CHAPTER X

Second act of the _Vampire_--Analysis--My neighbour again objects--He has seen a vampire--Where and how--A statement which records the existence of vampires--Nero--Why he established the race of hired applauders--My neighbour leaves the orchestra

While Ruthven's preparations for marrying Malvina were in progress, Edgard, one of his vassals, married Lovette. Lovette made the prettiest, the sweetest and the most graceful betrothed imaginable: she was Jenny Vertpré, at twenty.

Lord Ruthven, who really loved Malvina, would much rather have sucked the blood of another man's wife than that of his own; so, at the request of Edgard, his servant, he willingly acceded to be present at his nuptials. The marriage takes place. Lord Ruthven is seen sitting down: the ballet is just about to begin, when an ancient bard comes forward with his harp; he was a guest at every castle, the poet invited to every marriage. He recognised Ruthven, who did not recognise him, being otherwise employed in ogling poor Lovette.

The bard tunes his harp and sings:--

"O jeune vierge de Staffa Brûlant de la première flamme, Dont le cœur palpite déjà Aux doux noms d'amante et de femme! Au moment d'unir votre sort A l'amant de votre pensée, Gardez-vous, jeune fiancée, De l'amour qui donne la mort!"

This first couplet rouses Lord Ruthven's anger, who sees in it a warning addressed to Lovette, and who consequently fears to see his victim snatched away from him. So he turns his bewitching glance from the young girl to glare furiously on the bard, who continues unconcernedly:--

"Quand le soleil de ces déserts Des monts ne dore plus la cime, Alors, les anges des enfers Viennent caresser leurs victimes.... Si leur douce voix vous endort, Reculez, leur main est glacée! Gardez-vous, jeune fiancée, De l'amour qui donne la mort!"

A third stanza and Lovette will escape from the Vampire. The bard, who is the angel of marriage in disguise, must not therefore be allowed to sing his third stanza. Lord Ruthven complains that the song brings back unhappy memories, and sends the old man away.

Then, as night draws on, as there is no time to lose, since, unless he can suck the blood of a maiden before one o'clock in the morning, he must die, he seeks an interview with Lovette. Lovette would fain decline; but Edgard is afraid of displeasing his lord and master, who, left alone with Lovette, endeavours to seduce her, swears to her that he loves her, and places a purse full of gold in her hand. Just at that moment the bard's harp is heard and the refrain of the song:--

"Gardez-vous, jeune fiancée, De l'amour qui donne la mort!"

Then everybody comes on, and the ballet begins. Towards the middle of the ballet, Lovette withdraws, tired; Ruthven, who has not let her go out of sight, follows her. Edgard soon perceives that neither Lovette nor his lord are present. He goes out in his turn. Cries are heard from the wing; Lovette runs on, terrified; a pistol-shot is heard: Lord Ruthven falls mortally wounded on the stage.

"He tried to dishonour my betrothed!" cries Edgard, who appears, his pistol still smoking in his hand.

Aubrey dashes towards the wounded man. Lord Ruthven still breathes; he asks to be left alone with his friend. Everybody goes off.

"One last promise, Aubrey," says Lord Ruthven.

"Oh, ask it, take my life!... it will be unbearable to me without thee," replies Aubrey.

"My friend, I only ask thee for profound secrecy for twelve hours."

"For twelve hours?"

"Promise me that Malvina shall not know anything of what has happened--that you will not do anything to avenge my death before the hour of one in the morning has struck.... Swear secrecy by my dying breath!..."

"I swear it!" says Aubrey, stretching forth his hands. The moon comes out from behind clouds and shines brilliantly during Ruthven's last words.

"Aubrey," says Ruthven, "the queen of night casts light upon me for the last time.... Let me see her and pay my final vows to heaven!"

Ruthven's head falls back at these words. Then Aubrey, helped by Lovette's father, carries the dead man to the rocks in the distance, kisses his hand for the last time, and retires, led away by the old man. At that moment the moonlight completely floods Ruthven's body with its rays and lights up the frozen mountains....

The curtain falls, and the whole house applauds enthusiastically, save my neighbour, who still growls under his breath. Such inveterate animosity against a play which appeared to me to be full of interest astonished me, coming from a person who seemed so well disposed as he. He had not merely contented himself with noisy exclamations, as I have indicated, but, still worse, during the whole of the last scene he had played in a disturbing fashion with a key which he several times put to his lips.

"Really, monsieur," I said, "I think you are very hard on this piece."

My neighbour shrugged his shoulders.

"Yes, monsieur, I know it, and the more so because the author considers himself a man of genius, a man of talent, the possessor of a good style; but he deceives himself. I saw the piece when it was played three years ago, and now I have seen it again. Well, what I said then, I repeat: the piece is dull, unimaginative, improbable. Yes, see how he makes vampires act! And then _Sir_ Aubrey! People don't talk of _Sir_ Aubrey. Aubrey is a family name, and the title of _Sir_ is only used before the baptismal name. Ah! the author was wise to preserve his anonymity; he showed his sense in doing that."

I took advantage of a moment when my neighbour stopped to take breath, and I said--

"Monsieur, you said just now, 'Yes, see how he makes vampires act!' Did you not say so? I was not mistaken, was I?"

"No."

"Well, by employing such language you gave me the impression that you believe they really exist?"

"Of course they exist."

"Have you ever seen any, by chance?"

"Certainly I have seen them."

"Through a solar microscope?" I laughingly suggested. "No, with my own eyes, as Orgon and Tartuffe."

"Whereabouts?"

"In Illyria."

"In Illyria? Ah! Have you been in Illyria?"

"Three years."

"And you saw vampires there?"

"Illyria, you must know, is the historic ground of vampires like Hungary, Servia and Poland."

"No, I did not know.... I do not know anything. Where were the vampires you saw?"

"At Spalatro. I was lodging with a good man of sixty-two. He died. Three days after his burial, he appeared to his son, in the night, and asked for something to eat: the son gave him all he wanted; he ate it, and then vanished. The next day the son told me what had happened, telling me he felt certain his father would not return once only, and asking me to place myself, the following night, at a window to see him enter and go out. I was very anxious to see a vampire. I stood at the window, but that night he did not come. The son then told me, fearing lest I should be discouraged, that he would probably come on the following night. On the following night I placed myself again at my window, and sure enough, towards midnight, the old man appeared, and I recognised him perfectly. He came from the direction of the cemetery; he walked at a brisk pace, but his steps made no sound. When he reached the door, he knocked; I counted three raps: the knocks sounded hard on the oak, as though it were struck with a bone and not with a finger. The son opened the door and the old man entered...."

I listened to this story with the greatest attention, and I began to prefer the intervals to the melodrama.

"My curiosity was too highly excited for me to leave my window," continued my neighbour; "there I stayed. Half an hour later, the old man came out; he returned whence he had come--that is to say, in the direction of the cemetery. He disappeared round the corner of a wall. At the same moment, almost, my door opened. I turned round quickly and saw the son. He was very pale. 'Well,' I said,'so your father came?' 'Yes ... did you see him enter?' 'Enter and come out.... What did he do to-day?' 'He asked me for food and drink, as he did the other day.' 'And did he eat and drink?' 'He ate and drank.... But that is not all ... this is what troubles me. He said to me ...' 'Ah!' he said something else than a mere request for food and drink?' 'Yes, he said to me, "This is the second time I have come and eaten with thee. It is now thy turn to come and eat with me."' 'The devil!...' 'I am to expect him the same hour the day after to-morrow.' 'The deuce you are!' 'Yes, yes, that is just what worries me.' The day but one after, he was found dead in his bed! The same day two or three other people in the same village who had also seen the old man, and to whom he had spoken, fell ill and died too. It was then recognised that the old man was a vampire. I was questioned; I told all I had seen and heard. Justice demanded an examination of the graveyard. They opened the tombs of all those who had died during the previous six weeks: every corpse was in a state of decomposition. But when they came to Kisilowa's tomb--that was the old man's name--they found him with his eyes open, his lips red, his lungs breathing properly, although he was as rigid as if in death. They drove a stake through his heart; he uttered a loud cry and blood gushed out from his mouth: then they laid him on a stack of wood, reduced him to ashes and scattered the ashes to the four winds.... I left the country soon after. I never heard if his son turned into a vampire too."

"Why should he have become a vampire too?" I asked.

"Ah! because it is the custom of those who die from a vampire's bite to become vampires."

"Really, you say this as though it were a known fact."

"But indeed it is a known, registered and well established fact! Do you doubt it?... Read Don Calmet's _Traité des apparitions_, vol ii. pp. 41 _et sqq_.; you will find a record signed by the hadnagi Barriavar and the ancient heïduques; further by Battiw, first lieutenant of the regiment of Alexander of Wurtemberg; by Clercktinger, surgeon-major of the Fürstenberg regiment; by three other surgeons of the company and by Goltchitz, captain at Slottats, stating that in the year 1730, a month after the death of a certain heïduque, who lived in Medreiga, named Arnold-Paul, who had been crushed by the fall of a hay waggon, four people died suddenly, and, from the nature of their death, according to the traditions of the country, it was evident that they had been the victims of vampirism; they then called to mind that, during his life, this Arnold-Paul had often related how, in the neighbourhood of Cossova, on the Turko-Servian frontier, he had been worried by a Turkish vampire,--for they too hold the belief that those who have been passive vampires during their lives become active vampires after their death,--but that he had found a cure in the eating of earth from the vampire's grave, and in rubbing himself with its blood-- precautions which did not prevent him from becoming a vampire after his death; for, four persons having died, they thought the deed was due to him, and they exhumed his body forty days after his burial: he was quite recognisable, and his body bore the colour of life; his hair, his nails and his beard had grown; his veins were filled with a bloody fluid, which exuded from all parts of his body upon the shroud in which he was wrapped round: the hadnagi, or bailiff of the place, in the presence of those who performed the act of exhumation, and who was a man experienced in cases of vampirism, caused a very sharp stake to be driven through the heart of the said Arnold-Paul, after the usual custom, piercing his body through and through, a frightful cry escaping from his lips, as though he were alive; this act accomplished, they cut off his head, burned him to ashes, and did the same with the corpses of the four or five other victims of vampirism, lest they, in their turn, should cause the deaths of others; but none of these precautions prevented the same wonders from being renewed, five years later, about the year 1735, when seventeen people, belonging to the same village, died from vampirism, some without any previous illness, others after having languished two or three days; among others a young person, named Stranoska, daughter of the heïduque Jeronitzo, went to bed in perfect health, waked up in the middle of the night, trembling all over, uttering fearful shrieks, and saying that the son of the heïduque Millo, who had died nine weeks before, had tried to strangle her during her sleep; she languished from that instant, and died in three days' time: since what she had said of the son of Millo led them to suspect him of being a vampire, they exhumed him, and found him in a state which left no doubt of the fact of vampirism; they discovered, in short, after prolonged investigation, that the defunct Arnold-Paul had not only killed the four persons already referred to, but also many animals, of which fresh vampires, and particularly Millo's son, had eaten; on this evidence, they decided to disinter all who had died since a certain date, and among about forty corpses they discovered seventeen which bore evident signs of vampirism; so they pierced their hearts, cut off their heads, then burnt them and threw their bodies into the river."

"Does the book which contains this evidence cost as much as an Elzevir, monsieur?"

"Oh dear no! You will pick it up anywhere, two volumes, in 18mo, of 480 pages each. Techener, Guillemot or Frank will have a copy. It will cost you from forty sous to three francs."

"Thanks, I shall give myself the pleasure of buying a copy."

"Now will you allow me to depart?... Three years ago I thought the third act pretty bad; it will seem worse to me to-day."

"If you really must, monsieur ..."

"Yes, really you must let me go."

"But first may I ask your advice?"

"With the greatest pleasure.... Speak."

"Before I came into the orchestra, I entered the pit, and there I had a slight breeze."

"Ah! It was you, was it?"

"It was I."

"You ...?"

"Yes."

"Smacked ...?"

"Yes."

"What occasioned you to allow yourself that diversion?"

I told him my adventure, and asked him if I ought to forewarn my witnesses overnight, or if it would be time enough next morning.

He shook his head.

"Oh, neither to-night nor to-morrow morning," he said.

"What! neither to-night nor to-morrow?"

"No; it would be useless trouble."

"Why so?"

"Because you fell into a nest of hired applauders."

"A nest of hired applauders!... What are they?" I asked.

"Oh! young man," exclaimed my neighbour in paternal accents, "do your utmost to preserve your holy innocence!"

"But suppose I beg you to put an end to it ...?"

"Have you ever heard that in former times there were emperors of Rome?"

"Certainly."

"Do you remember the name of the fifth of those emperors?" "I think it was Nero."

"Right.... Well, Nero, who poisoned his cousin Britannicus, disembowelled his mother Agrippina, strangled his wife Octavia, killed his wife Poppæa with a kick in the stomach, had a tenor voice, after the style of Ponchard; only his style was less cultivated, and occasionally he sang false! That did not matter whilst Nero sang before his roystering companions or before his courtesans at the Palatine or Maison-Dorée; neither was it of much consequence when Nero sang as he watched Rome burn: the Romans were too much occupied with the fire to pay any attention to a semi-tone too high or a flat too low. But when he took it into his head to sing in a public theatre, it was a different matter: every time the illustrious tenor deviated in the slightest degree from musical correctness, some spectator allowed himself--what I shall permit myself to do immediately, if you insist on my remaining to the end of this silly melodrama--to whistle. Of course the spectator was arrested and promptly flung to the lions; but as he passed before Nero, instead of saying simply, according to custom, 'Augustus, he who is about to die salutes thee!' he said,'Augustus, I am to die because you sang false; but when I am dead, you will not sing the more correctly.' This final salutation, taken up and added to by other culprits, annoyed Nero: he had the whistlers strangled in the corridors, and no one whistled any more. But it was not enough for Nero,--that _hankerer after the impossible,_ as Tacitus called him,--it was not enough that no one whistled any more, he wanted everybody to applaud him. Now, he could indeed strangle those who whistled, but he could not exactly strangle those who did not applaud; he would have had to strangle the whole audience, and that would have been no light job: Roman theatres held twenty, thirty, forty thousand spectators!... As they were so strong in numbers, they could easily have prevented themselves from being strangled. Nero went one better: he instituted a body composed of Roman nobles--a kind of confraternity consisting of some three thousand members. These three thousand chevaliers were not the emperor's pretorians, they were the artist's body-guard; wherever he went, they followed him; whenever he sang, they applauded him. Did a surly spectator raise a murmur, a sensitive ear allow its owner to utter a slight whistle, that murmur or whistle was immediately drowned by applause. Nero ruled triumphant in the theatre. Had not Sylla, Cæsar and Pompey exhausted all other kinds of triumph? Well, my dear sir, that race of chevaliers has been perpetuated under the name of _claqueurs_. The Opéra has them, the Théâtre-Français has them, the Odéon has them--and is fortunate in having them!--finally, the Porte-Saint-Martin has them; nowadays their mission is not only to support poor actors--it consists even more, as you have just seen, in preventing bad plays from collapsing. They are called _romains_, from their origin; but our _romains_ are not recruited from among the nobility. No, managers are not so hard to please in their choice, and it is not necessary to show a gold ring on the first finger; provided they can show a couple of big hands, and bring these large hands rapidly and noisily together, that is the only quartering of nobility required of them. So, you see, I am quite right to warn you not to upset two of your friends for one of those rapscallions.... Now that I have enlightened you, will you allow me to leave?"

I knew it would be impertinent to retain my neighbour any longer. Though his conversation, which had covered a wide range of subjects in a short time, was agreeable and highly edifying to myself, it was evident he could not say the same of mine. I could not teach him anything, save that I was ignorant of everything he knew. So I effaced myself with a sigh, not daring to ask him who he was, and allowing him to pass by with his _Pastissier françois_ hugged with both hands to his breast, fearing, no doubt, lest one of the chevaliers of whom he had just spoken, curious in the matter of rare books, should relieve him of it.

I watched him withdraw with regret: a vague presentiment told me that, after having done me so much service, this man would become one of my closest friends. In the meanwhile, he had made the intervals far more interesting than the play.

Happily the bell was ringing for the third act, and so the intervals were at an end.