Ever feel you are on the receiving end of a string of bad luck? Well, take a gander at my retelling of French author Jean Richepin’s tale about Constant Guignard, certainly one of the most luckless mortals in the history of humankind.
CONSTANT GUIGNARD
Poor Constant Guignard. His mother died in childbirth and, unable to bear the grief, his dad hanged himself. As a lad at school, he suffered illness on all the exam days and when his schoolmates misbehaved, he was the one who repeatedly received the thrashings. Once when he helped a friend with his Latin, his friend passed but Guignard was expelled for cheating.
As a young man, convinced happiness is the reward of virtue, Constant set out to overcome his bad luck by the sheer force of heroism. He went to work for a finance company but, during his first day on the job, the building caught fire. At the risk of his life, Constant rushed over to save the money in the company safe. Unfortunately, the stacks of bills burnt to a crisp in his hands. When he stumbled out of the flames, two police officers grabbed him and a month later he was sentenced to five years in prison.
During a riot in the prison, Constant attempted to rescue the warden under attack but, alas, Constant inadvertently tripped the warden who was then massacred by the inmates. So they sent Constant to Devil’s Island for twenty years. But, driven by the knowledge of his innocence, he made his way back to France under an assumed name.
Following a botched attempt to save a carriage which resulted in the death of an old man, two women and three children, Constant abandoned acts of heroism and contented himself with gestures of charity. However, every good act backfired: the money he gave to families in need resulted in the husbands becoming drunks; the wool jackets he distributed to the poor made them overheated and they subsequently died of pneumonia, a dog he rescued gave rabies to half a dozen people.
Constant shifted gears: he decided to concentrate on a single person so he adopted a young orphan girl. He was so kind to her, she fell in love with him. He told her he looked upon her as a father and could never be her lover; rather, he would seek out an appropriate handsome gentleman for her to marry. The next day he found her lying against his door, a knife in her heart.
He set plans to save a friend who was about to commit a crime, but once again his plans backfired and he was the one arrested and taken away. At the trial, the public prosecutor recounted all the evils Constant Guignard perpetrated – his cheating at school, his theft of his employer’s money, his leading a prison riot, his lechery with an innocent orphan girl, his shameful life as a hardened criminal. His lawyer had no choice but to plead insanity. The jury was unmoved: Constant Guignard was sentenced to the scaffold.
A month after the execution, a friend learned of the honest man’s sad death. Knowing Constant to be a good man, a true hero, his friend made arrangement for a special 'Hero' tombstone to commemorate his life, a life besmirched by the harshest of fates. But the stone carver misread a letter in the epitaph and the tombstone marking the grave read:
Here lies Constant Guignard
A Zero
Note; Constant Guignard is a short story in Jean Richepin’s collection: Les morts bizarres (Bizarre Deaths). The English translation of Constant Guignard is included in French Decadent Tales published by Oxford University Press.
Jean Richepin, 1849 - 1926
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