Here are three outlandish Jean Richepin tales from his collection Les Morts Bizarres (Bizarre Deaths). Enjoy!
DESHOULIÈRES
Deshoulières was a man obsessed - his obsession: to be totally original and unpredictable in every phase of his daily life. He pushed this rule of conduct to the point of extreme eccentricity and thus became known as the dandy of the unpredictable.
Detecting originality exclusively in change, Deshoulières contrived the axiom that one should never, ever repeat one's same appearance. To this end, our dandy of the unpredictable varied his clothes, mannerisms, speech and physical appearance each time he strolled the Paris streets. If there was anyone who took to heart Baudelaire's insistence that life should be lived as if continually in front of a mirror, Deshoulières is our man.
Likewise with his mind - Deshoulières was a veritable mental kaleidoscope, "showing up paradoxes like colored glass, mingled with the most monstrous truisms," which overwhelmed the listener at every turn. Moreover, he was blessed with an entire array of artistic gifts in poetry, painting and music. Had he pursued any of these with dedication, he would undoubtedly be counted among the immortals, on the level of Keats or Shelley, Rembrandt or Vermeer, Mozart or Liszt.
But, alas, to center his creative juices in exclusively one direction would be both predictable and, even worse, boring. No, no, no . . . none of that for Deshoulières. For, as his told his friends, there was no sense in his attempting to be a god since he already was a god. And the reaction to the dandy's bold statement? Most Parisians wrote him off as a complete lunatic but there were some who judged him a weird kind of Antichrist.
Genius that he was, Deshoulières concocted a bit of originality that eventually cost him his life: he murdered his mistress, had her embalmed and continued to love her. The deed was pulled off with such skill, such novelty, such panache, our dandy of the unpredictable could not be pinned to the murder.
But the fact his monstrous crime remained a secret struck Deshoulières as far too banal. Thus, he performed a master stroke of the unpredictable: he confessed to the murder and displayed not the slighted remorse. Predictably, the whole of Paris cried out in horror and all eyes were riveted on Deshoulières.
We may ask: What did the supreme dandy do in prison? Jean Richepin informs us, "he busied himself not with his defense, nor with his notoriety, but with classifying and codifying the mysteries of animal magnetism, and of transforming this dense philosophical treatise into a sequence of monosyllabic sonnets."
At his trial, his lawyer, an illustrious member of the profession, produced a defense so extraordinary, the jury was left in tears, a defense most certainly establishing Deshoulières' innocence. But then, ever the dandy of the unpredictable, Deshoulières congratulated his lawyer on such a stunning performance then proceeded in "proving his own guilt so comprehensively that no possible doubt could remain. The verdict that had seemed so certain was reversed by him like a glove, and he obtained what he wanted: the unpredictable result of having himself, by his own volition, condemned to death."
Completely unperturbed, Deshoulières spent his last hours inventing a new dance-step and developing a unique recipe for oyster sauce. As a grand finale of his unpredictable life, when he was taken to the guillotine, at the last moment, so as not to have his neck sliced like any Tom, Dick or Harry, Deshoulières pulled his head down and the guillotine blade topped his skull like a boiled egg. So befitting for the dandy of the unpredictable! Bizarre death, anyone?
CONSTANT GUIGNARD
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.
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
THE METAPHYSICAL MACHINE
Instead of an inquisitive English scientist exploring the future as we find in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Richepin’s short tale features an obsessed French madman exploring metaphysical truth by a machine that looks something like the Englishman’s time machine but with two important differences: a dentist’s drill rigged up to produce excruciating pain in his hollow tooth and a mechanized scroll enabling the Frenchman to write as he undergoes his torment.
Sounds crazy? It is crazy, although the narrator
repeatedly insists he is not mad. At one point in his frenzied telling,
our philosophical pioneer exclaims, “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.”
Now, where does
all this lead us? Does the French visionary survive his adventure as
does Wells' English scientist? Hint: this tale isn't part of Bizarre Deaths for nothing!
French author Jean Richepin, 1849-1926
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