‘You should make your peace with God, ma fille. I am ready to take your confession.’
‘It is time. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’
‘Tell me, my child. Keep nothing back.’
‘There was a time, long ago, in the year 1882, when I did something that changed many lives. I did not know then what would happen. I acted on impulse and for motives I thought to be good. I was thirty-four, the Mistress of the Corps de Ballet at the Paris Opera. I was married but my husband had deserted me and run off with another woman.’
‘You must forgive them, my child. Forgiveness is a part of penitence.’
‘Oh, I do, Father. Long since. But I had a daughter, Meg, then six years old. There was a fair out at Neuilly and I took her one Sunday. There were calliopes and carousels, steam engines and performing monkeys who collected centimes for the hurdy-gurdy man. Meg had never seen a funfair before. But there was also a show of freaks. A line of tents with notices advertising the world’s strongest man, the acrobat dwarves, a man so covered in tattoos that one could not see his skin, a black man with a bone through his nose and pointed teeth, a lady with a beard.
‘At the end of the line was a sort of cage on wheels, with bars spaced almost a foot apart, and filthy reeking straw on the floor. It was bright in the sun but dark in the cage so I peered in to see what animal it contained. I heard the clank of chains and saw something lying huddled in the straw. Just then a man came up.
‘He was big and beefy, with a red, crude face. He carried a tray on a sash round his neck. It contained lumps of horse manure collected from where the ponies were tethered, and pieces of rotten fruit. “Have a go, lady,” he said, “see if you can pelt the monster. One centime a throw.” Then he turned to the cage and shouted, “Come on, come near the front or you know what you’ll get.” The chains clanked again, and something more animal than human shuffled into the light, nearer to the bars.
‘I could see that it was indeed human, though hardly so. A male in rags, crusted with filth, gnawing on an old piece of apple. Apparently he had to live on what people threw over him. Ordure and faeces clung to his thin body. There were manacles on his wrists and ankles and the steel had bitten into the flesh to leave open wounds where maggots writhed. But it was the face and head that caused Meg to burst into tears.
‘The skull and face were hideously deformed, the former displaying only a few tufts of filthy hair. The face was distorted down one side as if struck long ago by a monstrous hammer and the flesh of this visage was raw and shapeless like molten candle wax. The eyes were deep-set in sockets puckered and misshapen. Only half of the mouth and a section of jaw on one side had escaped the deformation and looked like a normal human face.
‘Meg was holding a toffee-apple. I do not know why, but I took it off her, walked to the bars and held it out. The beefy man went into a rage, screaming and shouting that I was depriving him of his living. I ignored him and pushed the toffee-apple into the filthy hands behind the bars. And I looked into the eyes of this deformed monster.
‘Father, thirty-five years ago when the ballet was suspended during the Franco-Prussian War, I was among those who tended the young wounded coming back from the front. I have seen men in agony, I have heard them scream. But I have never seen pain like I saw in those eyes.’
‘Pain is part of the human condition, my child. But what you did that day with the toffee-apple was not a sin, but an act of compassion. I must hear your sins if I am to give absolution.’
‘But I went back that night and I stole him.’
‘You did what?’
‘I went to the old shuttered opera house, took a heavy pair of bolt-cutters from the carpentry shop and a large cowled cloak from wardrobe, hired a hansom cab and returned to Neuilly. The field of the funfair was deserted in the moonlight. The performers were asleep in their caravans. There were curs who started to bark, but I threw them scraps of meat. I found the cage-trailer, withdrew the iron bar that held it closed, opened the door and called softly inside.
‘The creature was chained to one wall. I cut the chains on his wrists and feet and urged him to come out. He seemed terrified, but when he saw me in the moonlight, he shuffled out and dropped to the ground. I covered him in the cloak, pulled the cowl over that dreadful head and led him away to the coach. The driver grumbled at the awful smell, but I paid him extra and he drove us back to my flat behind the rue le Peletier. Was taking him away a sin?’
‘Certainly it was an offence in law, my child. He belonged to the fair-owner, brutal though the man may have been. As to an offence before God … I do not know. I think not.’
‘There is more, Father. Have you the time?’
‘You are facing eternity. I think I can spare a few minutes, but recall there may be others dying here who will also need me.’
‘I hid him in my small flat for a month, Father. He took a bath, the first in his life, then another and many more. I disinfected the open wounds and bandaged them so that they slowly healed. I gave him clothes from my husband’s chest and food so that he recovered his health. He also for the first time in his life slept in a real bed with sheets - I moved Meg in with me, which was a good thing to do because she was terrified of him. I found that he was himself petrified with fear if anyone came to the door and would scuttle away to hide under the stairs. I also found that he could talk, in French but with an Alsatian accent, and slowly over that month he told me his story.
‘He was born Erik Muhlheim, just forty years ago. In Alsace which was then French but soon to be annexed by Germany. He was the only son of a circus family, living in a caravan, constantly moving from town to town.
‘He told me that he had learned in early childhood the circumstances of his birth. The midwife had screamed when she saw the tiny child emerging into the world, for he was even then horribly disfigured. She handed the squealing bundle to the mother and ran away, yelling (foolish cow) that she had delivered the devil himself.
‘So poor Erik arrived, destined from birth to be hated and rejected by people who believe that ugliness is the outward show of sinfulness.
‘His father was the circus carpenter, engineer and handyman. It was watching him at work that Erik first developed his talent for anything that could be constructed with tools and hands. It was in the sideshows that he saw the techniques of illusion, with mirrors, trapdoors and secret passages that would later play such a part in his life in Paris.
‘But his father was a drunken brute who whipped the boy constantly for the most minor offences or none at all; his mother a useless besom who just sat in the corner and wailed. Spending most of his young life in pain and in tears, he tried to avoid the caravan and slept in the straw with the circus animals and especially the horses. He was seven, sleeping in the stables, when the Big Top caught fire.
‘The fire ruined the circus, which went bankrupt. The staff and the artistes scattered to join other enterprises. Erik’s father, without a job, drank himself to death. His mother ran away to become a skivvy in nearby Strasbourg. Running out of money for booze, his father sold him to the master of a passing freak show. He spent nine years in the wheeled cage, daily pelted with filth and ordure for the amusement of cruel crowds. He was sixteen when I found him.’
‘A pitiable tale, my child, but what has this to do with your mortal sins?’
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‘Patience, Father. Hear me out, you will understand, for no creature on the planet has ever heard the truth before. I kept Erik in my apartment for a month but it could not go on. There were neighbours, callers at our door. One night I took him to my place of work, the Opera, and he had found his new home.