BOOK: Guy Endore, "The Werewolf of Paris"

Guy Endore: The Werewolf of Paris. New York: Pegasus Crime, 2012. 9781605984575. 294 pp.

I had never heard of this author or this book before noticing it by chance in a bookshop; I was intrigued by the publisher's blurb on the back cover, which says that this work occupies a similar position in werewolf literature as Dracula does in vampire literature. Having read little or nothing about werewolves before, I naturally couldn't help being curious about this novel.

There are one or two parallels with Dracula, but also a few significant differences. Dracula, famously, does not tell the story in a straightforward fashion but reveals things gradually through a series of letters, diary entries, newspaper articles and the like. The Werewolf of Paris likewise doesn't tell the story in an entirely straightforward manner, although it doesn't go as far as to be an epistolary novel like Dracula is. It is built around the conceit that the author, writing in the 1930s (the novel was first published in 1933), happened to come across an old manuscript from the 1870s, written by a little-known political pamphleteer as an unsolicited legal brief in the trial of a young soldier accused of lycantrophy. The novel, then, is Endore's expanded presentation of this fictional manuscript, with additional bits of historical background and even a few footnotes referring to old newspapers or books. [For example, Gayot de Pitaval, the author of an early collection of detective stories, mentioned here on p. 42, really existed.]

On the other hand, Dracula, as far as I remember it (but it has been a very long time since I've read it; though I also listened it to it in audiobook form more recently), is very much a product of the Victorian age (it appeared in 1897); it was quite clear what is good and what is evil in that world, it was also quite clear that good would ultimately win, and if you wanted to shock or titillate the reader, it didn't take very much to do so. The Werewolf of Paris, by contrast, is clearly the product of a much more modern world, in which the former certainties about good and evil are a good deal less certain, and where you need to be a good deal rougher to shock the reader.

Thus the book begins with a historical chapter about two neighbouring noble families, the Pitamonts and the Pitavals, engaged in bitter rivalry. One of the former murders two of the latter, but gets caught and imprisoned an an oubliette, a small underground dungeon where he slowly goes mad over the decades, howling like a wolf and being fed on hunks of raw meat that his captors throw into his dungeon from an opening in the ceiling (there we see the lupine element make its appearance for the first time!). This story has a grim ending with a curious mixture of the modern and the medieval: both families go bankrupt and their castles get repossessed by bankers; as one of his last acts before being evicted, the old Pitaval puts poison in the final portion of raw meat for his old Pitamont prisoner, and shortly afterwards throws the key of the oubliette to the prisoner's widow.

The story then moves to early-1850s Paris, a turbulent time not long after the revolutionary year of 1848. We are introduced to Mme. Didier, a relatively well-off widow, her nephew Aymar, and her young servant girl Josephine. The latter gets molested by a corrupt priest named Father Pitamont. In what we would now probably recognize as a none-too-surprising psychological response to this traumatic experience, she starts offering herself to seemingly every man with five minutes to spare, of which Aymar himself is also quite happy to take advantage. Nevertheless, when she gets pregnant, nobody seems to have any doubt that the child is the priest's. Mme. Didier complains to the bishop rather than to the police, with the result that the priest gets off with merely being transferred to a different parish (p. 48). Wishing to avoid scandal, she lets Josephine keep the baby, which is to be passed off as Josephine's child by a fictional husband who is now at sea (p. 72).

There are many odd things about the baby, little Bernard, from the start, such as that he was born on Christmas Day and that his palms and eyebrows are unusually hairy (pp. 61–4, 74–5). After Mme. Didier's death, Aymar moves to the countryside, keeps employing Josephine and helps her with raising Bertrand. Gradually we see more and more signs of his lupine nature. A chance event reveals to Bertrand that he has a taste for animal blood (p. 106). He seems to be anaemic, which Aymar tries to cure by feeding him raw meat (p. 114; the latter seems to be something of a recurring element in this novel). He has nightmares in which he dreams of running around like a wolf, slaughtering sheep and the like. Sure enough, local sheep are being found dead, clearly by a wolf, and when a hunter manages to injure the animal, Bertrand wakes up injured in the same way next morning (p. 103). Aymar takes to studying werewolf literature and keeping Bertrand locked up at night, often hearing odd scratchings and scufflings from inside his room.

We see Bernard's tastes progress to human blood and human flesh. Travelling to a nearby town for a school examination, he visits a brothel and leaves a prostitute badly injured with his bites (p. 124). He digs up a recent grave to feed on the dead man's flesh (p. 132). Finally his mother helps him escape from his room so he could go to Paris, ostensibly with a view to studying medicine. On the way he wakes up in a forest next to a partly eaten corpse of an old friend who happened to be travelling to Paris by the same route that day (p. 140).

Aymar travels to Paris as well, hoping to find Bertrand and put an end to his crimes. But by then it's 1870, the Franco-Prussian war, the Siege of Paris, and soon after that the Commune, and the whole place is something of a chaotic mess. Bertrand having changed his name (p. 241), Aymar is unable to track him down for a long time, and the most he can do is keep an eye out for newspaper accounts of crimes of a type by now all too familiar: desecration of fresh graves, and the occasional murder with a dash of cannibalism.

Bertrand joins the National Guard and falls in love with Sophie, the young daughter of a rich banker, whose life seems to have been something of a golden cage so far and to whom a relationship with someone like Bertrand, a rough and poor soldier fresh from the provinces, is probably a chance to feel the sort of intense emotions that have previously been missing from her life. Bertrand, for his part, seems to hope that love can cure him, and when Sophie learns more about his condition, she lets him make cuts in her skin and suck her blood, hoping thereby to assuage his bloodlust enough to keep him from committing crimes (pp. 231, 237); but he keeps finding himself yearning that he could rip her throat in true wolf fashion.

Their story comes to an end in the final days of the Paris Commune, which is being suppressed by the bourgeois government of Versailles in an orgy of fire and blood. Bertrand, finally unable to resist his lupine urges, tries to murder a soldier for his flesh and blood, but fails and gets arrested instead. Learning about this, Aymar files a document explaining the whole thing, hoping to convince the court that Bertrand really is a werewolf and must not be released. But in a cruel irony of fate, the revolutionary tribual of the Commune, a cangaroo court which has condemned so many people to death on the flimsiest pretenses and the emptiest of charges, lets Bertrand live, on the logic that they are on the side of modernity, of science, of progress, and take no stock in medieval superstition and religious nonsense, a category which clearly includes the whole phenomenon of werewolves (p. 246). Bertrand, in their eyes, is merely insane and will be committed to a state asylum. Sophie eventually commits suicide. Aymar gets Bertrand transferred to a private asylum, hoping that he will be treated better there; but he is in fact being treated much worse, the sadistic staff beat him and feed him raw meat (!), and then drug him heavily before Aymar's visits to that he is unable to complain (p. 278). After some time he escapes through a window and commits suicide by jumping off the roof.

There is no happy ending here, only a sad one. In Dracula you could close the book glad that good has triumphed over evil, but here you can only conclude that there was never much good to begin with, and it certainly can't be said to have triumphed. As Aymar, who has been vaguely involved in revolutionary activism as early as 1848, surveys the carnage with which the bourgeois regime of Versailles is suppressing the Commune, with far greater bloodshed and cruelty than any that the Commune had itself previously perpetrated, he cannot help wondering as to who the real werewolves are (pp. 263–4): “The Commune shot fifty-seven from the prison of La Roquette. Versailles retaliated with nineteen hundred. To that comparison add this one. The whole famous Reign of Terror in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle, or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?/ Bertrand, it now seemed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! ‘And there'll be worse,’ he said, and again he had that marvelous rising of the heart. Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!” (P. 264.) And this was written in 1933 — prophetic words indeed!

I really liked this aspect of the book — how could it not appeal to a long-time fan of revolutionary violence (from a safe distance) like me! Here, a werewolf is not merely a more or less fictional, more or less real monster of medieval legend, but a metaphor for the cruelty inherent in human nature — man is werewolf to man, you might be tempted to say.

There are several aspects of the werewolf phenomenon that remain tantalizingly unexplained in this novel. Is Bernard's condition only a strange mental affliction that occasionally descends upon his mind like a haze and makes him perpetrate his crimes in a state in which he is unable to control himself — or does he actually transform into a wolf? Aymar is inclined towards the latter view but cannot positively assert so, as we can see in an interesting conversation he has with the asylum director near the end of the book (p. 282–3). And what are we to make of the hereditary aspect of lycantrophy? We see that Bertrand is treated in the last stage of his life very much like that old Pitamont prisoner was — imprisoned naked and fed on raw meat; and Bertrand's biological father was a Pitamont, though presumably not one descended from that prisoner, who is not described as having had any children before being captured.

This was a very pleasant novel, a nice mixture of the medieval and the modern, of fact and fiction, and placed in a setting that I was glad to see, as France during the revolutions of 1848 and 1871 is something I'd like to read more about, so it was good to see a piece of fiction set in that environment. I'm not sure if I particularly want to read more werewolf novels, but I'm glad that I read this one.

There is one complaint I have to make about this particular edition, however. It was evidently produced by scanning and OCRing an old printed edition and then typesetting the resulting text. You can tell this by the numerous misprints of the type that are obviously caused by OCR errors, as they apparently couldn't be bothered to proofread the text after OCRing it: “w\olves” (p. 97); “are” for “arc” (p. 139); “he did not fall to protect” (p. 207); “cof1m” (for “coffin”, p. 222); “aw” for “off” and “a sha” for “in the” (both p. 242); “reinoved” (p. 246); “famons” (p. 264).

ToRead:

There's an interesting wikipedia page about the author, Guy Endore. He was among other things a member of the Communist Party, which unsurprisingly caused him some trouble as a screenwriter in 1950s Hollywood; but it also helps explain why this novel shows the sympathetic view of the Paris Commune that we mentioned earlier.

• Endore also wrote Babouk: The Story of a Slave, which his wiki page describes as a “left-wing novel of the Haitian Revolution”. Sounds interesting.
• He translated Alraune by the German horror writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, whom I now heard of for the first time but judging by his wikipedia page his work sounds very intriguing :)

P.S. On an unrelated subject: I was interested to learn, while writing this post, that the were- part of werewolf is not usually pronounced like the standalone word were (the past tense of be), but like the word wear or alternatively like the word weir. Truly there is no end to the marvels of English spelling and pronunciation :P