François Bertrand: The Vampire of Montparnasse

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François Bertrand: The Vampire of Montparnasse
François Bertrand: The Vampire of Montparnasse
Anonim

In the middle of the 19th century, France was shocked by a series of scandalous stories related to the abuse of the dead. One of the female known necrophiliacs received the nickname Vampire of Montparnasse - at the place of discovery. His bloody path left an indelible mark on the memory of Parisians.

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Guy de Maupassant, who loved to shock bourgeois French society, put a passionate speech into the mouth of the protagonist of one of his most scandalous stories "The Grave" of the fashionable lawyer Kurbatail, in which he tried to explain to the jury his terrible act: the watchman found him at the moment of extracting the body of a young woman from the grave … Not hiding the intensity of feelings, Kurbatayl confessed his love for his bride, whose untimely death was such a terrible blow for him that he, unable to bear the separation, wanted to touch his beloved creature again. The repulsive details of the exhumation described by Maupassant did not affect the opinion of the jury. At the end of the story, they recognized the unfortunate lover as innocent, despite the fact that his act violated all moral norms. The fate of the real prototype of the ardent lawyer was different, however, and the motives of his actions were completely different.

Epidemic

In the 40-50-ies of the XIX century, France was engulfed in a real epidemic of strange and disgusting crimes, one way or another associated with desecration of corpses. The famous German psychopathologist Richard von Kraft-Ebing in his monumental work "Sexual Psychopathy" describes several such shocking cases, each of which became the reason for a new surge of rumors about hellish messengers devouring human souls.

In 1845, one young man from the department of the Marne, not meeting the understanding of a lady he liked, killed her, drowned her in the river, and then outraged her lifeless body. The shocked townsfolk immediately decided that the devil had possessed the young man. Only an armed gendarmerie detachment saved him from reprisals, but in 1879 he was still executed. After the autopsy, his inappropriate behavior was explained by a congenital brain pathology. This topic was happily picked up by the tabloid press, and its details chilled the blood of the French for a long time, until on the pages of newspapers this story was replaced by the stories of two monks and a morgue keeper who found unnatural pleasure in the company of the dead, as well as a Parisian prelate who performed strange rites on the bodies of prostitutes at the junction of the black mass and banal adultery. And the Gazette Medical in July 1859 shocked readers with a story about a young man from a “noble family” who desecrated the corpse of a neighbor's girl.

But all these newspaper essays were completely overshadowed by the terrible story of the sergeant of the 74th regiment of the French army Francois Bertrand.

Werewolf in uniform

We know little about Bertrand's childhood and background. It is only known that he was born into a fairly prosperous peasant family, was of a fragile constitution, shy, and in his early youth decided to choose the spiritual path. But from the seminary he was drafted into the army, where the gentle Bertrand unexpectedly found himself. He was an honest campaigner, did not tolerate foul language, and still displayed great piety. At that time, no one knew about the other side of his nature, hidden from the eyes.

Having inherited a vulnerable psyche from an uncle who ended his days in a hospital for the mentally ill, Bertrand probably experienced some serious mental trauma in his early youth and from the age of nine began to show signs of aggression, a tendency to sadism and … a strong attraction to women. Over time, this passion acquired frightening features: he liked to imagine the torture of women, and a little later - their dismemberment. With such predilections, François found himself outside the closed world of his village, in an engineering regiment, which had changed its deployment more than once. Quiet Sergeant Bertrand moved along with the unit, leaving the corpses of cruelly gutted dogs everywhere since 1846 …

The ripper

In January 1847, Sergeant Bertrand, late in the evening, walked past one of the cemeteries located on the outskirts of Paris. The cemetery gates were not tightly closed, and François, not knowing why, decided to look into the churchyard. Later, he assured the doctors that some inexplicable devilish force had pushed him to the graves. Finding a fresh grave, Bertrand dug it out, pulled out the body and brutally hacked it with a shovel, experiencing ecstasy, and also instantly getting rid of a painful attack of headache. These attacks rolled over him about every two weeks for two years, forcing him to repeat his visits to cemeteries, where he looked for fresh graves and ravaged them in the most barbaric way.

Rumors spread throughout Paris, one more terrible than the other. Someone assured that the dead were hunted by insane experimental doctors who, like Dr. Victor Frankenstein, dream of creating a monster from the fragments of the bodies. Someone assured that a sect of Satan worshipers operates in Paris, and everything that happens is the result of their terrible rituals, and someone, recalling notes from the provincial press, believed that "a deep decline in morality and extreme sensuality" led to a general degradation of sexual desire … Proof of this was Bertrand's next crime, committed in July 1848, when he obtained the corpse of a 16-year-old girl and abused him. Since then, his adventures have acquired even more repulsive features.

How many desecrated graves were on Bertrand's account? The investigation managed to prove only 15 episodes, but journalists at different times spoke about 100 and even 150 cases. He was caught only in July 1849 by chance.

Eternal peace

For the time being, no one managed to not only catch, but even just see the Vampire from Montmartre. But after the rain, one watchman was "lucky" to find Bertrand's tracks near the place near the cemetery wall, where he entered the churchyard. There the watchman installed a stretcher - a wire, one end of which was tied to the trigger of a "bulldog" pocket revolver, and on the night of March 7-8, 1849, the long-awaited shot finally rang out.

The wounded Bertrand managed to escape and even take the help of the regimental doctor Marshal de Calvi, to whom he honestly told his story. True to his professional oath, the doctor did not betray his patient's secret. Therefore, Bertrand was caught only in July, when unquenched passion again brought him to the same cemetery. This time the limping vampire was captured.

The arrest of the sergeant and his trial for several weeks became the number one public sensation, even the term "necrophilia" itself appeared after the conversation of the Belgian doctor Joseph Guislein with Bertrand in 1850. The defense built its line in court on Bertrand's insanity, as well as on the fact that for all the monstrousness of his actions … he did not harm anyone! At that time, the concept of moral harm was not seriously considered by the French justice. And yet the verdict handed down to the fanatic under the article "desecration of graves" was strangely mild - he was sentenced to only one year in prison!

Monster on the loose

The further fate of the vampire from Montparnasse is unclear. It was said that after a year of imprisonment, he ended up in a psychiatric clinic, where he remained until his death on February 25, 1878. However, the writer and journalist Michel Dansel, who dedicated the book to Bertrand, found out that the Vampire from Montparnasse not only found himself free, but was even re-enlisted in the ranks of the French army (!) And served in Algeria in the light infantry battalion until his retirement in 1856. …

Then he moved to Le Havre and got married. All this time both in Africa and later in France in cemeteries from time to time there were cases of desecration of graves. Dansel confidently ascribes two of them to Bertrand, which occurred in 1864 and 1867, but Algerian sources point to hundreds of corpses disfigured in local necropolises in the period until the mid-fifties, i.e.just at the time when Bertrand was serving in the colonial army. Why did neither the Algerian authorities nor the metropolis pay any attention to these facts? The answer to this question, perhaps, lies precisely in the very fantasies of the townsfolk who associated the adventures of François Bertrand with something supernatural.

Embraced by darkness

Against the background of a general interest in the otherworldly, the secrets of the human psyche and sexuality, the adventures of characters like Bertrand aroused not only burning interest, but also sympathy in society! The bourgeois even acted out scenes of "necrophilia" at special balls that took place within the cemetery walls, and some of them were looking for more thrills. Suffice it to recall the voluptuous prelate and the "young man from a noble family", which were mentioned above.

Maupassant, who was inspired by the story of Bertrand to create the story "The Tomb", later described the story of another man, the murderer of children and the sadist Moiron, whom society also reacted with amazing leniency, mixed with a strange sense of involvement in his atrocities. When a new vampire, Victor Ardisson of Mui, was caught a few decades later, at the end of the 19th century, it turned out that his adventures began in much the same way as his predecessor Bertrand.

And since 1892, working as a gravedigger, he calmly collected a monstrous collection of fragments of the dead bodies of his "clients", which he often, without hesitation, dug right after the funeral. The detained Ardisson gladly went to the prison, learning that there is also a morgue there. So the approach of the Great War with its thousands of deaths in France and other European states, as if in a mirror, was reflected in the history of French bloodsuckers, whose crimes, against the background of the actions of many political leaders of that era, often look no worse than Christmas tales.

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