I talked with the elderly Archer
Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916;
and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an
authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected. When, however, I asked them what connection with France or its language
the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and
ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say
was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of
might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son
Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not himself known the
legend, but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins,
seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird
significance to the French raving of Rhoby Harris, which she had so
often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been
at the shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783,
and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a
somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy's last moments, but he had soon
forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The
granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She
and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer's
son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after my
experience. *       *       *       *       *

Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could
furnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a
zeal more penetrating than that which 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 the long strip of home 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, as rumor 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; something 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
excited 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 rumor 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 down the bay, had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here
the strangers 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 neighbors, 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 demoniac 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
unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to
name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not have
generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would
have brought some drastic and frightened action--indeed, might not its
limited whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased the
Roulets from the town? *       *       *       *       *

I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the
unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the
building, and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor.