Whosoever witnesses this kind of anguish witnesses the extreme of human
misfortune.
Dark zones are these. Baleful night bursts and spreads o’er them. Evil
accumulated dissolves in misfortune upon them, they are swept with
blasts of despair by the tempest of fatalities, there a downpour of
trials and sorrows streams upon dishevelled heads in the darkness;
squalls, hail, a hurricane of distress, swirl and whirl back and forth
athwart them; it rains, rains without cease: it rains horror, it rains
vice, it rains crime, it rains the blackness of night; yet we must
explore this obscurity, and in the sombre storm the mind essays a
difficult flight, the flight of a wet bird, as it were.
There is always a vague, spectral dread in these low regions where
hell penetrates; they are so little in the human order and so
disproportionate that they create phantoms. It is hardly surprising,
therefore, that a legend should be connected with this sinister bouquet
offered by Bicêtre to La Salpêtrière or by La Force to Saint Lazare; it
is related at night in the cells and wards after the keepers have gone
their rounds.
It was shortly after the murder of the money-changer Joseph. A bouquet
was sent from La Force to a woman’s prison, Saint Lazare or the
Madelonnettes. In this bouquet was a sprig of white lilac which one of
the women prisoners selected.
A month or two elapsed; the woman was released from prison. She was
extremely enamoured, through the white lilac, of the unknown master she
had given to herself. She began to perform for him her strange function
of sister, mother, and mystic spouse, ignorant of his name, knowing only
his prison number. All her miserable savings, religiously deposited
with the clerk of the prison, went to this man. In order the better to
affiance herself to him, she took advantage of the advent of spring to
cull a sprig of real lilac in the fields. This sprig of lilac, attached
by a piece of sky-blue ribbon to the head of his bed, formed a pendant
to a sprig of consecrated box, an ornament which these poor desolate
alcoves never lack. The lilac withered thus.
This woman, like all Paris, had heard of the affair of the Palais-Royal
and of the two Italians, Malagutti and Ratta, arrested for the murder of
the money-changer.
She thought little about the tragedy, which did not concern her, and
lived only in her white lilac. This lilac was all in all to her; she
thought only of doing her “duty” to it.
One bright, sunny day she was seated in her room, sewing some garment or
other for her sorry evening toilet. Now and then she looked up from
her work at the lilac that hung at the head of the bed. At one of these
moments while her gaze was fixed upon the sprig of faded flower the
clock struck four.
Then she fancied she saw an extraordinary thing.
A sort of crimson pearl oozed from the extremity of the stalk of the
flower, grew larger, and dripped on to the white sheet of the bed.
It was a spot of blood.
That day, at that very hour, Ratta and Malagutti were executed.
It was evident that the white lilac was one of these two. But which one?
The hapless girl became insane and had to be confined in La Salpêtrière.
She died there. From morn to night, and from night to morn, she would
gibber: “I am Mme. Ratta-Malagutti.”
Thus are these sombre hearts.