The Double Life

At last the howling became groaning, and eventually the groaning itself stopped. Théophraste’s face had become comparatively placid.

“Why do you cry out in that way, Cartouche?” “I scream because it is a punishment that I cannot denounce my accomplices. I have their names on the end of my tongue! They do not see that if I do not denounce them it is because I cannot move the end of my tongue! I cannot! I cannot! I cannot! And they struck with their mallet again! And they sunk the pieces of wood into my legs again! It is unjust! I cannot move the end of my tongue!”

“What are they doing to you now, Cartouche?” “The doctor and the surgeon are leaning over me and feeling my pulse. They are congratulating themselves on having chosen that kind of torture, which is, they are saying to the commissioners, the least dangerous to life and the least susceptible to accidents.”

“And now, Cartouche, what are they doing to you?”

“They are doing nothing to me, and I regret it, for they have decided to bury the second wedge in me only a half hour after the first, and let the pain which it produced pass away, and the sensibility be entirely restored. I am looking at my judges. They have black mouths. I like the face of the executioner better. He is no more amused than I. He wants to be somewhere else. But there he comes with the second judge. They are all around me. They are over me! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!…”

Never had Théophraste looked so terrible. His mouth was wide open, and his tongue seemed paralyzed. Foam was around his lips, and his eyes seemed to start out of his head.

M. Lecamus looked across to M. Eliphaste, who said, when the second howl had died away, “Why do you scream, Cartouche?”

“Because these torturers will not listen to the names that are on the end of my tongue.”

“But you have not told us any names. You have only screamed.”

“It is Cartouche they are torturing and Longuet who screams,” answered Théophraste.

M. Eliphaste was taken aback by this last response. He turned toward the two silent onlookers and said in a low, trembling voice, “Then it is he who is suffering.”

There was no room for doubting this truth. The fearful expressions on Théophraste’s face as he imagined the executioner forcing the wedge in, showed too plainly that though it was Cartouche whom they tortured, it was Théophraste who really suffered.

M. Eliphaste seemed very concerned. Never before had such a case come before his astral scalpel. The identity of the soul had been proven, and suffering Cartouche had cried out in distress after two centuries. This cry had waited to come from the lips of Théophraste.

M. Eliphaste leaned his head on his hands and prayed. After a short silence he turned to M. Lecamus and said, “We are only at the second wedge, and there are seven of them.”

“Do you think my husband will have the strength to bear them?” asked Marceline.

M. Eliphaste leaned over the prostrate form of Théophraste and examined his head, just as the doctor had done to Cartouche in the torture chamber.

“The man is all right,” said he. “I don’t believe there is anything to fear now. We must kill Cartouche.”

“I think so, too,” said Lecamus. “It is necessary for the future security and definite happiness of M. Longuet.”

M. Eliphaste then continued his interrogations:

“And now what are they doing to you, Cartouche?”

“They are questioning me. I cannot reply. Why doesn’t that man in the corner of the dungeon do his duty? I have not yet seen his face. He turned his back to me and made a noise with old irons. The executioner is very quiet. He is leaning against the wall, yawning. There is a lamp on the table which gives light to two men, who write incessantly. Behind the man who is making the noise I see a little red light. The executioner’s assistant has loosened the knots in the cords a little, which gives me a relief for which I am grateful… But… but… but the assistant on the other side pulls and pulls. If he continues to pull the cords so he will cut my legs off. They bring a crucifix for me to kiss. Behind the man who turned his back on me I hear something like crackling embers, and there are small red flames which lick the stone walls. Between the two men who are writing there is a man who makes a sign. The executioner has a kind face. I sign to him for some water. I could bear the pain better if I had not such a thirst. The executioner raises his mallet! I swear I cannot say the names which are at the end of my tongue. They will not leave me. I cannot speak! Oh! why cannot you hear them? Take them from me!”

By this time his mouth had become closed, but the lips were opened in such a way as to make it appear that he had no lips. The teeth were locked and welded together tightly. A muffled cry of suffering came from the throat, but could not escape through the closed teeth. Suddenly there was a sharp grinding, and his teeth began to break under the great pressure of that closed jaw. Pieces of teeth were scattered over the bed, and blood issued from his mouth. His horrible groaning continued, and Théophraste showed signs of weakening under the great strain.

At this horrible spectacle M. Eliphaste declared wearily that he had never assisted or suspected that he could assist at such suffering. He confessed that until to-day he had never operated on a reincarnated soul of less than five hundred years. It was obvious that in spite of all his science and all his experience the illustrious medium was nonplussed.

M. Eliphaste did not try any longer to dissimulate his anxiety. He could have stopped the operation there if he had had time. But they buried the wedges in so rapidly that it did not even permit him to question M. Longuet.

During this last performance M. Longuet’s toothless mouth opened again. Other cries issued from it which were not like human cries at all. They were so curious and so weird that all three onlookers leaned over him, trembling with terror to see how such a cry could be made by a human mouth.

Mme. Longuet wanted to run away, but in her fright she fell. When she arose the cries had ceased. M. Eliphaste commanded her to be quiet, recalling to her with a severe look her responsibility in the operation.

M. Théophraste now reposed peacefully on his strap-mattress. That peacefulness, following immediately the horrors of such suffering, was extraordinary. He was not in pain. He remembered none of it. After the torturing was over he ceased to think of it, and consequently this was how he could reply to M. Eliphaste in the intervals of torture, in the most natural way, without physical emotion.

M. Eliphaste again began to interrogate him:

“And now where are you, Cartouche?”

“I am still in the torture chamber. Ah! they hold me! They hold me tightly! They hold my arms! What are they going to do? The man in the center says, ‘By order of the Regent we must have the names. So much the worse if he dies for it! Are the tongs ready? Begin with the breasts!.. Oh! Oh! The man kneeling before the burning coals gets up, making a noise with the irons. He hands the red tongs to the executioner. They uncover my right breast! Oh! Oh! It is dreadful! I cannot live through it!”

CHAPTER XX

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.”

CHAPTER XXI

The Result of the Operation

As soon as Théophraste had pronounced these words, M. Eliphaste made a sweeping gesture with his right arm. He leaned over the prostrate form, and blew impatiently on his eye.

He said to him: “Awake thou, Théophraste Longuet!”

This was repeated three times, each time with greater earnestness. However, Théophraste never moved. His immobility was deathlike, and his toothless mouth and bloodless lips made the silent onlookers believe that he had followed Cartouche in the shadow of death. His corpselike pallor seemed to them to be already turning green, and his hair, having become suddenly white, gave him the appearance of a very old man. Was he already dead? Was he decomposing already?

M. Eliphaste repeated the gestures, and in his lids, intense earnestness appeared like a madman. He blew again on the eyes, and parted the eyelashes, again crying out: “Théophraste Longuet, awake thou! Awake thou, Théophraste Longuet!”

Just at the moment when they believed that Théophraste Longuet would never return to life again, a slight tremble shook his frame, and drawing a deep breath, he turned his face toward them. At first he breathed with difficulty, but quickly recovering, he opened his eyes and said: “Cartouche is dead!”

M. Eliphaste’s face lit up with emotion. “Let us thank God,” he said, “that the operation has been successful,” and he began his prayer again: “In the beginning thou wast silent! Eon! Source of all ages!…”

Mme. Longuet and M. Adolphe threw themselves on Théophraste, while thanking God from the bottom of their hearts. They felt that the death of Cartouche had not been too dearly bought. The operation had certainly been a rough one, but he had only lost his teeth, and his hair had turned white. Mme. Longuet put her arms around her husband, and helped him rise from the couch. “Let us go. We have stopped here too long already,” she said.

“Speak louder,” said Théophraste, with strange enunciation. “I have something in my ears. I cannot move, either.”

“It is natural that you should be a little benumbed, my dear,” said Mme. Longuet. “You have been stretched on that bed for a long time. But make an effort.”