The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century by Terry Hale Read Free Book Online Page A

the adorable creature?
    I know not whether I slept or not, but I know that all the glad symphony of nature was singing its songs in my heart; I know that the night appeared to me everlasting – the day interminable; I know that whilst I kept urging the time to move on, I wanted to restrain it, so as not to lose one minute of the days I hoped to live.
    The following night I was in the Rue Ferou by nine o’clock.
    At half-past nine Solange appeared.
    She came towards me, and threw her arms round my neck.
    ‘Saved!’ cried she; ‘my father is saved, and to you I owe his preservation. Oh, how I do love you!’
    A fortnight later Solange received a letter, informing her that her father was in England.
    The next day I brought her a passport. She took it and burst into tears.
    ‘You don’t love me, then?’ said she.
    ‘I love you more than my life,’ I answered her; ‘but I pledged my word to your father, and I must keep it above all things.’
    ‘Then,’ said she, ‘I will break mine. If thou hast the heart to let me go, Albert, I have not the heart to leave thee.’
    Alas! she remained.

    Again there was a short pause in the narrative – a silence still more respected than the former; for all felt conscious that the end of the story was drawing near, and M. Ledru had said that this story was one he might not have a sufficient strength to go through.
    He resumed it almost immediately.
    Three months had passed away since the night Solange had declined to depart, and, since then, not a word had been said about separation.
    Solange had wished to have a lodging in the Rue Taranne. I had taken it in the name of Solange; I knew her by no other, as she herself knew me by that of Albert only. I had obtained for her a situation as junior teacher in a girls’ school, the better to secure her from the pursuit of the revolutionary tribunal, now become more active than ever.
    On Thursdays and Sundays we spent the day together in the small apartment in the Rue Taranne.
    Each day brought us a letter: I wrote to her in the name of Solange; she to me in the name of Albert.
    These three months were the happiest of my life.
    Still I had not abandoned the design I had formed after my interview with the executioner’s assistant. I had asked and obtained permission to make experiments on the tenaciousness of life after capital punishment; and these experiments had proved to me that pain, acute and terrible pain, survived the butchery.
    ‘Ah! that’s what I protest against,’ cried the doctor.
    ‘Come,’ resumed M. Ledru, ‘will you deny that the blade of the guillotine strikes that part of our body which is most fraught with sensation, on account of the many nerves that meet in it? Will you deny that the neck contains all the nerves of the upper limbs: the sympathetic, the vaginal, the frenetic, and lastly, the spinal marrow – the very source of all those that belong to the lower limbs? Will you deny that the severing, the crushing of the vertebral column, must produce one of the most frightful pains that a human being can endure?’
    ‘All this I grant,’ said the doctor; ‘but this pain lasts only a few seconds.’
    ‘That do I deny in my turn,’ exclaimed M. Ledru, with deep sincerity; ‘and even did it last but a few seconds, during that space, consciousness, personal identity, the self , continue alive; the head hears, sees, and judges its own severance from the body; and who will argue that the short duration of the torture compensates for its horrible intensity?’
    ‘So, then, in your opinion, the decree of the Constituent Assembly, which substituted the guillotine for the gallows, was an error in philanthropy, and it was better to be hanged than beheaded?’
    ‘Undoubtedly. Many have hanged themselves, or been hanged, who have been restored to life. Such people have been able to make known the sensations they experienced. It was that of sudden apoplexy – that is to say, a deep sleep, without any particular