Shunned House | Page 7

my uncle had occasionally
shown in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history
of the site from its very settlement in 1636--or even before, if any
Narragansett Indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I
found, at the start, that the land had been part of a long strip of the lot
granted originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips
beginning at the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the
hill to a line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The
Throckmorton lot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I
became very assiduous in tracing that section through which Back or
Benefit Street was later run. It had, a rumour indeed said, been the
Throckmorton graveyard; but as I examined the records more carefully,
I found that the graves had all been transferred at an early date to the
North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.

Then suddenly I came--by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the
main body of records and might easily have been missed--upon
something which aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with
several of the queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease
in 1697, of a small tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At
last the French element had appeared--that, and another deeper element
of horror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my
weird and heterogeneous reading--and I feverishly studied the platting
of the locality as it had been before the cutting through and partial
straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I
had half expected, that where the shunned house now stood, the
Roulets had laid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic
cottage, and that no record of any transfer of. graves existed. The
document, indeed, ended in much confusion; and I was forced to
ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley Library
before I could find a local door which the name of Etienne Roulet
would unlock. In the end I did find something; some thing of such
vague but monstrous import that I set about at once to examine the
cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and ex cited minuteness.
The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down
the west shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude,
and had encountered much opposition before the Providence selectmen
allowed them to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in
East Greenwich, whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes, and rumour said that the cause of dislike extended
beyond mere racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes which
involved other French settlers with the English in rivalries which not
even Governor Andros could quell. But their ardent Protestantism--too
ardent, some whispered--and their evident distress when virtually
driven from the village had been granted a haven; and the swarthy
Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and
drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at
Pardon Tillinghast's wharf, far south in Town Street. There had,
however, been a riot of some sort later on--perhaps forty years later,
after old Roulet's death--and no one seemed to hear of the family after
that.

For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well
remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life
of a New England seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whose
erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the
family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence
never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbours, it was
freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the
proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this had
undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria
Robbins. What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris
and other inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future
discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of those who
had known the legends realized that additional link with the terrible
which my wider reading had given me; that ominous item in the annals
of morbid horror which tells of the creature Jacques Roulet, of Caude,
who in 1598 was condemned to death as a daemoniac but afterward
saved from the stake by the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse.
He had been found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood,
shortly after the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One
wolf was seen to lope away