_In the Charnel House_
|THE recital which follows is the integral reproduction of what came out
of the mouth of Théophraste while plunged in hypnotic sleep, from the
moment that he submitted to the torture until he died. This part is of
the highest importance, not only for the experimental spirit of science,
but for history, for it destroys the legend of the wheel and shows to
us, in an indisputable fashion, the real death of Cartouche. I have
not found this part stored in the oaken chest, but in the papers and
statements which have been read in the Spiritual Congress of 1889. It is
all from M. Eliphaste’s hand.
Théophraste, or, rather, Cartouche in the power of M. Eliphaste, said,
“I do not know exactly what has happened to me. I have died, I
have hidden the document, and I have not met a single person. When
I re-opened my eyes (I had them closed then, and I was without doubt
falling from a feebleness that seemed like death) I did not recognize
at first a single one of the objects which surrounded me, and I did not
know the place into which they had carried me. Certainly I am no longer
in the torture room, nor in my dungeon in the tower of Montgomery. Am
I only in the Conciergerie again? I do not know. Where have they
imprisoned me after the torture, whilst waiting for my death? Into what
new prison have they thrown me? The first thing that I distinguish is
a bluish light which flitters across some heavy bars which are covered
with a grating. The moon visits me. It descends two or three steps. I
try to make a movement, but I cannot. I am an inert thing. My will does
not control my legs any longer, nor a single one of my muscles. It is as
if they had severed all relations between my will and my flesh. My brain
is no longer the master of seeing and comprehending. It is no longer
master of my actions. My poor legs! I feel them scattered around me. I
ought to have attained a degree of suffering—I kneel on one, as I have
explained, so that I shall not suffer more. But where am I?... The moon
descended two more steps, and then two more.... Oh! Oh! What is this
that the moon lights? It is an eye! A large eye! But the eye is empty;
that large eye is empty, and the other eye at its side—which is also
lighted now—is covered again with its green eyelid. I see the whole
head! It had no skin on the cheeks, but it had a beard on the chin. The
moon advances continuously. It halts gently in the holes of the nose. It
has two holes in the nose, two on a head.... They threw me, then, into
a common ditch! The moon shone on me.... I have two legs of a corpse
across my stomach. I recognize those steps now, and this ditch, and this
moon.... I am in the charnel house of Montfançon!... I am afraid!...
When I went up to the Cleopimetes by the Bue des Morts on junketing days
I used to look at that charnel house through the grating. I looked at
it with curiosity because I already saw my carrion there, but the idea
never occurred to me that when a carrion was there it could look from
the other side of the grating. And now my carrion sees! They threw me
there because they thought me dead, and I am buried alive, with the
corpses of the persons hanged. My fate is entirely miserable and
surpasses all that the imagination of men could invent! The saddest
reflections assail me, and if I ask myself first of all, by what
artifice of fate I am reduced to such an extremity, I am obliged to
confess that fate had nothing to do with this affair, but my pride only.
I should have continued quietly to be the ‘chief of all the robbers’
if I had remained alive. But La Belle Laittiere was right when she said
in the tavern of the Reine Margot that I was no longer fit to live. I
was pleased to play the potentate, and I ended by having a mania for
cutting up in pieces all those whom I suspected. My lieutenants ran more
danger in serving me than in deserting me. They betrayed me, and
that was logical. The beginning of my bad luck was the affair of the
Luxembourg. It should have opened my eyes, but my pride hindered me from
seeing clearly. This is a good time for these reflections, now that I am
in the charnel house.
“I am living in the charnel house with the dead, and for the first
time in my life I am afraid. But I am not afraid of the dead; I am
afraid of the living, for there is one near me alive! _I know that he
moves_. It is strange that at this moment, when I am upon the limit
of life and death, my senses perceive things that they ignored in
good health, and while my ears do not hear any more, on account of the
boiling water with which they were filled, I know there is some one
alive near me. Shall I be then not the only one to live in this domain
of putrefaction? I recall that the Vache-a-Paniers told me that the
Count de Charalais had caused some women who had resisted him to
be buried alive in the little ditches near the earthen mound of
Montfançon, but I, Cartouche, have no desire to think of such a crime.
I know very well that he bathes himself in the blood of young virgins
whom he had killed, to cure himself of a terrible disease which ate into
his flesh, but to bury women alive in ditches, that I do not believe.
And yet there is on my left side a woman who moves in one of the
ditches. I do not hear her, I feel her. The moon had lengthened its ray
of light as far as myself. Its ray is divided into three by the bars of
the grating. This makes three blue bands, by which I see, first of
all, the hole of the eye, and the three holes of the nose, and then a
wonderful mouth, which sticks its tongue out at me. Then there are three
bodies without heads. In the left side of the third body I distinguish
very plainly the putrefied wound in which was buried one of the rings
from which the headless one was hanged. He could not be hanged by the
neck, as he had no head. As I do not feel the woman at my side in the
ditch move any more, I collect my wits a little and I employ myself
in remembering the bodies which fill the charnel house. I begin to see
those which are entirely in the shadows. There are some! There are some
more sounds. They bring all the executed criminals here from the city.
There are some fresh ones, there are some decayed ones, there are
some well preserved ones, and all dry; but the others are not
presentable—they are falling into ruin. I will soon be a ruin like
them. However, all is not said, all is not finished, since I exist. Hope
is not dead. One finds hope even in the depths of a charnel house. Oh,
if I could move! The dead men are moving! I will end by moving also. I
have turned my eyes as far as it is possible in the right corner of the
orbit. I have seen that the corpse which is on my stomach does not
move its head. It slides on my stomach. I begin to be afraid again, not
because the dead one moved—for the charnel house belongs to the dead,
who do there what they wish, but because they pull the dead man by the
legs. I turn my eyes in the other corner. In the left corner I saw a
dead man’s leg in the air. This leg ought to be held by something,
pulled by something. The moon rises the length of the wall, with the leg
as far as one of the holes. And my eyes look so much to the left that
they see a living hand. The living hand which came out of the hole holds
the dead foot. _I feel, I know that there is a woman eating_ in the
ditch at the side. And now I cannot take my eyes from the hole for fear
of seeing the live hand come back and seeing it reach out. But I hope on
my salvation. I hope that the hand will not be long enough. Suddenly the
moon ceases to light up the hole, and I turn my eyes toward the grating
where the moonlight enters. Then I see between the moon and me a man
on the steps of the charnel house. A living man. I am saved perhaps. I
wished to cry out with joy, and I should have, perhaps, if the horror
of that which I feel and know all at once had not suddenly closed
my throat. _I feel, I know_, that that man has come to rob me of
my bones!... On account of the Courtesan Emilie!... The Regent is
remembered with the Duke of Orleans and Jean sans Peur.
“The Courtesan Emilie would not see him again. The devil meddled with
the affair, and carried a bone of Cartouche, who was beloved by Emilie,
to place in her bed between her chemise and her skin. I know this, my
eye has read this in the heart of the man who descends the steps of the
charnel house. He comes there to take my bones from me.... He lights a
lantern. He goes straight to my corpse. He does not see, then, that the
eyes of my corpse are moving!... He draws out from under his cloak—a
steel blade sharp and red in the rays from the lantern. He puts the
lantern down, he catches me by the shoulders and leaves me half sitting
against the wall, under the hole. He took my left hand with his left
hand, and with his right hand he buried the steel blade in my wrist.
I do not feel the blade in my wrist, but I see it. It turns around my
wrist. It is going to cut it, already it has detached it. Now I commence
to feel the blade! Life has come back into my wrist! Oh, yes, my
wrist!... Oh, yes, my wrist!... One last blow with the blade and my left
hand remains in his left hand. Oh, my poor wrist!... Yes! Yes! Yes! The
life! The life! The life of a nerve! I tell you that it sufficed for the
life of a nerve! Oh! Oh! Oh! The man howls and breaks his lantern with
a kick. My hand is partly in the man’s hand, but by a great miracle
of the ebbing life in my wrist, my hand, at the moment it leaves my arm,
has seized the hand of the man! And the man cannot rid himself of my
hand, which is stiffening in death, and which holds him! Ah! he moves
about, he shakes, he howls, he shakes my hand, which holds him—which
holds him. He pulls my hand with his right hand, but he cannot free
himself thus of the wrist of a dead man’s hand! I see him as he
flees from the charnel house, howling, bounding over the steps in the
moonlight like a fool, like a madman, gesticulating with my wrist.
“At this moment, above my head, a hand that I do not see, but which I
feel, comes out of the wall and takes me by the hair! It pulls me, pulls
me by the head. Oh, to cry out! To cry out! To cry out! But how can I
cry out with those living teeth staving me in the neck and throat?”
“And now, Cartouche, where art thou?”
“I go into the darkness radiant in death.”