It was difficult and abhorrent for everyone who attended that interrogation to listen to these blasphemous words. Enguerrand did not wish to use his right to speak. He looked at the Inquisitor with impudence, at times scoffing at him, exchanging glances with his comrades. But the Marquis de Rocheteau magnanimously made up for Enguerrand’s silence, pouring out a flood of noxious words, insults and blasphemies:
“You wonder why we break mirrors? What kind of magic is this? Here is the answer: we break mirrors because that way the deception has only one side, this one where we all are. That is not enough for you. You don’t want God inside you, where you cannot hide your iniquities from Him, but you rather place him in front of you. On the outside you are whitewashed tombs, and on the inside you are rotting. And you think that you can frighten us with torture, while death and torture are exactly what we want. You try to scare us with the fire of the stake, and you already have one foot in the fire of hell, you hypocrites. But Ferrarius has escaped and you will never find him. He is now far away, followed by a few of the brothers; he has slipped out of the hand of your earthly justice. I know the date of my death, just as I know the date of my birth. I’ve got nothing else to say.”
Robert de Prevois, seeing that the heretics were not showing the slightest inclination toward recanting, ordered that Callistus, Enguerrand and the Marquis be tortured, for the salvation of their souls. But Satan, who finds hellish pleasure in ruining actions pleasing to God, filled the bodies of his subjects with supernatural strength and they were able to withstand the most strenuous of tortures, occasionally joking about it or ostensibly forgiving their torturers. Seeing that the Devil was winning, and fearing for the souls of others, Robert de Prevois ordered a public-wide repentance and dressed himself in a goat’s hair shirt.
In the meantime, one of the bandits who had slipped away from the justice of Dagobert raised a rebellion among the people and the crowd arrived in front of the prison, demanding that the heretics be set free. What was worse, the Satanic machine of Enguerrand and his company began to be replicated in Paris. The people, quick to do evil and slow to think, accepted the demonic two-wheelers because the rumor began that whoever could cover a certain distance sitting on such an apparatus without falling would have all sins forgiven. Hundreds of such monstrous two-wheelers appeared in Paris, disturbing public order and causing such scandals that it was shameful for an honest man to go out into the street.
In the meantime, the stubbornness of the heretics locked up and tortured in the dungeon began to soften. But they remained faithful to their belief, claiming that they had a Covenant with God and that they did not dare back down because they had sworn to undergo whatever suffering necessary. The Inquisitor told them that they had been blinded and that their covenant was with the Devil, but Callistus and Enguerrand did not want to give in. They had, they said, signed a covenant with God and that there was no doubt about it; the Devil does not personally bring a contract in which he is a party, but rather appears as a merchant, banker or mediator. The stipulations of the contract were ostensibly related to business, but that was trap, because the Devil later fits such a contract into the complex book of bills and debts that he uses to rule this world. The next day the Marquis fell unconscious because, according to his calculations, he was supposed to die the day after, which he actually did. But all Satan’s hopes were in vain; the experienced Father Robert did not allow himself to be deceived; he knew that the Devil attempts to confuse people by foreseeing events from the future.
Dagobert again had to take up his sword. The unruliness of the crowd demanding freedom for the heretics went beyond all measure of good taste, and the King ordered that an end be put to it. For three whole days the rebels put up a strong resistance, but they began to fail from exhaustion and it was not difficult for Dagobert to send them scurrying. The Satanic two-wheelers were gathered into a pile and burned, and their production and use was forbidden under the threat of the death penalty.
Since the anger of the crowd was silenced, and since the heretics refused to recant, they were sent before the court of the Holy Inquisition and sentenced to death by burning, with the hope that the flames would achieve that which neither mercy nor torture had. Listening to the reading of the sentence, Enguerrand de Auxbris-Malvoisin spoke for the first time since his arrest. He recited some kind of incantation:
And then you must pass
Through flames, painful and hard
But bringing salvation. Here, everything rotten will burn and
All that will be left is just that which
Fire is, but does not burn
and is not hot.
On January 28, Anno Domini 1348, the confessor visited the heretics in the dungeon and they miraculously agreed to give their confession. The cart carrying Enguerrand and Callistus was driven all the way across Paris as a warning and example of the fate of those who rebel against the Divine Order. The commoners, frightened, downtrodden because of the recent uprising and bloodshed, followed the heretics in silence on their long last journey. Before the sentence was publicly read, the Inquisitor asked the heretics if they wanted to repent, to which they answered that they had repented even before they had been caught. Then, Brother Guillaume read the sentence and Robert de Prevois gave the signal for the fire to be set to the stake. The heretics quickly vanished in the smoke and flames.
May it stand recorded for all generations that Enguerrand, before losing consciousness, shouted an incomprehensible word, certainly some kind of hellish incantation: Dharamsala, Dharamsala, Dharamsala…**
The Manuscript of Captain Queensdale
Publisher’s Preface
In a copy of The Encyclopedia of Wind Roses printed in 1872, bought quite accidentally in a secondhand bookstore in Zürich, instead of the final signature which was missing, I found a manuscript dated 1892, written in calligraphy. The contents of the manuscript (which was, in fact, a copy of another) changed the direction of my life to a great extent, as you will see, just as it changed the life of the copyist. I do not possess a single proof that would support the validity of the lines which follow. It is possible that the whole thing is a joke. Someone with an English sense of humor (the copyist is English) is doubtlessly willing to undertake extensive and expensive preparations in order to, after his own death, make fools of a small group of unknown people. My intuition convinces me otherwise. In any case, whether the facts correspond to reality or whether they are the fruit of someone’s imagination, I believe it is worthwhile to publish this carefully selected text, printed in six copies, and I now send it into the world to find its six readers.
Rheiner Meier
Zürich, 1903
Preface
BY THE UnKNOWN COPYIST
At the end of 1898, crushed by inexplicable depression and fatigue, I left London, a lovely social position, a reputable name (that I will not mention here) and withdrew to the land of my ancestors in Western England, hoping that, far from the hustle and bustle of the city, I would find peace and dignity, and prepare for death. At the beginning, it seemed that nothing would come of my plan because, not far from my home, one of the nouveau riche had moved in, some sort of London private-eye, a detective who had been on the front pages of the scandalous chronicles for years; a chronic user of morphine and amateur violinist, who broke down at the very appearance of a velocipede because he had recently suffered a nervous breakdown. I do not know what related the velocipedes to his illness but, since that vehicle had attained a certain popularity amongst the young, his attacks occurred almost daily. I doubt that, in my life, I have met a man, and I have met plenty, who was more completely in love with himself. In truth, to be in love with anyone is a matter of the naïveté common to early youth, but to be in love with oneself, and therefore with the person we know best, means either to be an idiot or an evil man, and my neighbor was, I am convinced, both.
To