: “W E L L? And you have nothing to say?” until Robert gasped:

“Oui, monsieur le juge…rotten weather, rotten weather, indeed!”

Then the great body withdrew, the wreath of smiles came forth again and the fat lips trumpeted, while the little glittering eyes buried in fat held the prisoner: “But we're due for a change,” with a deprecating gesture of his white, sausage-like fingers. A pronouncement which Robert enthusiastically seconded.

After some preliminary formalities and some questions addressed to the commissionaire and to an austere gentleman who was the conservateur of the cemetery (Robert knew him from a distance), the judge demanded of the culprit:

“Do you not know Article Thirty-seven of Heading Seven?”

“No, monsieur.” Robert trembled.

“What! You are a coachman in the funeral service and do not know that private hiring of coachmen is forbidden?”