Le Marchand de Sable : le podcast pour s'endormir · Engle

Souvenir de M. Auguste Beldoe - Histoires Extraordinaires - Edgar Allan Poe

·28 min·2 clips

A young gentleman with cat-like eyes and an exsanguine complexion sparks profound curiosity about his origins.

1. 'Le Marchand de Sable' presents Poe's 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains' (here titled 'Souvenir de M. Auguste Bédelot'), a story set in Virginia in 1827. 2. The unnamed narrator meets Mr. Auguste Bédelot, a young man whose exact age and background are impossible to determine, near Charlottesville, Virginia. 3. The episode's central puzzle: how can a young man's appearance simultaneously suggest extreme youth and a century of age, and how do his visions of a foreign city connect to a real historical event? 4. Bédelot is described with clinical precision — cat-like pupils that emit interior light when excited, limbs excessively long and emaciated, a smile of deep and unvarying melancholy. 5. His unusual condition is managed by Dr. Templeton, a physician who became a devoted Mesmerist in Paris and established a strong hypnotic rapport with his patient. 6. Bédelot takes large doses of opium every morning before solitary walks in the wild Ragged Mountains near Charlottesville. 7. On a foggy November day during the Indian summer, Bédelot goes out and fails to return until evening; he then recounts a vision of extraordinary vividness. 8. Wandering in the mountains, he enters a gorge he does not recognise; the opium and the heavy fog produce a heightened, rhapsodic perception of every leaf and sound. 9. He encounters a half-naked man shaking iron rings and, just behind him, a large hyena — yet he concludes he must be dreaming and bathes his face in a spring to wake himself. 10. He sits beneath a tree and notices the shadow it casts is that of a palm tree — this shatters his assumption of dreaming because palm trees do not grow in Virginia. 11. A gust of wind disperses the fog to reveal a vast oriental city below — minarets, bazaars, elephants, and a majestic river — 'of a character even more singular than any described in The Thousand and One Nights.' 12. Bédelot joins a small detachment of English-uniformed soldiers defending a kiosk against a ferocious crowd; he fights with 'the nervous ferocity of despair.' 13. He is struck by a poisoned arrow in the right temple, dies, and then experiences a bodiless state, observing his own swollen corpse beneath him before a galvanic shock returns him to his body. 14. Dr. Templeton, listening to the account, grows pale and trembling; he reveals he was writing down the events of Bédelot's vision in a notebook at the same moment they occurred. 15. Templeton shows a miniature portrait dated 1780 of his friend Holdeb — an exact likeness of Bédelot — and explains that the events Bédelot described are the historical insurrection of Chaitesing at Benares during Warren Hastings's administration. 16. Holdeb was the officer who fell under the poisoned arrow in that 1780 event; Templeton was part of the same detachment and witnessed it. 17. The story is told in a slow, deliberate narrator's voice suited to a sleep podcast; long sentences and dense atmospheric descriptions create an immersive, hypnagogic quality. 18. The format is a solo reading — no discussion, no music noted in the transcript — intended as bedtime audio storytelling. 19. Listeners who enjoy slow gothic readings, Poe, or 19th-century supernatural fiction will find this episode satisfying. 20. Listeners seeking quick narratives or non-fiction content will likely lose attention during Poe's long descriptive passages.

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