FANTOMAS: THE CORPSE WHO KILLS

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FANTOMAS: THE CORPSE WHO KILLS

BY ALLAIN & SOUVESTRE

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-908694-17-1

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2011 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

INTRODUCTION

FANTOMAS is the Emperor of Crime, the Lord of Terror, the Genius of Evil, the nihilistic and psychopathic anti-hero of a series of sublime pulps, books brimming with motifs of the “marvellous”: nuns, coffins, severed hands, daggers, masks, bells that bleed, corpses, roses and revolvers, gloves of human skin, deathsheads, lunatics and labyrinths. A master of disguise, Fantômas inhabits shadows; no-one knows his true identity or appearance. His penchant is for criminal atrocities and random acts of “beautiful-compulsive” violence, human carnage on a mass scale, outrageous theft, arson and destruction, virtuoso displays of terrorism and chaos compounded by the brutality of the Paris street-gangs under his command. And, “unseizable”, he evades justice every time...

“Fantômas.”

“What did you say?”

“I said: Fantômas.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Nothing... Everything!”

“But what is it?”

“Nobody... And yet, yes, it is somebody!”

“And what does this somebody do?”

“Spreads terror!”

Thus begins Fantômas (1911), the first book in a series of thirty-two, conceived a decade before Surrealism but admired almost from the start by the Paris avant-garde of the time. As early as 1912, Fantômas was wildly acclaimed by the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire (who would invent the term “Surrealist” in 1917) and his circle of friends, including the Cubist painters Picasso and Juan Gris, proto-Surrealist writer Max Jacob, and the arch-modernist Blaise Cendrars. Reviewing the pulp novels in the literary journal Mercure de France, Apollinaire praised them as being “amongst the most imaginative works in existence”. He and Jacob soon founded an appreciation society, the Societé des Amis de Fantômas, attracting many members. Jacob included two prose-poems, “Fantômas” and “Fantômas Again” in his 1916 collection The Dice Cup ( Le Cornet à Dés), whilst Blaise Cendrars in 1914 proclaimed Fantômas to be “the school hymn of brutish humanity”, a work akin in poetic scope to the Latin classic The Aeneid. And Juan Gris’ still-life canvas “Fantômas: Pipe And Newspaper” of 1915 showed a cafe table scattered with various items, including a copy of a Fantômas novel (an icon of the “marvellous” in amongst everyday objects).

A few years later, in the nouvelle série, nos. 11/12, 1923 issue of Littérature, André Breton and his fellow nascent Surrealists would famously include the Fantômas pulps amongst their list of “accursed literature”, aligning the series with the dangerous works of such authors as de Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, and Raymond Roussel.[1] Fantômas can certainly be seen as linking back to Lautréamont’s Maldoror in certain of its themes; both Maldoror and Fantômas are elusive, shape-shifting outsiders, scornful of humankind, with penchants for wanton and irrational acts of cruelty and violence.

"Today he is in Madrid, tomorrow he will be in St. Petersburg; yesterday he was in Peking.... This assassin is perhaps seven hundred leagues away from this country; or perhaps he is a few steps behind you..."

–Les Chants de Maldoror

This aspect of Fantômas, his ability to become any person, any object, at any place, is also reflected in Max Jacob’s Fantômas: “On the burnished silver knocker of the door, darkened by time, by the dust of time, was a kind of chiseled Buddha with a too-high forehead, with pendulous ears, with the look of a sailor or a gorilla: it was Fantômas…”.[2]

Fantômas is simultaneously everyone and no-one, anything and everything, real and illusory; unseizable as he recurringly slides in and out of reality, his convolutions recall the mechanism of an endless, metamorphic dream.

Also deriving from Maldoror – specifically from the infamous simile “as beautiful as the random meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table” – is the notion of something marvellous erupting from such a collision of everyday objects, a collision that jolts perception; this in turns leads to Breton’s key assertion that “beauty must be convulsive, or not at all”, and the Surrealists could clearly perceive convulsive beauty in the anarchic, murderous mayhem perpetrated by Fantômas at every opportunity.[3] This aesthetic of “sublime horror” also relates strongly to Freud’s notion of the uncanny.

“Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist... all of these have something particularly uncanny about them.”

–Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919).

The Freudian uncanny, much embraced by the Surrealists, is often evoked in the pages of Fantômas; guillotined heads, skin stripped from flesh, mangled bodies, hands chopped off – particularly in the grotesque/bizarre cover image of La Main Coupée, which depicts a severed hand gripping a roulette wheel[4] – and even the deathshead tattoo of Hélene, Fantômas’s daughter, are all reminiscent of Freud’s syndrome[5].

Other elements of Fantômas that the Surrealists enjoyed include the fact that the city of Paris, where most of the adventures unfold, is truqué – “rigged” or “loaded” – in favour of Fantômas by a system of “objective chance”; in connection with this, the way that authors Allain and Souvestre constructed the Fantômas novels – each writing an alternate chapter at great speed and then meeting to patch it all together – can be said to recall the Surrealist chance-game of cadavre exquis.[6]

Of all the Surrealists, the two who engaged most with Fantômas appear to be René Magritte, in particular, and Robert Desnos. In his paintings, Magritte evoked the iconography of the serial on several occasions; one of the most famous is Le Barbare (1928), showing the masked face of Fantômas fading in and out of a brick wall. Other Magritte paintings take their cue directly from the Louis Feuillade film adaptations;[7] L’Homme du Large (1926) reproduces the final scene from Juve Contre Fantômas (1913), in which the arch-assassin’s arms are flung high in triumph after blowing up his enemies, whilst also from 1926 is L’Assassin Menacé, which recreates a frame from the third serial, Le Mort Qui Tue (1913), where two street-thugs lie in wait for their victim on either side of a doorway. Other canvases by Magritte of the same period seem to take their cue from the original book covers – both La Traversée Difficile (1926) and Le Musée d'une Nuit (1927) prominently feature severed hands, as on the cover for La Main Coupée. The later Le Retour de Flamme (1943) is a virtual facsimile of the original cover for the first novel in the series, except that in Magritte's painting Fantômas grasps a flower instead of a dagger.

Magritte also wrote several texts featuring Fantômas; the following were published in the journal Distances in March, 1928:

A THEATRICAL EVENT.

Juve has been on the trail of Fantômas for quite some time.

He crawls along the broken cobblestones of a mysterious passage. To guide himself he gropes along the walls with his fingers. Suddenly, a whiff of hot air hits him in the face. He comes nearer... His eyes adjust to the darkness. Juve distinguishes a door with loose boards a few feet in front of him. He undoes his overcoat in order to wrap it around his left arm, and gets his revolver ready. As soon as he has cleared the door, Juve realizes that his precautions were unnecessary: Fantômas is close by, sleeping deeply. In a matter of seconds Juve has tied up the sleeper. Fantômas continues to dream – of his disguises, perhaps, as usual.

Juve, in the highest of spirits, pronounces some regrettable words. They cause the prisoner to start. He wakes up, and once awake, Fantômas is no longer Juve's captive. Juve has failed again this time. One means remains for him to achieve his end: Juve will have to get into one of Fantômas's dreams – he will try to take part as one of its characters.

[Fantômas] ... is never entirely invisible. One can see his portrait through his face... When memories pursue him he follows his arm, which drags him away. His movements are those of an automaton; he brushes aside any furniture or walls that are in his way... Fantômas' science is more valuable than his language. We do not guess, and we cannot doubt, his powers.

Robert Desnos's 25-stanza poem La Complainte de Fantômas ("The Lament Of Fantômas"), was dramatized and broadcast throughout France and Belgium in November 1933. Antonin Artaud, previously appointed as director of the “Bureau of Surrealist Research” by André Breton in 1925, featured as the voice of Fantômas, whilst Kurt Weill composed the music (now lost). By all accounts this was an epic production, and a worthy final tribute to the Lord of Terror by one of the leading Surrealists.

In retrospect, it may be tempting to suggest that at least some of the mythic and oneiric qualities that the Surrealists attributed to Fantômas were over-exaggerated – certainly the authors were as bemused as Freud was by the attentions of these rabid avant-gardists – but the fact remains that it is as much due to its championing by Breton and company as it is to the film adaptations of Louis Feuillade that the legend of Fantômas, the unseizable Emperor of Crime, endures to this day.

Notes

[1] The following issue of Littérature featured a play by Breton, Robert Desnos and Benjamin Péret entitled "What a Beautiful Day!", in which Fantômas appeared upon the family coat of arms of a monkey .

[2] “Sur le marteau de la porte en argent bruni, sali par le temps, sali par la poussière du temps, une espèce de Bouddha ciselé au front trop haut, aux oreilles pendantes, aux allures de marin ou de gorille : c'était Fantômas...”

[3] This affinity with anarchy, violence and crime was also reflected in the Surrealists’ obsession with notorious real-life cases of the day, including the bloody exploits of the outlaw Bonnot gang, the serial Bluebeard murders of Landru, parents-poisoner Violette Nozière, female assassin Germaine Berton, and the case of the Papin sisters, two maids who butchered their employers.

[4] The lurid pulp covers of the Fantômas series, drawn by the Italian artist Gino Starace, were no doubt nearly as much an inspiration to the Surrealists as the texts within; powerful full-colour images that include a hooded man on the gallows, two men trapped in a blazing barrel, the poisoned corpse of a beautiful woman, a sleeping man menaced by a black-clad assassin, two nuns peering into an empty coffin, a bride in white gown and black face-mask, a terrified man face up in the guillotine. All reinforcing one of the main themes in the Fantômas books: that sudden death is always imminent. But Starace’s enduring image of Fantômas is that from the very first novel; the gigantic figure of the Lord of Terror himself, formally attired and masked like a bandit, towers over nocturnal Paris, dwarfing even the Eiffel Tower, and grasping, half-concealed, a bloody stiletto in his right hand. Several of these covers were reproduced by Georges Bataille in his counter-Breton journal, Documents (1929–30).

[5] Salvador Dalí, in particular, had a great compulsion towards the deathshead motif in his paintings and drawings of the 1930’s.

[6] Cadavre Exquis: literally, “exquisite corpse”. In 1925, at 54 rue du Chateau, the Surrealists played a form of Consequences. Everyone wrote a secret word on a folded sheet of paper before passing it to his neighbour. The first sentence obtained in this arbitrary manner was “the exquisite corpse drank the new wine”. This Surrealist game, in which the random procedure was viewed as a form of dream-work, was also often practised in Surrealist drawing. Another popular Surrealist game, said to be favoured by Georges Sadoul, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, and Yves Tanguy, involved one person calling out a Fantômas title, and the others trying to guess the number of murders committed in that episode. Tanguy also painted Fantômas No.1 (1925-26), a spacially distorted rendering that features indistinct figures, a nude blood-splattered corpse, and Surrealist flourishes such as a cluster of eggs.

[7] There is no doubt that Breton and his associates, all fervent fans of early cinema – especially horror film, the pulp serials (which they described as “beyond fashion! beyond taste!”) and slapstick comedies – were also much swayed by Louis Feuillade’s five classic film adaptations of Fantômas (1913–14). Feuillade brilliantly brought the novels to life and evoked a compelling urban poetry, yet it seems equally certain that it was to the entire body of the novels that the Surrealists returned when meting out praise for Fantômas. It should be noted that Feuillade, restricted by censorship codes, was unable to fully reproduce the graphic violence of the originals that many Surrealists found so addictive. Nonetheless, later film versions pale by comparison to Feuillade; an Italian production, shot in 1964, is a travesty in nearly every respect, and is noteworthy only for the presence of French actor Jean Marais in the title role. Marais was, of course, the long-time lover of Jean Cocteau, appearing in several Cocteau films, and Cocteau himself was an open admirer of Fantômas, praising the serial’s “absurd and magnificent lyricism”. The Genius of Evil only figured once in a “Surrealist” film – by one of the minor Belgian Surrealists – being adapted to the screen in Ernst Moerman's 1936 short, Mr. Fantômas, Chapitre 280,000. Pierre Prévert's 1928 film, Paris la Belle, featured a Fantômas book cover in the closing sequence.

The Surrealist connection extends, although somewhat tenuously, as far forward as 1980, when two episodes of a Fantômas series of four 90-minute episodes (starring Helmut Berger as Fantômas, Jacques Dufilho as Juve and Gayle Hunnicutt as Lady Beltham) were directed by Juan Luis Buñuel, son of the legendary Surrealist film-maker (the other two episodes were directed by Claude Chabrol, the “French Hitchcock”). The younger Buñuel’s efforts included an adaptation of The Corpse Who Kills.

FOREWORD

FANTOMAS: THE CORPSE WHO KILLS ( Le Mort Qui Tue) was preceded by volumes 1 and 2 in the Fantômas serial: Fantômas and Juve Contre Fantômas[1]. For the benefit of the present reader, there follows a brief indicator of the serial storyline, and main characters, thus far.

Fantômas introduces not only the book’s eponymous anti-hero, but also his main antagonist, the police detective Inspector Juve. Good and evil, light and dark, these two characters serve to construct the serial’s central duality – a duality which is often blurred, distorted and fractured to the point of psychosis (Juve finds himself copying his enemy’s methodology, and at one point is himself arrested on suspicion of being Fantômas). Other key players who feature in this first installment include: Jérôme Fandor (aka Charles Rambert), the journalist who becomes Juve’s greatest ally in the war against Fantômas – he is also rumoured to be Fantômas’ son, and harbours an unrequited, possibly incestuous passion for Fantômas’ opium addict daughter, Hélène; Lady Beltham, long-time mistress and spellbound accomplice of Fantômas; and Princess Sonia Danidoff, a Russian femme fatale.

Fantômas opens with three heinous crimes: Lady Beltham’s husband, Lord Beltham is abducted and found murdered and stuffed in a trunk; the old Marquise de Langrune is found naked and hacked to pieces at her chateau; and Princess Sonia Danidoff is terrorized and robbed by a masked intruder as she takes a bath in her hotel suite. Inspector Juve blames all three outrages on his nemesis, Fantômas, and sets out to bring him to justice and the guillotine.

Convinced that an English soldier named Gurn – at whose apartment Beltham’s corpse was discovered – is actually Fantômas, Juve pursues him throughout the book and finally manages to have him put on trial for murder.

Gurn is sentenced to death but, aided by Lady Beltham, is able to switch places with an actor, Valgrand, made up to look like him; Valgrand, drugged, is hauled to the scaffold and duly decapitated before Juve can intervene. The book ends with the police inspector’s horror and impotent fury:

"There was a click of the spring, the flash of the falling blade, a spurt of blood, a dull groan from ten thousand mouths, and the head rolled into the basket!

But Juve...thrust the assistants away, and plunging his hands into the blood-soaked hay, seized the severed head by the hair and stared at it... 'It isn't Gurn who has just been put to death!' Juve panted brokenly. 'This face has not gone white – it is painted! It is made up – like an actor. Oh, curse him! Fantômas has escaped! Fantômas has gotten away! He has had some innocent man executed in his stead! I tell you, Fantômas is alive!'"

In Juve Contre Fantômas, the theme of disguise and interchanging personas continues with Fantômas being identified by Juve as both Loupart, a brutal gang leader, and as a surgeon, Dr. Chalek (Loupart’s supposed victim in a robbery!). In this book, Fantômas torments Juve by a series of savage crimes, deceptions and labyrinthine false trails. It is packed with murderous set-pieces: a woman (Valgrand’s widow)crushed to death by a snake, Juve nearly buried alive in a room filling with sand, a high-speed train collision that kills and maims hundreds of innocent passengers, Juve and Fandor nearly burnt alive in a blazing winery, a young woman who hurls herself from a balcony in terror, attempted murder by gas poisoning and electrocution, Juve nearly suffocated by the same boa constrictor that killed Valgrand’s widow, and, finally, Juve and Fandor lured to a house that Fantômas, now dressed in what will henceforth be his signature black hood and cape, has packed with dynamite. As they enter, the arch-criminal detonates the huge blast and makes his escape, levelling the house behind him.

“But were Juve and Fandor among the dead?”

To find out, read on.

Notes

[1] “Juve Versus Fantômas”; originally published in English as “The Silent Executioner” by Brentano’s (1917), and reprinted under the same title by William Morrow in 1986. Filmed as “Juve Contre Fantômas” by Louis Feuillade, 1913, 4 episodes.

CHAPTER ONE : THE DRAMA OF THE RUE NORVINS

On Monday, April 4th, 19–, the evening paper La Capitale published the following article on its first page:

“A drama, over the motives of which there is a bewildering host of conjectures, was unfolded this morning on the heights of Montmartre. The Baroness de Vibray, well known in the Parisian world and among artists, whose generous patroness she was, has been found dead in the studio of the ceramic painter, Jacques Dollon. The young painter, rendered completely helpless by a sleeping draft, lay stretched out beside her when the crime was discovered. We say ‘crime’ deliberately, because, when the preliminary medical examination was completed, it was clear that the death of the Baroness de Vibray was due to the absorption of some poison.

The painter, Jacques Dollon, whom the enlightened attentions of Doctor Mayran had drawn from his condition of torpor, underwent a short interrogation from the superintendent of police, in the course of which he made remarks of so suspicious a nature that the examining magistrate put him under arrest then and there. At police headquarters they remain absolutely mute regarding this strange affair. Nevertheless, the personal investigation undertaken by us throws a little light on what is already called: The Drama of the Rue Norvins.

The Discovery of the Crime

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