When in May, 1886, I found myself at last in Paris, I naturally determined to throw myself on the charity of an old chum of mine, Eugene Marie d’Ardeche, who had forsaken Boston a year or more ago on receiving word of the death of an aunt who had left him such property as she possessed. I fancy this windfall surprised him not a little, for the relations between the aunt and nephew had never been cordial, judging from Eugene’s remarks touching the lady, who was, it seems, a more or less wicked and witch-like old person, with a penchant for black magic, at least such was the common report.

Why she should leave all her property to d’Ardeche, no one could tell, unless it was that she felt his rather hobbledehoy tendencies towards Buddhism and occultism might some day lead him to her own unhallowed height of questionable illumination. To be sure d’Ardeche reviled her as a bad old woman, being himself in that state of enthusiastic exaltation which sometimes accompanies a boyish fancy for occultism; but in spite of his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle. Blaye de Tartas made him her sole heir, to the violent wrath of a questionable old party known to infamy as the Sar Torrevieja, the “King of the Sorcerers.” This malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the Rue M. le Prince during the life of Mlle. de Tartas had, it seems, fully expected to enjoy her small wealth after her death; and when it appeared that she had left him only the contents of the gloomy old house in the Quartier Latin, giving the house itself and all else of which she died possessed to her nephew in America, the Sar proceeded to remove everything from the place, and then to curse it elaborately and comprehensively, together with all those who should ever dwell therein.

Whereupon he disappeared.

This final episode was the last word I received from Eugene, but I knew the number of the house, 252 Rue M. le Prince. So, after a day or two given to a first cursory survey of Paris, I started across the Seine to find Eugene and compel him to do the honors of the city.

Every one who knows the Latin Quarter knows the Rue M. le Prince, running up the hill towards the Garden of the Luxembourg. It is full of queer houses and odd corners,—or was in ’86,—and certainly No. 252 was, when I found it, quite as queer as any. It was nothing but a doorway, a black arch of old stone between and under two new houses painted yellow. The effect of this bit of seventeenth-century masonry, with its dirty old doors, and rusty broken lantern sticking gaunt and grim out over the narrow sidewalk, was, in its frame of fresh plaster, sinister in the extreme.

I wondered if I had made a mistake in the number; it was quite evident that no one lived behind those cobwebs. I went into the doorway of one of the new hôtels and interviewed the concierge.

No, M. d’Ardeche did not live there, though to be sure he owned the mansion; he himself resided in Meudon, in the country house of the late Mlle. de Tartas. Would Monsieur like the number and the street?

Monsieur would like them extremely, so I took the card that the concierge wrote for me, and forthwith started for the river, in order that I might take a steamboat for Meudon. By one of those coincidences which happen so often, being quite inexplicable, I had not gone twenty paces down the street before I ran directly into the arms of Eugene d’Ardeche. In three minutes we were sitting in the queer little garden of the Chien Bleu, drinking vermouth and absinthe, and talking it all over.

“You do not live in your aunt’s house?” I said at last, interrogatively.

“No, but if this sort of thing keeps on I shall have to. I like Meudon much better, and the house is perfect, all furnished, and nothing in it newer than the last century. You must come out with me to-night and see it. I have got a jolly room fixed up for my Buddha. But there is something wrong with this house opposite. I can’t keep a tenant in it,—not four days. I have had three, all within six months, but the stories have gone around and a man would as soon think of hiring the Cour des Comptes to live in as No. 252. It is notorious. The fact is, it is haunted the worst way.”

I laughed and ordered more vermouth.

“That is all right. It is haunted all the same, or enough to keep it empty, and the funny part is that no one knows how it is haunted. Nothing is ever seen, nothing heard. As far as I can find out, people just have the horrors there, and have them so bad they have to go to the hospital afterwards. I have one ex-tenant in the Bicêtre now. So the house stands empty, and as it covers considerable ground and is taxed for a lot, I don’t know what to do about it. I think I’ll either give it to that child of sin, Torrevieja, or else go and live in it myself. I shouldn’t mind the ghosts, I am sure.”

“Did you ever stay there?”

“No, but I have always intended to, and in fact I came up here to-day to see a couple of rake-hell fellows I know, Fargeau and Duchesne, doctors in the Clinical Hospital beyond here, up by the Parc Mont Souris. They promised that they would spend the night with me some time in my aunt’s house,—which is called around here, you must know, ‘la Bouche d’Enfer,’—and I thought perhaps they would make it this week, if they can get off duty. Come up with me while I see them, and then we can go across the river to Véfour’s and have some luncheon, you can get your things at the Chatham, and we will go out to Meudon, where of course you will spend the night with me.”

The plan suited me perfectly, so we went up to the hospital, found Fargeau, who declared that he and Duchesne were ready for anything, the nearer the real “bouche d’enfer” the better; that the following Thursday they would both be off duty for the night, and that on that day they would join in an attempt to outwit the devil and clear up the mystery of No. 252.

“Does M. l’Américain go with us?” asked Fargeau.

“Why of course,” I replied, “I intend to go, and you must not refuse me, d’Ardeche; I decline to be put off. Here is a chance for you to do the honors of your city in a manner which is faultless. Show me a real live ghost, and I will forgive Paris for having lost the Jardin Mabille.”

So it was settled.

Later we went down to Meudon and ate dinner in the terrace room of the villa, which was all that d’Ardeche had said, and more, so utterly was its atmosphere that of the seventeenth century. At dinner Eugene told me more about his late aunt, and the queer goings on in the old house.

Mlle. Blaye lived, it seems, all alone, except for one female servant of her own age; a severe, taciturn creature, with massive Breton features and a Breton tongue, whenever she vouchsafed to use it. No one ever was seen to enter the door of No. 252 except Jeanne the servant and the Sar Torrevieja, the latter coming constantly from none knew whither, and always entering, never leaving. Indeed, the neighbors, who for eleven years had watched the old sorcerer sidle crab-wise up to the bell almost every day, declared vociferously that never had he been seen to leave the house. Once, when they decided to keep absolute guard, the watcher, none other than Maître Garceau of the Chien Bleu, after keeping his eyes fixed on the door from ten o’clock one morning when the Sar arrived until four in the afternoon, during which time the door was unopened (he knew this, for had he not gummed a ten-centime stamp over the joint and was not the stamp unbroken) nearly fell down when the sinister figure of Torrevieja slid wickedly by him with a dry “Pardon, Monsieur!” and disappeared again through the black doorway.

This was curious, for No. 252 was entirely surrounded by houses, its only windows opening on a courtyard into which no eye could look from the hôtels of the Rue M. le Prince and the Rue de l’Ecole, and the mystery was one of the choice possessions of the Latin Quarter.

Once a year the austerity of the place was broken, and the denizens of the whole quarter stood open-mouthed watching many carriages drive up to No. 252, many of them private, not a few with crests on the door panels, from all of them descending veiled female figures and men with coat collars turned up. Then followed curious sounds of music from within, and those whose houses joined the blank walls of No. 252 became for the moment popular, for by placing the ear against the wall strange music could distinctly be heard, and the sound of monotonous chanting voices now and then. By dawn the last guest would have departed, and for another year the hôtel of Mlle. de Tartas was ominously silent.

Eugene declared that he believed it was a celebration of “Walpurgisnacht,” and certainly appearances favored such a fancy.

“A queer thing about the whole affair is,” he said, “the fact that every one in the street swears that about a month ago, while I was out in Concarneau for a visit, the music and voices were heard again, just as when my revered aunt was in the flesh. The house was perfectly empty, as I tell you, so it is quite possible that the good people were enjoying an hallucination.”

I must acknowledge that these stories did not reassure me; in fact, as Thursday came near, I began to regret a little my determination to spend the night in the house. I was too vain to back down, however, and the perfect coolness of the two doctors, who ran down Tuesday to Meudon to make a few arrangements, caused me to swear that I would die of fright before I would flinch. I suppose I believed more or less in ghosts, I am sure now that I am older I believe in them, there are in fact few things I can not believe. Two or three inexplicable things had happened to me, and, although this was before my adventure with Rendel in Pæstum, I had a strong predisposition to believe some things that I could not explain, wherein I was out of sympathy with the age.

Well, to come to the memorable night of the twelfth of June, we had made our preparations, and after depositing a big bag inside the doors of No. 252, went across to the Chien Bleu, where Fargeau and Duchesne turned up promptly, and we sat down to the best dinner Père Garceau could create.

I remember I hardly felt that the conversation was in good taste. It began with various stories of Indian fakirs and Oriental jugglery, matters in which Eugene was curiously well read, swerved to the horrors of the great Sepoy mutiny, and thus to reminiscences of the dissecting-room. By this time we had drunk more or less, and Duchesne launched into a photographic and Zolaesque account of the only time (as he said) when he was possessed of the panic of fear; namely, one night many years ago, when he was locked by accident into the dissecting-room of the Loucine, together with several cadavers of a rather unpleasant nature. I ventured to protest mildly against the choice of subjects, the result being a perfect carnival of horrors, so that when we finally drank our last crème de cacao and started for “la Bouche d’Enfer,” my nerves were in a somewhat rocky condition.

It was just ten o’clock when we came into the street. A hot dead wind drifted in great puffs through the city, and ragged masses of vapor swept the purple sky; an unsavory night altogether, one of those nights of hopeless lassitude when one feels, if one is at home, like doing nothing but drink mint juleps and smoke cigarettes.

Eugene opened the creaking door, and tried to light one of the lanterns; but the gusty wind blew out every match, and we finally had to close the outer doors before we could get a light. At last we had all the lanterns going, and I began to look around curiously. We were in a long, vaulted passage, partly carriageway, partly footpath, perfectly bare but for the street refuse which had drifted in with eddying winds. Beyond lay the courtyard, a curious place rendered more curious still by the fitful moonlight and the flashing of four dark lanterns. The place had evidently been once a most noble palace. Opposite rose the oldest portion, a three-story wall of the time of Francis I., with a great wisteria vine covering half. The wings on either side were more modern, seventeenth century, and ugly, while towards the street was nothing but a flat unbroken wall.

The great bare court, littered with bits of paper blown in by the wind, fragments of packing cases, and straw, mysterious with flashing lights and flaunting shadows, while low masses of torn vapor drifted overhead, hiding, then revealing the stars, and all in absolute silence, not even the sounds of the streets entering this prison-like place, was weird and uncanny in the extreme. I must confess that already I began to feel a slight disposition towards the horrors, but with that curious inconsequence which so often happens in the case of those who are deliberately growing scared, I could think of nothing more reassuring than those delicious verses of Lewis Carroll’s:—

“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice,
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice,
What I tell you three times is true,”—

which kept repeating themselves over and over in my brain with feverish insistence.

Even the medical students had stopped their chaffing, and were studying the surroundings gravely.

“There is one thing certain,” said Fargeau, “anything might have happened here without the slightest chance of discovery. Did ever you see such a perfect place for lawlessness?”

“And anything might happen here now, with the same certainty of impunity,” continued Duchesne, lighting his pipe, the snap of the match making us all start. “D’Ardeche, your lamented relative was certainly well fixed; she had full scope here for her traditional experiments in demonology.”

“Curse me if I don’t believe that those same traditions were more or less founded on fact,” said Eugene. “I never saw this court under these conditions before, but I could believe anything now. What’s that!”

“Nothing but a door slamming,” said Duchesne, loudly.

“Well, I wish doors wouldn’t slam in houses that have been empty eleven months.”

“It is irritating,” and Duchesne slipped his arm through mine; “but we must take things as they come. Remember we have to deal not only with the spectral lumber left here by your scarlet aunt, but as well with the supererogatory curse of that hell-cat Torrevieja. Come on! let’s get inside before the hour arrives for the sheeted dead to squeak and gibber in these lonely halls. Light your pipes, your tobacco is a sure protection against ‘your whoreson dead bodies’; light up and move on.”

We opened the hall door and entered a vaulted stone vestibule, full of dust, and cobwebby.

“There is nothing on this floor,” said Eugene, “except servants’ rooms and offices, and I don’t believe there is anything wrong with them. I never heard that there was, any way. Let’s go up stairs.”

So far as we could see, the house was apparently perfectly uninteresting inside, all eighteenth-century work, the façade of the main building being, with the vestibule, the only portion of the Francis I. work.

“The place was burned during the Terror,” said Eugene, “for my great-uncle, from whom Mlle. de Tartas inherited it, was a good and true Royalist; he went to Spain after the Revolution, and did not come back until the accession of Charles X., when he restored the house, and then died, enormously old. This explains why it is all so new.”

The old Spanish sorcerer to whom Mlle. de Tartas had left her personal property had done his work thoroughly. The house was absolutely empty, even the wardrobes and bookcases built in had been carried away; we went through room after room, finding all absolutely dismantled, only the windows and doors with their casings, the parquet floors, and the florid Renaissance mantels remaining.

“I feel better,” remarked Fargeau. “The house may be haunted, but it don’t look it, certainly; it is the most respectable place imaginable.”

“Just you wait,” replied Eugene. “These are only the state apartments, which my aunt seldom used, except, perhaps, on her annual ‘Walpurgisnacht.’ Come up stairs and I will show you a better mise en scène.”

On this floor, the rooms fronting the court, the sleeping-rooms, were quite small,—(“They are the bad rooms all the same,” said Eugene,)—four of them, all just as ordinary in appearance as those below. A corridor ran behind them connecting with the wing corridor, and from this opened a door, unlike any of the other doors in that it was covered with green baize, somewhat moth-eaten. Eugene selected a key from the bunch he carried, unlocked the door, and with some difficulty forced it to swing inward; it was as heavy as the door of a safe.

“We are now,” he said, “on the very threshold of hell itself; these rooms in here were my scarlet aunt’s unholy of unholies. I never let them with the rest of the house, but keep them as a curiosity. I only wish Torrevieja had kept out; as it was, he looted them, as he did the rest of the house, and nothing is left but the walls and ceiling and floor. They are something, however, and may suggest what the former condition must have been. Tremble and enter.”

The first apartment was a kind of anteroom, a cube of perhaps twenty feet each way, without windows, and with no doors except that by which we entered and another to the right. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with a black lacquer, brilliantly polished, that flashed the light of our lanterns in a thousand intricate reflections. It was like the inside of an enormous Japanese box, and about as empty. From this we passed to another room, and here we nearly dropped our lanterns. The room was circular, thirty feet or so in diameter, covered by a hemispherical dome; walls and ceiling were dark blue, spotted with gold stars; and reaching from floor to floor across the dome stretched a colossal figure in red lacquer of a nude woman kneeling, her legs reaching out along the floor on either side, her head touching the lintel of the door through which we had entered, her arms forming its sides, with the fore arms extended and stretching along the walls until they met the long feet. The most astounding, misshapen, absolutely terrifying thing, I think, I ever saw. From the navel hung a great white object, like the traditional roe’s egg of the Arabian Nights. The floor was of red lacquer, and in it was inlaid a pentagram the size of the room, made of wide strips of brass. In the centre of this pentagram was a circular disk of black stone, slightly saucer-shaped, with a small outlet in the middle.

The effect of the room was simply crushing, with this gigantic red figure crouched over it all, the staring eyes fixed on one, no matter what his position. None of us spoke, so oppressive was the whole thing.

The third room was like the first in dimensions, but instead of being black it was entirely sheathed with plates of brass, walls, ceiling, and floor,—tarnished now, and turning green, but still brilliant under the lantern light. In the middle stood an oblong altar of porphyry, its longer dimensions on the axis of the suite of rooms, and at one end, opposite the range of doors, a pedestal of black basalt.

This was all. Three rooms, stranger than these, even in their emptiness, it would be hard to imagine. In Egypt, in India, they would not be entirely out of place, but here in Paris, in a commonplace hôtel, in the Rue M. le Prince, they were incredible.

We retraced our steps, Eugene closed the iron door with its baize covering, and we went into one of the front chambers and sat down, looking at each other.

“Nice party, your aunt,” said Fargeau. “Nice old party, with amiable tastes; I am glad we are not to spend the night in those rooms.”

“What do you suppose she did there?” inquired Duchesne. “I know more or less about black art, but that series of rooms is too much for me.”

“My impression is,” said d’Ardeche, “that the brazen room was a kind of sanctuary containing some image or other on the basalt base, while the stone in front was really an altar,—what the nature of the sacrifice might be I don’t even guess. The round room may have been used for invocations and incantations. The pentagram looks like it. Any way it is all just about as queer and fin de siècle as I can well imagine. Look here, it is nearly twelve, let’s dispose of ourselves, if we are going to hunt this thing down.”

The four chambers on this floor of the old house were those said to be haunted, the wings being quite innocent, and, so far as we knew, the floors below. It was arranged that we should each occupy a room, leaving the doors open with the lights burning, and at the slightest cry or knock we were all to rush at once to the room from which the warning sound might come. There was no communication between the rooms to be sure, but, as the doors all opened into the corridor, every sound was plainly audible.

The last room fell to me, and I looked it over carefully.

It seemed innocent enough, a commonplace, square, rather lofty Parisian sleeping-room, finished in wood painted white, with a small marble mantel, a dusty floor of inlaid maple and cherry, walls hung with an ordinary French paper, apparently quite new, and two deeply embrasured windows looking out on the court.

I opened the swinging sash with some trouble, and sat down in the window seat with my lantern beside me trained on the only door, which gave on the corridor.

The wind had gone down, and it was very still without,—still and hot. The masses of luminous vapor were gathering thickly overhead, no longer urged by the gusty wind. The great masses of rank wisteria leaves, with here and there a second blossoming of purple flowers, hung dead over the window in the sluggish air. Across the roofs I could hear the sound of a belated fiacre in the streets below. I filled my pipe again and waited.

For a time the voices of the men in the other rooms were a companionship, and at first I shouted to them now and then, but my voice echoed rather unpleasantly through the long corridors, and had a suggestive way of reverberating around the left wing beside me, and coming out at a broken window at its extremity like the voice of another man. I soon gave up my attempts at conversation, and devoted myself to the task of keeping awake.

It was not easy; why did I eat that lettuce salad at Père Garceau’s? I should have known better. It was making me irresistibly sleepy, and wakefulness was absolutely necessary. It was certainly gratifying to know that I could sleep, that my courage was by me to that extent, but in the interests of science I must keep awake. But almost never, it seemed, had sleep looked so desirable. Half a hundred times, nearly, I would doze for an instant, only to awake with a start, and find my pipe gone out. Nor did the exertion of relighting it pull me together. I struck my match mechanically, and with the first puff dropped off again. It was most vexing. I got up and walked around the room. It was most annoying. My cramped position had almost put both my legs to sleep. I could hardly stand. I felt numb, as though with cold. There was no longer any sound from the other rooms, nor from without. I sank down in my window seat. How dark it was growing! I turned up the lantern. That pipe again, how obstinately it kept going out! and my last match was gone. The lantern, too, was that going out? I lifted my hand to turn it up again. It felt like lead, and fell beside me.

Then I awoke,—absolutely. I remembered the story of “The Haunters and the Haunted.” This was the Horror. I tried to rise, to cry out. My body was like lead, my tongue was paralyzed. I could hardly move my eyes. And the light was going out. There was no question about that. Darker and darker yet; little by little the pattern of the paper was swallowed up in the advancing night. A prickling numbness gathered in every nerve, my right arm slipped without feeling from my lap to my side, and I could not raise it,—it swung helpless. A thin, keen humming began in my head, like the cicadas on a hillside in September. The darkness was coming fast.

Yes, this was it. Something was subjecting me, body and mind, to slow paralysis. Physically I was already dead. If I could only hold my mind, my consciousness, I might still be safe, but could I? Could I resist the mad horror of this silence, the deepening dark, the creeping numbness? I knew that, like the man in the ghost story, my only safety lay here.

It had come at last. My body was dead, I could no longer move my eyes. They were fixed in that last look on the place where the door had been, now only a deepening of the dark.

Utter night: the last flicker of the lantern was gone. I sat and waited; my mind was still keen, but how long would it last? There was a limit even to the endurance of the utter panic of fear.

Then the end began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,—awful eyes, like a dead dream. More beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like a never ending flow of opal water into a circular tunnel. I could not have moved my eyes had I possessed the power: they devoured the fearful, beautiful things that grew slowly, slowly larger, fixed on me, advancing, growing more beautiful, the white flakes of light sweeping more swiftly into the blazing vortices, the awful fascination deepening in its insane intensity as the white, vibrating eyes grew nearer, larger.

Like a hideous and implacable engine of death the eyes of the unknown Horror swelled and expanded until they were close before me, enormous, terrible, and I felt a slow, cold, wet breath propelled with mechanical regularity against my face, enveloping me in its fetid mist, in its charnel-house deadliness.

With ordinary fear goes always a physical terror, but with me in the presence of this unspeakable Thing was only the utter and awful terror of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare. Again and again I tried to shriek, to make some noise, but physically I was utterly dead. I could only feel myself go mad with the terror of hideous death. The eyes were close on me,—their movement so swift that they seemed to be but palpitating flames, the dead breath was around me like the depths of the deepest sea.

Suddenly a wet, icy mouth, like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless, jelly-like, fell over mine. The horror began slowly to draw my life from me, but, as enormous and shuddering folds of palpitating jelly swept sinuously around me, my will came back, my body awoke with the reaction of final fear, and I closed with the nameless death that enfolded me.

What was it that I was fighting? My arms sunk through the unresisting mass that was turning me to ice. Moment by moment new folds of cold jelly swept round me, crushing me with the force of Titans. I fought to wrest my mouth from this awful Thing that sealed it, but, if ever I succeeded and caught a single breath, the wet, sucking mass closed over my face again before I could cry out. I think I fought for hours, desperately, insanely, in a silence that was more hideous than any sound,—fought until I felt final death at hand, until the memory of all my life rushed over me like a flood, until I no longer had strength to wrench my face from that hellish succubus, until with a last mechanical struggle I fell and yielded to death.

***

Then I heard a voice say, “If he is dead, I can never forgive myself; I was to blame.”

Another replied, “He is not dead, I know we can save him if only we reach the hospital in time. Drive like hell, cocher! twenty francs for you, if you get there in three minutes.”

Then there was night again, and nothingness, until I suddenly awoke and stared around. I lay in a hospital ward, very white and sunny, some yellow fleurs-de-lis stood beside the head of the pallet, and a tall sister of mercy sat by my side.

To tell the story in a few words, I was in the Hôtel Dieu, where the men had taken me that fearful night of the twelfth of June. I asked for Fargeau or Duchesne, and by and by the latter came, and sitting beside the bed told me all that I did not know.

It seems that they had sat, each in his room, hour after hour, hearing nothing, very much bored, and disappointed. Soon after two o’clock Fargeau, who was in the next room, called to me to ask if I was awake. I gave no reply, and, after shouting once or twice, he took his lantern and came to investigate. The door was locked on the inside! He instantly called d’Ardeche and Duchesne, and together they hurled themselves against the door. It resisted. Within they could hear irregular footsteps dashing here and there, with heavy breathing. Although frozen with terror, they fought to destroy the door and finally succeeded by using a great slab of marble that formed the shelf of the mantel in Fargeau’s room. As the door crashed in, they were suddenly hurled back against the walls of the corridor, as though by an explosion, the lanterns were extinguished, and they found themselves in utter silence and darkness.

As soon as they recovered from the shock, they leaped into the room and fell over my body in the middle of the floor. They lighted one of the lanterns, and saw the strangest sight that can be imagined. The floor and walls to the height of about six feet were running with something that seemed like stagnant water, thick, glutinous, sickening. As for me, I was drenched with the same cursed liquid. The odor of musk was nauseating. They dragged me away, stripped off my clothing, wrapped me in their coats, and hurried to the hospital, thinking me perhaps dead. Soon after sunrise d’Ardeche left the hospital, being assured that I was in a fair way to recovery, with time, and with Fargeau went up to examine by daylight the traces of the adventure that was so nearly fatal. They were too late. Fire engines were coming down the street as they passed the Académie. A neighbor rushed up to d’Ardeche: “O Monsieur! what misfortune, yet what fortune! It is true la Bouche d’Enfer—I beg pardon, the residence of the lamented Mlle. de Tartas,—was burned, but not wholly, only the ancient building. The wings were saved, and for that great credit is due the brave firemen. Monsieur will remember them, no doubt.”

It was quite true. Whether a forgotten lantern, overturned in the excitement, had done the work, or whether the origin of the fire was more supernatural, it was certain that “the Mouth of Hell” was no more. A last engine was pumping slowly as d’Ardeche came up; half a dozen limp, and one distended, hose stretched through the porte cochère, and within only the façade of Francis I. remained, draped still with the black stems of the wisteria. Beyond lay a great vacancy, where thin smoke was rising slowly. Every floor was gone, and the strange halls of Mlle. Blaye de Tartas were only a memory.

With d’Ardeche I visited the place last year, but in the stead of the ancient walls was then only a new and ordinary building, fresh and respectable; yet the wonderful stories of the old Bouche d’Enfer still lingered in the quarter, and will hold there, I do not doubt, until the Day of Judgment.

The post No. 252 Rue M. le Prince appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

***

Why do they say that I am insane?

Just because I am not like absolutely everyone else, just because I do not play my role like one of Panurge’s sheep, just because I remain indoors for weeks and months at a time–is that any reason to call me insane? On the contrary; I believe that thanks to the life I have led—above all to the great idea which that life has revealed to me—I am a sage. I was certainly not in the least insane when I first conceived that idea.

I had read a great deal, studied a great deal. I was particularly attracted to works of philosophy—but I do not like the philosophers of our own day, because they do not know how true philosophers must live. In order to conceive a philosophical system it is necessary to follow a contemplative lifestyle, solitary and absorbed. Now, how can you find such studious conditions in our hectic world, whose distractions seep into a man’s every pore? I therefore confined my studies to the pleasurable company of the ancient philosophers. I sought out those whose mutilated works are only known to us through fragments or translations: Leucippus, Democritus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides. I felt a singular joy in reconstructing old systems of thought with the aid of their remaining debris, much as Cuvier has reconstructed antediluvian species from a few bones. Men who occupy themselves with decaying things are the only ones who will comprehend the happiness that I obtained by thus rediscovering the homoeomeric theory of Anaxagoras, and a few others. Alongside these fragments, I also cherished the complete but obscure systems of mystics and theologians: subtle depths into whose metaphysical exercises a wounded spirit plunges with delight. The Alexandrines, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus have enraptured me, and I have tasted ineffable sensuality with St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas.

I do not offer this reading-list, any part of which would suffice to prove that I am a savant, out of vanity; I offer it partly to demonstrate that I have merely been a scholar, not a madman, and—more importantly—to explain how the great idea of which I spoke before first came to me.

This is it!

In the course of all this reading I was struck by one thing, which became the point of departure for my own system: the knowledge that in the midst of cosmogonic and theological hypotheses, the human spirit locates itself less by reasoning than by intuition. This is not a matter of logical deduction, since one does not move from “the assertion of what is known” to “the contents of the unknown”. It is a matter of positing the “contents of the unknown” directly—which is to say, in other words, of seeing the absolute. Proof is not an issue; the absolute must be seen. One sees, or one does not see. I might experience it myself at any moment.

Such an enlightenment, of which I had not previously been able to obtain any sensation, came to me suddenly after a long meditation. The absurd became an evident truth. I felt like a blind man, who had had the concept of colour explained to him at length without having any ability to understand it, whose eyes were suddenly opened to sensation.

If this process allowed me to understand the truths of metaphysics, it followed that they had also been discovered by this procedure: such was my first step. I inferred that the absolute was, for us, not a conclusion but an apparition. A fact which seemed at first to be bizarre and unreasonable was soon proven by me, by means of a superhuman sense which sometimes seizes words.

A word, or an assemblage of words—a phrase—is there before me; it becomes an absurdity, as if inscribed in hieroglyphics. I repeat the word—the phrase—without any longer being able to attach any meaning to it; somehow, I fix my spirit to the material form of the word, to the image of the alphabetical signs, to the sound of the syllables. For a week, a month, many months afterwards, I have arranged matters so that I am voluntarily haunted by an incomprehensible absurdity. Then, one fine day, the human sense of that absurdity obliterates itself, the form and the sound of the word become symbols, and I comprehend the incomprehensible.

I had found the key to metaphysics.

I shall not tell you how the idea was refined, little by little, to the point at which it condensed into a theory. That would take too long. The slow and shadowy transformations of an idea are a labyrinth of reflections, whose thread is lost even while one is extending it. Having shown how I arrived at the portal of the labyrinth, I will simply tell you what I sought to draw out of it: my system of perceptible metaphysics.

Until now, only three aspects of human inner life have been considered: sensation, consciousness and reason. To make the next part of my discourse clearer, I will call the senses by the correct term “external senses”, inasmuch as they apply themselves to external objects; and I will reunite consciousness and reason under the term “internal senses”, inasmuch as they both apply themselves to my interior self and its modifications.

The metaphysical error which still weighs us down thus becomes palpable: the materialists apply the external senses, and the spiritualists the internal senses, to the absolute—but the absolute is neither in me nor in the objects exterior to me. There is the reason for the impotence of human research into the absolute—an impotence that has remained constant throughout the ages. The sceptics have set metaphysical questions aside. Sincere searchers have tried to escape the error, the mystics by means of ecstasy and the theologians by means of faith; they were in the right in searching for a new means, but both fell back into error by subjecting ecstasy and faith to the procedures of reason.

Only one man, prior to myself, has glimpsed the infallible procedure which leads to the Absolute. That was the theologian Thomassin, who wrote these words:

Mens, sola sibi reddita, naturae suae ingenium et praestantiam totam obtinens, naturaliter ominatur SENSIT que summum aliquid et INEXCOGITABILE principium.

Which means:

The soul, reduced to itself alone, in possession of all its being and all its power, perceives naturally and SENSES that something, that sovereign principle, which is INACCESSIBLE TO REASON.

The words are clear, and I think that even the most vulgar intelligence can understand them. This quotation renders in simple terms all that remains for me to say in completing my theory, which can now be summarized in a single affirmation:

Besides the external senses and the internal senses, there is another sense, internal and external at the same time, knowing its object as the external senses do, immaterial as the internal senses are, but having absolutely nothing in common with either of them—and that is the SENSE OF THE ABSOLUTE.

But what am I saying? What have I written there? To tell the truth, I am afraid. I have kept my mind as calm as I could in order to explain my discovery in simple terms. Now that task is complete, I am terrified. Have I read the meaning of what I have written? It is as if I have written that human beings have a third eye! Worse than that–I have written that human beings have a new sense. A monstrosity!

It seems to me that I can hear laughter all around me, and voices saying: mad, mad, mad! I am, however, perfectly lucid. My intellect is sound—I am certain of it. No, I am not mad; that is not true. I can see—I tell you. I can see. But they will not believe that I can see, because they are blind. How unfortunate! Who, then, will hear me without laughing? How can I show that?

That is nothing in itself. The eyes cannot see it; the ears cannot hear it; the fingers cannot touch it; consciousness cannot speak of it. What horror! Reason itself cannot comprehend it. Ah! You see, you admit that you are beyond reason—you must be mad! No, no, a thousand times no. Who calls me mad, then? You lie! The whole world is laughing, isn’t it? Oh well—if I am mad, I might as well go all the way; I’ll die of it if I have to—but that which I see, you will see too.

My sense of the absolute is real; it exists; it is. I shall exercise this new sense; I shall sacrifice everything in its cause; I shall write down the things that it has revealed to me, and those things will be so prodigious, so resplendent, so true, that the world will be dazzled by them. They will have to listen to me when they hear about the manifest Apocalypse!

An analogy immediately suggested a means by which I might exercise this new sense vigorously. I observed that blind men have an extremely delicate sense of touch, and that men who become deaf are recompensed by tracking the movements of the lips with their eyes, thus coming to understand the words which they do not hear. It is easy enough to conclude that the atrophy of one sense makes the others sharper.

I understood, then, why the priests of Buddha are compelled to seek solitary and silent immobility, and I no longer found the situation of those seers who absorbed in contemplation of their navels ridiculous. They seek in contemplative ecstasy to forget the sensible world. Unfortunately, ecstasy does not last; and in spite of their heroism, these immobile ones experience sensations between their cataleptic fits. Nor are they limited to indistinct and confused sensations; they are eternally confined within the workings of Consciousness and Reason, so they are perpetually distracted, if not by the external senses, at least by the internal ones.

It was necessary, therefore, to find a state in which the mind was unoccupied either by sensations or by thoughts.

Was that possible?

As for sensations, yes. Nothing is easier, given a firm and resolute will, than to render oneself blind, deaf and dumb. It is a matter of paralysing the nerves, nothing more. When the day came, I could deprive myself of my senses, conserving only touch, so that I would be able to write down my visions in the dark. Eventually, I would arrive at the point of having no more memories of sensations—they would be effaced, little by little, from a mind that was no longer cultivated in that manner.

As for thoughts, that was not so easy. If one ceases to think, does one not cease to be? Yes, in the everyday sense of the word—but not in mine. What need had I of the modes of thought in common usage? What did reasoning matter to me, in all its forms? So, it was necessary to cease to think, or at least to think as little as possible. To cure me of that particular malady, I had a remedy already: obsession. Obsession atrophies all other ideas, leaving one and one only in possession of the mind. That would complement the atrophy of the senses within my mental regime.

That regime, which would soon be mine, was therefore reduced to this: to annihilate, as far as was possible, all my internal and external senses, in order to allow free play and give an exceeding acuity to the sense of the absolute.

It remained, before undertaking the great work, to identify the precise circumstances in which that sense is at its most vigorous, and in which it could be most comfortably exerted. My reflections and researches on this point were lengthy. A memory of my youth put me on the track of that which I was trying to find. Delicate as the subject of this memory is, I must insist on its introduction here, in the interests of science and better to understand the means that I believed I had to employ.

Everyone knows that in the course of pleasurable excitation there is a brief—and, in consequence, very little studied—moment, during which one’s entire being melts, like a filament of metal in an electric current. It is like a flash of lightning in which a human being is engulfed in a substance, of which it is at that moment a sort of conductor. All of creation is alive in that flash; it is, if I might express it in such terms, the microcosm of the absolute. I discovered this subtle explication while recalling to mind the sensation itself.

On the other hand, I had to consider that the moment in question is, as I have said, a mere flash. There is no way of making that kind of flash last indefinitely—but I took note of the fact that this pleasurable excitation possesses its strange property, not because it is pleasurable, but because it is an excitation. The Orientals have prolonged it by introducing pain into the ecstasy. By the excitation of pain, in effect, the flash becomes less vivid but more durable. One can produce by this means an agitation in which everything is annihilated, a kind of current that melts humanity. This, then, is the exact state in which the startled mind can attain the absolute.

I had only to imagine a kind of continuous pain, powerful enough to throw me into that state, and an apparatus that, while making it utterly impossible for me to escape the pain in question, would permit me to write down my visions. The kind of pain that I eventually settled on was the prolonged irritation of the dental nerves, and the choice inspired me in no time at all to devise the ingenious apparatus within which I was soon seated.

So, this is what is firmly decided at the present moment: I shall deliver myself to the absolute. After fifteen years spent working on my system and putting my regime into effect, I believe that I have finally brought about the conditions necessary for an attempt of the last and greatest experiences of all. I have subjected myself to all the necessary mutilations. I am blind and deaf. I have not spoken a single word for fifteen years. I have renounced the use of gross and imperfect senses, including Consciousness and Reason, which might constrain my new sense. I have kept nothing of the old humanity but attention and will. I know how to write in the dark; the words I shall write will provide illumination!

My first experience will last about an hour. It is now seven o’clock in the morning. My old manservant will come to my room at eight. There, he will find my written instructions, as he is accustomed to do every day. In these instructions I tell him to descend to the basement of my house, which he has never entered, and I explain how he can let me out of the apparatus if he finds me unconscious. I write all these details so as to establish firmly that I act entirely freely and knowing perfectly well what I am doing.

As I could die during the experience, I have also taken the opportunity to record the history of my theory briefly and clearly. For the same reason, desirous of leaving no mystery behind me, I shall now describe my metaphysical apparatus.

It is a mechanical chair, all of whose parts I have made and assembled myself. My legs will be immobilised by a sheath into which I will introduce them as I sit down. Once seated, I shall place my left arm on the arm of the chair, and my head upon an earflap to the right. In this position, I shall open my mouth, which will be kept open by a solid leather plug covered in India-rubber, which I can bite without breaking my jaws. Beside the earflap, in the gap made by my open mouth, I shall place the little mechanism which will produce the pain, which comprises a drill-bit that moves back and forth rapidly and continuously.

This drill will plunge into a hollow tooth, progressing automatically to a depth of half a centimetre in the course of an hour. Another mechanism will gradually unwind a scroll of parchment under my right hand, on which I shall record continuously whatever I see.

To avoid the natural laxity of humanity, which might incite me to stop the drilling-mechanism, I have arranged the whole machine in the following manner: one button is situated within range of my left hand; to the first pressure I exert the machine will respond and I shall immediately be secured to the chair by shackles of iron which will encircle my arms and fix my head. At the same time, the two mechanisms will begin to operate; once started, it will be impossible for me to stop them.

The clockwork movement is set for one hour.

***

.…I am here–everything is going well.…

     .…I am writing this on the scroll, as a trial.…

     .…atrocious pain–good–the beginning.…

     .…I’m waiting.…

     .…joy–horror–absolute–absolute–words?–I can see at last–inexcogitabile—mad—mad—mad—joy—joy.…

     .…words to express?—obvious—of course—yes.…

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….…

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….

…enough—triangle—enough.…

     .…absolute—here it is—at last—here it is—here it is.…

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….

***

At eight o’clock the old manservant went into his master’s room, found the written instructions and went down into the basement.

The madman was in his chair. He was dead.

The convulsions of his legs had twisted the sheath without being able to get out. The wrist of his left hand was badly torn by the iron bracelet, against which it had strained in vain. Flayed tendons were visible, taut as violin strings. The right arm was restrained between the shoulder to the elbow but free from the elbow to the wrist. The hand, unable to reach as far as the head, was stuck to the breast, which it had clawed repeatedly with its fingernails. Two of the fingers were embedded to the depth of the first knuckle. The head, half-turned around but maintained in its position by the earflap, displayed a hideous grimace. Bloody froth oozed from the gums. The teeth had cut through the rubber and had broken in their anguished mastication of the plug within.

The roller was still advancing the parchment, and the drill was still boring implacably into a molar, making an almost imperceptible grinding sound: bzi, bzi, bzi.

It was the laughter of the absolute.

The post The Metaphysical Machine appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.