Haunted Castles by Ray Russell

foyer, directly after the last curtain?”
    â€œWill you be there in time?” I asked. “The Guignol shows are short, I hear.”
    â€œI will be there,” said Sellig, and we parted.

III
STAGE OF TORTURE
    L e Théâtre du Grand Guignol, as you probably know, had been established just a dozen or so years before, in 1896, on the Rue Chaptal, in a tiny building that had once been a chapel. Father Didon, a Dominican, had preached there, and in the many incarnations the building was to go through in later years it was to retain its churchly appearance. Right up to the day of its demolition in 1962, I’m told, it remained exactly as it had always been: quaint, small, huddled inconspicuously in a cobble-stone nook at the end of a Montmartre alley; inside, black-raftered, with gothic tracery writhing along the portals and fleurs-de-lis on the walls, with carved cherubs and a pair of seven-foot angels—dim with the patina of a century—smiling benignly down on the less than three hundred seats and loges . . . which, you know, looked not like conventional seats and loges but like church pews and confessionals. After the good Father Didon was no longer active, his chapel became the shop of a dealer specializing in religious art; still later, it was transformed into a studio for the academic painter, Rochegrosse; and so on, until, in ’96, a man named Méténier—who had formerly been secretary to a
commissaire de
police
—rechristened it the Théâtre du Grand Guignol and made of it the famous carnival of horror. Méténier died the following year, aptly enough, and Max Maurey took it over. I met Maurey briefly—he was still operating the theatre in 1909, the year of my little story.
    The subject matter of the Guignol plays seldom varied. Their single acts were filled with girls being thrown into lighthouse lamps . . . faces singed by vitriol or pressed forcibly down upon red hot stoves . . . naked ladies nailed to crosses and carved up by gypsies . . . a variety of surgical operations . . . mad old crones who put out the eyes of young maidens with knitting needles . . . chunks of flesh ripped from victims’ necks by men with hooks for hands . . . bodies dissolved in acid baths . . . hands chopped off; also arms, legs, heads . . . women raped and strangled . . . all done in a hyper-realistic manner with ingenious trick props and the Guignol’s own secretly formulated blood—a thick, suety, red gruel which was actually capable of congealing before your eyes and which was kept continually hot in a big cauldron backstage.
    Some actors—but especially actresses—made spectacular careers at the Guignol. You may know of Maxa? She was after my time, actually, but she was supposed to have been a beautiful woman, generously endowed by Nature, and they say it was impossible to find one square inch of her lovely body that had not received some variety of stage violence in one play or another. The legend is that she died ten thousand times, in sixty separate and distinct ways, each more hideous than the last; and that she writhed in the assaults of brutal rapine on no less than three thousand theatrical occasions. For the remainder of her life she could not speak above a whisper: the years of screaming had torn her throat to shreds.
    At any rate, the evening following my first meeting with Sellig, César and I were seated in this unique little theatre with two young ladies we had escorted there; they were uncommonly pretty but uncommonly common—in point of fact, they were barely on the safe side of respectability’s border, being inhabitants of that peculiar demimonde, that shadow world where several professions—actress, model, barmaid, bawd—mingle and merge and overlap and often coexist. But we were young, César and I, and this was, after all, Paris.