Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
THE MEGAPACK SERIES
THE MYSTERIOUS SKETCH
LEX TALIONIS
THE MAN-WOLF
MYRTLE
UNCLE CHRISTIAN’S INHERITANCE
THE BEAR-BAITING
THE SCAPEGOAT
A NIGHT IN THE WOODS
THE QUEEN OF THE BEES
A FOREST BETROTHAL
THE DEAN’S WATCH
THE OWL’S EAR
THE INVISIBLE EYE
THE WATERS OF DEATH
THE THREE SOULS
THE CONSCRIPT
WATERLOO
THE BLOCKADE OF PHALSBURG
THE INVASION OF FRANCE IN 1814
THE PLÉBISCITE
THE ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN MEGAPACK
Version 1.0.0
COPYRIGHT INFO
The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack is copyright © 2013 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved. For more information, contact the publisher.
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
Erckmann-Chatrian was the name used by French authors Émile Erckmann (1822–1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–1890), nearly all of whose works were jointly written.
Both Erckmann and Chatrian were born in the département of Moselle, in the Lorraine region in the extreme north-east of France. They specialised in military fiction and ghost stories in a rustic mode, applying to the Vosges mountain range and the Alsace-Lorraine region techniques inspired by story-tellers from the Black Forest. Lifelong friends who first met in the spring of 1847, they finally quarreled during the mid-1880s, after which they did not produce any more stories jointly. During 1890 Chatrian died, and Erckmann wrote a few pieces under his own name.
Tales of supernatural horror by the duo that are famous in English include “The Wild Huntsman” (tr. 1871), “The Man-Wolf” (tr. 1876) and “The Crab Spider.” These stories received praise from the renowned English ghost story writer, M. R. James.
Partly as a result of their republicanism, they were praised by Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, and fiercely attacked in the pages of Le Figaro. Gaining popularity from 1859 for their nationalistic, anti-militaristic and anti-German sentiments, they were well-selling authors but had trouble with political censorship throughout their careers. Generally the novels were written by Erckmann, and the plays mostly by Chatrian.
—John Betancourt
Publisher, Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
THE MEGAPACK SERIES
Over the last few years, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has proved to be one of our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”
The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt, Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!).
A NOTE FOR KINDLE READERS
The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your reader.)
RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?
Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).
Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.
TYPOS
Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.
If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at wildsidepress@yahoo.com or use the message boards above.
THE MEGAPACK SERIES
MYSTERY
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack
The Charlie Chan Megapack
The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack
The Detective Megapack
The Father Brown Megapack
The Jacques Futrelle Megapack
The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack
The First Mystery Megapack
The Penny Parker Megapack
The Pulp Fiction Megapack
The Raffles Megapack
The Victorian Mystery Megapack
The Wilkie Collins Megapack
GENERAL INTEREST
The Adventure Megapack
The Baseball Megapack
The Christmas Megapack
The Second Christmas Megapack
The Classic American Short Stories Megapack
The Classic Humor Megapack
The Military Megapack
SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
The Edward Bellamy Megapack
The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack
The Philip K. Dick Megapack
The Randall Garrett Megapack
The Second Randall Garrett Megapack
The Murray Leinster Megapack
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack
The Martian Megapack
The Andre Norton Megapack
The H. Beam Piper Megapack
The Pulp Fiction Megapack
The Mack Reynolds Megapack
The First Science Fiction Megapack
The Second Science Fiction Megapack
The Third Science Fiction Megapack
The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack
The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack
The Robert Sheckley Megapack
The Steampunk Megapack
The Time Travel Megapack
The Wizard of Oz Megapack
HORROR
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack
The E.F. Benson Megapack
The Second E.F. Benson Megapack
The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack
The Ghost Story Megapack
The Second Ghost Story Megapack
The Third Ghost Story Megapack
The Horror Megapack
The M.R. James Megapack
The Macabre Megapack
The Second Macabre Megapack
The Mummy Megapack
The Vampire Megapack
The Werewolf Megapack
WESTERNS
The B.M. Bower Megapack
The Max Brand Megapack
The Buffalo Bill Megapack
The Cowboy Megapack
The Zane Grey Megapack
The Western Megapack
The Second Western Megapack
The Wizard of Oz Megapack
YOUNG ADULT
The Boys’ Adventure Megapack
The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack
The G.A. Henty Megapack
The Penny Parker Megapack
The Pinocchio Megapack
The Rover Boys Megapack
The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack
The Tom Swift Megapack
AUTHOR MEGAPACKS
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack
&nb
sp; The Edward Bellamy Megapack
The B.M. Bower Megapack
The E.F. Benson Megapack
The Second E.F. Benson Megapack
The Max Brand Megapack
The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack
The Wilkie Collins Megapack
The Philip K. Dick Megapack
The Jacques Futrelle Megapack
The Randall Garrett Megapack
The Anna Katharine Green Megapack
The Zane Grey Megapack
The Second Randall Garrett Megapack
The M.R. James Megapack
The Murray Leinster Megapack
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack
The Andre Norton Megapack
The H. Beam Piper Megapack
The Mack Reynolds Megapack
The Rafael Sabatini Megapack
The Saki Megapack
The Robert Sheckley Megapack
OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY
The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)
The Wildside Book of Fantasy
The Wildside Book of Science Fiction
Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
THE MYSTERIOUS SKETCH
CHAPTER I
Opposite the Saint Sebaldus Chapel in Nuremberg rises up a little inn, tall and narrow, with a jagged gable, dusty windows and a plaster cast of Our Lady on top of its roof. It was here that I spent the unhappiest days of my life. I had gone to Nuremberg to study the old German masters, but, due to a lack of liquidity, I had to paint portraits…and what portraits they were! Fat purveyors of tittle-tattle with a cat on their knees, aldermen in wigs, burgomasters wearing a three-cornered hat and the whole thing set off by luminous ochre and cinnabar by the bucketful.
From portraits I descended to sketches and from sketches to outlines.
Nothing can be worse, believe me, than to constantly have on your back a head steward, tight-lipped, shrill, impudent-looking, who comes to you every day with: “So then! How soon will you be paying, sir? Have you any idea how much your bill is now? No. It doesn’t bother you, does it?… Sir eats, drinks and sleeps as he pleases… Does not our heavenly Father feed even the birds of the air? Sir’s bill comes to four hundred schillings and ten kreuzer… It’s hardly worth mentioning, I know.”
Those who have not heard this scale being sung can have no concept of it—love of art, imagination, a sacred passion for the beautiful all dry up under the withering breath of such a browbeater… You grow gauche and timid, all your energy dissipated along with any feeling of personal dignity.
One night, penniless as usual, and threatened with debtor’s prison by that worthy steward Rap, I decided I would thwart his hopes of payment by slitting my throat. With this pleasant thought in mind, sitting on my truckle bed opposite the window, I gave myself up to a thousand philosophical reflexions of varying degrees of cheerfulness. I did not dare to open my razor for fear that the irresistible force of my reasoning might well instil in me sufficient courage to do away with myself once and for all. Having argued with myself in this way, I blew out my candle, deferring the conclusion to this line of thought to the morrow.
This abominable Rap had driven me completely round the bend. All I could do now artistically was draw silhouettes and my only desire was to have the money to rid myself of this awful man’s odious presence. But that night my mind performed a singular about-turn. I woke up going on for one o’clock, relit my light and, wrapping around me my grey smock, dashed down on paper a quick sketch reminiscent of an old Dutch master…something strange, bizarre and bearing no resemblance to my usual style.
Picture a dark courtyard hemmed in by high dilapidated walls…These walls are furnished with hooks seven or eight feet from the ground. Even at a cursory glance we may guess that this is a shambles of some sort.
On the left there is a latticework made up of narrow strips. Through it you can see a side of beef suspended from an enormous ceiling by enormous pulleys. Broad pools of blood run down over paving stones and meet up in a drain full of undefined debris.
The light comes down from on high, from between chimneys, against which weathervanes are silhouetted by a piece of sky only as big as your hand and the roofs of neighbouring houses drop their shadows dramatically from one floor to another.
At the end of this recess is a space. In this space is a woodshed, on this woodshed ladders, a few bales of straw, rope, a hen-coop and an old rabbit hutch that has seen better days.
How did these heterogeneous details come to present themselves to my imagination?… I do not know. I had no memories of things like this and yet each stroke of my charcoal pencil was a fantastic feat of observation by dint of being true to nature. Nothing was missing!
But on the right of the picture one corner of the sketch remained blank. I knew not what to put there… Something was stirring and moving about… Suddenly I saw a foot, a foot in the air, a foot off the ground. Despite its improbable position, I followed my inspiration without understanding where all this was leading. This foot bordered on a leg…over the tensely stretched-out leg there soon floated part of a dress…To cut a long story short an old woman appeared, rumpled, dishevelled, haggard, successively leaning backward over the edge of a well and fighting against a fist that was strangling her…
I was drawing a murder scene. The charcoal pencil fell from my hand.
This woman, posed in the most brazen of attitudes, the small of her back pushed up against the coping of the well, her face twisted in terror, her two hands tightly attached to the arm of the murderer, frightened me… I did not dare to look at her. But the man himself, the owner of this arm, I could not see… It was impossible for me to finish what I was doing.
“I’m tired,” I told myself, my brow bathed in sweat. “I only have this one figure still to do. I’ll finish it tomorrow… It shouldn’t be hard.”
And I went back to bed, scared half to death by my vision. Five minutes later I was fast asleep.
The following day I was up at the crack of dawn. I had just got dressed and was preparing myself to take up where I had left off when two short knocks resounded at the door:
“Come in!”
The door opened. A man already in the twilight of his life, tall, thin, dressed in black, appeared on the threshold. The face of this man, his eyes set close together, his great hook nose over which loomed a broad, bony brow had something stern about it. He greeted me solemnly.
“Mr Christian Venius, the painter?” he said.
“I am he, sir.”
He bowed once more, giving his own name:
“Baron Frederick Van Spreckdal.”
The appearance in my poor hovel of the rich art collector Van Spreckdal, a judge in the criminal court, made a strong impression on me. I could not stop myself from casting a surreptitious glance at my old worm-eaten furniture, my damp tapestries and my dusty floor. I felt humiliated by such a squalid state of affairs… But Van Spreckdal did not seem to pay any attention to these things and promptly sat down at my little table:
“Mister Venius,” he went on, “I’ve come to…”
But, just then, his eyes came to rest on the incomplete sketch.… He failed to finish his sentence. I had seated myself on the edge of the truckle bed and the sudden attention given by this person to one of my works made my heart beat faster with a feeling of apprehension that was difficult to define.
After a minute Van Spreckdal raised his head:
“Are you the author of this sketch?” he asked, now giving me his undivided attent
ion.
“Yes, sir.”
“What are you asking for it?”
“I don’t sell my sketches… It’s the rough draft for a picture.”
“I see,” he said, lifting up the paper with the tips of his long yellow fingers. He took a magnifying glass from his waistcoat pocket and started to study the drawing in silence.
The sun’s rays were, at this time of day, falling obliquely into my garret. Van Spreckdal did not breathe a word; his big nose curved into a claw, his thick eyebrows contracted, and his protruding chin created a thousand wrinkles in his long sunken cheeks. The silence was so impenetrable that I could hear quite distinctly the plaintive buzzing of a fly caught in a spider’s web.
“And how big is this picture going to be, Mister Venius?” he said without even looking at me.
“Three feet by four feet.”
“What will you charge for the picture?”
“Fifty ducats.”
Van Spreckdal placed the drawing on the table and took out of his pocket a drooping green silk purse, elongated into the shape of a pear. He slid the rings in order to open it.
“Fifty ducats then,” he said. “There you have them.”
I went dizzy.
The baron got up, said goodbye to me and I heard his great ivory-handled cane knock against each step till he finally came to the bottom of the stairs. Then, waking up from my temporary stupor, I suddenly remembered that I had not thanked him, and I ran down those four flights of stairs as quick as a flash. But, when I got to the door, it was in vain that I looked both right and left—the street was deserted.
“Well! Fancy that!” I said to myself. “Here’s a how-d’you-do!”
And I went back up the stairs quite out of breath.
CHAPTER II
The surprising way in which Van Spreckdal had just appeared to me threw me into a deep trance: “Yesterday,” I said to myself as I contemplated the pile of ducats sparkling in the sunshine, “yesterday I formed the culpable intention of cutting my throat for the lack of a few miserable schillings and today good fortune smiles on me unbidden… A good job then I didn’t open my razor and, if ever the temptation to do away with myself overtakes me again, I’ll take care to put the thing off to the following day.”
After these judicious reflexions, I sat down to finish the sketch. Four strokes of the charcoal pencil and that would be that. But here an unfathomable disappointment awaited me. I found it impossible to make these four strokes. I had lost the thread of my inspiration and the mysterious personage would not emerge from the limbo of my brain. It was in vain that I evoked it, mapped it out, went back to it—it was no more in keeping with the whole than a figure by Raphael would be in a David Teniers smoke-filled snug… I was sweating cobs.