“Now explain to the court how you proceeded.”
It was awful. Our Lady had to explain. The police had demanded details, so had the examining magistrate, and now it was the court's turn. Our Lady was ashamed, not of his deed (that was impossible), but of continually repeating the same old story. He was so tired of ending his account with the words: “Until he was done for,” that he boldly thought of giving a new version. He decided to relate something else. Yet, at the same time, he related exactly the story he had told in the very same words to the detectives, the judge, the lawyer, and the psychiatrists. For, to Our Lady, a gesture is a poem and can be expressed only with the help of a symbol which is always, always the same. And all that remained with him of his two-year-old act was the bare expression. He was rereading his crime as a chronicle is reread, but it was no longer really about the crime that he was talking. Meanwhile, the clock on the wall opposite him was behaving in orderly fashion, but time was out of order, with the result that, every second, the clock ticked off long periods and short ones.
Of the twelve good old men and true of the jury, four were wearing spectacles. These four were cut off from communion with the courtroom, glass being a bad conductor–it insulates–and they followed, elsewhere, other adventures. In fact, none of them seemed interested in this murder case. One of the old men kept sleeking his beard; he was the only one who appeared to be attentive, but, looking at him more closely, we see that his eyes are hollow, like those of statues. Another was made of cloth. Another was drawing circles and stars on the green table cover; in daily life he was a painter, and his sense of humor led him at times to color pert little sparrows perched on a garden scarecrow. Another was spitting all his teeth into his pale blue–France blue–handkerchief. They stood up and followed the judge through the small hidden door. The deliberations are as secret as the election of a chief of masked bandits, as the execution of a traitor within a confraternity. The crowd relieved itself by yawning, stretching, and belching. Our Lady's lawyer left his bench and walked over to his client.
“Keep your chin up, my boy,” he said, squeezing Our Lady's hands. “You answered very well. You were frank. I think the jury is with us.”
As he spoke, he squeezed Our Lady's hands, supported him or clung to him. Our Lady smiled. It was a smile that was enough to damn his judges, a smile so azure that the guards themselves had an intuition of the existence of God and of the great principles of geometry. Think of the moonlight tinkling of the toad; at night it is so pure that the vagabond on the highway stops and does not go on until he has heard it again.
“They putting up a fight?” he asked, winking.
“Yes, yes, it's all right,” said the lawyer.
The guard of honor presented arms, and the unhooded Court emerged from the wall. M. Vase de Sainte-Marie sat down in silence; then everyone sat down very noisily. The judge placed his head between his beautiful white hands and said:
“We shall now hear the witnesses. Oh! first let's look at the police report. Are the inspectors here?”
It is extraordinary that a presiding judge should be so absentminded as to forget so serious a thing. Our Lady was shocked by his mistake, just as he would have been shocked by a spelling mistake (had he known how to spell) in the prison regulations. A clerk ushered in the two detectives who had arrested Our Lady. The one who had formerly carried on the now two-year-old investigation was dead. They therefore gave a succinct report of the facts: an astounding story in which a fake murder led to the discovery of a real one. This discovery is impossible, I'm dreaming. “All because of a trifle!” But, after all, I admit this amusing discovery, which leads to death, a little more readily ever since the guard took away the manuscript I had in my pocket during recreation. I have a feeling of catastrophe; then I dare not believe that a catastrophe of this kind can be the logical outcome of such slight carelessness. Then I think of the fact that criminals lose their heads because of such slight carelessness, so slight that one should have the right to repair it by backing up, that it's so trifling that if one asked the judge, he would consent, and that one cannot. Despite their training, which they say is Cartesian, the members of the jury will be unable, when, in a few hours, they condemn Our Lady to death, to figure out whether they did so because he strangled a doll or because he cut up a little old man into pieces. The detectives, instigators of anarchism, withdrew with a pretty kowtow to the judge. Outside, snow was falling. This could be guessed from the movement of the hands in the courtroom, which were turning up coat collars. The weather was overcast. Death was advancing stealthily over the snow. A clerk called the witnesses. They were waiting in a little side room, the door of which opened opposite the prisoner's box. The door opened, each time, just enough to let them edge through sideways, and one by one, drop by drop, they were infused into the trial. They went straight to the bar, where each raised his right hand and replied “I so swear” to a question no one asked. Our Lady saw Mimosa II enter. The clerk, however, had called out, “René Hirsch.” When he called “Antoine Berthollet,” First Communion appeared; at “Eugène Marceau,” Lady-apple appeared. Thus, in the eyes of Our bewildered Lady, the little faggots from Pigalle to Place Blanche lost their loveliest adornment, their names lost their corolla, like the paper flower that the dancer holds at his finger tips and which, when the ballet is over, is a mere wire stem. Would it not have been better to have danced the entire dance with a simple wire? The question is worth examining. The faggots showed the framework that Darling discerned behind the silk and velvet of every armchair. They were reduced to nothing, and that's the best thing that's been done so far. They entered aggressively or shyly, perfumed, made up, expressed themselves with studied care. They were no longer the grove of crinkly paper that flowered on the terraces of cafés. They were misery in motley. (Where do the faggots get their noms de guerre? But first it should be noted that none of them were chosen by those who bore them. This, however, does not hold for me. I can hardly give the exact reasons why I chose such and such a name. Divine, First Communion, Mimosa, Our Lady of the Flowers and Milord the Prince did not occur to me by chance. There is a kinship among them, an odor of incense and melting taper, and I sometimes feel as if I had gathered them among the artificial or natural flowers in the chapel of the Virgin Mary, in the month of May, under and about the greedy plaster statue that Alberto was in love with and behind which, as a child, I used to hide the phial containing my spunk.) Some of them uttered a few words that were terrifyingly precise, such as: “He lived at 8 Rue Berthe,” or “I met him for the first time on October 17. It was at Graff's Café.” A raised pinkie, lifted as if the thumb and forefinger were holding a teacup, disturbed the gravity of the session, and by means of this stray straw could be seen the tragic nature of its mass. The clerk called out: “M. Louis Culafroy.” Supported by Ernestine, who was wearing black and stood bolt upright, the only real woman to be seen at the trial, Divine entered. What remained of her beauty fled in confusion. The lines and shadows deserted their posts; it was a debacle. Her lovely face was uttering heart-rending appeals, howls as tragic as the cries of a dying woman. Divine was wearing a brown, silky camel-hair coat. She too said:
“I so swear.”
“What do you know about the accused?” asked the judge.
“I've known him for a long time, your Honor, but nevertheless I can say that I think he's very naïve, very childlike. I've always regarded him as being very sweet. He could be my son.”
She went on to tell, with a great deal of tact, how they had lived together for a long time. There was no mention of Darling. Divine was at last the grown-up she had not been allowed to be anywhere else. By God! here he is again, the witness, who has finally emerged from the child Culafroy whom he had never ceased to be. If he never performs any simple act, it is because only a few old men can be simple, that is, pure, purged, simplified as a diagram, which is perhaps the state of being of which Jesus said: “. . . like unto little children” (though no child is ever like
that), which a life-long withering labor does not always achieve. Nothing about him was simple, not even his smile, which he liked to draw out with the right corner of his mouth or spread across his face, with his teeth clenched.
The greatness of a man is not only a function of his faculties, of his intelligence, of whatever gifts he may have; it is also made up of the circumstances that have elected him to serve them as support. A man is great if he has a great destiny; but this greatness is of the order of visible, measurable greatness. It is magnificence seen from without. Though it may be wretched when seen from within, it is then poetic, if you are willing to agree that poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible. Culafroy had a wretched destiny, and it is because of this that his life was composed of those secret acts, each of which is in essence a poem, as the infinitesimal movement of the finger of a Balinese dancer is a sign that can set a world in motion because it issues from a world whose multifarious meaning is unavowable. Culafroy became Divine; he was thus a poem written only for himself, hermetic to whoever did not have the key to it. In short, this is his secret glory, like the one I have decreed upon myself so as to obtain peace at last. And I have it, for a fortuneteller in a fair-booth assured me that some day I would be famous. With what sort of fame? I tremble at the thought. But this prophecy is enough to calm my old need for thinking I have genius. I carry within me, preciously, the words of the augury: “Some day you will be famous.” I live with it in secret, like families, in the evening. by the lamp, and always, if they have one, with the shining memory of their kinsman who was sentenced to death. It illuminates and horrifies me. This quite virtual fame ennobles me, like a parchment that no one can decipher, an illustrious birth kept secret, a royal bar sinister, a mask or perhaps a divine filiation, the kind of thing Josephine must have felt, she who never forgot that she had given birth to the child who was to become the prettiest woman in the village, Marie, the mother of Solange–the goddess born in a hovel who had more blazons on her body than Mimosa had on her buttocks and in her gestures, and more nobility than a Chambure. This kind of consecration had kept the other women of her age (the others, mothers of men) away from Josephine. In the village, her situation was akin to that of the Mother of Jesus among the women of the Galilean village. Marie's beauty made the town illustrious. To be the human mother of a divinity is a more disturbing state than that of divinity. The Mother of Jesus must have had incomparable emotions while carrying her son, and later, while living and sleeping side by side with a son who was God–that is, everything and herself as well–who could make the world not be, His Mother, Himself not be, a God for whom she had to prepare, as Josephine did for Marie, the yellow corn mush.
Moreover, it was not that Culafroy, as child and Divine, was of exceptional finesse. But exceptionally strange circumstances had chosen him as their place of election, without informing him, had adorned him with a mysterious text. He served a poem in accordance with the whims of a rhyme without rhyme or reason. It was later, at the hour of his death, that, in a single wonder-struck glance, he was able to reread, with his eyes closed, the life he had written upon his flesh. And now Divine emerges from her inner drama, from that core of the tragic which she bears within her, and for the first time in her life is taken seriously in the parade of humans. The prosecuting attorney stopped the parade. The witnesses had left by the open door. Each having appeared for but a second, they burned up as they passed; the unknown whisked them away. The true centers of life were the witness room–a Court of Miracles–and the chamber of the jury. It was there that the room of the foul crime, with all its accessories, was reconstructed. The amazing thing was that the necktie was still there, crouching on the green table, paler than usual, soft, but ready to dart forth, as a slouching hoodlum on the bench in a police station might dart forth. The crowd was as restless as a dog. Someone announced that Death had been delayed by a derailment. It grew dark all at once. Finally, the judge called upon the expert alienist. It was he who, really and truly, sprang up through an invisible trap door of an invisible box. He had been sitting among the audience, which had not suspected him. He stood up and walked to the bar. He read his report to the members of the jury. From the winged report dropped such words as the following: “Unbalanced . . . psychopathy . . . inter-relation . . . splanchnic system . . . schizophrenia . . . unbalanced, unbalanced, unbalanced, unbalanced . . . equilibrist,” and all at once, poignant, bleeding, “the sympathetic nerve.” He did not pause: “. . . Unbalanced . . . semi-responsibility . . . secretion . . . Freud . . . Jung . . . Adler . . . secretion . . .” But the perfidious voice was caressing certain syllables, and the man's gestures were struggling against enemies: “Father, watch out on the left, on the right.” Certain words finally ricocheted on the perfidious voice (as in pig Latin words where you have to unscramble other words that may be naïve or nasty: edbay, oorday). One understood the following: “What is a malefactor? A tie dancing in the moonlight, an epileptic rug, a stairway going up flat on its belly, a dagger on the march since the beginning of the world, a panicky phial of poison, gloved hands in the darkness, a sailor's blue collar, an open succession, a series of benign and simple gestures, a silent hasp.” The great psychiatrist finally read his conclusions: “That he (Our Lady of the Flowers) is psychically unbalanced, non-affective, amoral. Yet, that in any criminal act, as in any act, there is an element of volition which is not due to the irritating complicity of things. In short, Baillon is partly responsible for the murder.”
Snow was falling. About the courtroom, all was silence. The Criminal Court was abandoned in infinite space, all alone. It had already ceased to obey the laws of the earth. Swiftly it flew across stars and planets. It was, in the air, the stone house of the Holy Virgin. The passengers no longer expected help from the outside world. The moorings had been cut. It was at that moment that the frightened part of the courtroom (the crowd, the jurymen, the lawyers, the guards) should have dropped to their knees and broken out into hymns of praise, when the other part (Our Lady), freed from the weight of carnal labors (to put someone to death is a carnal labor), had organized itself as a couple and sung: “Life is a dream . . . a charming dream . . .” But the crowd does not have the sense of grandeur. It does not obey this dramatic injunction, and nothing was less serious than what followed. Our Lady himself felt his pride softening. He looked at Judge Vase de Sainte-Marie for the first time with the eyes of a man. It is so sweet to love that he could not keep from dissolving into a feeling of sweet, trusting tenderness for the judge. “Maybe he ain't a louse!” he thought, and at once his sweet insensitivity collapsed, and the relief it afforded him was like the release of urine from the penis after a night of continence. Remember that when Darling used to wake up. he would find himself on earth after he had pissed. Our Lady loved his executioner, his first executioner. He was already granting a kind of wavering, premature pardon to the icy monocle, the metallic hair, the earthly mouth, the future sentence delivered according to frightful Scriptures. Exactly what is an executioner? A child dressed as a Fatal Sister, an innocent isolated by the splendor of his purple rags, a poor, a humble fellow. Someone lit the chandeliers and wall lights. The prosecuting attorney took the floor. Against the adolescent murderer, who had been cut out of a block of clear water, he said only things that were very fair, within the scope of the judge and jurors. That is, it was necessary to protect rentiers, who sometimes live all the way upstairs, beneath the roof, and to put to death children who slaughter them. . . . It was all very reasonable, spoken in a very sagacious and at times noble tone. With an accompaniment of his head:
“. . . It is regrettable (in a minor key; then, continuing in the major) . . . it is regrettable . . .”
His arm, pointing at the murderer, was obscene.
“Strike hard!” he cried. “Strike hard!”
The prisoners referred to him as “The Blowhard.” At that formal session, he illustrated very accurately a poster nailed
to a huge door. An old marquise, lost in the darkness of the crowd, thought to herself: “The Republic has already guillotined five of us. . . .” But her thought went no deeper. The tie was still on the table. The jurors still had not got over their fear. It was just about then that the clock struck five. During the indictment, Our Lady had sat down. The courthouse seemed to him to be situated between apartment buildings, at the rear of the kind of well-shaped inner courtyard on which all the kitchen and toilet windows look out, where uncombed housemaids lean forward and, with their hands cupped over their ears, listen and try to miss nothing of the proceedings. Five stories and four faces. The maids are toothless and spy on each other behind them. Through the gloom of the kitchen, one can make out the gold or plush spangles in the mystery of the opulent apartments where ivory-headed old gentlemen watch with tranquil eyes the approach of murderers in slippers. For Our Lady, the courthouse is at the bottom of this well. It is small and light, like the Greek temple that Minerva carries in her open hand. The guard at his left made him stand up, for the judge was questioning him: “What do you have to say in your defense?” The old tramp who was his cellmate in the Santé Prison had prepared a few suitable words for him to say to the Court. He looked for them but was unable to find them. The phrase “I didn't do it on purpose” took shape on his lips. Had he said it, nobody would have been surprised. Everyone expected the worst. All the answers that occurred to him came forward in slang, and a feeling for the proprieties suggested to him that he speak French, but everyone knows that in trying moments it is the mother tongue that prevails. He had to be natural. To be natural, at that moment, was to be theatrical, but his maladroitness saved him from ridicule and lopped off his head. He was truly great. He said: