"Solange: Dr. Ledru's Story of the Reign of Terror" (1849) by Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
A story from International Short Stories: French (1910) edited by William Patten
"Solange: Dr. Ledru's Story of the Reign of Terror" (1849) by Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) begins with an echo of Washington Irving's "German Student." Dr. Albert Ledru, a revolutionary scientist, rescues an aristocrat's daughter from a citizen night patrol.
Because he is a friend of Danton, Albert is able to get Solange's father out of France. Sadly, he and Solange fall in love.
[....] Those three months were the happiest of my life.
In the meantime I was making some interesting experiments suggested by one of the guillotiniers. I had obtained permission to make certain scientific tests with the bodies and heads of those who perished on the scaffold. Sad to say, available subjects were not wanting. Not a day passed but thirty or forty persons were guillotined, and blood flowed so copiously on the Place de la Révolution that it became necessary to dig a trench three feet deep around the scaffolding. This trench was covered with deals. One of them loosened under the feet of an eight-year-old lad, who fell into the abominable pit and was drowned.
For self-evident reasons I said nothing to Solange of the studies that occupied my attention during the day. In the beginning my occupation had inspired me with pity and loathing, but as time wore on I said: “These studies are for the good of humanity,” for I hoped to convince the lawmakers of the wisdom of abolishing capital punishment.
The Cemetery of Clamart had been assigned to me, and all the heads and trunks of the victims of the executioner had been placed at my disposal. A small chapel in one corner of the cemetery 'shad been converted into a kind of laboratory for my benefit. You know, when the queens were driven from the palaces, God was banished from the churches.
Every day at six the horrible procession filed in. The bodies were heaped together in a wagon, the heads in a sack. I chose some bodies and heads in a haphazard fashion, while the remainder were thrown into a common grave.
In the midst of this occupation with the dead, my love for Solange increased from day to day; while the poor child reciprocated my affection with the whole power of her pure soul....
You don't need a Magic Eightball to imagine the story's end.
Dumas, however, goes one better than Washington Irving, and adumbrates not an animate corpse, but an animate head.
After the "executioner’s red hearse with its ghastly freight from the Place de la Révolution" arrives at Albert's laboratory:
[....] Suddenly I fancied I heard a voice! A voice at once soft and plaintive; a voice within the chapel, pronouncing the name of “Albert!”
I was startled.
“Albert!”
But one person in all the world addressed me by that name!
Slowly I directed my weeping eyes around the chapel, which, though small, was not completely lighted by the feeble rays of the candle, leaving the nooks and angles in darkness, and my look remained fixed on the blood-soaked sack near the altar with its hideous contents.
At this moment the same voice repeated the same name, only it sounded fainter and more plaintive.
“Albert!”
I bolted out of my chair, frozen with horror.
The voice seemed to proceed from the sack!
I touched myself to make sure that I was awake; then I walked toward the sack with my arms extended before me, but stark and staring with horror. I thrust my hand into it. Then it seemed to me as if two lips, still warm, pressed a kiss upon my fingers!
I had reached that stage of boundless terror where the excess of fear turns into the audacity of despair. I seized the head and collapsing in my chair, placed it in front of me.
Then I gave vent to a fearful scream. This head, with its lips still warm, with the eyes half closed, was the head of Solange!
I thought I should go mad.
Three times I called:
“Solange! Solange! Solange!”
At the third time she opened her eyes and looked at me. Tears trickled down her cheeks; then a moist glow darted from her eyes, as if the soul were passing, and the eyes closed, never to open again....
The "player on the other side" has made his move.
Early in the story, sudden death has been foreshadowed:
[....] the night was even more depressing than the day. I recall now that a dog, locked up in a room below us, howled till two o’clock in the morning. The next day we were told that the dog’s master had gone away with the key in his pocket, had been arrested on the way, tried at three, and executed at four.
* * *
The plot of "Solange: Dr. Ledru's Story of the Reign of Terror" strikes a humdrum note today.
Still, the old deconsecrated church, the open graves in the rain, and the blood trench at the Place de la Révolution are skilled dramatic strokes of scene-making. As is the thought of Albert at the end of each day's executions, sorting sacks of severed heads to find any remaining signs of consciousness.
Jay
17 March 2024