‘How frustrating!’ said the detective, who knew my liking for long literary excursions. ‘I don’t know what kind of case you’re dealing with but you should know that events every bit as extraordinary are happening in 1934.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘It’ll be worth it, I promise. You’ve never heard anything like it, even in a novel.’
‘Don’t get carried away!’
‘Give me half an hour, Singleton. Just enough time to bring you up to date.’
‘You’re making my mouth water, Superintendent! Go on then, tell me what’s happened.’
Notes
3 Built in 1862, the Théâtre des Nations changed its name to Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in 1949 before being renamed Théâtre de la Ville in 1967. (Publisher’s note)
4 This is reported in Chapter XIV of Aristide Marie’s book. Nerval was the subject of a book by Eugène de Mirecourt which had been dedicated to him in cabbalistic letters and, under a sketch, had written ‘I am the other’. (Publisher’s note)
5 Juve was the ingenious policeman who hunted Fantômas in the series of the same name written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain between 1911 and 1913. Tirauclair was the hero of L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) by Émile Geboriau. Chantecoq was one of the characters in Belphégor by Arthur Bernède, published in 1927. (Publisher’s note)
6 In fact, different police forces coexisted in France, created according to need and without any coordination between them. In particular, a war was raging between the Sûreté Générale (which became the Sûreté Nationale in 1934), which had been autonomous since 1877 and was directly attached to the Ministry of the Interior, and the Préfecture de Police in Paris. (Publisher’s note)
We sat in a café on Rue de Rivoli. Through the window I could see the vast form of the Hôtel de Ville and, in front, the old Place de Grève where so many villains had been quartered in the Middle Ages and much of the nobility had been decapitated during the Revolution.
‘Four days ago,’ began Fourier, savouring his first sip of an excellent red wine from Burgundy, ‘the old Marquis de Brindillac was found dead in his bedroom at his home, Château B—, between Dourdan and Étampes in the Paris region. He was a renowned physiologist, highly thought of by his peers, who spent his life studying the human brain and particularly the mysteries of sleep. A jovial and passionate man, he was also rather eccentric. He had always been interested in analysing and understanding dreams, something which had led him to a fairly unorthodox kind of research over the past few years. As luck would have it, the fellow died in his sleep!
‘At quarter past ten in the morning on Saturday 13 October, last Saturday that is, the Marquise de Brindillac, whose bedroom is just opposite her husband’s, was worried when he didn’t answer after she knocked on his door. Usually, at that time he had been up for a while and was already hard at work. As the doors to the Marquis’s bedroom, study and library were all locked from the inside (the three rooms lead into each other through connecting doors), she alerted a servant who, with the help of the gardener, forced open the bedroom door. They found the poor man dead in bed in his nightclothes, the sheets kicked down around his legs. The most incredible thing was the look on his face: it was frozen in an expression of intense fear, a fear very difficult to explain because his eyes were closed, as if the terror had come not from something external, brutally waking him, but, on the contrary, had gripped him from inside sleep itself.
‘A doctor was called, followed a few minutes later by a gendarme. For the doctor there was no doubt that the Marquis had died from heart failure, after a violent panic attack which had weakened him. However, he thought it unlikely that one could die of fright and, given the unusual nature of the tragedy (in all his career he had never seen such an expression of terror on anyone’s face!), he declared that he couldn’t issue a death certificate stating that the Marquis had died of natural causes. Consequently, the gendarme arranged for the body to be removed and the Versailles public prosecutor, who was hurriedly contacted, decided to carry out an autopsy as is required in such a situation.
‘The body was transported to the morgue in Étampes. On Monday morning the pathologist delivered his report and he, too, concluded that the Marquis had died of heart failure caused by a night terror. However, he emphasised that the Marquis de Brindillac was in excellent health when he went to bed, if it can be put that way. No heart or respiratory problems, no sign of bleeding to the brain. The report confirmed that the victim had died of fright but nothing more was known about what had frightened him.
‘But did that really matter? After three days of fruitless investigation, that was what everyone was beginning to wonder. The Marquis was seventy-two; at that age anyone can be unlucky, even if they’re fit and well. A sudden shock and that’s it! And anyway, perhaps we were mistaken in thinking we saw terror on his face? Maybe we should just have seen it as a sign of suffering, the torment of a body until then lucky in life and which, suddenly, feels abandoned by it. Good heavens, when you die you rarely look happy about it! Between you and me, that opinion was hardly outrageous and those closest to him went along with it: the Marquis’s widow, his colleagues at the Académie des Sciences, who know a thing or two about reports and diagnosis. Why, even his friends at the Meta-what-sit Institute, who have made a speciality out of splitting hairs, didn’t call for a more comprehensive investigation.’
‘Do you mean the Institut Métapsychique?’
‘That’s the one. A bunch of cranks, doctors and scientists, often very well known in their fields, who believe in life after death and that man has certain occult powers. Do you know it?’
‘I’ve heard of it. There’s a similar society in London.’
‘If I am to believe the gendarmes’ report, the poor Marquise appears to regret that the most eccentric aspect of her husband’s character ended up getting the better of him. She’s sure that, in some way, it was these new ideas that killed him. Or, more precisely, the enormous enthusiasm he’d put into his latest research. Although he had retired from his position as a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, he had recently thrown himself into some fairly unconventional work with unbridled energy.’
‘What work was this?’
‘The Marquis – because, despite his status as a doctor of medicine and a professor of physiology, the good man preferred people to use his noble title! – the Marquis claimed, for example, that one could control one’s dreams and move at will through entirely invented dream landscapes.’
‘My word!’
‘Indeed. Anyway, in the light of the results of the local gendarmes’ investigation, on Tuesday the public prosecutor decided to close the case. And that’s when one of those blasted journalists waded in, digging up a story which goes back three months.’
Fourier took a copy of Paris-Soir out of his coat pocket. The newspaper was dated the day before; it had been folded to highlight one article in particular.
DEADLY SLEEP
Could this be the beginning of