A Madman
He died a high-court judge, an upright magistrate whose irreproachable life was held up to honour in every court in France. Barristers, young puisne judges, judges, greeted with a low bow that marked their profound respect, his thin white impressive face, lighted up by two fathomless gleaming eyes.
He had given up his life to the pursuit of crime and the protection of the weak. Swindlers and murderers had had no more formidable enemy, for he seemed to read, in the depths of their souls, their most secret thoughts, and penetrate at a glance the dark twistings of their motives.
He had died, in his eighty-second year, everywhere honoured, and followed by the regrets of a whole nation. Soldiers in scarlet trousers had escorted him to his grave, and men in white ties had delivered themselves round his coffin of grief-stricken speeches and tears that seemed sincere.
And then came the strange document that the startled solicitor discovered in the desk where he had been accustomed to keep the dossiers of famous criminals.
It had for title:
“Why?”
June 20th, 1851. I have just left the court. I have condemned Blondel to death. Why did this man kill his five children? Why? Often, one comes across people to whose temperaments the taking of life affords a keen physical pleasure. Yes, yes, it must be a physical pleasure, perhaps the sharpest of all, for is not killing an act more like the act of creation than any other? To make and to destroy. In these two words is contained the history of the universe, the history of all worlds, of all that exists, all. Why is it so intoxicating to kill?
June 25th. To think that there is a living being in there—loves, walks, runs! A living being. What is a living being? This thing possessed of life, bearing within itself the vital power of motion and a will that orders this motion. It is kin to nothing, this human being. Its feet do not belong to the ground. It is a germ of life wandering over the earth; and this germ of life, come I know not whence, can be destroyed at will. Then nothing, forever nothing. It decays, it is ended.
June 26th. Then why is it a crime to kill? Yes, why? It is, on the contrary, a law of nature. The ordained purpose of every being is to kill: he kills to live, and he kills for the sake of killing. To kill is in our nature: we must kill. The beasts kill continually, every day, at every moment of their existence. Man kills continually to feed himself, but as he must also kill for sheer sensual satisfaction, he has invented sport. A child kills the insects that he finds, the little animals that come his way. But that does not satisfy the irresistible lust for wholesale killing, which is in us. It is not enough to kill beasts; we must kill men too. In other days, we satisfied this need by human sacrifice. Today the necessities of living in a community have made murder a crime. We condemn it and punish the assassin. But since we cannot live without yielding to the innate and imperious instinct of death, we assuage it from time to time by wars in which one whole race butchers another. War is a debauch of blood, a debauch in which the armies sate themselves and on which not only plain citizens are drunken, but women, and the children who every evening read under the lamp the hysterical recital of the massacres.
One would have imagined that scorn would be meted out to those destined to accomplish these slaughterings of men. No. They are heaped with honours. They are clad in gold and gorgeous raiment; they wear feathers on their heads, decorations on their breasts; and they are given crosses, rewards, honours of all kinds. They are haughty, respected, adored of women, acclaimed by the mob, and solely because their mission in life is to shed human blood. They drag through the streets their instruments of death, which the black-coated passerby regards with envy. For killing is the glorious law thrust by nature into the profoundest impulse of our being. There is nothing more lovely and more honourable than to kill.
June 30th. To kill is the law; because nature loves immortal youth. She seems to cry through all her unconscious acts: “Hasten! Hasten! Hasten!” As she destroys, so she renews.
July 2nd. Being—what is being? All and nothing. For thought, it is the reflection of all things. For memory and for science, it is an epitome of the world, the tale of which it bears within itself. Mirror of things, and mirror of deeds, each human being becomes a little universe within the universe.
But travel; look at the people swarming everywhere, and man is nothing now, nothing now, nothing! Get into a ship, put a wide space between yourself and the crowded shore, and you will soon see nothing but the coast. The infinitesimal speck of being disappears, so tiny it is, so insignificant. Traverse Europe in a swift train and look out through the window. Men, men, always men, innumerable, inglorious, swarming in the fields, swarming in the streets; dull-witted peasants able to do no more than turn up the earth; ugly women able to do no more than prepare food for their men, and breed. Go to India, go to China, and you will see scurrying about more thousands of creatures, who are born, live, and die without leaving more trace than the ant crushed to death on the road. Go to the country of black men, herded in their mud huts; to the country of fair-skinned Arabs sheltered under a brown canvas that flaps in the wind, and you will understand that the solitary individual being is nothing, nothing. The race is all. What is the individual, the individual member of a wandering desert tribe? And men who are wise do not trouble themselves overmuch about death. Man counts for nothing with them. A man kills his enemy: it is war. That, in the old days, was the way of the world, in every great house, in every province.
Yes, journey over the world and watch the swarming of the innumerable and nameless human beings. Nameless? Aye, there’s the rub! To kill is a crime because we have enumerated human beings. When they are born, they are registered, named, baptised. The law takes charge of them. Very well, then! The man who is not registered is of no account: kill him in the desert, kill him in the hills or in the plain, what does it matter! Nature loves death: she will not punish it.
What is verily sacred, is the social community. That’s it! It is that which protects man. The individual is sacred because he is a member of the social community. Homage to the social state, the legal God. On your knees!
The State itself can kill because it has the right to alter the social community. When it has had two hundred thousand men butchered in a war, it erases them from the community, it suppresses them by the hands of its registrars. That is the end of it. But we who cannot alter the records of the town halls, we must respect life. Social community, glorious divinity who reigns in the temples of the municipalities, I salute you. You are stronger than nature. Ah! Ah!
July 3rd. To kill must be a strange pleasure and of infinite relish to a man. To have there, standing before him, a living thinking being: to thrust in him a little hole, only a little hole, to see pouring out that red stuff which we call blood, which makes life, and then to have in front of one only a lump of nerveless flesh, cold, inert, emptied of thought.
August 5th. I who have spent my life in judging, condemning, in killing by uttered words, in killing by the guillotine such as have killed by the knife, I, I, if I did as do all the assassins whom I have struck down, I, I, who would know it?
August 10th. Who would ever know it? Who would suspect me, me, especially if I chose a creature in whose removal I have no interest?
August 15th. The temptation. The temptation has entered into me like a worm that crawls. It crawls, it moves, it roves through my whole body, in my mind, which thinks only of one thing—to kill; in my eyes which lust to see blood, to see something die; in my ears, where there sounds continually something strange, monstrous, shattering, and stupefying, like the last cry of a human creature; in my legs which tingle with desire to go, to go to the spot where the thing could come to pass; in my hands which tremble with lust to kill. What a glorious act it would be, a rare act, worthy of a free man, greater than other men, captain of his soul, and a seeker after exquisite sensations!
August 22nd. I could resist no longer. I have killed a small beast just to try, to begin with.
Jean, my man, had a goldfinch in a cage hung in a window of the servant’s room. I sent him on an errand and I took the little bird in my hand, in my hand where I felt the beating of his heart. He was warm. I went up to my room. From time to time, I clutched him harder, his heart beat faster; it was frightful and delicious. I all but choked him. But I should not have seen the blood.
Then I took the scissors, short nail-scissors, and I cut his throat in three strokes, so cleverly. He opened his beak, he struggled to escape me, but I held him fast, oh, I held him; I would have held a mad bulldog, and I saw the blood run. How beautiful blood is, red, gleaming, clear! I longed to drink it. I wetted the end of my tongue with it. It was good. But he had so little of it, the poor little bird! I have not had time to enjoy the sight of it as I would have liked. It must be glorious to see a bull bleed to death.
And then I did all that assassins do, that real ones do. I washed the scissors, I washed my hands, I threw out the water, and I carried the body, the corpse, into the garden to bury it. I hid it in the strawberry bed. It will never be found. Every day I shall eat a strawberry from that plant. In very truth, how one can enjoy life when one knows how!
My man wept; he supposed that his bird had flown. How could he suspect me? Ah! Ah!
Aug. 25th. I must kill a man. I must.
Aug. 30th. It is done. What a simple thing it is!
I went to take a walk in the Bois de Vernes. I was thinking of nothing, no, of nothing. And there was a child on the road, a little boy eating a slice of bread and butter.
He stood still to let me pass and said:
“Good day, Monsieur le président.”
And the thought came into my head: “Suppose I were to kill him?”
I replied:
“Are you all alone, my boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All alone in the wood?”
“Yes, sir.”
The desire to kill intoxicated me like strong drink. I approached him stealthily, sure that he would run away. And then I seized him by the throat … I squeezed him, I squeezed him with all my strength. He looked at me with terrified eyes. What eyes! Quite round, fathomless, clear, terrible. I have never experienced so savage an emotion … but so short. He clutched my wrists with his little hands, and his body writhed like a feather in the fire. Then he moved no more.
My heart thudded, ah! the bird’s heart! I flung the body in a ditch, then grasses over him.
I went home again; I dined well. What an utterly simple affair!
That evening I was very gay, lighthearted, young again. I spent the rest of the evening at the Prefect’s house. They found me good company.
But I have not seen blood. I am calm.
Aug. 30th. The corpse has been found. They are searching for the murderer. Ah! Ah!
Sept. 1st. They have arrested two tramps. Proofs are lacking.
Sept. 2nd. The parents have been to see me. They wept. Ah! Ah!
Oct. 6th. They have discovered nothing. Some wandering vagabond must have struck the blow. Ah! Ah! If I had only seen the blood flow, I think I should now be quiet in my mind.
Oct. 10th. The lust to kill possesses my every nerve. It is like the furious passions of love that torture us at twenty.
Oct. 20th. Yet another. I was walking along the river, after breakfast. And I saw, under a willow, a fisherman fast asleep. It was high noon. A spade was stuck, it might have been for the purpose, in a nearby field of potatoes.
I took it, I came back; I lifted it like a club and, cutting through it with a single blow, I split the fisherman’s head right open. Oh, how he bled! Crimson blood, full of brains. It trickled into the water, very gently. And I went on my way at a solemn pace. If anyone had seen me! Ah! Ah! I should have made an excellent assassin.
Oct. 25th. The affair of the fisherman has roused a great outcry. His nephew, who used to fish with him, has been accused of the murder.
Oct. 26th. The examining magistrate declares that the nephew is guilty. Everyone in the town believes it. Ah! Ah!
Oct. 27th. The nephew has put up a poor defence. He declares that he had gone to the village to buy bread and cheese. He swears that his uncle was killed in his absence. Who believes him?
Oct. 28th. The nephew is as good as condemned, so utterly have they made him lose his head. Ah! Ah! Justice!
Nov. 15th. Crushing evidence accumulates against the nephew, who will inherit from his uncle. I shall preside at the assizes.
Jan. 25th. To death! To death! To death! I have condemned him to death. Ah! Ah! The solicitor-general spoke like an angel. Ah! Ah! Yet another. I shall go to see him executed.
March 20th. It is done. He was guillotined this morning. He made a good end, very good. It gave me infinite pleasure. How sweet it is to see a man’s head cut off! The blood spurted out like a wave, like a wave. Oh, if I could, I would have liked to have bathed in it! What intoxicating ecstasy to crouch below it, to receive it in my hair and on my face, and rise up all crimson, all crimson! Ah, if people knew!
Now I shall wait, I can afford to wait. So little a thing might trip me up.
The manuscript contained several more papers, but without relating any fresh crime.
The alienists, to whom it was entrusted, declare that there exist in the world many undetected madmen, as cunning and as redoubtable as this monstrous maniac.