A Book of Scoundrels

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And while his conduct at Laval was unimpeachable, he always proved a
nice susceptibility in his return. A cab carried him within a discreet
distance of his home, whence, having exchanged the grey for the more
sober black, he would tramp on foot, and thus creep in tranquil and
unobserved. But simple as it is to enjoy, enjoyment must still be
purchased, and the Abbe was never guilty of a meanness. The less guilty
scheme was speedily staled, and then it was that the Abbe bethought him
of murder.

His first victim was the widow Bourdais, who pursued the honest calling
of a florist at Laval. Already the curate was on those terms of intimacy
which unite the robber with the robbed; for some months earlier he had
imposed a forced loan of sixty francs upon his victim. But on the 15th
of July 1893, he left Entrammes, resolved upon a serious measure. The
black valise was in his hand, as he set forth upon the arid, windy road.
Before he reached Laval he had made the accustomed transformation, and
it was no priest, but a layman, doucely dressed in grey, that awaited
Mme. Bourdais' return from the flower-market. He entered the shop with
the coolness of a friend, and retreated to the door of the parlour when
two girls came to make a purchase. No sooner had the widow joined him
than he cut her throat, and, with the ferocity of the beast who loves
blood as well as plunder, inflicted some forty wounds upon her withered
frame. His escape was simple and dignified; he called the cabman, who
knew him well, and who knew, moreover, what was required of him; and
the priest was snugly in bed, though perhaps exhausted with blood and
pleasure, when the news of the murder followed him to his village.

Next day the crime was common gossip, and the Abbe's friends took
counsel with him. One there was astonished that the culprit remained
undiscovered. 'But why should you marvel?' said Bruneau. 'I could kill
you and your wife at your own chimney-corner without a soul knowing. Had
I taken to evil courses instead of to good I should have been a terrible
assassin.' There is a touch of the pride which De Quincey attributes
to Williams in this boastfulness, and throughout the parallel is
irresistible. Williams, however, was the better dandy; he put on a
dress-coat and patent-leather pumps because the dignity of his work
demanded a fitting costume. And Bruneau wore the grey suit not without
a hope of disguise. Yet you like to think that the Abbe looked
complacently upon his valise, and had forethought for the cut of his
professional coat; and if he be not in the first flight of artistry,
remember his provincial upbringing, and furnish the proper excuse.

Meanwhile the scandal of the murdered widow passed into forgetfulness,
and the Abbe was still impoverished. Already he had robbed his vicar,
and the suspicion of the Abbe Fricot led on to the final and the
detected crime. Now Fricot had noted the loss of money and of bonds, and
though he refrained from exposure he had confessed to a knowledge of
the criminal. M. Bruneau was naturally sensitive to suspicion, and he
determined upon the immediate removal of this danger to his peace. On
January 2, 1894, M. Fricot returned to supper after administering the
extreme unction to a parishioner. While the meal was preparing, he
went into his garden in sabots and bareheaded, and never again was seen
alive. The supper cooled, the vicar was still absent; the murderer,
hungry with his toil, ate not only his own, but his victim's share of
the food, grimly hinting that Fricot would not come back. Suicide was
dreamed of, murder hinted; up and down the village was the search made,
and none was more zealous than the distressed curate.

At last a peasant discovered some blocks of wood in the well, and before
long blood-stains revealed themselves on the masonry. Speedily was the
body recovered, disfigured and battered beyond recognition, and the
voice of the village went up in denunciation of the Abbe Bruneau.
Immunity had made the culprit callous, and in a few hours suspicion
became certainty. A bleeding nose was the lame explanation given for
the stains which were on his clothes, on the table, on the keys of
his harmonium. A quaint and characteristic folly was it that drove the
murderer straight to the solace of his religion. You picture him, hot
and red-handed from murder, soothing his battered conscience with some
devilish Requiem for the unshrived soul he had just parted from its
broken body, and leaving upon the harmonium the ineradicable traces of
his guilt. Thus he lived, poised between murder and the Church, spending
upon the vulgar dissipation of a Breton village the blood and money of
his foolish victims. But for him 'les tavernes et les filles' of Laval
meant a veritable paradise, and his sojourn in the country is proof
enough of a limited cunning. Had he been more richly endowed, Paris had
been the theatre of his crimes. As it is, he goes down to posterity as
the Man in the Grey Suit, and the best friend the cabmen of Laval ever
knew. Them, indeed, he left inconsolable.




MONSIEUR L'ABBE


The childhood of the Abbe Rosselot is as secret as his origin, and no
man may know whether Belfort or Bavaria smiled upon his innocence. A
like mystery enshrouds his early manhood, and the malice of his foes,
who are legion, denounces him for a Jesuit of Innsbruck. But since he
has lived within the eye of the world his villainies have been revealed
as clearly as his attainments, and history provides him no other rival
in the corruption of youth than the infamous Thwackum.

It is not every scholar's ambition to teach the elements, and Rosselot
adopted his modest calling as a cloak of crime. No sooner was he
installed in a mansion than he became the mansion's master, and
henceforth he ruled his employer's domain with the tyrannical severity
of a Grand Inquisitor. His soul wrapped in the triple brass of
arrogance, he even dared to lay his hands upon food before his betters
were served; and presently, emboldened by success, he would order the
dinners, reproach the cook with a too lavish use of condiments, and
descend with insolent expostulation into the kitchen. In a week he had
opened the cupboards upon a dozen skeletons, and made them rattle their
rickety bones up and down the draughty staircases, until the inmates
shivered with horror and the terrified neighbours fled the haunted
castle as a lazar-house. Once in possession of a family secret, he felt
himself secure, and henceforth he was free to browbeat his employer and
to flog his pupil to the satisfaction of his waspish nature. Moreover,
he was endowed with all the insight and effrontery of a trained
journalist. So sedulous was he in his search after the truth, that
neither man nor woman could deny him confidence. And, as vinegar flowed
in his veins for blood, it was his merry sport to set wife against
husband and children against father. Not even were the servants
safe from his watchful inquiry, and housemaids and governesses alike
entrusted their hopes and fears to his malicious keeping. And when the
house had retired to rest, with what a sinister delight did he chuckle
over the frailties and infamies, a guilty knowledge of which he had
dragged from many an unwilling sinner! To oust him, when installed, was
a plain impossibility, for this wringer of hearts was only too glib
in the surrender of another's scandal; and as he accepted the last
scurrility with Christian resignation, his unfortunate employer could
but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this
smiling, demoniacal tutor.

But a too villainous curiosity was not the Abbe's capital sin.

Not only did he entertain his leisure with wrecking the happiness of a
united family, but he was an enemy open and declared of France. It
was his amiable pastime at the dinner-table, when he had first helped
himself to such delicacies as tempted his dainty palate, to pronounce
a pompous eulogy upon the German Emperor. France, he would say with an
exultant smile, is a pays pourri, which exists merely to be the football
of Prussia. She has but one hope of salvation--still the monster
speaks--and that is to fall into the benign occupation of a vigorous
race. Once upon a time--the infamy is scarce credible--he was conducting
his young charges past a town-hall, over the lintel of whose door
glittered those proud initials 'R. F.' 'What do they stand for?' asked
this demon Barlow. And when the patriotic Tommy hesitated for an answer,
the preceptor exclaimed with ineffable contempt, 'Race de fous'! It is
no wonder, then, that this foe of his fatherland feared to receive a
letter openly addressed; rather he would slink out under cover of night
and seek his correspondence at the poste restante, like a guilty lover
or a British tourist.

The Chateau de Presles was built for his reception. It was haunted by a
secret, which none dare murmur in the remotest garret. There was no more
than a whisper of murder in the air, but the Marquis shuddered when his
wife's eye frowned upon him. True, the miserable Menaldo had disappeared
from his seminary ten years since, but threats of disclosure were
uttered continually, and respectability might only be purchased by a
profound silence. Here was the Abbe's most splendid opportunity, and he
seized it with all the eagerness of a greedy temperament. The Marquise,
a wealthy peasant, who was rather at home on the wild hill-side than in
her stately castle, became an instant prey to his devilish intrigue.
The governess, an antic old maid of fifty-seven, whose conversation was
designed to bring a blush to the cheek of the most hardened dragoon,
was immediately on terms of so frank an intimacy that she flung bread
pellets at him across the table, and joyously proposed, if we may
believe the priest on his oath, to set up housekeeping with him, that
they might save expense. Two high-spirited boys were always at hand to
encourage his taste for flogging, and had it not been for the Marquis,
the Abbe's cup would have been full to overflowing. But the Marquis
loved not the lean, ogling instructor of his sons, and presently began
to assail him with all the abuse of which he was master. He charged the
Abbe with unspeakable villainy; salop and saligaud were the terms in
which he would habitually refer to him. He knew the rascal for a spy,
and no modesty restrained him from proclaiming his knowledge. But
whatever insults were thrown at the Abbe he received with a grin
complacent as Shylock's, for was he not conscious that when he liked the
pound of flesh was his own!

With a fiend's duplicity he laid his plans of ruin and death. The
Marquise, swayed to his will, received him secretly in the blue room
(whose very colour suggests a guilty intrigue), though never, upon
the oath of an Abbe, when the key was turned in the lock. A journey to
Switzerland had freed him from the haunting suspicion of the Marquis,
and at last he might compel the wife to denounce her husband as
a murderer. The terrified woman drew the indictment at the Abbe's
dictation, and when her husband returned to St. Amand he was instantly
thrust into prison. Nothing remained but to cajole the sons into an
expressed hatred of their father, and the last enormity was committed by
a masterpiece of cunning. 'Your father's one chance of escape,' argued
this villain in a cassock, 'is to be proved an inhuman ruffian.
Swear that he beat you unmercifully and you will save him from the
guillotine.' All the dupes learned their lesson with a certainty which
reflects infinite credit upon the Abbe's method of instruction.

For once in his life the Abbe had been moved by greed as well as by
villainy. His early exploits had no worse motive than the satisfaction
of an inhuman lust for cruelty and destruction. But the Marquise was
rich, and when once her husband's head were off, might not the Abbe reap
his share of the gathered harvest? The stakes were high, but the game
was worth the playing, and Rosselot played it with spirit and energy
unto the last card. His appearance in court is ever memorable, and as
his ferret eyes glinted through glass at the President, he seemed the
villain of some Middle Age Romance. His head, poised upon a lean, bony
frame, was embellished with a nose thin and sharp as the blade of a
knife; his tightly compressed lips were an indication of the rascal's
determination. 'Long as a day in Lent'--that is how a spectator
described him; and if ever a sinister nature glared through a sinister
figure, the Abbe's character was revealed before he parted his lips in
speech. Unmoved he stood and immovable; he treated the imprecations of
the Marquis with a cold disdain; as the burden of proof grew heavy on
his back, he shrugged his shoulders in weary indifference. He told his
monstrous story with a cynical contempt, which has scarce its equal in
the history of crime; and priest, as he was, he proved that he did
not yield to the Marquis himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his
vocabulary. He brought charges against the weird world of Presles with
an insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim. He described
the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in a slang which
would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer than upon a pious Abbe.
And, his story ended, he leered at the Court with the satisfaction of
one who had discharged a fearsome duty.

But his rascality overshot its mark; the Marquise, obedient to his
priestly casuistry, displayed too fierce a zeal in the execution of his
commands. And he took to flight, hoping to lose in the larger world of
Paris the notoriety which his prowess won him among the poor despised
Berrichons. He left behind for our consolation a snatch of philosophy
which helps to explain his last and greatest achievement. 'Those who
have money exist only to be fleeced.' Thus he spake with a reckless
revelation of self. Yet the mystery of his being is still unpierced. He
is traitor, schemer, spy; but is he an Abbe? Perhaps not. At any rate,
he once attended the 'Messe des Morts,' and was heard to mumble a
'Credo,' which, as every good Catholic remembers, has no place in that
solemn service.


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University Press