CHAPTER FOUR
AVEROIGNE
With the Averoigne83 story-cycle, Smith came closest to producing a series with a non-fabulous backdrop. The stories that comprise the series take place in the imaginary Medieval French province of Averoigne, and the settings range in time from the twelfth century to the eighteenth.84 But despite the firmer historical grounding, Smith had no wish to create historically accurate fiction: when called out by Lovecraft for contradicting the accepted chronology of France, Smith was unconcerned, and replied that Averoigne was “a realm no less mythical than [James Branch] Cabell’s Poictesme”.85
Averoigne is also Smith’s most conventionally romantic setting, a land of dark forests and lonely castles, peopled by superstitious peasants, minstrels, and monks, with witches, vampires, and werewolves lurking in the shadows. The completed works in the story-cycle are “The End of the Story”, “The Satyr”, “A Rendezvous in Averoigne”, “The Holiness of Azédarac”, “The Maker of Gargoyles”, “The Colossus of Ylourgne”, “The Mandrakes”, “The Beast of Averoigne”, “The Disinterment of Venus”, “Mother of Toads”, and “The Enchantress of Sylaire”. Projected but unwritten tales include “The Queen of the Sabbath”, “The Sorceress of Averoigne” (both SS), and “The Oracle of Sadaqua” (BB).
One of the finest stories in this series is “The Beast of Averoigne” (1932, LW), which Smith felt was among his most technically polished works.86 Like “The Testament of Athammaus” and “The Double Shadow”, it is in the form of a first-person account, meant for future ages, which tells of a horror witnessed by the narrator. Unlike the other Averoigne tales, the horror of this story is an unearthly one.
In the year of a red comet, a series of gruesome murders take place in the forests and villages of Averoigne. Animals, and later men, are found with their spines laid open and the marrow removed. One night in the woods, a young monk from the Benedictine Abbey of Perigon sees a horrible apparition:
It moved as with the flitting of a fen-fire, and was of changeable color, being pale as a corposant, or ruddy as new-spilled blood, or green as the poisonous distillation that surrounds the moon...revealing dimly the black abomination of head and limbs that were not those of any creature wrought by God. The horror stood erect, rising to more than the height of a tall man; and it swayed like a great serpent, and its members undulated, bending like heated wax.
A few days later the monk falls prey to the creature and dies in the fashion of its other victims. With each murder, Theophile, the abbot of Perigon, grows paler and more agitated.
Luc le Chaudronnier, a sorcerer and the narrator of the story, is called upon to vanquish the Beast. He stations himself outside the Abbey one night; when the creature appears, he releases an ancient demon, pent within the ring once owned by the prehistoric wizard Eibon (thus is the story linked to the Hyperborean series). The demon defeats the Beast, which is revealed as Theophile, whose body had housed a demon from the comet.
Theophile’s unwitting participation in the murders is suppressed, and it is said thereafter that he died at the hands of the Beast. The story ends with an effective evocation of the cosmic dread that permeates the work:
...they who will read this record in future ages will believe it not, saying that no demon or malign spirit could have prevailed thus upon true holiness. Indeed, it were well that none should believe the story: for thin is the veil betwixt man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnamable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of Earth.
In contrast to the tense and grim “Beast of Averoigne”, “The Disinterment of Venus” (1932, GL) is ironic and humorous. It, too, takes place in the Abbey of Perigon. Three monks digging in “the Benedictine’s turnip and carrot patches” unearth what they first think is a stone. They work to remove the obstruction “for the honor of the monastery and the glory of God” but find it to be an antique statue of Venus, dating from Roman days. The monks are affected strangely by its presence: the clearing away of soil from the statue’s face and breasts, for instance, was “a task [they] performed with great thoroughness”. That night the three go off drinking and wenching, and the other monks begin to complain of carnal desires.
One night the pious and zealous Brother Louis (who as it happens is “handsome as Adonis”) goes forth to smash the image. In the morning he is found crushed beneath the fallen statue, with the arms of Venus clasped tightly about him. Try as they might, his fellow monks cannot release Venus’ grip, so they bury him in the vegetable patch, along with the statue.
In “The Enchantress of Sylaire” (AY), a lover’s rejection drives the young poet Anselme into hermitage. One day he comes upon a beautiful woman, Sephora, who leads him through a portal of Druidic stones and into another world. She announces herself as the enchantress of the region, called Sylaire, and makes it known that she wishes Anselme to remain as her consort. Sephora shares her domain with a black wolf; one day as Anselme is walking alone through the woods, the creature reveals itself to be Malachie, a werewolf. By eating a garlic-like root, he can throw off the wolf-shape for a while. Malachie claims that he is a former lover of Sephora, who tricked him into drinking water from a pool that causes lycanthropy. He warns Anselme that Sephora is “an ancient lamia, well-nigh immortal, who feeds on the vital fires of young men”, and that her beauty is an illusion.
Confronted, Sephora denies all of this, and the love-struck Anselme believes her. Together, they plot to make Malachie’s affliction permanent, by substituting water from the werewolf-pool for an antidote he has been brewing. The wolf goes mad after drinking the potion, and Anselme kills him with a sword.
Malachie had earlier given Anselme a mirror with the power to dispel illusion. By this time Anselme knows that Malachie had spoken truthfully about Sephora, but instead of using the mirror to reveal the true Sephora, he throws it out a window and takes her in his arms. Because she is “the essence of all the beauty and romance that he had ever craved”, Anselme would prefer to accept her illusion of womanhood, than to dispel it.
“The Enchantress of Sylaire”, which dates from around 1940, is the last of the Averoigne tales, and constitutes an unintentional remake of the first entry in the series, “The End of the Story” (1929, OST). The setting for “The End of the Story” is also the most modern one. In 1798, Christophe Morand takes shelter from a storm in the Abbey of Perigon. He is welcomed by the abbot, Hilaire, and is shown about the monastery’s library. There he reads an illicit manuscript, which tells of a knight’s adventures in the nearby ruined Château des Faussesflammes. Morand is strangely moved by the story and makes his own journey to the ruins. Because “The End of the Story” is a first person account, Smith generates a parallel structure which relates the story’s narrative to the manuscript that Morand reads: we are given two manuscripts, two dooms, separated by centuries.
Morand descends a hidden staircase within the ruins and finds himself in a beautiful, sunlit world, “a land of classic myth, of Grecian legend”. Nymphs and satyrs scamper about a temple; within it, he finds Nycea, “a woman of goddess-like beauty”. She welcomes him with kind words but offers no explanations for herself or her world. Morand falls under her spell.
Hours later an agitated Hilaire appears on the scene, shouting prayers and sprinkling holy water. The beautiful world vanishes, and the abbot leads Morand to the surface. Hilaire explains that “the marble palace and all the luxury therein, were no more than a satanic delusion, a lovely bubble that arose from the dust and mold of immemorial death, of ancient corruption”.
And though Morand is told that the beauty of Nycea is an illusion (as Anselme had similarly been warned in “The Enchantress of Sylaire”), that she is “a lamia, an ancient vampire”, he can only think to regain her couch. “I lamented the beautiful dream of which [Hilaire] had deprived me.... I knew that whatever she was, woman or demon or serpent, there was no one in all the world who could ever arouse in me the same desire and the same delight”. He resolves to return to Nycea, and so the story ends.
“The Holiness of Azédarac” (1931, LW) is one of Smith’s most well-rounded and enjoyable stories. Azédarac, Bishop of Ximes, “lives in the odor of incense and piety” but at the same time “maintains a private understanding with the Adversary”. He secretly worships Satan, as well as other and more potent entities.87 “The chief difference between myself and many other ecclesiastics”, he tells his servant, “is that I serve the Devil wittingly and of my own free will, while they do the same in sanctimonious blindness”.
Brother Ambrose is sent by the Archbishop to investigate rumors concerning Azédarac. He learns the truth about the Bishop and is on his way to deliver a report when he is met by Azédarac’s henchman, disguised as a fellow traveller. At a roadside tavern, Ambrose is given wine laden with a potion that transports him seven-hundred years into the past. The year is now 475 A.D., and he finds himself in the company of Moriamis, a beautiful sorceress. She is glad for his company, but though Ambrose falls for her charms, he is reluctant to break his monastic vows. Moriamis patiently (and with a certain wit) explains that the centuries that separate him from his own age “should be long enough to procure the remission of any sin, no matter how often repeated”.
Moriamis had once been the lover of Azédarac and had stolen some amount of the time-travel liquid from him before he left for the 12th century. After a time spent pleasantly with Moriamis, Ambrose resolves to return to his own age and make his report to the Archbishop. She gives him the stolen potion, along with a counter-draft that, should he wish to use it, will send him back to her.
Ambrose arrives at the tavern by the road but learns that the year is 1210, fifty-five years beyond his own time. His Archbishop is long dead, as is Azédarac, now St. Azédarac. He downs the second draft and finds Moriamis awaiting him; he never suspects that she doctored both potions to transport him forward and backward by 755 years rather than 700, thereby guaranteeing his return.
In view of the journeys Ambrose undertakes, and the subterfuge and setbacks he encounters, Smith considered “The Holiness of Aredarac” an exceptionally “plotty” bit of story-writing for him.
A less attractive—though no less amorous or conniving—sorceress is presented in “Mother of Toads” (1937, TSS), a gruesomely erotic short tale. A huge and hideous witch living alone by a bog is known as La Mère des Crapauds or Mother of Toads, both for her amphibian neighbors and for her appearance. Pierre, an apothecary’s apprentice on an errand to pick up some of her potions, attracts her fancy. She entices him with a cup of wine, into which she has introduced an aphrodisiac. He finds his passion kindled by her foul form: “The lumpish limbs had grown voluptuous; the pale, thick-lipped mouth enticed him with the promise of ampler kisses than other mouths could yield”. Hours later he awakens in La Mère’s bed, with her “her toad-like...pale, warty body pressed and bulged against him”. Repulsed, Pierre runs from the hut, but becomes lost in a strange sudden fog. He strays into the bog and is attacked by an endless army of toads. Borne under the surface by the mass of their clinging bodies, Pierre perishes. In the original version of “Mother of Toads”, his last impression is of “two enormous breasts” that were “crushed closely down upon his face”, smothering him.88
The longest of the Averoigne tales (15,000 words) is “The Colossus of Ylourgne” (1932, GL). Nathaire is an infamous necromancer of Vyones, whose career parallels that of Namirrha from “The Dark Eidolon”, which Smith composed six months later. His parentage is unknown and perhaps demonic; in his early years in Vyones, he was stoned for necromancy and lamed, and has since nurtured a hatred for the city and has plotted his revenge upon it. After he has disappeared from Vyones, corpses of the newly-dead or freshly-buried rise and begin a strange pilgrimage. Groups of the dead, “deaf, dumb, totally insensate...hurrying with horrible speed and sureness”, pass into the forest. The mystery of this exodus is maintained for much of the story.
The young Gaspard du Nord, a former student of Nathaire, leaves Vyones to discover the reason for the flight of the dead, in which he sees the hand of his former master. At the ruined castle of Ylourgne, he finds Nathaire and the dead at work constructing a huge simulacra of the wizard, molded from the rendered flesh of the corpses. Du Nord is captured, but after a painful escape from the dungeons (which Smith describes at excessive length), he returns to warn Vyones. In the meanwhile, the Colossus, animated by the soul of Nathaire, leaves the castle and brings havoc to the countryside.
As the giant enters Vyones, du Nord hails it from the roof of the cathedral. When it bends over to investigate, the Colossus inhales a powder dispersed by the young sorcerer, and Nathaire’s control is destroyed. In gentle bewilderment, the corpse-giant wanders into the hills and digs itself a grave, striving to retrieve the peace of death. In time, it is reduced to an “enormous, rook-haunted bulk” from which the wizard’s voice is occasionally heard to issue in protest.
83. Rah Hoffman recalls that Smith pronounced this name as though it rhymed with “Kahn” (private communication).
84. The following completed stories take place in the following years: “The Maker of Gargoyles” (1138), “The Holiness of Azédarac” (1175), “The Colossus of Ylourgne” (1281), “The Beast of Averoigne” (1369), “The Mandrakes” (ca. 1400), “The Disinterment of Venus” (1550), “A Rendezvous in Averoigne” (ca.1550), “The Satyr” (ca.1575), “The End of the Story” (1789).
85. Letter to Lovecraft (#37, LL), 4 December 1933. Although attempts have been made to match Averoigne in a detailed way to the actual French province of Auvergne (see Glenn Rahman, “The History of Averoigne?”, in Crypt of Cthulhu No. 26, [Hallowmass 1984]), it is unlikely that Smith took more than the hint of the name from Auvergne.
86. “I think that I have done better tales, but few that are technically superior”. Letter to Derleth, 18 April 1933.
87. As an in-joke with his friend Lovecraft, Smith has Azédarac also worship the gods of the Cthulhu Mythos.
88. To market “Mother of Toads”, Smith found it necessary to remove the most erotic passages from the original version of the story. See The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith for the complete text.