The Vampire of Ropraz Read Online Free
Author: Jacques Chessex
seems to arouse the Vampire’s ardour. Scarcely have Nadine Jordan’s tortured body and scalp been discovered at Carrouge, when the Jorat is again stunned by a third macabre affair.
This time it happens at Ferlens, a village to the east of Carrouge, on the road to Lake Bret. A young woman of twenty-three has just died of tuberculosis, and her husband, Jacques Beaupierre, has granted her last wish to be buried with her head resting on the little rubber cushion that helped her endure her suffering. A strange wish, and a promise piously kept: Justine Beaupierre is buried on Tuesday the 21st of March, her head resting, inside her coffin, on the absurd but serviceable object.
Imagine Beaupierre’s horror, on his first visit to the graveyard, when he sees the aforesaid cushion, orange-coloured and very easy to spot in the nine o’clock light, on the path leading to his wife’s grave!
Once again, an open grave, a gaping coffin, a burial gown torn away, the young woman’s throat pierced and slashed, her breasts sliced off and partly eaten. Dried sperm and traces of saliva like animal slaver, as Jacques Beaupierre would later describe it, around the navel and in the creases of the groin. The belly is sliced open with a long, neat cut; the pubic area and genitalia have been excised and removed. Pieces of them, chewed and spat out, hair, tender flesh and cartilage, will be found in the boxwood coppice that runs along the graveyard fence. Just as scraps of the pubic area and hair were found in the dark Crochet hedge in Ropraz, after the February outrage.
“The colour of Justine Beaupierre’s eyes?”
“Brown, darkish in shade.”
“Colour of her hair?”
“Dark brown.”
“The complexion of the aforesaid?”
“Pale and clear.”
“The height of the aforesaid?”
“Medium, well formed. Well-developed breasts. Narrow hips.”
“Build of the aforesaid?”
“Slender and willowy. Ninety pounds at most.”
You would think that the Vampire of Ropraz keeps to one type of woman, always the same, and that he selects his sacrificial victim well in advance. Where does he get his information? How does he know that a dark, slim girl is dying, and in what precise location? Does he have a list of the young patients near death in all the clinics, sanatoria, isolation wards and nursing homes in the country? Has he an accomplice in the Moudon hospital? And the times of the funerals: how does he know the very day, the very hour, that such and such a young woman is to be laid to rest in such and such a village?
People begin to suspect churchwardens and undertakers, and the one in Ferlens, old Cordey,
is grilled by the investigators. Thanks be to God, he is saved by the bottle. At the time of the Beaupierre crime, Jérémie Cordey was still dead drunk, thanks to the tips he had been given the previous day.
Justine Beaupierre is reburied. Once again a new gown for the massacred corpse, and once again Pastor Béranger, not fearing to compare these dreadful events with the Ten Plagues of Egypt, with the merited punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. “What crime are we paying for, miserable creatures that we are? Thou knowest, O Lord, and we know too, if only we look deep into our hearts. None is innocent before the Lord. It is only after we have examined all our sins, and decided to repent, to change the direction of our lives, that Thou, O Lord, wilt restore peace to our towns and villages. As Thou hast, in Thy goodness, bestowed peace upon our hearts benighted by so much error.”
There, it has been said: God will destroy the Vampire once we have surrendered to Him. A biblical vow, commensurate with the obsession
with sin engrafted in the bodies of Calvinists in their wasteland. Their souls in despair at the steep ascent to a heaven that is out of reach. Béranger knows his people well. However, especially after night has fallen, everyone thinks of the three lovely bodies, bloody and cut to pieces deep in their fresh beds of
This time it happens at Ferlens, a village to the east of Carrouge, on the road to Lake Bret. A young woman of twenty-three has just died of tuberculosis, and her husband, Jacques Beaupierre, has granted her last wish to be buried with her head resting on the little rubber cushion that helped her endure her suffering. A strange wish, and a promise piously kept: Justine Beaupierre is buried on Tuesday the 21st of March, her head resting, inside her coffin, on the absurd but serviceable object.
Imagine Beaupierre’s horror, on his first visit to the graveyard, when he sees the aforesaid cushion, orange-coloured and very easy to spot in the nine o’clock light, on the path leading to his wife’s grave!
Once again, an open grave, a gaping coffin, a burial gown torn away, the young woman’s throat pierced and slashed, her breasts sliced off and partly eaten. Dried sperm and traces of saliva like animal slaver, as Jacques Beaupierre would later describe it, around the navel and in the creases of the groin. The belly is sliced open with a long, neat cut; the pubic area and genitalia have been excised and removed. Pieces of them, chewed and spat out, hair, tender flesh and cartilage, will be found in the boxwood coppice that runs along the graveyard fence. Just as scraps of the pubic area and hair were found in the dark Crochet hedge in Ropraz, after the February outrage.
“The colour of Justine Beaupierre’s eyes?”
“Brown, darkish in shade.”
“Colour of her hair?”
“Dark brown.”
“The complexion of the aforesaid?”
“Pale and clear.”
“The height of the aforesaid?”
“Medium, well formed. Well-developed breasts. Narrow hips.”
“Build of the aforesaid?”
“Slender and willowy. Ninety pounds at most.”
You would think that the Vampire of Ropraz keeps to one type of woman, always the same, and that he selects his sacrificial victim well in advance. Where does he get his information? How does he know that a dark, slim girl is dying, and in what precise location? Does he have a list of the young patients near death in all the clinics, sanatoria, isolation wards and nursing homes in the country? Has he an accomplice in the Moudon hospital? And the times of the funerals: how does he know the very day, the very hour, that such and such a young woman is to be laid to rest in such and such a village?
People begin to suspect churchwardens and undertakers, and the one in Ferlens, old Cordey,
is grilled by the investigators. Thanks be to God, he is saved by the bottle. At the time of the Beaupierre crime, Jérémie Cordey was still dead drunk, thanks to the tips he had been given the previous day.
Justine Beaupierre is reburied. Once again a new gown for the massacred corpse, and once again Pastor Béranger, not fearing to compare these dreadful events with the Ten Plagues of Egypt, with the merited punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. “What crime are we paying for, miserable creatures that we are? Thou knowest, O Lord, and we know too, if only we look deep into our hearts. None is innocent before the Lord. It is only after we have examined all our sins, and decided to repent, to change the direction of our lives, that Thou, O Lord, wilt restore peace to our towns and villages. As Thou hast, in Thy goodness, bestowed peace upon our hearts benighted by so much error.”
There, it has been said: God will destroy the Vampire once we have surrendered to Him. A biblical vow, commensurate with the obsession
with sin engrafted in the bodies of Calvinists in their wasteland. Their souls in despair at the steep ascent to a heaven that is out of reach. Béranger knows his people well. However, especially after night has fallen, everyone thinks of the three lovely bodies, bloody and cut to pieces deep in their fresh beds of
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