The Blue Peril Page 3

  Conclusion: we are dealing with an association of individuals armed with powerful means of execution, abundantly provided with capital, whose immediate goal is to terrorize their victims. (The two workmen who are being kept under surveillance can only be accomplices.) But is this terror being spread for its own sake, or as a sort of preliminary anesthetic? Is this the comedy, or merely a prologue? If so, is it the prologue to a drama?

  In fact, it was neither one or the other—or rather, it was both at the same time.

  III. The Flying Thieves10

  The two Italian workmen could hardly be ignorant of the suspicions weighing upon them. As the only equivocal travelers and unknown guests, people were all the more determined to believe them guilty when that guilt was, so to speak, removed from the category of misadventure to the superterrestrial rank to which the rural imagination had guided it. “Those Piedmontese! Those foreign beggars!” They might have been lynched on the spot—but the presence of the gendarmes and a certain reporter from Paris prevented that summary justice. “Better to keep a close watch on their actions,” they said to one another—and that was decided.

  Elementary cunning advised providing the two fellows with work and continuing to shelter them, in order to lull their suspicions. Unfortunately, one by one, the local farmers refused to do so. The Italians received their final wages on the evening of April 23, from a farmer in Champrion—the village tormented the previous night—and lay down to sleep beneath the stars, on the edge of the nearby forest. A couple of gendarmes was set to watch them and, hidden according to the rules of the art, fell asleep to a man.

  Champrion, however, was plagued for a second time. The sarvants appropriated a goose and some ducks, whose owners, confident of not being robbed two nights in a row, had neglected to bring them inside. The inhabitants had also to deplore the loss of a simulated bronze urn, garnished with geranium-ivy, which surmounted one of the pillars of an entry-gate. The vase on the other pillar, likewise equipped with geranium-ivy, was let alone. Still that spirit of spoliation and teasing, characteristic of hobgoblins, gnomes, brownies, kobolds, imps, korrigans, djinn, trolls—and sarvants.

  When they woke up, the paired-up policemen who had gone to sleep with such unfortunate accord found that the Italians were no longer there—but they maintained doggedly that the latter were hidden by the branches, well enough to have been able to have run through the woods without being observed, exercise their villainous prowess and get back to their hiding-place.

  It is, in any case, undeniable that the journeymen had left early that morning, heading for Châtel. A young lad was able to catch up with them by bicycle in that hamlet, situated—like all the others—on the road from Bellegarde to Culoz, between the river and the mountain. There, the two companions were seen going from door to door all day, begging for employment that was inexorably refused to them. The Châtelois were counting on a continuation of the bizarre events and knew that it was now their turn to suffer them. They looked at the two pariahs as if they were the Evil One’s scouts.

  This is how they were described by the diabolical newspapers: one of them, tall and blond, made a contrast with the other, short and dark-haired. Large belts girded them, red for the former, blue for the latter. Similarly costumed in discolored beige, coiffed by soft felt hats molded to their heads, they were shod in heavy knee-length boots, and each of them carried his pouch and his tools tied in a bundle slung over his shoulder.

  Having been sent packing everywhere, even from the inn, they ate bread taken from their pouches when dusk fell, and lay down under a bush on the edge of the village, on the Culoz side. The local inhabitants, frightened by the descent of a dark night, imprisoned their livestock and bolted their doors. The sun had not touched the horizon when a midnight silence already reigned over Châtel.

  The Parisian reporter and two replacement gendarmes then took up position at the tiny window of a single-story barn, from which they could see the Italians’ bush. These three watchers had decided to divide the night up into four watches; only one of them would stand sentry duty while his companions slept.

  It was Brigadier Géruzon who stood the first watch while in anticipation of theirs, his colleague Milot and the reporter snored in the straw. Géruzon was to wake them up at the slightest sign of trouble. The suspects were sleeping twenty meters away, lying under a sweet-briar bush. The road passed by on the left, not far away, soon disappearing around a corner of the wood. On the same side, the Rhône rumbled, and on the other, the Colombier massif rose up steeply in its overwhelming supremacy: an enormous heap of chaotic stages, studded with buttresses and pitted by ravines, rocky and verdant, dark by virtue of the hour, masking the houses of Culoz with one final outcrop.

  A church bell chimed seven, and there was a fine interval of brightness in front of him when Géruzon saw the tall Piedmontese move, sit up and wake his comrade. They were conversing together in low voices, making gestures toward the hamlet in a discouraged manner, as if somewhat disappointed, when they suddenly seemed to come to a decision, threw their pouches and tools around their necks, and set off along the road again, marching in the direction of Culoz.

  Brigadier Géruzon decided that waking his colleagues would take time and would doubtless generate some noise. As the Italians were about to go out of sight round the corner of the wood, he jumped down to the ground from the skylight and set off behind them. And he would have to run! Not following the road, of course, in view of the fugitives, but across the fields and straight through the aforementioned corner.

  He had just reached it when a sort of exclamation—a kind of “hup!” he said—struck his ears. And just as he arrived at the roadway, emerging with a thousand precautions from the curtain of foliage, he perceived the two Piedmontese about 60 meters away, not on the road but above the road, at an approximate height of five meters, moving toward Culoz with surprising rapidity in mid-air. In the blink of an eye, Géruzon saw them vanish behind the first outcrop of the Colombier.

  Having lived through that prodigious adventure, as rapid as speech, the brigadier was initially dumbstruck. Then, running fast enough to render him breathless, he went to wake Milot and the reporter, in order to relate the phenomenon to them as succinctly as he could. He endured their annoyance and reproaches for having kept all the glory for himself, but he riposted with an explanation of the motives that had led him to act in that manner, and made the most of his bravery, adding that he had not done it without experiencing a slight thrill of fear. On the basis of that confession, the others accused him of hallucination, and lamented not having been there. The night being as dark as could be, however, the newshound decided to put off his investigations until the following day. Until then, telling themselves that Châtel was logically designated for attack, the three sentinels kept watch in silence, with their ears pricked.

  They heard no abnormal sounds.

  At dawn, they natives observed joyfully that nothing had happened during the night. This informed them that the Italians were nothing less than sarvants of a particularly malevolent species—flying demons—and they shuddered at the thought of Culoz, toward which they had flown: Culoz, where people had not been on the alert. They were right to shudder; the first cart-driver who passed by, coming from Culoz, spread the news of its pillage. The sarvants had skipped Châtel, finding nothing there to steal.

  This discovery provided an admirable explanation—in a manner as simple as a hello—of the absence of footprints following the thefts, that being the altitude at which the thieves flew, since they were flying thieves who remained suspended in mid-air while they were “at work.”

  Needless to report, however, some people treated this as an absurdity, and many pitying looks were directed at Brigadier Géruzon. The honest gendarme was unconcerned by that. He guided the reporter from the sweet-briar bush to the corner of the wood, and they both saw the tracks of the Italians; the prints of their hob-nailed boots were easily distinguishable in the soil of the field. When they re
turned to the road, however, they were no longer visible, the two pedestrians having marched on the grass verge. To judge by their trail alone, therefore, the Piedmontese could have walked in that manner all the way to Culoz, or even beyond. It might have been the case, after all, that they had not taken flight—in the case of a (probable) aberration of Géruzon—and even that they had taken no part in the sack of Culoz. The reporter took it upon himself to send emissaries there by bicycle, charged with establishing the present location of the Italians, without putting them on the alert. Then, while awaiting their return, he extracted Géruzon from a group of locals, to whom his tale was beginning to seem overly wonderful, and advised him not to delay any longer in making his report.

  The patrols of cyclists launched in pursuit of the nomads came back to Châtel around noon, without having found the slightest indication of their presence anywhere. This news succeeded in convincing the journalist, at least sufficiently for one of the leading Paris newspapers to publish this sensational headline on the following day:

  (Item 81)

  AEROPLANES OBSOLETE

  The advent of avianthropes

  The bird-men of Bugey

  After which followed an interpretation of the Bugist mystery, by means of the proven existence of a gang of prowlers in possession of the secret of flight without wings. Our journalist called them, pedantically, “wingless avianthropes.” He trembled to see such an important discovery—doubtless effected by the “diminution of corporeal weight, a sort of physical emancipation from matter, conferring freedom from gravity”—in the hands of such rascals. And he concluded with a black-edged portrait of the terror of the Bugists, whom he represented as “flabbergasted by fear,” wondering what would happen now that the sarvants, having reached Culoz, had to decide between going into the riverside villages of the Rhône and the villages distributed at the foot of the Colombier.

  This article, vaguely impregnated with a residue of skepticism, was condemned as a lie even by the most gullible of fools. Proofs were demanded, and that was the cause of a swarm of reporters heading for Bugey, disembarking at Culoz—a railway junction—coming from Switzerland, Italy, Germany and other more-or-less adjacent nations.

  Whether because the local combination of the river and the mountain was necessary to their exploits, however, or because they were reduced to honesty by the vigilance of the gendarmerie, or for some entirely different reason, the sarvants suddenly ceased their campaign.

  The journalists went home, to their republics, kingdoms or empires; the peasants made fun of one another; Géruzon thought he had had a dream. That unexpected quietude did not deceive the wisest of men—by which I mean Monsieur Le Tellier—in the slightest, however; for, when he installed himself at Maristel on the evening of April 26, the day after the discomfiture of Culoz, he planned to spend his vacation making a rational study of the mystery. The partisans of the hoax hypothesis even claimed that the arrival of such a clear-sighted man was not unconnected with the cessation of hostilities.

  IV. Mirastel and Its Inhabitants

  The time has now come to describe the location at which Monsieur Le Tellier, his family and his secretary, had just arrived, and also to sketch a portrait of those who came with him and those whom he found—and finally, to reveal why Mirastel had received its annual guests at such a premature moment.

  To anyone observing it from the south—a tourist sailing on Lac Bourget, for example—the Colombier seems a formidable peak, an isolated mount. From that direction, one might take it for a giant relative of those buttes which strew the country with their abrupt rotundities, and which the natives call “molards.” That is an illusion. The Colombier has no peak. What makes it seem as if it has is the fact that it is the rump of a very long chain in which the Jura terminates. The Colombier extends a long way toward the north, raising up its tortuous spine for league upon league before stopping here, in a gradual collapse of hillocks and ravines: a magnificent descent of curt and thickset forests, a succession of abrupt gorges and undulating moors, like the apse of some superhuman cathedral, from which outcrops of rock and verdure radiate like mountainous flying buttresses.

  The eastern slope of the Colombier dies out at the level of the Rhône, whose meandering course festoons its contours. The western slope does not plunge so low, widening out into the pleasant plateau of the Valromey. As for the rump, it limits a vast marsh traversed by the Rhône.

  At the foot of that rump, the highway, wedded to its curve, turns from there towards Geneva and Lyon; passing through the sarvant-haunted region, it alternately encounters villages and châteaux. The communes are distributed along the road, and are named Culoz, Béon, Luyrieu, Talissieu, Ameyzieu and Artemare. Between them, but higher up on the flank of the mountain, manor-houses loom up in their various and more-or-less lordly superiority: Montverrand, feudal; Lurieu, a ruin; Châteaufroid, Medieval; Mirastel, Louis XIII; and Machuraz, Renaissance.

  Among all these châteaux, Mirastel alone is of interest to us. It is easily recognizable. From the railway, which runs alongside the road some distance away, one sees it standing out from the green background of the mountain between Machuraz, which has white walls beneath red tiles, and Châteaufroid, whose two towers bear blue slate cones. It is made of bricks—bricks that have become pink, always illuminated by the bright sunlight—and flanked by four corner towers. Three are still coiffed with their old grey slate roofs in the form of pointed balloons, like Saracen helmets, but the forth supports the cupola of an observatory.

  The garden of Mirastel, leaning over its far side as if on a pulpit, surrounds it with a fleece of foliage. Its terrace, planted with trees, forms a rocky plinth for its wall. It overlooks its two neighbors, and is overlooked itself by the mountain hamlets of Ouche and Chavornay, which are superimposed behind it to the left, marking out the stony path to the summit. Two cart-tracks climb in zigzags to Mirastel’s main gate. One comes from Talisseu, the other from Ameyzieu. Both are thus connected to the highway, but in the middle of the vague triangle that their fork describes, a goat-track climbs up the steep slope, leading directly from the road to the threshold of the enclosure.

  How did that castle, in the freshness of its youth, escape so totally the hatred of Richelieu? Why is it not, like so many others, a ruin that one might mistake from afar for a rock, among all those rocks that evening assimilates to its disconnected battlements? Legend holds that it sheltered in those days, not some bellicose predator, but a mild and inoffensive gentleman, doubtless afflicted by insomnia. Spending his days reading books and his nights reading the sky, he loved to take inventory of the constellations from the top of a high tower. That was the origin of the name Mirastel, which means “aimed at the stars” or “stellar observatory.”

  In truth, when the late Monsieur Arquedouve bought the residence, the north-western tower had never had a cover; it ended in a platform—but many antique astronomical instruments were unearthed from under the debris, in the form of a mass of copper objects engraved and embellished with allegorical figures: zodiacal and equinoctial spheres, azimuthal horizons, quadrants, sextants, celestial globes, astrolabes, gnomons and other ancient items recovered from the Chaldeans, to which it was convenient to add one of those interminable telescopes of whose agency Kepler was availing himself in the era when Mirastel had been newly-built.

  Monsieur Arquedouve, a rich Lyonnais businessman, acquired the domain in 1874, 11 years after his marriage and on the insistence of his spouse, who was infatuated with the country and dreamed of nothing but astronomy. This superior woman, an emulator of Hypatia, Madame Lepaute and Madame du Châtelet,11 wanted to build an observatory on the platform of the tower; but the work had only just finished when Madame Arquedouve was struck by a double misfortune. An all-but-inexplicable amaurosis deprived her of sight permanently, and her husband died, leaving the poor blind woman with two daughters, Augustine and Lucie, aged ten and eight.

  From that day on, Madame Arquedouve never left Mirastel. In spite of h
er infirmity, energy and habit made her a remarkable educator and an accomplished mistress of the house. She devoted herself as necessity demanded to the most various kinds of work, with an incredible skill—but when she left her park it was to go into darkness, and it was a great pity, on beautiful starry nights, to see her raise her extinct eyes to the splendor of a sky that she could not see, but whose harmonious silence she could hear.

  Her ambition was to have a stepson who was an astronomer. She realized it. Four year after her elder daughter’s marriage to Doctor Calixte Monbardeau, established in Artemare, the younger married Jean Le Tellier, then attached to the Observatory of Marseilles. It was Monsieur Le Tellier who benefited from the installation of the tower. It was equipped with a fine equatorial telescope, which permitted him to pursue some of his work at Mirastel, during the summer months.

  Now Monsieur Le Tellier was the director of the Paris Observatory, and Madame Arquedouve was a grandmother four times over. Unfortunately, however, a further deplorable humiliation had crushed her. Suzanne Monbardeau, the eldest of her grandchildren, had allowed herself to be seduced by a man named Front, a rustic Don Juan from Belley devoid of all sentiment. He had abducted her. Monsieur Monbardeau never wanted to hear his daughter’s name spoken again, so the sad Suzanne lived with her lover in a modest cottage some distance from the little town, no longer seeing any member of her family except her brother Henri—and he, in order to meet her, had to hide from both Front and their relatives. There was a good deal of misery, as you can imagine.