Alexandre Dumas - Horror At Fontenay

In his lively preface, Alan Hull Walton can tell us nothing about the books publishing history - he found a very battered volume among a friend's collection - but his research satisfied him that it was the work of Dumas pere, "almost certainly written without collaboration", and, most likely, abandoned by the author who seems to have lost interest in the project (the Sphere edition runs to a mere 190 pages all in, making it very attractive to most of us, unforgivably stingy to the readership of the day). As the preface continues, it becomes clear that, even if the original was "almost certainly written without collaboration", the same cannot be said of the Sphere which has Mr. Hull Walton's dabs all over it. He adds paragraphs, runs a big blue marker pen through boring bits, tarts it up here and there, even provides an ending. And .... well, this is the third time i've read it which tells you at least somebody likes it. There's a very Penny Dreadful feel to Une Journie a Fontenay-aux-Roses, in that it's incredibly patchy but somehow still holds together. I still reckon Dumas saves the best, and certainly the most famous story 'til last, but for it's atmosphere of madness and sheer dread, the next sequence certainly runs it close.

The Mayor Relates Some Facts - The Mystery Deepens - The Sequel: Next up, a poignant ghost story set against ....

"... We were at the height of the Terror: hundreds upon hundreds were being executed - day after day, week after week, while the crowds roared and applauded and shrieked with delight ... Ah, but they were dreadful times - times when virtue or nobility were guarantees of prison or the guillotine: when debtors paid their debts by denouncing their creditors; when criminals pursued by the law denounced their judges to the Revolutionary Committees; when those who had no work denounced those who had, and heirs denounced the relatives whose fortunes would eventually becomes theirs. It was a time when husbands - or wives - found the guillotine a convenient way of ridding themselves of unwanted partners; and when children, for no better reason than malicious spite, denounced their parents ....."

Much to the astonishment of Dr. Roberts, Ledru says that he believes Jacquermin's seemingly lunatic account of how his wife's severed head attacked him, citing odd goings on at the execution of Marat's murderer, Charlotte Corday, and, from personal experience, his doomed romance with Solange, the beautiful daughter of an Aristocrat he'd helped smuggle out of the country. Ledru had secured passports for father and daughter, but, fatally, Solange chose to remain in Paris out of love for him.

As a young, influential and increasingly disillusioned Revolutionary, Ledru had set out to disprove Dr. Guillotin's assertion that his invention was a more humane method of execution than the rope, in the hope he could persuade the Revolutionary Committee to abolish the death penalty. To this end, he'd built a laboratory next to the cemetery at Clamort where the bodies of the slain were daily thrown into the huge communal pits. His vocation is a depressing one at the best of times, but how much worse when he recognises the head of his loved one among the day's latest sackload ...

The Black Cat And Other Horrors: Dr. Roberts, a cynic in matters supernatural, argues that Ledru's terrible experience was merely a hallucination, and relates the story of a Judge who was haunted to madness and death by a tomcat, a cadaverous usher and, finally, a skeleton with glaring eyes, after a vicious criminal cursed him from the scaffold.

The Chevalier's story takes us back to Saint-Denis in 1794 when, as curator of the Museum of National Antiquities, he reluctantly supervised The Desecration of The Royal Tombs, the bodies of all the Kings of France exhumed by order of the Revolutionary authorities and unceremoniously reburied in quicklime. When a workman defaces the immaculately preserved corpse of Henry IV, "the best of the few worthwhile King's France ever had", he is shunned by the entire community until a mysterious woman lures him back to the scene of his crime. The very angry dead monarchs await ...

damn! i was getting right into Horror At Fontenay and then forgot it existed!

The Body On The Gallows: Moulle, the Abbe of St Suplice, recalls how he saved the soul of L'Artifaille, a notorious master thief he surprised in the act of looting the church. L'Artifaille was so moved by Moulle's offer to pay him not to steal the chalice that he walked away empty handed save for a medallion of the virgin which the Abbe gratefully blessed for him. Some years later, L'Artifaille is hung for his persistent pilfering, and his executioner returns to the gallows after nightfall intent on stealing the medallion. The corpse isn't about to let it go without a fight ...

The Bracelet Of Human Hair: Not my favourite in the book, it has to be said. Aliette's is another benevolent ghost story. An old man's love for his wife survives the grave. At least when the strand of hair goes missing we get a fairly tasty exhumation scene to alleviate the joy and niceness.

from memory, the next and last is the best of the lot.