At six o’clock next morning two vehicles with postilions, prison vans, called in the vigorous language of the populace, _paniers a salade_, came out of La Force to drive to the Conciergerie by the Palais de Justice.
Few loafers in Paris can have failed to meet this prison cell on wheels; still, though most stories are written for Parisian readers, strangers will no doubt be satisfied to have a description of this formidable machine. Who knows? A police of Russia, Germany, or Austria, the legal body of countries to whom the “Salad-basket” is an unknown machine, may profit by it; and in several foreign countries there can be no doubt that an imitation of this vehicle would be a boon to prisoners.
This ignominious conveyance, yellow-bodied, on high wheels, and lined with sheet-iron, is divided into two compartments. In front is a box-seat, with leather cushions and an apron. This is the free seat of the van, and accommodates a sheriff’s officer and a gendarme. A strong iron trellis, reaching to the top, separates this sort of cab-front from the back division, in which there are two wooden seats placed sideways, as in an omnibus, on which the prisoners sit. They get in by a step behind and a door, with no window. The nickname of Salad-basket arose from the fact that the vehicle was originally made entirely of lattice, and the prisoners were shaken in it just as a salad is shaken to dry it.
For further security, in case of accident, a mounted gendarme follows the machine, especially when it conveys criminals condemned to death to the place of execution. Thus escape is impossible. The vehicle, lined with sheet-iron, is impervious to any tool. The prisoners, carefully searched when they are arrested or locked up, can have nothing but watch-springs, perhaps, to file through bars, and useless on a smooth surface.
So the _panier a salade_, improved by the genius of the Paris police, became the model for the prison omnibus (known in London as “Black Maria”) in which convicts are transported to the hulks, instead of the horrible tumbril which formerly disgraced civilization, though Manon Lescaut had made it famous.
The accused are, in the first instance, despatched in the prison van from the various prisons in Paris to the Palais de Justice, to be questioned by the examining judge. This, in prison slang, is called “going up for examination.” Then the accused are again conveyed from prison to the Court to be sentenced when their case is only a misdemeanor; or if, in legal parlance, the case is one for the Upper Court, they are transferred from the house of detention to the Conciergerie, the “Newgate” of the Department of the Seine.
Finally, the prison van carries the criminal condemned to death from Bicetre to the Barriere Saint–Jacques, where executions are carried out, and have been ever since the Revolution of July. Thanks to philanthropic interference, the poor wretches no longer have to face the horrors of the drive from the Conciergerie to the Place de Greve in a cart exactly like that used by wood merchants. This cart is no longer used but to bring the body back from the scaffold.
Without this explanation the words of a famous convict to his accomplice, “It is now the horse’s business!” as he got into the van, would be unintelligible. It is impossible to be carried to execution more comfortably than in Paris nowadays.
At this moment the two vans, setting out at such an early hour, were employed on the unwonted service of conveying two accused prisoners from the jail of La Force to the Conciergerie, and each man had a “Salad-basket” to himself.
Nine-tenths of my readers, ay, and nine-tenths of the remaining tenth, are certainly ignorant of the vast difference of meaning in the words incriminated, suspected, accused, and committed for trial—jail, house of detention, and penitentiary; and they may be surprised to learn here that it involves all our criminal procedure, of which a clear and brief outline will presently be sketched, as much for their information as for the elucidation of this history. However, when it is said that the first van contained Jacques Collin and the second Lucien, who in a few hours had fallen from the summit of social splendor to the depths of a prison cell, curiosity will for the moment be satisfied.
The conduct of the two accomplices was characteristic; Lucien de Rubempre shrank back to avoid the gaze of the passers-by, who looked at the grated window of the gloomy and fateful vehicle on its road along the Rue Saint–Antoine and the Rue du Martroi to reach the quay and the Arch of Saint–Jean, the way, at that time, across the Place de l’Hotel de Ville. This archway now forms the entrance gate to the residence of the Prefet de la Seine in the huge municipal palace. The daring convict, on the contrary, stuck his face against the barred grating, between the officer and the gendarme, who, sure of their van, were chatting together.
The great days of July 1830, and the tremendous storm that then burst, have so completely wiped out the memory of all previous events, and politics so entirely absorbed the French during the last six months of that year, that no one remembers—or a few scarcely remember—the various private, judicial, and financial catastrophes, strange as they were, which, forming the annual flood of Parisian curiosity, were not lacking during the first six months of the year. It is, therefore, needful to mention how Paris was, for the moment, excited by the news of the arrest of a Spanish priest, discovered in a courtesan’s house, and that of the elegant Lucien de Rubempre, who had been engaged to Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu, taken on the highroad to Italy, close to the little village of Grez. Both were charged as being concerned in a murder, of which the profits were stated at seven millions of francs; and for some days the scandal of this trial preponderated over the absorbing importance of the last elections held under Charles X.
In the first place, the charge had been based on an application by the Baron de Nucingen; then, Lucien’s apprehension, just as he was about to be appointed private secretary to the Prime Minister, made a stir in the very highest circles of society. In every drawing-room in Paris more than one young man could recollect having envied Lucien when he was honored by the notice of the beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse; and every woman knew that he was the favored attache of Madame de Serizy, the wife of one of the Government bigwigs. And finally, his handsome person gave him a singular notoriety in the various worlds that make up Paris—the world of fashion, the financial world, the world of courtesans, the young men’s world, the literary world. So for two days past all Paris had been talking of these two arrests. The examining judge in whose hands the case was put regarded it as a chance for promotion; and, to proceed with the utmost rapidity, he had given orders that both the accused should be transferred from La Force to the Conciergerie as soon as Lucien de Rubempre could be brought from Fontainebleau.
As the Abbe Carlos had spent but twelve hours in La Force, and Lucien only half a night, it is useless to describe that prison, which has since been entirely remodeled; and as to the details of their consignment, it would be only a repetition of the same story at the Conciergerie.
But before setting forth the terrible drama of a criminal inquiry, it is indispensable, as I have said, that an account should be given of the ordinary proceedings in a case of this kind. To begin with, its various phases will be better understood at home and abroad, and, besides, those who are ignorant of the action of the criminal law, as conceived of by the lawgivers under Napoleon, will appreciate it better. This is all the more important as, at this moment, this great and noble institution is in danger of destruction by the system known as penitentiary.
A crime is committed; if it is flagrant, the persons incriminated (inculpes) are taken to the nearest lock-up and placed in the cell known to the vulgar as the Violon—perhaps because they make a noise there, shrieking or crying. From thence the suspected persons (inculpes) are taken before the police commissioner or magistrate, who holds a preliminary inquiry, and can dismiss the case if there is any mistake; finally, they are conveyed to the Depot of the Prefecture, where the police detains them pending the convenience of the public prosecutor and the examining judge. They, being served with due notice, more or less quickly, according to the gravity of the case, come and examine the prisoners who are still provisionally detained. Having due regard to the presumptive evidence, the examining judge then issues a warrant for their imprisonment, and sends the suspected persons to be confined in a jail. There are three such jails (Maisons d’Arret) in Paris—Sainte–Pelagie, La Force, and les Madelonettes.
Observe the word inculpe, incriminated, or suspected of crime. The French Code has created three essential degrees of criminality —inculpe, first degree of suspicion; prevenu, under examination; accuse, fully committed for trial. So long as the warrant for committal remains unsigned, the supposed criminal is regarded as merely under suspicion, inculpe of the crime or felony; when the warrant has been issued, he becomes “the accused” (prevenu), and is regarded as such so long as the inquiry is proceeding; when the inquiry is closed, and as soon as the Court has decided that the accused is to be committed for trial, he becomes “the prisoner at the bar” (accuse) as soon as the superior court, at the instance of the public prosecutor, has pronounced that the charge is so far proved as to be carried to the Assizes.
Thus, persons suspected of crime go through three different stages, three siftings, before coming up for trial before the judges of the upper Court—the High Justice of the realm.
At the first stage, innocent persons have abundant means of exculpating themselves—the public, the town watch, the police. At the second state they appear before a magistrate face to face with the witnesses, and are judged by a tribunal in Paris, or by the Collective Court of the departments. At the third stage they are brought before a bench of twelve councillors, and in case of any error or informality the prisoner committed for trial at the Assizes may appeal for protection to the Supreme court. The jury do not know what a slap in the face they give to popular authority, to administrative and judicial functionaries, when they acquit a prisoner. And so, in my opinion, it is hardly possible that an innocent man should ever find himself at the bar of an Assize Court in Paris—I say nothing of other seats of justice.
The detenu is the convict. French criminal law recognizes imprisonment of three degrees, corresponding in legal distinction to these three degrees of suspicion, inquiry, and conviction. Mere imprisonment is a light penalty for misdemeanor, but detention is imprisonment with hard labor, a severe and sometimes degrading punishment. Hence, those persons who nowadays are in favor of the penitentiary system would upset an admirable scheme of criminal law in which the penalties are judiciously graduated, and they will end by punishing the lightest peccadilloes as severely as the greatest crimes.
The reader may compare in the _Scenes of Political Life_ (for instance, in Une Tenebreuse affaire) the curious differences subsisting between the criminal law of Brumaire in the year IV., and that of the Code Napoleon which has taken its place.
In most trials, as in this one, the suspected persons are at once examined (and from inculpes become prevenus); justice immediately issues a warrant for their arrest and imprisonment. In point of fact, in most of such cases the criminals have either fled, or have been instantly apprehended. Indeed, as we have seen the police, which is but an instrument, and the officers of justice had descended on Esther’s house with the swiftness of a thunderbolt. Even if there had not been the reasons for revenge suggested to the superior police by Corentin, there was a robbery to be investigated of seven hundred and fifty thousand francs from the Baron de Nucingen.
Just as the first prison van, conveying Jacques Collin, reached the archway of Saint–Jean—a narrow, dark passage, some block ahead compelled the postilion to stop under the vault. The prisoner’s eyes shone like carbuncles through the grating, in spite of his aspect as of a dying man, which, the day before, had led the governor of La Force to believe that the doctor must be called in. These flaming eyes, free to rove at this moment, for neither the officer nor the gendarme looked round at their “customer,” spoke so plain a language that a clever examining judge, M. Popinot, for instance, would have identified the man convicted for sacrilege.
In fact, ever since the “salad-basket” had turned out of the gate of La Force, Jacques Collin had studied everything on his way. Notwithstanding the pace they had made, he took in the houses with an eager and comprehensive glance from the ground floor to the attics. He saw and noted every passer-by. God Himself is not more clear-seeing as to the means and ends of His creatures than this man in observing the slightest differences in the medley of things and people. Armed with hope, as the last of the Horatii was armed with his sword, he expected help. To anybody but this Machiavelli of the hulks, this hope would have seemed so absolutely impossible to realize that he would have gone on mechanically, as all guilty men do. Not one of them ever dreams of resistance when he finds himself in the position to which justice and the Paris police bring suspected persons, especially those who, like Collin and Lucien, are in solitary confinement.
It is impossible to conceive of the sudden isolation in which a suspected criminal is placed. The gendarmes who apprehend him, the commissioner who questions him, those who take him to prison, the warders who lead him to his cell—which is actually called a cachot, a dungeon or hiding-place, those again who take him by the arms to put him into a prison-van—every being that comes near him from the moment of his arrest is either speechless, or takes note of all he says, to be repeated to the police or to the judge. This total severance, so simply effected between the prisoner and the world, gives rise to a complete overthrow of his faculties and a terrible prostration of mind, especially when the man has not been familiarized by his antecedents with the processes of justice. The duel between the judge and the criminal is all the more appalling because justice has on its side the dumbness of blank walls and the incorruptible coldness of its agents.
But Jacques Collin, or Carlos Herrera—it will be necessary to speak of him by one or the other of these names according to the circumstances of the case—had long been familiar with the methods of the police, of the jail, and of justice. This colossus of cunning and corruption had employed all his powers of mind, and all the resources of mimicry, to affect the surprise and anility of an innocent man, while giving the lawyers the spectacle of his sufferings. As has been told, Asie, that skilled Locusta, had given him a dose of poison so qualified as to produce the effects of a dreadful illness.
Thus Monsieur Camusot, the police commissioner, and the public prosecutor had been baffled in their proceedings and inquiries by the effects apparently of an apoplectic attack.
“He has taken poison!” cried Monsieur Camusot, horrified by the sufferings of the self-styled priest when he had been carried down from the attic writhing in convulsions.
Four constables had with great difficulty brought the Abbe Carlos downstairs to Esther’s room, where the lawyers and the gendarmes were assembled.
“That was the best thing he could do if he should be guilty,” replied the public prosecutor.
“Do you believe that he is ill?” the police commissioner asked.
The police is always incredulous.
The three lawyers had spoken, as may be imagined, in a whisper; but Jacques Collin had guessed from their faces the subject under discussion, and had taken advantage of it to make the first brief examination which is gone through on arrest absolutely impossible and useless; he had stammered out sentences in which Spanish and French were so mingled as to make nonsense.
At La Force this farce had been all the more successful in the first instance because the head of the “safety” force—an abbreviation of the title “Head of the brigade of the guardians of public safety” —Bibi–Lupin, who had long since taken Jacques Collin into custody at Madame Vauquer’s boarding-house, had been sent on special business into the country, and his deputy was a man who hoped to succeed him, but to whom the convict was unknown.
Bibi–Lupin, himself formerly a convict, and a comrade of Jacques Collin’s on the hulks, was his personal enemy. This hostility had its rise in quarrels in which Jacques Collin had always got the upper hand, and in the supremacy over his fellow-prisoners which _Trompe-la-Mort_ had always assumed. And then, for ten years now, Jacques Collin had been the ruling providence of released convicts in Paris, their head, their adviser, and their banker, and consequently Bibi–Lupin’s antagonist.
Thus, though placed in solitary confinement, he trusted to the intelligent and unreserved devotion of Asie, his right hand, and perhaps, too, to Paccard, his left hand, who, as he flattered himself, might return to his allegiance when once that thrifty subaltern had safely bestowed the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs that he had stolen. This was the reason why his attention had been so superhumanly alert all along the road. And, strange to say! his hopes were about to be amply fulfilled.
The two solid side-walls of the archway were covered, to a height of six feet, with a permanent dado of mud formed of the splashes from the gutter; for, in those days, the foot passenger had no protection from the constant traffic of vehicles and from what was called the kicking of the carts, but curbstones placed upright at intervals, and much ground away by the naves of the wheels. More than once a heavy truck had crushed a heedless foot-passenger under that arch-way. Such indeed Paris remained in many districts and till long after. This circumstance may give some idea of the narrowness of the Saint–Jean gate and the ease with which it could be blocked. If a cab should be coming through from the Place de Greve while a costermonger-woman was pushing her little truck of apples in from the Rue du Martroi, a third vehicle of any kind produced difficulties. The foot-passengers fled in alarm, seeking a corner-stone to protect them from the old-fashioned axles, which had attained such prominence that a law was passed at last to reduce their length.
When the prison van came in, this passage was blocked by a market woman with a costermonger’s vegetable cart—one of a type which is all the more strange because specimens still exist in Paris in spite of the increasing number of green-grocers’ shops. She was so thoroughly a street hawker that a Sergeant de Ville, if that particular class of police had been then in existence, would have allowed her to ply her trade without inspecting her permit, in spite of a sinister countenance that reeked of crime. Her head, wrapped in a cheap and ragged checked cotton kerchief, was horrid with rebellious locks of hair, like the bristles of a wild boar. Her red and wrinkled neck was disgusting, and her little shawl failed entirely to conceal a chest tanned brown by the sun, dust, and mud. Her gown was patchwork; her shoes gaped as though they were grinning at a face as full of holes as the gown. And what an apron! a plaster would have been less filthy. This moving and fetid rag must have stunk in the nostrils of dainty folks ten yards away. Those hands had gleaned a hundred harvest fields. Either the woman had returned from a German witches’ Sabbath, or she had come out of a mendicity asylum. But what eyes! what audacious intelligence, what repressed vitality when the magnetic flash of her look and of Jacques Collin’s met to exchange a thought!
“Get out of the way, you old vermin-trap!” cried the postilion in harsh tones.
“Mind you don’t crush me, you hangman’s apprentice!” she retorted. “Your cartful is not worth as much as mine.”
And by trying to squeeze in between two corner-stones to make way, the hawker managed to block the passage long enough to achieve her purpose.
“Oh! Asie!” said Jacques Collin to himself, at once recognizing his accomplice. “Then all is well.”
The post-boy was still exchanging amenities with Asie, and vehicles were collecting in the Rue du Martroi.
“Look out, there—Pecaire fermati. Souni la—Vedrem,” shrieked old Asie, with the Red–Indian intonations peculiar to these female costermongers, who disfigure their words in such a way that they are transformed into a sort onomatopoeia incomprehensible to any but Parisians.
In the confusion in the alley, and among the outcries of all the waiting drivers, no one paid any heed to this wild yell, which might have been the woman’s usual cry. But this gibberish, intelligible to Jacques Collin, sent to his ear in a mongrel language of their own—a mixture of bad Italian and Provencal—this important news:
“Your poor boy is nabbed. I am here to keep an eye on you. We shall meet again.”
In the midst of his joy at having thus triumphed over the police, for he hoped to be able to keep up communications, Jacques Collin had a blow which might have killed any other man.
“Lucien in custody!” said he to himself.
He almost fainted. This news was to him more terrible than the rejection of his appeal could have been if he had been condemned to death.
Now that both the prison vans are rolling along the Quai, the interest of this story requires that I should add a few words about the Conciergerie, while they are making their way thither. The Conciergerie, a historical name—a terrible name,—a still more terrible thing, is inseparable from the Revolutions of France, and especially those of Paris. It has known most of our great criminals. But if it is the most interesting of the buildings of Paris, it is also the least known—least known to persons of the upper classes; still, in spite of the interest of this historical digression, it should be as short as the journey of the prison vans.
What Parisian, what foreigner, or what provincial can have failed to observe the gloomy and mysterious features of the Quai des Lunettes—a structure of black walls flanked by three round towers with conical roofs, two of them almost touching each other? This quay, beginning at the Pont du Change, ends at the Pont Neuf. A square tower—the Clock Tower, or Tour de l’Horloge, whence the signal was given for the massacre of Saint–Bartholomew—a tower almost as tall as that of Saint–Jacques de la Boucherie, shows where the Palais de Justice stands, and forms the corner of the quay.
These four towers and these walls are shrouded in the black winding sheet which, in Paris, falls on every facade to the north. About half-way along the quay at a gloomy archway we see the beginning of the private houses which were built in consequence of the construction of the Pont Neuf in the reign of Henry IV. The Place Royale was a replica of the Place Dauphine. The style of architecture is the same, of brick with binding courses of hewn stone. This archway and the Rue de Harlay are the limit line of the Palais de Justice on the west. Formerly the Prefecture de Police, once the residence of the Presidents of Parlement, was a dependency of the Palace. The Court of Exchequer and Court of Subsidies completed the Supreme Court of Justice, the Sovereign’s Court. It will be seen that before the Revolution the Palace enjoyed that isolation which now again is aimed at.
This block, this island of residences and official buildings, in their midst the Sainte–Chapelle—that priceless jewel of Saint–Louis’ chaplet—is the sanctuary of Paris, its holy place, its sacred ark.
For one thing, this island was at first the whole of the city, for the plot now forming the Place Dauphine was a meadow attached to the Royal demesne, where stood a stamping mill for coining money. Hence the name of Rue de la Monnaie—the street leading to the Pont Neuf. Hence, too, the name of one of the round towers—the middle one—called the Tour d’Argent, which would seem to show that money was originally coined there. The famous mill, to be seen marked in old maps of Paris, may very likely be more recent than the time when money was coined in the Palace itself, and was erected, no doubt, for the practice of improved methods in the art of coining.
The first tower, hardly detached from the Tour d’Argent, is the Tour de Montgomery; the third, and smallest, but the best preserved of the three, for it still has its battlements, is the Tour Bonbec.
The Sainte–Chapelle and its four towers—counting the clock tower as one—clearly define the precincts; or, as a surveyor would say, the perimeter of the Palace, as it was from the time of the Merovingians till the accession of the first race of Valois; but to us, as a result of certain alterations, this Palace is more especially representative of the period of Saint–Louis.
Charles V. was the first to give the Palace up to the Parlement, then a new institution, and went to reside in the famous Hotel Saint–Pol, under the protection of the Bastille. The Palais des Tournelles was subsequently erected backing on to the Hotel Saint–Pol. Thus, under the later Valois, the kings came back from the Bastille to the Louvre, which had been their first stronghold.
The original residence of the French kings, the Palace of Saint–Louis, which has preserved the designation of Le Palais, to indicate the Palace of palaces, is entirely buried under the Palais de Justice; it forms the cellars, for it was built, like the Cathedral, in the Seine, and with such care that the highest floods in the river scarcely cover the lowest steps. The Quai de l’Horloge covers, twenty feet below the surface, its foundations of a thousand years old. Carriages run on the level of the capitals of the solid columns under these towers, and formerly their appearance must have harmonized with the elegance of the Palace, and have had a picturesque effect over the water, since to this day those towers vie in height with the loftiest buildings in Paris.
As we look down on this vast capital from the lantern of the Pantheon, the Palace with the Sainte–Chapelle is still the most monumental of many monumental buildings. The home of our kings, over which you tread as you pace the immense hall known as the _Salle des Pas–Perdus_, was a miracle of architecture; and it is so still to the intelligent eye of the poet who happens to study it when inspecting the Conciergerie. Alas! for the Conciergerie has invaded the home of kings. One’s heart bleeds to see the way in which cells, cupboards, corridors, warders’ rooms, and halls devoid of light or air, have been hewn out of that beautiful structure in which Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque—the three phases of ancient art—were harmonized in one building by the architecture of the twelfth century.
This palace is a monumental history of France in the earliest times, just as Blois is that of a later period. As at Blois you may admire in a single courtyard the chateau of the Counts of Blois, that of Louis XII., that of Francis I., that of Gaston; so at the Conciergerie you will find within the same precincts the stamp of the early races, and, in the Sainte–Chapelle, the architecture of Saint–Louis.
Municipal Council (to you I speak), if you bestow millions, get a poet or two to assist your architects if you wish to save the cradle of Paris, the cradle of kings, while endeavoring to endow Paris and the Supreme Court with a palace worthy of France. It is a matter for study for some years before beginning the work. Another new prison or two like that of La Roquette, and the palace of Saint–Louis will be safe.
In these days many grievances afflict this vast mass of buildings, buried under the Palais de Justice and the quay, like some antediluvian creature in the soil of Montmartre; but the worst affliction is that it is the Conciergerie. This epigram is intelligible. In the early days of the monarchy, noble criminals—for the villeins (a word signifying the peasantry in French and English alike) and the citizens came under the jurisdiction of the municipality or of their liege lord—the lords of the greater or the lesser fiefs, were brought before the king and guarded in the Conciergerie. And as these noble criminals were few, the Conciergerie was large enough for the king’s prisoners.
It is difficult now to be quite certain of the exact site of the original Conciergerie. However, the kitchens built by Saint–Louis still exist, forming what is now called the mousetrap; and it is probable that the original Conciergerie was situated in the place where, till 1825, the Conciergerie prisons of the Parlement were still in use, under the archway to the right of the wide outside steps leading to the supreme Court. From thence, until 1825, condemned criminals were taken to execution. From that gate came forth all the great criminals, all the victims of political feeling—the Marechale d’Ancre and the Queen of France, Semblancay and Malesherbes, Damien and Danton, Desrues and Castaing. Fouquier–Tinville’s private room, like that of the public prosecutor now, was so placed that he could see the procession of carts containing the persons whom the Revolutionary tribunal had sentenced to death. Thus this man, who had become a sword, could give a last glance at each batch.
After 1825, when Monsieur de Peyronnet was Minister, a great change was made in the Palais. The old entrance to the Conciergerie, where the ceremonies of registering the criminal and of the last toilet were performed, was closed and removed to where it now is, between the Tour de l’Horloge and the Tour de Montgomery, in an inner court entered through an arched passage. To the left is the “mousetrap,” to the right the prison gates. The “salad-baskets” can drive into this irregularly shaped courtyard, can stand there and turn with ease, and in case of a riot find some protection behind the strong grating of the gate under the arch; whereas they formerly had no room to move in the narrow space dividing the outside steps from the right wing of the palace.
In our day the Conciergerie, hardly large enough for the prisoners committed for trial—room being needed for about three hundred, men and women—no longer receives either suspected or remanded criminals excepting in rare cases, as, for instance, in these of Jacques Collin and Lucien. All who are imprisoned there are committed for trial before the Bench. As an exception criminals of the higher ranks are allowed to sojourn there, since, being already disgraced by a sentence in open court, their punishment would be too severe if they served their term of imprisonment at Melun or at Poissy. Ouvrard preferred to be imprisoned at the Conciergerie rather than at Sainte–Pelagie. At this moment of writing Lehon the notary and the Prince de Bergues are serving their time there by an exercise of leniency which, though arbitrary, is humane.
As a rule, suspected criminals, whether they are to be subjected to a preliminary examination—to “go up,” in the slang of the Courts—or to appear before the magistrate of the lower Court, are transferred in prison vans direct to the “mousetraps.”
The “mousetraps,” opposite the gate, consist of a certain number of old cells constructed in the old kitchens of Saint–Louis’ building, whither prisoners not yet fully committed are brought to await the hour when the Court sits, or the arrival of the examining judge. The “mousetraps” end on the north at the quay, on the east at the headquarters of the Municipal Guard, on the west at the courtyard of the Conciergerie, and on the south they adjoin a large vaulted hall, formerly, no doubt, the banqueting-room, but at present disused.
Above the “mousetraps” is an inner guardroom with a window commanding the court of the Conciergerie; this is used by the gendarmerie of the department, and the stairs lead up to it. When the hour of trial strikes the sheriffs call the roll of the prisoners, the gendarmes go down, one for each prisoner, and each gendarme takes a criminal by the arm; and thus, in couples, they mount the stairs, cross the guardroom, and are led along the passages to a room contiguous to the hall where sits the famous sixth chamber of the law (whose functions are those of an English county court). The same road is trodden by the prisoners committed for trial on their way to and from the Conciergerie and the Assize Court.
In the _Salle des Pas–Perdus_, between the door into the first court of the inferior class and the steps leading to the sixth, the visitor must observe the first time he goes there a doorway without a door or any architectural adornment, a square hole of the meanest type. Through this the judges and barristers find their way into the passages, into the guardhouse, down into the prison cells, and to the entrance to the Conciergerie.
The private chambers of all the examining judges are on different floors in this part of the building. They are reached by squalid staircases, a maze in which those to whom the place is unfamiliar inevitably lose themselves. The windows of some look out on the quay, others on the yard of the Conciergerie. In 1830 a few of these rooms commanded the Rue de la Barillerie.
Thus, when a prison van turns to the left in this yard, it has brought prisoners to be examined to the “mousetrap”; when it turns to the right, it conveys prisoners committed for trial, to the Conciergerie. Now it was to the right that the vehicle turned which conveyed Jacques Collin to set him down at the prison gate. Nothing can be more sinister. Prisoners and visitors see two barred gates of wrought iron, with a space between them of about six feet. These are never both opened at once, and through them everything is so cautiously scrutinized that persons who have a visiting ticket pass the permit through the bars before the key grinds in the lock. The examining judges, or even the supreme judges, are not admitted without being identified. Imagine, then, the chances of communications or escape! —The governor of the Conciergerie would smile with an expression on his lips that would freeze the mere suggestion in the most daring of romancers who defy probability.
In all the annals of the Conciergerie no escape has been known but that of Lavalette; but the certain fact of august connivance, now amply proven, if it does not detract from the wife’s devotion, certainly diminished the risk of failure.
The most ardent lover of the marvelous, judging on the spot of the nature of the difficulties, must admit that at all times the obstacles must have been, as they still are, insurmountable. No words can do justice to the strength of the walls and vaulting; they must be seen.
Though the pavement of the yard is on a lower level than that of the quay, in crossing this Barbican you go down several steps to enter an immense vaulted hall, with solid walls graced with magnificent columns. This hall abuts on the Tour de Montgomery—which is now part of the governor’s residence—and on the Tour d’Argent, serving as a dormitory for the warders, or porters, or turnkeys, as you may prefer to call them. The number of the officials is less than might be supposed; there are but twenty; their sleeping quarters, like their beds, are in no respect different from those of the _pistoles_ or private cells. The name _pistole_ originated, no doubt, in the fact that the prisoners formerly paid a pistole (about ten francs) a week for this accommodation, its bareness resembling that of the empty garrets in which great men in poverty begin their career in Paris.
To the left, in the vast entrance hall, sits the Governor of the Conciergerie, in a sort of office constructed of glass panes, where he and his clerk keep the prison-registers. Here the prisoners for examination, or committed for trial, have their names entered with a full description, and are then searched. The question of their lodging is also settled, this depending on the prisoner’s means.
Opposite the entrance to this hall there is a glass door. This opens into a parlor where the prisoner’s relations and his counsel may speak with him across a double grating of wood. The parlor window opens on to the prison yard, the inner court where prisoners committed for trial take air and exercise at certain fixed hours.
This large hall, only lighted by the doubtful daylight that comes in through the gates—for the single window to the front court is screened by the glass office built out in front of it—has an atmosphere and a gloom that strike the eye in perfect harmony with the pictures that force themselves on the imagination. Its aspect is all the more sinister because, parallel with the Tours d’Argent and de Montgomery, you discover those mysterious vaulted and overwhelming crypts which lead to the cells occupied by the Queen and Madame Elizabeth, and to those known as the secret cells. This maze of masonry, after being of old the scene of royal festivities, is now the basement of the Palais de Justice.
Between 1825 and 1832 the operation of the last toilet was performed in this enormous hall, between a large stove which heats it and the inner gate. It is impossible even now to tread without a shudder on the paved floor that has received the shock and the confidences of so many last glances.
The apparently dying victim on this occasion could not get out of the horrible vehicle without the assistance of two gendarmes, who took him under the arms to support him, and led him half unconscious into the office. Thus dragged along, the dying man raised his eyes to heaven in such a way as to suggest a resemblance to the Saviour taken down from the Cross. And certainly in no picture does Jesus present a more cadaverous or tortured countenance than this of the sham Spaniard; he looked ready to breathe his last sigh. As soon as he was seated in the office, he repeated in a weak voice the speech he had made to everybody since he was arrested:
“I appeal to His Excellency the Spanish Ambassador.”
“You can say that to the examining judge,” replied the Governor.
“Oh Lord!” said Jacques Collin, with a sigh. “But cannot I have a breviary! Shall I never be allowed to see a doctor? I have not two hours to live.”
As Carlos Herrera was to be placed in close confinement in the secret cells, it was needless to ask him whether he claimed the benefits of the pistole (as above described), that is to say, the right of having one of the rooms where the prisoner enjoys such comfort as the law permits. These rooms are on the other side of the prison-yard, of which mention will presently be made. The sheriff and the clerk calmly carried out the formalities of the consignment to prison.
“Monsieur,” said Jacques Collin to the Governor in broken French, “I am, as you see, a dying man. Pray, if you can, tell that examining judge as soon as possible that I crave as a favor what a criminal must most dread, namely, to be brought before him as soon as he arrives; for my sufferings are really unbearable, and as soon as I see him the mistake will be cleared up——”
As an universal rule every criminal talks of a mistake. Go to the hulks and question the convicts; they are almost all victims of a miscarriage of justice. So this speech raises a faint smile in all who come into contact with the suspected, accused, or condemned criminal.
“I will mention your request to the examining judge,” replied the Governor.
“And I shall bless you, monsieur!” replied the false Abbe, raising his eyes to heaven.
As soon as his name was entered on the calendar, Carlos Herrera, supported under each arm by a man of the municipal guard, and followed by a turnkey instructed by the Governor as to the number of the cell in which the prisoner was to be placed, was led through the subterranean maze of the Conciergerie into a perfectly wholesome room, whatever certain philanthropists may say to the contrary, but cut off from all possible communication with the outer world.
As soon as he was removed, the warders, the Governor, and his clerk looked at each other as though asking each other’s opinion, and suspicion was legible on every face; but at the appearance of the second man in custody the spectators relapsed into their usual doubting frame of mind, concealed under the air of indifference. Only in very extraordinary cases do the functionaries of the Conciergerie feel any curiosity; the prisoners are no more to them than a barber’s customers are to him. Hence all the formalities which appall the imagination are carried out with less fuss than a money transaction at a banker’s, and often with greater civility.
Lucien’s expression was that of a dejected criminal. He submitted to everything, and obeyed like a machine. All the way from Fontainebleau the poet had been facing his ruin, and telling himself that the hour of expiation had tolled. Pale and exhausted, knowing nothing of what had happened at Esther’s house during his absence, he only knew that he was the intimate ally of an escaped convict, a situation which enabled him to guess at disaster worse than death. When his mind could command a thought, it was that of suicide. He must, at any cost, escape the ignominy that loomed before him like the phantasm of a dreadful dream.
Jacques Collin, as the more dangerous of the two culprits, was placed in a cell of solid masonry, deriving its light from one of the narrow yards, of which there are several in the interior of the Palace, in the wing where the public prosecutor’s chambers are. This little yard is the airing-ground for the female prisoners. Lucien was taken to the same part of the building, to a cell adjoining the rooms let to misdemeanants; for, by orders from the examining judge, the Governor treated him with some consideration.
Persons who have never had anything to do with the action of the law usually have the darkest notions as to the meaning of solitary or secret confinement. Ideas as to the treatment of criminals have not yet become disentangled from the old pictures of torture chambers, of the unhealthiness of a prison, the chill of stone walls sweating tears, the coarseness of the jailers and of the food—inevitable accessories of the drama; but it is not unnecessary to explain here that these exaggerations exist only on the stage, and only make lawyers and judges smile, as well as those who visit prisons out of curiosity, or who come to study them.
For a long time, no doubt, they were terrible. In the days of the old Parlement, of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., the accused were, no doubt, flung pell-mell into a low room underneath the old gateway. The prisons were among the crimes of 1789, and it is enough only to see the cells where the Queen and Madame Elizabeth were incarcerated to conceive a horror of old judicial proceedings.
In our day, though philanthropy has brought incalculable mischief on society, it has produced some good for the individual. It is to Napoleon that we owe our Criminal Code; and this, even more than the Civil Code—which still urgently needs reform on some points—will remain one of the greatest monuments of his short reign. This new view of criminal law put an end to a perfect abyss of misery. Indeed, it may be said that, apart from the terrible moral torture which men of the better classes must suffer when they find themselves in the power of the law, the action of that power is simple and mild to a degree that would hardly be expected. Suspected or accused criminals are certainly not lodged as if they were at home; but every necessary is supplied to them in the prisons of Paris. Besides, the burden of feelings that weighs on them deprives the details of daily life of their customary value. It is never the body that suffers. The mind is in such a phase of violence that every form of discomfort or of brutal treatment, if such there were, would be easily endured in such a frame of mind. And it must be admitted that an innocent man is quickly released, especially in Paris.
So Lucien, on entering his cell, saw an exact reproduction of the first room he had occupied in Paris at the Hotel Cluny. A bed to compare with those in the worst furnished apartments of the Quartier Latin, straw chairs with the bottoms out, a table and a few utensils, compose the furniture of such a room, in which two accused prisoners are not unfrequently placed together when they are quiet in their ways, and their misdeeds are not crimes of violence, but such as forgery or bankruptcy.
This resemblance between his starting-point, in the days of his innocency, and his goal, the lowest depths of degradation and sham, was so direct an appeal to his last chord of poetic feeling, that the unhappy fellow melted into tears. For four hours he wept, as rigid in appearance as a figure of stone, but enduring the subversion of all his hopes, the crushing of all his social vanity, and the utter overthrow of his pride, smarting in each separate _I_ that exists in an ambitious man—a lover, a success, a dandy, a Parisian, a poet, a libertine, and a favorite. Everything in him was broken by this fall as of Icarus.
Carlos Herrera, on the other hand, as soon as he was locked into his cell and found himself alone, began pacing it to and fro like the polar bear in his cage. He carefully examined the door and assured himself that, with the exception of the peephole, there was not a crack in it. He sounded all the walls, he looked up the funnel down which a dim light came, and he said to himself, “I am safe enough!”
He sat down in a corner where the eye of a prying warder at the grating of the peephole could not see him. Then he took off his wig, and hastily ungummed a piece of paper that did duty as lining. The side of the paper next his head was so greasy that it looked like the very texture of the wig. If it had occurred to Bibi–Lupin to snatch off the wig to establish the identity of the Spaniard with Jacques Collin, he would never have thought twice about the paper, it looked so exactly like part of the wigmaker’s work. The other side was still fairly white, and clean enough to have a few lines written on it. The delicate and tiresome task of unsticking it had been begun in La Force; two hours would not have been long enough; it had taken him half of the day before. The prisoner began by tearing this precious scrap of paper so as to have a strip four or five lines wide, which he divided into several bits; he then replaced his store of paper in the same strange hiding-place, after damping the gummed side so as to make it stick again. He felt in a lock of his hair for one of those pencil leads as thin as a stout pin, then recently invented by Susse, and which he had put in with some gum; he broke off a scrap long enough to write with and small enough to hide in his ear. Having made these preparations with the rapidity and certainty of hand peculiar to old convicts, who are as light-fingered as monkeys, Jacques Collin sat down on the edge of his bed to meditate on his instructions to Asie, in perfect confidence that he should come across her, so entirely did he rely on the woman’s genius.
“During the preliminary examination,” he reflected, “I pretended to be a Spaniard and spoke broken French, appealed to my Ambassador, and alleged diplomatic privilege, not understanding anything I was asked, the whole performance varied by fainting, pauses, sighs—in short, all the vagaries of a dying man. I must stick to that. My papers are all regular. Asie and I can eat up Monsieur Camusot; he is no great shakes!
“Now I must think of Lucien; he must be made to pull himself together. I must get at the boy at whatever cost, and show him some plan of conduct, otherwise he will give himself up, give me up, lose all! He must be taught his lesson before he is examined. And besides, I must find some witnesses to swear to my being a priest!”
Such was the position, moral and physical, of these two prisoners, whose fate at the moment depended on Monsieur Camusot, examining judge to the Inferior Court of the Seine, and sovereign master, during the time granted to him by the Code, of the smallest details of their existence, since he alone could grant leave for them to be visited by the chaplains, the doctor, or any one else in the world.
No human authority—neither the King, nor the Keeper of the Seals, nor the Prime Minister, can encroach on the power of an examining judge; nothing can stop him, no one can control him. He is a monarch, subject only to his conscience and the Law. At the present time, when philosophers, philanthropists, and politicians are constantly endeavoring to reduce every social power, the rights conferred on the examining judges have become the object of attacks that are all the more serious because they are almost justified by those rights, which, it must be owned, are enormous. And yet, as every man of sense will own, that power ought to remain unimpaired; in certain cases, its exercise can be mitigated by a strong infusion of caution; but society is already threatened by the ineptitude and weakness of the jury —which is, in fact, the really supreme bench, and which ought to be composed only of choice and elected men—and it would be in danger of ruin if this pillar were broken which now upholds our criminal procedure.
Arrest on suspicion is one of the terrible but necessary powers of which the risk to society is counterbalanced by its immense importance. And besides, distrust of the magistracy in general is a beginning of social dissolution. Destroy that institution, and reconstruct it on another basis; insist—as was the case before the Revolution—that judges should show a large guarantee of fortune; but, at any cost, believe in it! Do not make it an image of society to be insulted!
In these days a judge, paid as a functionary, and generally a poor man, has in the place of his dignity of old a haughtiness of demeanor that seems odious to the men raised to be his equals; for haughtiness is dignity without a solid basis. That is the vicious element in the present system. If France were divided into ten circuits, the magistracy might be reinstated by conferring its dignities on men of fortune; but with six-and-twenty circuits this is impossible.
The only real improvement to be insisted on in the exercise of the power intrusted to the examining judge, is an alteration in the conditions of preliminary imprisonment. The mere fact of suspicion ought to make no difference in the habits of life of the suspected parties. Houses of detention for them ought to be constructed in Paris, furnished and arranged in such a way as greatly to modify the feeling of the public with regard to suspected persons. The law is good, and is necessary; its application is in fault, and public feeling judges the laws from the way in which they are carried out. And public opinion in France condemns persons under suspicion, while, by an inexplicable reaction, it justifies those committed for trial. This, perhaps, is a result of the essentially refractory nature of the French.
This illogical temper of the Parisian people was one of the factors which contributed to the climax of this drama; nay, as may be seen, it was one of the most important.
To enter into the secret of the terrible scenes which are acted out in the examining judge’s chambers; to understand the respective positions of the two belligerent powers, the Law and the examinee, the object of whose contest is a certain secret kept by the prisoner from the inquisition of the magistrate—well named in prison slang, “the curious man”—it must always be remembered that persons imprisoned under suspicion know nothing of what is being said by the seven or eight publics that compose _the Public_, nothing of how much the police know, or the authorities, or the little that newspapers can publish as to the circumstances of the crime.
Thus, to give a man in custody such information as Jacques Collin had just received from Asie as to Lucien’s arrest, is throwing a rope to a drowning man. As will be seen, in consequence of this ignorance, a stratagem which, without this warning, must certainly have been equally fatal to the convict, was doomed to failure.
Monsieur Camusot, the son-inlaw of one of the clerks of the cabinet, too well known for any account of his position and connection to be necessary here, was at this moment almost as much perplexed as Carlos Herrera in view of the examination he was to conduct. He had formerly been President of a Court of the Paris circuit; he had been raised from that position and called to be a judge in Paris—one of the most coveted posts in the magistracy—by the influence of the celebrated Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whose husband, attached to the Dauphin’s person, and Colonel of a cavalry regiment of the Guards, was as much in favor with the King as she was with MADAME. In return for a very small service which he had done the Duchess—an important matter to her—on occasion of a charge of forgery brought against the young Comte d’Esgrignon by a banker of Alencon (see _La Cabinet des Antiques_; _Scenes de la vie de Province_), he was promoted from being a provincial judge to be president of his Court, and from being president to being an examining judge in Paris.
For eighteen months now he had sat on the most important Bench in the kingdom; and had once, at the desire of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, had an opportunity of forwarding the ends of a lady not less influential than the Duchess, namely, the Marquise d’Espard, but he had failed. (See the _Commission in Lunacy_.)
Lucien, as was told at the beginning of the Scene, to be revenged on Madame d’Espard, who aimed at depriving her husband of his liberty of action, was able to put the true facts before the Public Prosecutor and the Comte de Serizy. These two important authorities being thus won over to the Marquis d’Espard’s party, his wife had barely escaped the censure of the Bench by her husband’s generous intervention.
On hearing, yesterday, of Lucien’s arrest, the Marquise d’Espard had sent her brother-inlaw, the Chevalier d’Espard, to see Madame Camusot. Madame Camusot had set off forthwith to call on the notorious Marquise. Just before dinner, on her return home, she had called her husband aside in the bedroom.
“If you can commit that little fop Lucien de Rubempre for trial, and secure his condemnation,” said she in his ear, “you will be Councillor to the Supreme Court——”
“How?”
“Madame d’Espard longs to see that poor young man guillotined. I shivered as I heard what a pretty woman’s hatred can be!”
“Do not meddle in questions of the law,” said Camusot.
“I! meddle!” said she. “If a third person could have heard us, he could not have guessed what we were talking about. The Marquise and I were as exquisitely hypocritical to each other as you are to me at this moment. She began by thanking me for your good offices in her suit, saying that she was grateful in spite of its having failed. She spoke of the terrible functions devolved on you by the law, ‘It is fearful to have to send a man to the scaffold—but as to that man, it would be no more than justice,’ and so forth. Then she lamented that such a handsome young fellow, brought to Paris by her cousin, Madame du Chatelet, should have turned out so badly. ‘That,’ said she, ‘is what bad women like Coralie and Esther bring young men to when they are corrupt enough to share their disgraceful profits!’ Next came some fine speeches about charity and religion! Madame du Chatelet had said that Lucien deserved a thousand deaths for having half killed his mother and his sister.
“Then she spoke of a vacancy in the Supreme Court—she knows the Keeper of the Seals. ‘Your husband, madame, has a fine opportunity of distinguishing himself,’ she said in conclusion—and that is all.”
“We distinguish ourselves every day when we do our duty,” said Camusot.
“You will go far if you are always the lawyer even to your wife,” cried Madame Camusot. “Well, I used to think you a goose. Now I admire you.”
The lawyer’s lips wore one of those smiles which are as peculiar to them as dancers’ smiles are to dancers.
“Madame, can I come in?” said the maid.
“What is it?” said her mistress.
“Madame, the head lady’s-maid came from the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse while you were out, and she will be obliged if you would go at once to the Hotel de Cadignan.”
“Keep dinner back,” said the lawyer’s wife, remembering that the driver of the hackney coach that had brought her home was waiting to be paid.
She put her bonnet on again, got into the coach, and in twenty minutes was at the Hotel de Cadignan. Madame Camusot was led up the private stairs, and sat alone for ten minutes in a boudoir adjoining the Duchess’ bedroom. The Duchess presently appeared, splendidly dressed, for she was starting for Saint–Cloud in obedience to a Royal invitation.
“Between you and me, my dear, a few words are enough.”
“Yes, Madame la Duchesse.”
“Lucien de Rubempre is in custody, your husband is conducting the inquiry; I will answer for the poor boy’s innocence; see that he is released within twenty-four hours.—This is not all. Some one will ask tomorrow to see Lucien in private in his cell; your husband may be present if he chooses, so long as he is not discovered. The King looks for high courage in his magistrates in the difficult position in which he will presently find himself; I will bring your husband forward, and recommend him as a man devoted to the King even at the risk of his head. Our friend Camusot will be made first a councillor, and then the President of Court somewhere or other.—Good-bye.—I am under orders, you will excuse me, I know?
“You will not only oblige the public prosecutor, who cannot give an opinion in this affair; you will save the life of a dying woman, Madame de Serizy. So you will not lack support.
“In short, you see, I put my trust in you, I need not say—you know——”
She laid a finger to her lips and disappeared.
“And I had not a chance of telling her that Madame d’Espard wants to see Lucien on the scaffold!” thought the judge’s wife as she returned to her hackney cab.
She got home in such a state of anxiety that her husband, on seeing her, asked:
“What is the matter, Amelie?”
“We stand between two fires.”
She told her husband of her interview with the Duchess, speaking in his ear for fear the maid should be listening at the door.
“Now, which of them has the most power?” she said in conclusion. “The Marquise was very near getting you into trouble in the silly business of the commission on her husband, and we owe everything to the Duchess.
“One made vague promises, while the other tells you you shall first be Councillor and then President.—Heaven forbid I should advise you; I will never meddle in matters of business; still, I am bound to repeat exactly what is said at Court and what goes on——”
“But, Amelie, you do not know what the Prefet of police sent me this morning, and by whom? By one of the most important agents of the superior police, the Bibi–Lupin of politics, who told me that the Government had a secret interest in this trial.—Now let us dine and go to the Varietes. We will talk all this over to-night in my private room, for I shall need your intelligence; that of a judge may not perhaps be enough——”
Nine magistrates out of ten would deny the influence of the wife over her husband in such cases; but though this may be a remarkable exception in society, it may be insisted on as true, even if improbable. The magistrate is like the priest, especially in Paris, where the best of the profession are to be found; he rarely speaks of his business in the Courts, excepting of settled cases. Not only do magistrates’ wives affect to know nothing; they have enough sense of propriety to understand that it would damage their husbands if, when they are told some secret, they allowed their knowledge to be suspected.
Nevertheless, on some great occasions, when promotion depends on the decision taken, many a wife, like Amelie, has helped the lawyer in his study of a case. And, after all, these exceptions, which, of course, are easily denied, since they remain unknown, depend entirely on the way in which the struggle between two natures has worked out in home-life. Now, Madame Camusot controlled her husband completely.
When all in the house were asleep, the lawyer and his wife sat down to the desk, where the magistrate had already laid out the documents in the case.
“Here are the notes, forwarded to me, at my request, by the Prefet of police,” said Camusot.
“_The Abbe Carlos Herrera_.
“This individual is undoubtedly the man named Jacques Collin, known as _Trompe-la-Mort_, who was last arrested in 1819, in the dwelling-house of a certain Madame Vauquer, who kept a common boarding-house in the Rue Nueve–Sainte-Genevieve, where he lived in concealment under the alias of Vautrin.”
A marginal note in the Prefet’s handwriting ran thus:
“Orders have been sent by telegraph to Bibi–Lupin, chief of the Safety department, to return forthwith, to be confronted with the prisoner, as he is personally acquainted with Jacques Collin, whom he, in fact, arrested in 1819 with the connivance of a Mademoiselle Michonneau.
“The boarders who then lived in the Maison Vauquer are still living, and may be called to establish his identity.
“The self-styled Carlos Herrera is Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre’s intimate friend and adviser, and for three years past has furnished him with considerable sums, evidently obtained by dishonest means.
“This partnership, if the identity of the Spaniard with Jacques Collin can be proved, must involve the condemnation of Lucien de Rubempre.
“The sudden death of Peyrade, the police agent, is attributable to poison administered at the instigation of Jacques Collin, Rubempre, or their accomplices. The reason for this murder is the fact that justice had for a long time been on the traces of these clever criminals.”
And again, on the margin, the magistrate pointed to this note written by the Prefet himself:
“This is the fact to my personal knowledge; and I also know that the Sieur Lucien de Rubempre has disgracefully tricked the Comte de Serizy and the Public Prosecutor.”
“What do you say to this, Amelie?”
“It is frightful!” repled his wife. “Go on.”
“The transformation of the convict Jacques Collin into a Spanish priest is the result of some crime more clever than that by which Coignard made himself Comte de Sainte–Helene.”
“_Lucien de Rubempre_.
“Lucien Chardon, son of an apothecary at Angouleme—his mother a Demoiselle de Rubempre—bears the name of Rubempre in virtue of a royal patent. This was granted by the request of Madame la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and Monsieur le Comte de Serizy.
“This young man came to Paris in 182 . . . without any means of subsistence, following Madame la Comtesse Sixte du Chatelet, then Madame de Bargeton, a cousin of Madame d’Espard’s.
“He was ungrateful to Madame de Bargeton, and cohabited with a girl named Coralie, an actress at the Gymnase, now dead, who left Monsieur Camusot, a silk mercer in the Rue des Bourdonnais, to live with Rubempre.
“Ere long, having sunk into poverty through the insufficiency of the money allowed him by this actress, he seriously compromised his brother-inlaw, a highly respected printer of Angouleme, by giving forged bills, for which David Sechard was arrested, during a short visit paid to Angouleme by Lucien. In consequence of this affair Rubempre fled, but suddenly reappeared in Paris with the Abbe Carlos Herrera.
“Though having no visible means of subsistence, the said Lucien de Rubempre spent on an average three hundred thousand francs during the three years of his second residence in Paris, and can only have obtained the money from the self-styled Abbe Carlos Herrera —but how did he come by it?
“He has recently laid out above a million francs in repurchasing the Rubempre estates to fulfil the conditions on which he was to be allowed to marry Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu. This marriage has been broken off in consequence of inquiries made by the Grandlieu family, the said Lucien having told them that he had obtained the money from his brother-inlaw and his sister; but the information obtained, more especially by Monsieur Derville, attorney-at-law, proves that not only were that worthy couple ignorant of his having made this purchase, but that they believed the said Lucien to be deeply in debt.
“Moreover, the property inherited by the Sechards consists of houses; and the ready money, by their affidavit, amounted to about two hundred thousand francs.
“Lucien was secretly cohabiting with Esther Gobseck; hence there can be no doubt that all the lavish gifts of the Baron de Nucingen, the girl’s protector, were handed over to the said Lucien.
“Lucien and his companion, the convict, have succeeded in keeping their footing in the face of the world longer than Coignard did, deriving their income from the prostitution of the said Esther, formerly on the register of the town.”
Though these notes are to a great extent a repetition of the story already told, it was necessary to reproduce them to show the part played by the police in Paris. As has already been seen from the note on Peyrade, the police has summaries, almost invariably correct, concerning every family or individual whose life is under suspicion, or whose actions are of a doubtful character. It knows every circumstance of their delinquencies. This universal register and account of consciences is as accurately kept as the register of the Bank of France and its accounts of fortunes. Just as the Bank notes the slightest delay in payment, gauges every credit, takes stock of every capitalist, and watches their proceedings, so does the police weigh and measure the honesty of each citizen. With it, as in a Court of Law, innocence has nothing to fear; it has no hold on anything but crime.
However high the rank of a family, it cannot evade this social providence.
And its discretion is equal to the extent of its power. This vast mass of written evidence compiled by the police—reports, notes, and summaries—an ocean of information, sleeps undisturbed, as deep and calm as the sea. Some accident occurs, some crime or misdemeanor becomes aggressive,—then the law refers to the police, and immediately, if any documents bear on the suspected criminal, the judge is informed. These records, an analysis of his antecedents, are merely side-lights, and unknown beyond the walls of the Palais de Justice. No legal use can be made of them; Justice is informed by them, and takes advantage of them; but that is all. These documents form, as it were, the inner lining of the tissue of crimes, their first cause, which is hardly ever made public. No jury would accept it; and the whole country would rise up in wrath if excerpts from those documents came out in the trial at the Assizes. In fact, it is the truth which is doomed to remain in the well, as it is everywhere and at all times. There is not a magistrate who, after twelve years’ experience in Paris, is not fully aware that the Assize Court and the police authorities keep the secret of half these squalid atrocities, or who does not admit that half the crimes that are committed are never punished by the law.
If the public could know how reserved the _employes_ of the police are —who do not forget—they would reverence these honest men as much as they do Cheverus. The police is supposed to be astute, Machiavellian; it is, in fact most benign. But it hears every passion in its paroxysms, it listens to every kind of treachery, and keeps notes of all. The police is terrible on one side only. What it does for justice it does no less for political interests; but in these it is as ruthless and as one-sided as the fires of the Inquisition.
“Put this aside,” said the lawyer, replacing the notes in their cover; “this is a secret between the police and the law. The judge will estimate its value, but Monsieur and Madame Camusot must know nothing of it.”
“As if I needed telling that!” said his wife.
“Lucien is guilty,” he went on; “but of what?”
“A man who is the favorite of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, of the Comtesse de Serizy, and loved by Clotilde de Grandlieu, is not guilty,” said Amelie. “The other _must_ be answerable for everything.”
“But Lucien is his accomplice,” cried Camusot.
“Take my advice,” said Amelie. “Restore this priest to the diplomatic career he so greatly adorns, exculpate this little wretch, and find some other criminal——”
“How you run on!” said the magistrate with a smile. “Women go to the point, plunging through the law as birds fly through the air, and find nothing to stop them.”
“But,” said Amelie, “whether he is a diplomate or a convict, the Abbe Carlos will find some one to get him out of the scrape.”
“I am only a considering cap; you are the brain,” said Camusot.
“Well, the sitting is closed; give your Melie a kiss; it is one o’clock.”
And Madame Camusot went to bed, leaving her husband to arrange his papers and his ideas in preparation for the task of examining the two prisoners next morning.
And thus, while the prison vans were conveying Jacques Collin and Lucien to the Conciergerie, the examining judge, having breakfasted, was making his way across Paris on foot, after the unpretentious fashion of Parisian magistrates, to go to his chambers, where all the documents in the case were laid ready for him.
This was the way of it: Every examining judge has a head-clerk, a sort of sworn legal secretary—a race that perpetuates itself without any premiums or encouragement, producing a number of excellent souls in whom secrecy is natural and incorruptible. From the origin of the Parlement to the present day, no case has ever been known at the Palais de Justice of any gossip or indiscretion on the part of a clerk bound to the Courts of Inquiry. Gentil sold the release given by Louise de Savoie to Semblancay; a War Office clerk sold the plan of the Russian campaign to Czernitchef; and these traitors were more or less rich. The prospect of a post in the Palais and professional conscientiousness are enough to make a judge’s clerk a successful rival of the tomb—for the tomb has betrayed many secrets since chemistry has made such progress.
This official is, in fact, the magistrate’s pen. It will be understood by many readers that a man may gladly be the shaft of a machine, while they wonder why he is content to remain a bolt; still a bolt is content—perhaps the machinery terrifies him.
Camusot’s clerk, a young man of two-and-twenty, named Coquart, had come in the morning to fetch all the documents and the judge’s notes, and laid everything ready in his chambers, while the lawyer himself was wandering along the quays, looking at the curiosities in the shops, and wondering within himself:—
“How on earth am I to set to work with such a clever rascal as this Jacques Collin, supposing it is he? The head of the Safety will know him. I must look as if I knew what I was about, if only for the sake of the police! I see so many insuperable difficulties, that the best plan would be to enlighten the Marquise and the Duchess by showing them the notes of the police, and I should avenge my father, from whom Lucien stole Coralie.—If I can unveil these scoundrels, my skill will be loudly proclaimed, and Lucien will soon be thrown over by his friends.—Well, well, the examination will settle all that.”
He turned into a curiosity shop, tempted by a Boule clock.
“Not to be false to my conscience, and yet to oblige two great ladies —that will be a triumph of skill,” thought he. “What, do you collect coins too, monsieur?” said Camusot to the Public Prosecutor, whom he found in the shop.
“It is a taste dear to all dispensers of justice,” said the Comte de Granville, laughing. “They look at the reverse side of every medal.”
And after looking about the shop for some minutes, as if continuing his search, he accompanied Camusot on his way down the quay without it ever occurring to Camusot that anything but chance had brought them together.
“You are examining Monsieur de Rubempre this morning,” said the Public Prosecutor. “Poor fellow—I liked him.”
“There are several charges against him,” said Camusot.
“Yes, I saw the police papers; but some of the information came from an agent who is independent of the Prefet, the notorious Corentin, who had caused the death of more innocent men than you will ever send guilty men to the scaffold, and——But that rascal is out of your reach.—Without trying to influence the conscience of such a magistrate as you are, I may point out to you that if you could be perfectly sure that Lucien was ignorant of the contents of that woman’s will, it would be self-evident that he had no interest in her death, for she gave him enormous sums of money.”
“We can prove his absence at the time when this Esther was poisoned,” said Camusot. “He was at Fontainebleau, on the watch for Mademoiselle de Grandlieu and the Duchesse de Lenoncourt.”
“And he still cherished such hopes of marrying Mademoiselle de Grandlieu,” said the Public Prosecutor—“I have it from the Duchesse de Grandlieu herself—that it is inconceivable that such a clever young fellow should compromise his chances by a perfectly aimless crime.”
“Yes,” said Camusot, “especially if Esther gave him all she got.”
“Derville and Nucingen both say that she died in ignorance of the inheritance she had long since come into,” added Granville.
“But then what do you suppose is the meaning of it all?” asked Camusot. “For there is something at the bottom of it.”
“A crime committed by some servant,” said the Public Prosecutor.
“Unfortunately,” remarked Camusot, “it would be quite like Jacques Collin—for the Spanish priest is certainly none other than that escaped convict—to have taken possession of the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs derived from the sale of the certificate of shares given to Esther by Nucingen.”
“Weigh everything with care, my dear Camusot. Be prudent. The Abbe Carlos Herrera has diplomatic connections; still, an envoy who had committed a crime would not be sheltered by his position. Is he or is he not the Abbe Carlos Herrera? That is the important question.”
And Monsieur de Granville bowed, and turned away, as requiring no answer.
“So he too wants to save Lucien!” thought Camusot, going on by the Quai des Lunettes, while the Public Prosecutor entered the Palais through the Cour de Harlay.
On reaching the courtyard of the Conciergerie, Camusot went to the Governor’s room and led him into the middle of the pavement, where no one could overhear them.
“My dear sir, do me the favor of going to La Force, and inquiring of your colleague there whether he happens at this moment to have there any convicts who were on the hulks at Toulon between 1810 and 1815; or have you any imprisoned here? We will transfer those of La Force here for a few days, and you will let me know whether this so-called Spanish priest is known to them as Jacques Collin, otherwise _Trompe-la-Mort_.”
“Very good, Monsieur Camusot.—But Bibi–Lupin is come . . .”
“What, already?” said the judge.
“He was at Melun. He was told that _Trompe-la-Mort_ had to be identified, and he smiled with joy. He awaits your orders.”
“Send him to me.”
The Governor was then able to lay before Monsieur Camusot Jacques Collin’s request, and he described the man’s deplorable condition.
“I intended to examine him first,” replied the magistrate, “but not on account of his health. I received a note this morning from the Governor of La Force. Well, this rascal, who described himself to you as having been dying for twenty-four hours past, slept so soundly that they went into his cell there, with the doctor for whom the Governor had sent, without his hearing them; the doctor did not even feel his pulse, he left him to sleep—which proves that his conscience is as tough as his health. I shall accept this feigned illness only so far as it may enable me to study my man,” added Monsieur Camusot, smiling.
“We live to learn every day with these various grades of prisoners,” said the Governor of the prison.
The Prefecture of police adjoins the Conciergerie, and the magistrates, like the Governor, knowing all the subterranean passages, can get to and fro with the greatest rapidity. This explains the miraculous ease with which information can be conveyed, during the sitting of the Courts, to the officials and the presidents of the Assize Courts. And by the time Monsieur Camusot had reached the top of the stairs leading to his chambers, Bibi–Lupin was there too, having come by the _Salle des Pas–Perdus_.
“What zeal!” said Camusot, with a smile.
“Ah, well, you see if it is _he_,” replied the man, “you will see great fun in the prison-yard if by chance there are any old stagers here.”
“Why?”
“_Trompe-la-Mort_ sneaked their chips, and I know that they have vowed to be the death of him.”
_They_ were the convicts whose money, intrusted to _Trompe-la-Mort_, had all been made away with by him for Lucien, as has been told.
“Could you lay your hand on the witnesses of his former arrest?”
“Give me two summonses of witnesses and I will find you some today.”
“Coquart,” said the lawyer, as he took off his gloves, and placed his hat and stick in a corner, “fill up two summonses by monsieur’s directions.”
He looked at himself in the glass over the chimney shelf, where stood, in the place of a clock, a basin and jug. On one side was a bottle of water and a glass, on the other a lamp. He rang the bell; his usher came in a few minutes after.
“Is anybody here for me yet?” he asked the man, whose business it was to receive the witnesses, to verify their summons, and to set them in the order of their arrival.
“Yes, sir.”
“Take their names, and bring me the list.”
The examining judges, to save time, are often obliged to carry on several inquiries at once. Hence the long waiting inflicted on the witnesses, who have seats in the ushers’ hall, where the judges’ bells are constantly ringing.
“And then,” Camusot went on, “bring up the Abbe Carlos Herrera.”
“Ah, ha! I was told that he was a priest in Spanish. Pooh! It is a new edition of Collet, Monsieur Camusot,” said the head of the Safety department.
“There is nothing new!” replied Camusot.
And he signed the two formidable documents which alarm everybody, even the most innocent witnesses, whom the law thus requires to appear, under severe penalties in case of failure.
By this time Jacques Collin had, about half an hour since, finished his deep meditations, and was armed for the fray. Nothing is more perfectly characteristic of this type of the mob in rebellion against the law than the few words he had written on the greasy scraps of paper.
The sense of the first—for it was written in the language, the very slang of slang, agreed upon by Asie and himself, a cipher of words —was as follows:—
“Go to the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse or Madame de Serizy: one of them must see Lucien before he is examined, and give him the enclosed paper to read. Then find Europe and Paccard; those two thieves must be at my orders, and ready to play any part I may set them.
“Go to Rastignac; tell him, from the man he met at the opera-ball, to come and swear that the Abbe Carlos Herrera has no resemblance to Jacques Collin who was apprehended at Vauquer’s. Do the same with Dr. Bianchon, and get Lucien’s two women to work to the same end.”
On the enclosed fragment were these words in good French:
“Lucien, confess nothing about me. I am the Abbe Carlos Herrera. Not only will this be your exculpation; but, if you do not lose your head, you will have seven millions and your honor cleared.”
These two bits of paper, gummed on the side of the writing so as to look like one piece, were then rolled tightly, with a dexterity peculiar to men who have dreamed of getting free from the hulks. The whole thing assumed the shape and consistency of a ball of dirty rubbish, about as big as the sealing-wax heads which thrifty women stick on the head of a large needle when the eye is broken.
“If I am examined first, we are saved; if it is the boy, all is lost,” said he to himself while he waited.
His plight was so sore that the strong man’s face was wet with white sweat. Indeed, this wonderful man saw as clearly in his sphere of crime as Moliere did in his sphere of dramatic poetry, or Cuvier in that of extinct organisms. Genius of whatever kind is intuition. Below this highest manifestation other remarkable achievements may be due to talent. This is what divides men of the first rank from those of the second.
Crime has its men of genius. Jacques Collin, driven to bay, had hit on the same notion as Madame Camusot’s ambition and Madame de Serizy’s passion, suddenly revived by the shock of the dreadful disaster which was overwhelming Lucien. This was the supreme effort of human intellect directed against the steel armor of Justice.
On hearing the rasping of the heavy locks and bolts of his door, Jacques Collin resumed his mask of a dying man; he was helped in this by the intoxicating joy that he felt at the sound of the warder’s shoes in the passage. He had no idea how Asie would get near him; but he relied on meeting her on the way, especially after her promise given in the Saint–Jean gateway.
After that fortunate achievement she had gone on to the Place de Greve.
Till 1830 the name of La Greve (the Strand) had a meaning that is now lost. Every part of the river-shore from the Pont d’Arcole to the Pont Louis–Philippe was then as nature had made it, excepting the paved way which was at the top of the bank. When the river was in flood a boat could pass close under the houses and at the end of the streets running down to the river. On the quay the footpath was for the most part raised with a few steps; and when the river was up to the houses, vehicles had to pass along the horrible Rue de la Mortellerie, which has now been completely removed to make room for enlarging the Hotel de Ville.
So the sham costermonger could easily and quickly run her truck down to the bottom of the quay, and hide it there till the real owner—who was, in fact, drinking the price of her wares, sold bodily to Asie, in one of the abominable taverns in the Rue de la Mortellerie—should return to claim it. At that time the Quai Pelletier was being extended, the entrance to the works was guarded by a crippled soldier, and the barrow would be quite safe in his keeping.
Asie then jumped into a hackney cab on the Place de l’Hotel de Ville, and said to the driver, “To the Temple, and look sharp, I’ll tip you well.”
A woman dressed like Asie could disappear, without any questions being asked, in the huge market-place, where all the rags in Paris are gathered together, where a thousand costermongers wander round, and two hundred old-clothes sellers are chaffering.
The two prisoners had hardly been locked up when she was dressing herself in a low, damp entresol over one of those foul shops where remnants are sold, pieces stolen by tailors and dressmakers—an establishment kept by an old maid known as La Romette, from her Christian name Jeromette. La Romette was to the “purchasers of wardrobes” what these women are to the better class of so-called ladies in difficulties—Madame la Ressource, that is to say, money-lenders at a hundred per cent.
“Now, child,” said Asie, “I have got to be figged out. I must be a Baroness of the Faubourg Saint–Germain at the very least. And sharp’s the word, for my feet are in hot oil. You know what gowns suit me. Hand up the rouge-pot, find me some first-class bits of lace, and the swaggerest jewelry you can pick out.—Send the girl to call a coach, and have it brought to the back door.”
“Yes, madame,” the woman replied very humbly, and with the eagerness of a maid waiting on her mistress.
If there had been any one to witness the scene, he would have understood that the woman known as Asie was at home here.
“I have had some diamonds offered me,” said la Romette as she dressed Asie’s head.
“Stolen?”
“I should think so.”
“Well, then, however cheap they may be, we must do without ’em. We must fight shy of the beak for a long time to come.”
It will now be understood how Asie contrived to be in the _Salle des Pas–Perdus_ of the Palais de Justice with a summons in her hand, asking her way along the passages and stairs leading to the examining judge’s chambers, and inquiring for Monsieur Camusot, about a quarter of an hour before that gentleman’s arrival.
Asie was not recognizable. After washing off her “make-up” as an old woman, like an actress, she applied rouge and pearl powder, and covered her head with a well-made fair wig. Dressed exactly as a lady of the Faubourg Saint–Germain might be if in search of a dog she had lost, she looked about forty, for she shrouded her features under a splendid black lace veil. A pair of stays, severely laced, disguised her cook’s figure. With very good gloves and a rather large bustle, she exhaled the perfume of powder a la Marechale. Playing with a bag mounted in gold, she divided her attention between the walls of the building, where she found herself evidently for the first time, and the string by which she led a dainty little spaniel. Such a dowager could not fail to attract the notice of the black-robed natives of the _Salle des Pas–Perdus_.
Besides the briefless lawyers who sweep this hall with their gowns, and speak of the leading advocates by their Christian names, as fine gentlemen address each other, to produce the impression that they are of the aristocracy of the law, patient youths are often to be seen, hangers-on of the attorneys, waiting, waiting, in hope of a case put down for the end of the day, which they may be so lucky as to be called to plead if the advocates retained for the earlier cases should not come out in time.
A very curious study would be that of the differences between these various black gowns, pacing the immense hall in threes, or sometimes in fours, their persistent talk filling the place with a loud, echoing hum—a hall well named indeed, for this slow walk exhausts the lawyers as much as the waste of words. But such a study has its place in the volumes destined to reveal the life of Paris pleaders.
Asie had counted on the presence of these youths; she laughed in her sleeve at some of the pleasantries she overheard, and finally succeeded in attracting the attention of Massol, a young lawyer whose time was more taken up by the _Police Gazette_ than by clients, and who came up with a laugh to place himself at the service of a woman so elegantly scented and so handsomely dressed.
Asie put on a little, thin voice to explain to this obliging gentleman that she appeared in answer to a summons from a judge named Camusot.
“Oh! in the Rubempre case?”
So the affair had its name already.
“Oh, it is not my affair. It is my maid’s, a girl named Europe, who was with me twenty-four hours, and who fled when she saw my servant bring in a piece of stamped paper.”
Then, like any old woman who spends her life gossiping in the chimney-corner, prompted by Massol, she poured out the story of her woes with her first husband, one of the three Directors of the land revenue. She consulted the young lawyer as to whether she would do well to enter on a lawsuit with her son-inlaw, the Comte de Gross–Narp, who made her daughter very miserable, and whether the law allowed her to dispose of her fortune.
In spite of all his efforts, Massol could not be sure whether the summons were addressed to the mistress or the maid. At the first moment he had only glanced at this legal document of the most familiar aspect; for, to save time, it is printed, and the magistrates’ clerks have only to fill in the blanks left for the names and addresses of the witnesses, the hour for which they are called, and so forth.
Asie made him tell her all about the Palais, which she knew more intimately than the lawyer did. Finally, she inquired at what hour Monsieur Camusot would arrive.
“Well, the examining judges generally are here by about ten o’clock.”
“It is now a quarter to ten,” said she, looking at a pretty little watch, a perfect gem of goldsmith’s work, which made Massol say to himself:
“Where the devil will Fortune make herself at home next!”
At this moment Asie had come to the dark hall looking out on the yard of the Conciergerie, where the ushers wait. On seeing the gate through the window, she exclaimed:
“What are those high walls?”
“That is the Conciergerie.”
“Oh! so that is the Conciergerie where our poor queen——Oh! I should so like to see her cell!”
“Impossible, Madame la Baronne,” replied the young lawyer, on whose arm the dowager was now leaning. “A permit is indispensable, and very difficult to procure.”
“I have been told,” she went on, “that Louis XVIII. himself composed the inscription that is to be seen in Marie–Antoinette’s cell.”
“Yes, Madame la Baronne.”
“How much I should like to know Latin that I might study the words of that inscription!” said she. “Do you think that Monsieur Camusot could give me a permit?”
“That is not in his power; but he could take you there.”
“But his business——” objected she.
“Oh!” said Massol, “prisoners under suspicion can wait.”
“To be sure,” said she artlessly, “they are under suspicion.—But I know Monsieur de Granville, your public prosecutor——”
This hint had a magical effect on the ushers and the young lawyer.
“Ah, you know Monsieur de Granville?” said Massol, who was inclined to ask the client thus sent to him by chance her name and address.
“I often see him at my friend Monsieur de Serizy’s house. Madame de Serizy is a connection of mine through the Ronquerolles.”
“Well, if Madame wishes to go down to the Conciergerie,” said an usher, “she——”
“Yes,” said Massol.
So the Baroness and the lawyer were allowed to pass, and they presently found themselves in the little guard-room at the top of the stairs leading to the “mousetrap,” a spot well known to Asie, forming, as has been said, a post of observation between those cells and the Court of the Sixth Chamber, through which everybody is obliged to pass.
“Will you ask if Monsieur Camusot is come yet?” said she, seeing some gendarmes playing cards.
“Yes, madame, he has just come up from the ‘mousetrap.’”
“The mousetrap!” said she. “What is that?—Oh! how stupid of me not to have gone straight to the Comte de Granville.—But I have not time now. Pray take me to speak to Monsieur Camusot before he is otherwise engaged.”
“Oh, you have plenty of time for seeing Monsieur Camusot,” said Massol. “If you send him in your card, he will spare you the discomfort of waiting in the ante-room with the witnesses.—We can be civil here to ladies like you.—You have a card about you?”
At this instant Asie and her lawyer were exactly in front of the window of the guardroom whence the gendarmes could observe the gate of the Conciergerie. The gendarmes, brought up to respect the defenders of the widow and the orphan, were aware too of the prerogative of the gown, and for a few minutes allowed the Baroness to remain there escorted by a pleader. Asie listened to the terrible tales which a young lawyer is ready to tell about that prison-gate. She would not believe that those who were condemned to death were prepared for the scaffold behind those bars; but the sergeant-at-arms assured her it was so.
“How much I should like to see it done!” cried she.
And there she remained, prattling to the lawyer and the sergeant, till she saw Jacques Collin come out supported by two gendarmes, and preceded by Monsieur Camusot’s clerk.
“Ah, there is a chaplain no doubt going to prepare a poor wretch——”
“Not at all, Madame la Baronne,” said the gendarme. “He is a prisoner coming to be examined.”
“What is he accused of?”
“He is concerned in this poisoning case.”
“Oh! I should like to see him.”
“You cannot stay here,” said the sergeant, “for he is under close arrest, and he must pass through here. You see, madame, that door leads to the stairs——”
“Oh! thank you!” cried the Baroness, making for the door, to rush down the stairs, where she at once shrieked out, “Oh! where am I?”
This cry reached the ear of Jacques Collin, who was thus prepared to see her. The sergeant flew after Madame la Baronne, seized her by the middle, and lifted her back like a feather into the midst of a group of five gendarmes, who started up as one man; for in that guardroom everything is regarded as suspicious. The proceeding was arbitrary, but the arbitrariness was necessary. The young lawyer himself had cried out twice, “Madame! madame!” in his horror, so much did he fear finding himself in the wrong.
The Abbe Carlos Herrera, half fainting, sank on a chair in the guardroom.
“Poor man!” said the Baroness. “Can he be a criminal?”
The words, though spoken low to the young advocate, could be heard by all, for the silence of death reigned in that terrible guardroom. Certain privileged persons are sometimes allowed to see famous criminals on their way through this room or through the passages, so that the clerk and the gendarmes who had charge of the Abbe Carlos made no remark. Also, in consequence of the devoted zeal of the sergeant who had snatched up the Baroness to hinder any communication between the prisoner and the visitors, there was a considerable space between them.
“Let us go on,” said Jacques Collin, making an effort to rise.
At the same moment the little ball rolled out of his sleeve, and the spot where it fell was noted by the Baroness, who could look about her freely from under her veil. The little pellet, being damp and sticky, did not roll; for such trivial details, apparently unimportant, had all been duly considered by Jacques Collin to insure success.
When the prisoner had been led up the higher part of the steps, Asie very unaffectedly dropped her bag and picked it up again; but in stooping she seized the pellet which had escaped notice, its color being exactly like that of the dust and mud on the floor.
“Oh dear!” cried she, “it goes to my heart.—He is dying——”
“Or seems to be,” replied the sergeant.
“Monsieur,” said Asie to the lawyer, “take me at once to Monsieur Camusot; I have come about this case; and he might be very glad to see me before examining that poor priest.”
The lawyer and the Baroness left the guardroom, with its greasy, fuliginous walls; but as soon as they reached the top of the stairs, Asie exclaimed:
“Oh, and my dog! My poor little dog!” and she rushed off like a mad creature down the _Salle des Pas–Perdus_, asking every one where her dog was. She got to the corridor beyond (la Galerie Marchande, or Merchant’s Hall, as it is called), and flew to the staircase, saying, “There he is!”
These stairs lead to the Cour de Harlay, through which Asie, having played out the farce, passed out and took a hackney cab on the Quai des Orfevres, where there is a stand; thus she vanished with the summons requiring “Europe” to appear, her real name being unknown to the police and the lawyers.
“Rue Neuve–Saint-Marc,” cried she to the driver.
Asie could depend on the absolute secrecy of an old-clothes purchaser, known as Madame Nourrisson, who also called herself Madame de Saint–Esteve; and who would lend Asie not merely her personality, but her shop at need, for it was there that Nucingen had bargained for the surrender of Esther. Asie was quite at home there, for she had a bedroom in Madame Nourrisson’s establishment.
She paid the driver, and went up to her room, nodding to Madame Nourrisson in a way to make her understand that she had not time to say two words to her.
As soon as she was safe from observation, Asie unwrapped the papers with the care of a savant unrolling a palimpsest. After reading the instructions, she thought it wise to copy the lines intended for Lucien on a sheet of letter-paper; then she went down to Madame Nourrisson, to whom she talked while a little shop-girl went to fetch a cab from the Boulevard des Italiens. She thus extracted the addresses of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and of Madame de Serizy, which were known to Madame Nourrisson by her dealings with their maids.
All this running about and elaborate business took up more than two hours. Madame la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, who lived at the top of the Faubourg Saint–Honore, kept Madame de Saint–Esteve waiting an hour, although the lady’s-maid, after knocking at the boudoir door, had handed in to her mistress a card with Madame de Saint–Esteve’s name, on which Asie had written, “Called about pressing business concerning Lucien.”
Her first glance at the Duchess’ face showed her how till-timed her visit must be; she apologized for disturbing Madame la Duchesse when she was resting, on the plea of the danger in which Lucien stood.
“Who are you?” asked the Duchess, without any pretence at politeness, as she looked at Asie from head to foot; for Asie, though she might be taken for a Baroness by Maitre Massol in the _Salle des Pas–Perdus_, when she stood on the carpet in the boudoir of the Hotel de Cadignan, looked like a splash of mud on a white satin gown.
“I am a dealer in cast-off clothes, Madame la Duchesse; for in such matters every lady applies to women whose business rests on a basis of perfect secrecy. I have never betrayed anybody, though God knows how many great ladies have intrusted their diamonds to me by the month while wearing false jewels made to imitate them exactly.”
“You have some other name?” said the Duchess, smiling at a reminiscence recalled to her by this reply.
“Yes, Madame la Duchesse, I am Madame de Saint–Esteve on great occasions, but in the trade I am Madame Nourrisson.”
“Well, well,” said the Duchess in an altered tone.
“I am able to be of great service,” Asie went on, “for we hear the husbands’ secrets as well as the wives’. I have done many little jobs for Monsieur de Marsay, whom Madame la Duchesse——”
“That will do, that will do!” cried the Duchess. “What about Lucien?”
“If you wish to save him, madame, you must have courage enough to lose no time in dressing. But, indeed, Madame la Duchesse, you could not look more charming than you do at this moment. You are sweet enough to charm anybody, take an old woman’s word for it! In short, madame, do not wait for your carriage, but get into my hackney coach. Come to Madame de Serizy’s if you hope to avert worse misfortunes than the death of that cherub——”
“Go on, I will follow you,” said the Duchess after a moment’s hesitation. “Between us we may give Leontine some courage . . .”
Notwithstanding the really demoniacal activity of this Dorine of the hulks, the clock was striking two when she and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse went into the Comtesse de Serizy’s house in the Rue de la Chaussee-d’Antin. Once there, thanks to the Duchess, not an instant was lost. The two women were at once shown up to the Countess, whom they found reclining on a couch in a miniature chalet, surrounded by a garden fragrant with the rarest flowers.
“That is well,” said Asie, looking about her. “No one can overhear us.”
“Oh! my dear, I am half dead! Tell me, Diane, what have you done?” cried the Duchess, starting up like a fawn, and, seizing the Duchess by the shoulders, she melted into tears.
“Come, come, Leontine; there are occasions when women like us must not cry, but act,” said the Duchess, forcing the Countess to sit down on the sofa by her side.
Asie studied the Countess’ face with the scrutiny peculiar to those old hands, which pierces to the soul of a woman as certainly as a surgeon’s instrument probes a wound!—the sorrow that engraves ineradicable lines on the heart and on the features. She was dressed without the least touch of vanity. She was now forty-five, and her printed muslin wrapper, tumbled and untidy, showed her bosom without any art or even stays! Her eyes were set in dark circles, and her mottled cheeks showed the traces of bitter tears. She wore no sash round her waist; the embroidery on her petticoat and shift was all crumpled. Her hair, knotted up under a lace cap, had not been combed for four-and-twenty hours, and showed as a thin, short plait and ragged little curls. Leontine had forgotten to put on her false hair.
“You are in love for the first time in your life?” said Asie sententiously.
Leontine then saw the woman and started with horror.
“Who is that, my dear Diane?” she asked of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse.
“Whom should I bring with me but a woman who is devoted to Lucien and willing to help us?”
Asie had hit the truth. Madame de Serizy, who was regarded as one of the most fickle of fashionable women, had had an attachment of ten years’ standing for the Marquis d’Aiglemont. Since the Marquis’ departure for the colonies, she had gone wild about Lucien, and had won him from the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, knowing nothing—like the Paris world generally—of Lucien’s passion for Esther. In the world of fashion a recognized attachment does more to ruin a woman’s reputation than ten unconfessed liaisons; how much more then two such attachments? However, as no one thought of Madame de Serizy as a responsible person, the historian cannot undertake to speak for her virtue thus doubly dog’s-eared.
She was fair, of medium height, and well preserved, as a fair woman can be who is well preserved at all; that is to say, she did not look more than thirty, being slender, but not lean, with a white skin and flaxen hair; she had hands, feet, and a shape of aristocratic elegance, and was as witty as all the Ronquerolles, spiteful, therefore, to women, and good-natured to men. Her large fortune, her husband’s fine position, and that of her brother, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, had protected her from the mortifications with which any other woman would have been overwhelmed. She had this great merit —that she was honest in her depravity, and confessed her worship of the manners and customs of the Regency.
Now, at forty-two this woman—who had hitherto regarded men as no more than pleasing playthings, to whom, indeed, she had, strange to say, granted much, regarding love as merely a matter of sacrifice to gain the upper hand,—this woman, on first seeing Lucien, had been seized with such a passion as the Baron de Nucingen’s for Esther. She had loved, as Asie had just told her, for the first time in her life.
This postponement of youth is more common with Parisian women than might be supposed, and causes the ruin of some virtuous souls just as they are reaching the haven of forty. The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse was the only person in the secret of the vehement and absorbing passion, of which the joys, from the girlish suspicion of first love to the preposterous follies of fulfilment, had made Leontine half crazy and insatiable.
True love, as we know, is merciless. The discovery of Esther’s existence had been followed by one of those outbursts of rage which in a woman rise even to the pitch of murder; then came the phase of meanness, to which a sincere affection humbles itself so gladly. Indeed, for the last month the Countess would have given ten years of her life to have Lucien again for one week. At last she had even resigned herself to accept Esther as her rival, just when the news of her lover’s arrest had come like the last trump on this paroxysm of devotion.
The Countess had nearly died of it. Her husband had himself nursed her in bed, fearing the betrayal of delirium, and for twenty-four hours she had been living with a knife in her heart. She said to her husband in her fever:
“Save Lucien, and I will live henceforth for you alone.”
“Indeed, as Madame la Duchesse tells you, it is of no use to make your eyes like boiled gooseberries,” cried the dreadful Asie, shaking the Countess by the arm. “If you want to save him, there is not a minute to lose. He is innocent—I swear it by my mother’s bones!”
“Yes, yes, of course he is!” cried the Countess, looking quite kindly at the dreadful old woman.
“But,” Asie went on, “if Monsieur Camusot questions him the wrong way, he can make a guilty man of him with two sentences; so, if it is in your power to get the Conciergerie opened to you, and to say a few words to him, go at once, and give him this paper.—He will be released tomorrow; I will answer for it. Now, get him out of the scrape, for you got him into it.”
“I?”
“Yes, you!—You fine ladies never have a son even when you own millions. When I allowed myself the luxury of keeping boys, they always had their pockets full of gold! Their amusements amused me. It is delightful to be mother and mistress in one. Now, you—you let the men you love die of hunger without asking any questions. Esther, now, made no speeches; she gave, at the cost of perdition, soul and body, the million your Lucien was required to show, and that is what has brought him to this pass——”
“Poor girl! Did she do that! I love her!” said Leontine.
“Yes—now!” said Asie, with freezing irony.
“She was a real beauty; but now, my angel, you are better looking than she is.—And Lucien’s marriage is so effectually broken off, that nothing can mend it,” said the Duchess in a whisper to Leontine.
The effect of this revelation and forecast was so great on the Countess that she was well again. She passed her hand over her brow; she was young once more.
“Now, my lady, hot foot, and make haste!” said Asie, seeing the change, and guessing what had caused it.
“But,” said Madame de Maufrigneuse, “if the first thing is to prevent Lucien’s being examined by Monsieur Camusot, we can do that by writing two words to the judge and sending your man with it to the Palais, Leontine.”
“Then come into my room,” said Madame de Serizy.
This is what was taking place at the Palais while Lucien’s protectresses were obeying the orders issued by Jacques Collin. The gendarmes placed the moribund prisoner on a chair facing the window in Monsieur Camusot’s room; he was sitting in his place in front of his table. Coquart, pen in hand, had a little table to himself a few yards off.
The aspect of a magistrate’s chambers is not a matter of indifference; and if this room had not been chosen intentionally, it must be owned that chance had favored justice. An examining judge, like a painter, requires the clear equable light of a north window, for the criminal’s face is a picture which he must constantly study. Hence most magistrates place their table, as this of Camusot’s was arranged, so as to sit with their back to the window and leave the face of the examinee in broad daylight. Not one of them all but, by the end of six months, has assumed an absent-minded and indifferent expression, if he does not wear spectacles, and maintains it throughout the examination.
It was a sudden change of expression in the prisoner’s face, detected by these means, and caused by a sudden point-blank question, that led to the discovery of the crime committed by Castaing at the very moment when, after a long consultation with the public prosecutor, the magistrate was about to let the criminal loose on society for lack of evidence. This detail will show the least intelligent person how living, interesting, curious, and dramatically terrible is the conflict of an examination—a conflict without witnesses, but always recorded. God knows what remains on the paper of the scenes at white heat in which a look, a tone, a quiver of the features, the faintest touch of color lent by some emotion, has been fraught with danger, as though the adversaries were savages watching each other to plant a fatal stroke. A report is no more than the ashes of the fire.
“What is your real name?” Camusot asked Jacques Collin.
“Don Carlos Herrera, canon of the Royal Chapter of Toledo, and secret envoy of His Majesty Ferdinand VII.”
It must here be observed that Jacques Collin spoke French like a Spanish trollop, blundering over it in such a way as to make his answers almost unintelligible, and to require them to be repeated. But Monsieur de Nucingen’s German barbarisms have already weighted this Scene too much to allow of the introduction of other sentences no less difficult to read, and hindering the rapid progress of the tale.
“Then you have papers to prove your right to the dignities of which you speak?” asked Camusot.
“Yes, monsieur—my passport, a letter from his Catholic Majesty authorizing my mission.—In short, if you will but send at once to the Spanish Embassy two lines, which I will write in your presence, I shall be identified. Then, if you wish for further evidence, I will write to His Eminence the High Almoner of France, and he will immediately send his private secretary.”
“And do you still pretend that you are dying?” asked the magistrate. “If you have really gone through all the sufferings you have complained of since your arrest, you ought to be dead by this time,” said Camusot ironically.
“You are simply trying the courage of an innocent man and the strength of his constitution,” said the prisoner mildly.
“Coquart, ring. Send for the prison doctor and an infirmary attendant. —We shall be obliged to remove your coat and proceed to verify the marks on your shoulder,” Camusot went on.
“I am in your hands, monsieur.”
The prisoner then inquired whether the magistrate would be kind enough to explain to him what he meant by “the marks,” and why they should be sought on his shoulder. The judge was prepared for this question.
“You are suspected of being Jacques Collin, an escaped convict, whose daring shrinks at nothing, not even at sacrilege!” said Camusot promptly, his eyes fixed on those of the prisoner.
Jacques Collin gave no sign, and did not color; he remained quite calm, and assumed an air of guileless curiosity as he gazed at Camusot.
“I, monsieur? A convict? May the Order I belong to and God above forgive you for such an error. Tell me what I can do to prevent your continuing to offer such an insult to the rights of free men, to the Church, and to the King my master.”
The judge made no reply to this, but explained to the Abbe that if he had been branded, a penalty at that time inflicted by law on all convicts sent to the hulks, the letters could be made to show by giving him a slap on the shoulder.
“Oh, monsieur,” said Jacques Collin, “it would indeed be unfortunate if my devotion to the Royal cause should prove fatal to me.”
“Explain yourself,” said the judge, “that is what you are here for.”
“Well, monsieur, I must have a great many scars on my back, for I was shot in the back as a traitor to my country while I was faithful to my King, by constitutionalists who left me for dead.”
“You were shot, and you are alive!” said Camusot.
“I had made friends with some of the soldiers, to whom certain pious persons had sent money, so they placed me so far off that only spent balls reached me, and the men aimed at my back. This is a fact that His Excellency the Ambassador can bear witness to——”
“This devil of a man has an answer for everything! However, so much the better,” thought Camusot, who assumed so much severity only to satisfy the demands of justice and of the police. “How is it that a man of your character,” he went on, addressing the convict, “should have been found in the house of the Baron de Nucingen’s mistress—and such a mistress, a girl who had been a common prostitute!”
“This is why I was found in a courtesan’s house, monsieur,” replied Jacques Collin. “But before telling you the reasons for my being there, I ought to mention that at the moment when I was just going upstairs I was seized with the first attack of my illness, and I had no time to speak to the girl. I knew of Mademoiselle Esther’s intention of killing herself; and as young Lucien de Rubempre’s interests were involved, and I have a particular affection for him for sacredly secret reasons, I was going to try to persuade the poor creature to give up the idea, suggested to her by despair. I meant to tell her that Lucien must certainly fail in his last attempt to win Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu; and I hoped that by telling her she had inherited seven millions of francs, I might give her courage to live.
“I am convinced, Monsieur le Juge, that I am a martyr to the secrets confided to me. By the suddenness of my illness I believe that I had been poisoned that very morning, but my strong constitution has saved me. I know that a certain agent of the political police is dogging me, and trying to entangle me in some discreditable business.
“If, at my request, you had sent for a doctor on my arrival here, you would have had ample proof of what I am telling you as to the state of my health. Believe me, monsieur, some persons far above our heads have some strong interest in getting me mistaken for some villain, so as to have a right to get rid of me. It is not all profit to serve a king; they have their meannesses. The Church alone is faultless.”
It is impossible to do justice to the play of Jacques Collin’s countenance as he carefully spun out his speech, sentence by sentence, for ten minutes; and it was all so plausible, especially the mention of Corentin, that the lawyer was shaken.
“Will you confide to me the reasons of your affection for Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre?”
“Can you not guess them? I am sixty years of age, monsieur—I implore you do not write it.—It is because—must I say it?”
“It will be to your own advantage, and more particularly to Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre’s, if you tell everything,” replied the judge.
“Because he is—Oh, God! he is my son,” he gasped out with an effort.
And he fainted away.
“Do not write that down, Coquart,” said Camusot in an undertone.
Coquart rose to fetch a little phial of “Four thieves’ Vinegar.”
“If he is Jacques Collin, he is a splendid actor!” thought Camusot.
Coquart held the phial under the convict’s nose, while the judge examined him with the keen eye of a lynx—and a magistrate.
“Take his wig off,” said Camusot, after waiting till the man recovered consciousness.
Jacques Collin heard, and quaked with terror, for he knew how vile an expression his face would assume.
“If you have not strength enough to take your wig off yourself ——Yes, Coquart, remove it,” said Camusot to his clerk.
Jacques Collin bent his head to the clerk with admirable resignation; but then his head, bereft of that adornment, was hideous to behold in its natural aspect.
The sight of it left Camusot in the greatest uncertainty. While waiting for the doctor and the man from the infirmary, he set to work to classify and examine the various papers and the objects seized in Lucien’s rooms. After carrying out their functions in the Rue Saint–Georges at Mademoiselle Esther’s house, the police had searched the rooms at the Quai Malaquais.
“You have your hand on some letters from the Comtesse de Serizy,” said Carlos Herrera. “But I cannot imagine why you should have almost all Lucien’s papers,” he added, with a smile of overwhelming irony at the judge.
Camusot, as he saw the smile, understood the bearing of the word “almost.”
“Lucien de Rubempre is in custody under suspicion of being your accomplice,” said he, watching to see the effect of this news on his examinee.
“You have brought about a great misfortune, for he is as innocent as I am,” replied the sham Spaniard, without betraying the smallest agitation.
“We shall see. We have not as yet established your identity,” Camusot observed, surprised at the prisoner’s indifference. “If you are really Don Carlos Herrera, the position of Lucien Chardon will at once be completely altered.”
“To be sure, she became Madame Chardon—Mademoiselle de Rubempre!” murmured Carlos. “Ah! that was one of the greatest sins of my life.”
He raised his eyes to heaven, and by the movement of his lips seemed to be uttering a fervent prayer.
“But if you are Jacques Collin, and if he was, and knew that he was, the companion of an escaped convict, a sacrilegious wretch, all the crimes of which he is suspected by the law are more than probably true.”
Carlos Herrera sat like bronze as he heard this speech, very cleverly delivered by the judge, and his only reply to the words “_knew that he was_” and “_escaped convict_” was to lift his hands to heaven with a gesture of noble and dignified sorrow.
“Monsieur l’Abbe,” Camusot went on, with the greatest politeness, “if you are Don Carlos Herrera, you will forgive us for what we are obliged to do in the interests of justice and truth.”
Jacques Collin detected a snare in the lawyer’s very voice as he spoke the words “Monsieur l’Abbe.” The man’s face never changed; Camusot had looked for a gleam of joy, which might have been the first indication of his being a convict, betraying the exquisite satisfaction of a criminal deceiving his judge; but this hero of the hulks was strong in Machiavellian dissimulation.
“I am accustomed to diplomacy, and I belong to an Order of very austere discipline,” replied Jacques Collin, with apostolic mildness. “I understand everything, and am inured to suffering. I should be free by this time if you had discovered in my room the hiding-place where I keep my papers—for I see you have none but unimportant documents.”
This was a finishing stroke to Camusot: Jacques Collin by his air of ease and simplicity had counteracted all the suspicions to which his appearance, unwigged, had given rise.
“Where are these papers?”
“I will tell you exactly if you will get a secretary from the Spanish Embassy to accompany your messenger. He will take them and be answerable to you for the documents, for it is to me a matter of confidential duty—diplomatic secrets which would compromise his late Majesty Louis XVIII—Indeed, monsieur, it would be better——However, you are a magistrate—and, after all, the Ambassador, to whom I refer the whole question, must decide.”
At this juncture the usher announced the arrival of the doctor and the infirmary attendant, who came in.
“Good-morning, Monsieur Lebrun,” said Camusot to the doctor. “I have sent for you to examine the state of health of this prisoner under suspicion. He says he had been poisoned and at the point of death since the day before yesterday; see if there is any risk in undressing him to look for the brand.”
Doctor Lebrun took Jacques Collin’s hand, felt his pulse, asked to look at his tongue, and scrutinized him steadily. This inspection lasted about ten minutes.
“The prisoner has been suffering severely,” said the medical officer, “but at this moment he is amazingly strong——”
“That spurious energy, monsieur, is due to nervous excitement caused by my strange position,” said Jacques Collin, with the dignity of a bishop.
“That is possible,” said Monsieur Lebrun.
At a sign from Camusot the prisoner was stripped of everything but his trousers, even of his shirt, and the spectators might admire the hairy torso of a Cyclops. It was that of the Farnese Hercules at Naples in its colossal exaggeration.
“For what does nature intend a man of this build?” said Lebrun to the judge.
The usher brought in the ebony staff, which from time immemorial has been the insignia of his office, and is called his rod; he struck it several times over the place where the executioner had branded the fatal letters. Seventeen spots appeared, irregularly distributed, but the most careful scrutiny could not recognize the shape of any letters. The usher indeed pointed out that the top bar of the letter T was shown by two spots, with an interval between of the length of that bar between the two points at each end of it, and there was another spot where the bottom of the T should be.
“Still that is quite uncertain,” said Camusot, seeing doubt in the expression of the prison doctor’s countenance.
Carlos begged them to make the same experiment on the other shoulder and the middle of his back. About fifteen more such scars appeared, which, at the Spaniard’s request, the doctor made a note of; and he pronounced that the man’s back had been so extensively seamed by wounds that the brand would not show even if it had been made by the executioner.
An office-clerk now came in from the Prefecture, and handed a note to Monsieur Camusot, requesting an answer. After reading it the lawyer went to speak to Coquart, but in such a low voice that no one could catch a word. Only, by a glance from Camusot, Jacques Collin could guess that some information concerning him had been sent by the Prefet of Police.
“That friend of Peyrade’s is still at my heels,” thought Jacques Collin. “If only I knew him, I would get rid of him as I did of Contenson. If only I could see Asie once more!”
After signing a paper written by Coquart, the judge put it into an envelope and handed it to the clerk of the Delegate’s office.
This is an indispensable auxiliary to justice. It is under the direction of a police commissioner, and consists of peace-officers who, with the assistance of the police commissioners of each district, carry into effect orders for searching the houses or apprehending the persons of those who are suspected of complicity in crimes and felonies. These functionaries in authority save the examining magistrates a great deal of very precious time.
At a sign from the judge the prisoner was dressed by Monsieur Lebrun and the attendant, who then withdrew with the usher. Camusot sat down at his table and played with his pen.
“You have an aunt,” he suddenly said to Jacques Collin.
“An aunt?” echoed Don Carlos Herrera with amazement. “Why, monsieur, I have no relations. I am the unacknowledged son of the late Duke of Ossuna.”
But to himself he said, “They are burning”—an allusion to the game of hot cockles, which is indeed a childlike symbol of the dreadful struggle between justice and the criminal.
“Pooh!” said Camusot. “You still have an aunt living, Mademoiselle Jacqueline Collin, whom you placed in Esther’s service under the eccentric name of Asie.”
Jacques Collin shrugged his shoulders with an indifference that was in perfect harmony with the cool curiosity he gave throughout to the judge’s words, while Camusot studied him with cunning attention.
“Take care,” said Camusot; “listen to me.”
“I am listening, sir.”
“You aunt is a wardrobe dealer at the Temple; her business is managed by a demoiselle Paccard, the sister of a convict—herself a very good girl, known as la Romette. Justice is on the traces of your aunt, and in a few hours we shall have decisive evidence. The woman is wholly devoted to you——”
“Pray go on, Monsieur le Juge,” said Collin coolly, in answer to a pause; “I am listening to you.”
“Your aunt, who is about five years older than you are, was formerly Marat’s mistress—of odious memory. From that blood-stained source she derived the little fortune she possesses.
“From information I have received she must be a very clever receiver of stolen goods, for no proofs have yet been found to commit her on. After Marat’s death she seems, from the notes I have here, to have lived with a chemist who was condemned to death in the year XII. for issuing false coin. She was called as witness in the case. It was from this intimacy that she derived her knowledge of poisons.
“In 1812 and in 1816 she spent two years in prison for placing girls under age upon the streets.
“You were already convicted of forgery; you had left the banking house where your aunt had been able to place you as clerk, thanks to the education you had had, and the favor enjoyed by your aunt with certain persons for whose debaucheries she supplied victims.
“All this, prisoner, is not much like the dignity of the Dukes d’Ossuna.
“Do you persist in your denial?”
Jacques Collin sat listening to Monsieur Camusot, and thinking of his happy childhood at the College of the Oratorians, where he had been brought up, a meditation which lent him a truly amazed look. And in spite of his skill as a practised examiner, Camusot could bring no sort of expression to those placid features.
“If you have accurately recorded the account of myself I gave you at first,” said Jacques Collin, “you can read it through again. I cannot alter the facts. I never went to the woman’s house; how should I know who her cook was? The persons of whom you speak are utterly unknown to me.”
“Notwithstanding your denial, we shall proceed to confront you with persons who may succeed in diminishing your assurance”
“A man who has been three times shot is used to anything,” replied Jacques Collin meekly.
Camusot proceeded to examine the seized papers while awaiting the return of the famous Bibi–Lupin, whose expedition was amazing; for at half-past eleven, the inquiry having begun at ten o’clock, the usher came in to inform the judge in an undertone of Bibi–Lupin’s arrival.
“Show him in,” replied M. Camusot.
Bibi–Lupin, who had been expected to exclaim, “It is he,” as he came in, stood puzzled. He did not recognize his man in a face pitted with smallpox. This hesitancy startled the magistrate.
“It is his build, his height,” said the agent. “Oh! yes, it is you, Jacques Collin!” he went on, as he examined his eyes, forehead, and ears. “There are some things which no disguise can alter. . . . Certainly it is he, Monsieur Camusot. Jacques has the scar of a cut on his left arm. Take off his coat, and you will see . . .”
Jacques Collin was again obliged to take off his coat; Bibi–Lupin turned up his sleeve and showed the scar he had spoken of.
“It is the scar of a bullet,” replied Don Carlos Herrera. “Here are several more.”
“Ah! It is certainly his voice,” cried Bibi–Lupin.
“Your certainty,” said Camusot, “is merely an opinion; it is not proof.”
“I know that,” said Bibi–Lupin with deference. “But I will bring witnesses. One of the boarders from the Maison Vauquer is here already,” said he, with an eye on Collin.
But the prisoner’s set, calm face did not move a muscle.
“Show the person in,” said Camusot roughly, his dissatisfaction betraying itself in spite of his seeming indifference.
This irritation was not lost on Jacques Collin, who had not counted on the judge’s sympathy, and sat lost in apathy, produced by his deep meditations in the effort to guess what the cause could be.
The usher now showed in Madame Poiret. At this unexpected appearance the prisoner had a slight shiver, but his trepidation was not remarked by Camusot, who seemed to have made up his mind.
“What is your name?” asked he, proceeding to carry out the formalities introductory to all depositions and examinations.
Madame Poiret, a little old woman as white and wrinkled as a sweetbread, dressed in a dark-blue silk gown, gave her name as Christine Michelle Michonneau, wife of one Poiret, and her age as fifty-one years, said that she was born in Paris, lived in the Rue des Poules at the corner of the Rue des Postes, and that her business was that of lodging-house keeper.
“In 1818 and 1819,” said the judge, “you lived, madame, in a boarding-house kept by a Madame Vauquer?”
“Yes, monsieur; it was there that I met Monsieur Poiret, a retired official, who became my husband, and whom I have nursed in his bed this twelvemonth past. Poor man! he is very bad; and I cannot be long away from him.”
“There was a certain Vautrin in the house at the time?” asked Camusot.
“Oh, monsieur, that is quite a long story; he was a horrible man, from the galleys——”
“You helped to get him arrested?”
“That is not true sir.”
“You are in the presence of the Law; be careful,” said Monsieur Camusot severely.
Madame Poiret was silent.
“Try to remember,” Camusot went on. “Do you recollect the man? Would you know him again?”
“I think so.”
“Is this the man?”
Madame Poiret put on her “eye-preservers,” and looked at the Abbe Carlos Herrera.
“It is his build, his height; and yet—no—if—Monsieur le Juge,” she said, “if I could see his chest I should recognize him at once.”
The magistrate and his clerk could not help laughing, notwithstanding the gravity of their office; Jacques Collin joined in their hilarity, but discreetly. The prisoner had not put on his coat after Bibi–Lupin had removed it, and at a sign from the judge he obligingly opened his shirt.
“Yes, that is his fur trimming, sure enough!—But it has worn gray, Monsieur Vautrin,” cried Madame Poiret.
“What have you to say to that?” asked the judge of the prisoner.
“That she is mad,” replied Jacques Collin.
“Bless me! If I had a doubt—for his face is altered—that voice would be enough. He is the man who threatened me. Ah! and those are his eyes!”
“The police agent and this woman,” said Camusot, speaking to Jacques Collin, “cannot possibly have conspired to say the same thing, for neither of them had seen you till now. How do you account for that?”
“Justice has blundered more conspicuously even than it does now in accepting the evidence of a woman who recognizes a man by the hair on his chest and the suspicions of a police agent,” replied Jacques Collin. “I am said to resemble a great criminal in voice, eyes, and build; that seems a little vague. As to the memory which would prove certain relations between Madame and my Sosie—which she does not blush to own—you yourself laughed at. Allow me, monsieur, in the interests of truth, which I am far more anxious to establish for my own sake than you can be for the sake of justice, to ask this lady —Madame Foiret——”
“Poiret.”
“Poret—excuse me, I am a Spaniard—whether she remembers the other persons who lived in this—what did you call the house?”
“A boarding-house,” said Madame Poiret.
“I do not know what that is.”
“A house where you can dine and breakfast by subscription.”
“You are right,” said Camusot, with a favorable nod to Jacques Collin, whose apparent good faith in suggesting means to arrive at some conclusion struck him greatly. “Try to remember the boarders who were in the house when Jacques Collin was apprehended.”
“There were Monsieur de Rastignac, Doctor Bianchon, Pere Goriot, Mademoiselle Taillefer——”
“That will do,” said Camusot, steadily watching Jacques Collin, whose expression did not change. “Well, about this Pere Goriot?”
“He is dead,” said Madame Poiret.
“Monsieur,” said Jacques Collin, “I have several times met Monsieur de Rastignac, a friend, I believe, of Madame de Nucingen’s; and if it is the same, he certainly never supposed me to be the convict with whom these persons try to identify me.”
“Monsieur de Rastignac and Doctor Bianchon,” said the magistrate, “both hold such a social position that their evidence, if it is in your favor, will be enough to procure your release.—Coquart, fill up a summons for each of them.”
The formalities attending Madame Poiret’s examination were over in a few minutes; Coquart read aloud to her the notes he had made of the little scene, and she signed the paper; but the prisoner refused to sign, alleging his ignorance of the forms of French law.
“That is enough for today,” said Monsieur Camusot. “You must be wanting food. I will have you taken back to the Conciergerie.”
“Alas! I am suffering too much to be able to eat,” said Jacques Collin.
Camusot was anxious to time Jacques Collin’s return to coincide with the prisoners’ hour of exercise in the prison yard; but he needed a reply from the Governor of the Conciergerie to the order he had given him in the morning, and he rang for the usher. The usher appeared, and told him that the porter’s wife, from the house on the Quai Malaquais, had an important document to communicate with reference to Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre. This was so serious a matter that it put Camusot’s intentions out of his head.
“Show her in,” said he.
“Beg your pardon; pray excuse me, gentlemen all,” said the woman, courtesying to the judge and the Abbe Carlos by turns. “We were so worried by the Law—my husband and me—the twice when it has marched into our house, that we had forgotten a letter that was lying, for Monsieur Lucien, in our chest of drawers, which we paid ten sous for it, though it was posted in Paris, for it is very heavy, sir. Would you please to pay me back the postage? For God knows when we shall see our lodgers again!”
“Was this letter handed to you by the postman?” asked Camusot, after carefully examining the envelope.
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Coquart, write full notes of this deposition.—Go on, my good woman; tell us your name and your business.” Camusot made the woman take the oath, and then he dictated the document.
While these formalities were being carried out, he was scrutinizing the postmark, which showed the hours of posting and delivery, as well at the date of the day. And this letter, left for Lucien the day after Esther’s death, had beyond a doubt been written and posted on the day of the catastrophe. Monsieur Camusot’s amazement may therefore be imagined when he read this letter written and signed by her whom the law believed to have been the victim of a crime:—
“_Esther to Lucien_.
“MONDAY, May 13th, 1830.
“My last day; ten in the morning.
“MY LUCIEN,—I have not an hour to live. At eleven o’clock I shall be dead, and I shall die without a pang. I have paid fifty thousand francs for a neat little black currant, containing a poison that will kill me with the swiftness of lightning. And so, my darling, you may tell yourself, ‘My little Esther had no suffering.’—and yet I shall suffer in writing these pages.
“The monster who has paid so dear for me, knowing that the day when I should know myself to be his would have no morrow—Nucingen has just left me, as drunk as a bear with his skin full of wind. For the first and last time in my life I have had the opportunity of comparing my old trade as a street hussy with the life of true love, of placing the tenderness which unfolds in the infinite above the horrors of a duty which longs to destroy itself and leave no room even for a kiss. Only such loathing could make death delightful.
“I have taken a bath; I should have liked to send for the father confessor of the convent where I was baptized, to have confessed and washed my soul. But I have had enough of prostitution; it would be profaning a sacrament; and besides, I feel myself cleansed in the waters of sincere repentance. God must do what He will with me.
“But enough of all this maudlin; for you I want to be your Esther to the last moment, not to bore you with my death, or the future, or God, who is good, and who would not be good if He were to torture me in the next world when I have endured so much misery in this.
“I have before me your beautiful portrait, painted by Madame de Mirbel. That sheet of ivory used to comfort me in your absence, I look at it with rapture as I write you my last thoughts, and tell you of the last throbbing of my heart. I shall enclose the miniature in this letter, for I cannot bear that it should be stolen or sold. The mere thought that what has been my great joy may lie behind a shop window, mixed up with the ladies and officers of the Empire, or a parcel of Chinese absurdities, is a small death to me. Destroy that picture, my sweetheart, wipe it out, never give it to any one—unless, indeed, the gift might win back the heart of that walking, well-dressed maypole, that Clotilde de Grandlieu, who will make you black and blue in her sleep, her bones are so sharp.—Yes, to that I consent, and then I shall still be of some use to you, as when I was alive. Oh! to give you pleasure, or only to make you laugh, I would have stood over a brazier with an apple in my mouth to cook it for you.—So my death even will be of service to you.—I should have marred your home.
“Oh! that Clotilde! I cannot understand her.—She might have been your wife, have borne your name, have never left you day or night, have belonged to you—and she could make difficulties! Only the Faubourg Saint–Germain can do that! and yet she has not ten pounds of flesh on her bones!
“Poor Lucien! Dear ambitious failure! I am thinking of your future life. Well, well! you will more than once regret your poor faithful dog, the good girl who would fly to serve you, who would have been dragged into a police court to secure your happiness, whose only occupation was to think of your pleasures and invent new ones, who was so full of love for you—in her hair, her feet, her ears—your ballerina, in short, whose every look was a benediction; who for six years has thought of nothing but you, who was so entirely your chattel that I have never been anything but an effluence of your soul, as light is that of the sun. However, for lack of money and of honor, I can never be your wife. I have at any rate provided for your future by giving you all I have.
“Come as soon as you get this letter and take what you find under my pillow, for I do not trust the people about me. Understand that I mean to look beautiful when I am dead. I shall go to bed, and lay myself flat in an attitude—why not? Then I shall break the little pill against the roof of my mouth, and shall not be disfigured by any convulsion or by a ridiculous position.
“Madame de Serizy has quarreled with you, I know, because of me; but when she hears that I am dead, you see, dear pet, she will forgive. Make it up with her, and she will find you a suitable wife if the Grandlieus persist in their refusal.
“My dear, I do not want you to grieve too much when you hear of my death. To begin with, I must tell you that the hour of eleven on Monday morning, the thirteenth of May, is only the end of a long illness, which began on the day when, on the Terrace of Saint–Germain, you threw me back on my former line of life. The soul may be sick, as the body is. But the soul cannot submit stupidly to suffering like the body; the body does not uphold the soul as the soul upholds the body, and the soul sees a means of cure in the reflection which leads to the needlewoman’s resource—the bushel of charcoal. You gave me a whole life the day before yesterday, when you said that if Clotilde still refused you, you would marry me. It would have been a great misfortune for us both; I should have been still more dead, so to speak—for there are more and less bitter deaths. The world would never have recognized us.
“For two months past I have been thinking of many things, I can tell you. A poor girl is in the mire, as I was before I went into the convent; men think her handsome, they make her serve their pleasure without thinking any consideration necessary; they pack her off on foot after fetching her in a carriage; if they do not spit in her face, it is only because her beauty preserves her from such indignity; but, morally speaking they do worse. Well, and if this despised creature were to inherit five or six millions of francs, she would be courted by princes, bowed to with respect as she went past in her carriage, and might choose among the oldest names in France and Navarre. That world which would have cried Raca to us, on seeing two handsome creatures united and happy, always did honor to Madame de Stael, in spite of her ‘romances in real life,’ because she had two hundred thousand francs a year. The world, which grovels before money or glory, will not bow down before happiness or virtue—for I could have done good. Oh! how many tears I would have dried—as many as I have shed—I believe! Yes, I would have lived only for you and for charity.
“These are the thoughts that make death beautiful. So do not lament, my dear. Say often to yourself, ‘There were two good creatures, two beautiful creatures, who both died for me ungrudgingly, and who adored me.’ Keep a memory in your heart of Coralie and Esther, and go your way and prosper. Do you recollect the day when you pointed out to me a shriveled old woman, in a melon-green bonnet and a puce wrapper, all over black grease-spots, the mistress of a poet before the Revolution, hardly thawed by the sun though she was sitting against the wall of the Tuileries and fussing over a pug—the vilest of pugs? She had had footmen and carriages, you know, and a fine house! And I said to you then, ‘How much better to be dead at thirty!’—Well, you thought I was melancholy, and you played all sorts of pranks to amuse me, and between two kisses I said, ‘Every day some pretty woman leaves the play before it is over!’—And I do not want to see the last piece; that is all.
“You must think me a great chatterbox; but this is my last effusion. I write as if I were talking to you, and I like to talk cheerfully. I have always had a horror of a dressmaker pitying herself. You know I knew how to die decently once before, on my return from that fatal opera-ball where the men said I had been a prostitute.
“No, no, my dear love, never give this portrait to any one! If you could know with what a gush of love I have sat losing myself in your eyes, looking at them with rapture during a pause I allowed myself, you would feel as you gathered up the affection with which I have tried to overlay the ivory, that the soul of your little pet is indeed there.
“A dead woman craving alms! That is a funny idea.—Come, I must learn to lie quiet in my grave.
“You have no idea how heroic my death would seem to some fools if they could know Nucingen last night offered me two millions of francs if I would love him as I love you. He will be handsomely robbed when he hears that I have kept my word and died of him. I tried all I could still to breathe the air you breathe. I said to the fat scoundrel, ‘Do you want me to love you as you wish? To promise even that I will never see Lucien again?’—‘What must I do?’ he asked.—‘Give me the two millions for him.’—You should have seen his face! I could have laughed, if it had not been so tragical for me.
“‘Spare yourself the trouble of refusing,’ said I; ‘I see you care more for your two millions than for me. A woman is always glad to know at what she is valued!’ and I turned my back on him.
“In a few hours the old rascal will know that I was not in jest.
“Who will part your hair as nicely as I do? Pooh!—I will think no more of anything in life; I have but five minutes, I give them to God. Do not be jealous of Him, dear heart; I shall speak to Him of you, beseeching Him for your happiness as the price of my death, and my punishment in the next world. I am vexed enough at having to go to hell. I should have liked to see the angels, to know if they are like you.
“Good-bye, my darling, good-bye! I give you all the blessing of my woes. Even in the grave I am your Esther.
“It is striking eleven. I have said my last prayers. I am going to bed to die. Once more, farewell! I wish that the warmth of my hand could leave my soul there where I press a last kiss—and once more I must call you my dearest love, though you are the cause of the death of your Esther.”
A vague feeling of jealousy tightened on the magistrate’s heart as he read this letter, the only letter from a suicide he had ever found written with such lightness, though it was a feverish lightness, and the last effort of a blind affection.
“What is there in the man that he should be loved so well?” thought he, saying what every man says who has not the gift of attracting women.
“If you can prove not merely that you are not Jacques Collin and an escaped convict, but that you are in fact Don Carlos Herrera, canon of Toledo, and secret envoy of this Majesty Ferdinand VII.,” said he, addressing the prisoner “you will be released; for the impartiality demanded by my office requires me to tell you that I have this moment received a letter, written by Mademoiselle Esther Gobseck, in which she declares her intention of killing herself, and expresses suspicions as to her servants, which would seem to point to them as the thieves who have made off with the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs.”
As he spoke Monsieur Camusot was comparing the writing of the letter with that of the will; and it seemed to him self-evident that the same person had written both.
“Monsieur, you were in too great a hurry to believe in a murder; do not be too hasty in believing in a theft.”
“Heh!” said Camusot, scrutinizing the prisoner with a piercing eye.
“Do not suppose that I am compromising myself by telling you that the sum may possibly be recovered,” said Jacques Collin, making the judge understand that he saw his suspicions. “That poor girl was much loved by those about her; and if I were free, I would undertake to search for this money, which no doubt belongs to the being I love best in the world—to Lucien!—Will you allow me to read that letter; it will not take long? It is evidence of my dear boy’s innocence—you cannot fear that I shall destroy it—nor that I shall talk about it; I am in solitary confinement.”
“In confinement! You will be so no longer,” cried the magistrate. “It is I who must beg you to get well as soon as possible. Refer to your ambassador if you choose——”
And he handed the letter to Jacques Collin. Camusot was glad to be out of a difficulty, to be able to satisfy the public prosecutor, Mesdames de Maufrigneuse and de Serizy. Nevertheless, he studied his prisoner’s face with cold curiosity while Collin read Esther’s letter; in spite of the apparent genuineness of the feelings it expressed, he said to himself:
“But it is a face worthy of the hulks, all the same!”
“That is the way to love!” said Jacques Collin, returning the letter. And he showed Camusot a face bathed in tears.
“If only you knew him,” he went on, “so youthful, so innocent a soul, so splendidly handsome, a child, a poet!—The impulse to sacrifice oneself to him is irresistible, to satisfy his lightest wish. That dear boy is so fascinating when he chooses——”
“And so,” said the magistrate, making a final effort to discover the truth, “you cannot possibly be Jacques Collin——”
“No, monsieur,” replied the convict.
And Jacques Collin was more entirely Don Carlos Herrera than ever. In his anxiety to complete his work he went up to the judge, led him to the window, and gave himself the airs of a prince of the Church, assuming a confidential tone:
“I am so fond of that boy, monsieur, that if it were needful, to spare that idol of my heart a mere discomfort even, that I should be the criminal you take me for, I would surrender,” said he in an undertone. “I would follow the example of the poor girl who has killed herself for his benefit. And I beg you, monsieur, to grant me a favor—namely, to set Lucien at liberty forthwith.”
“My duty forbids it,” said Camusot very good-naturedly; “but if a sinner may make a compromise with heaven, justice too has its softer side, and if you can give me sufficient reasons—speak; your words will not be taken down.”
“Well, then,” Jacques Collin went on, taken in by Camusot’s apparent goodwill, “I know what that poor boy is suffering at this moment; he is capable of trying to kill himself when he finds himself a prisoner——”
“Oh! as to that!” said Camusot with a shrug.
“You do not know whom you will oblige by obliging me,” added Jacques Collin, trying to harp on another string. “You will be doing a service to others more powerful than any Comtesse de Serizy or Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, who will never forgive you for having had their letters in your chambers——” and he pointed to two packets of perfumed papers. “My Order has a good memory.”
“Monsieur,” said Camusot, “that is enough. You must find better reasons to give me. I am as much interested in the prisoner as in public vengeance.”
“Believe me, then, I know Lucien; he has a soul of a woman, of a poet, and a southerner, without persistency or will,” said Jacques Collin, who fancied that he saw that he had won the judge over. “You are convinced of the young man’s innocence, do not torture him, do not question him. Give him that letter, tell him that he is Esther’s heir, and restore him to freedom. If you act otherwise, you will bring despair on yourself; whereas, if you simply release him, I will explain to you—keep me still in solitary confinement—tomorrow or this evening, everything that may strike you as mysterious in the case, and the reasons for the persecution of which I am the object. But it will be at the risk of my life, a price has been set on my head these six years past. . . . Lucien free, rich, and married to Clotilde de Grandlieu, and my task on earth will be done; I shall no longer try to save my skin.—My persecutor was a spy under your late King.”
“What, Corentin?”
“Ah! Is his name Corentin? Thank you, monsieur. Well, will you promise to do as I ask you?”
“A magistrate can make no promises.—Coquart, tell the usher and the gendarmes to take the prisoner back to the Conciergerie.—I will give orders that you are to have a private room,” he added pleasantly, with a slight nod to the convict.
Struck by Jacques Collin’s request, and remembering how he had insisted that he wished to be examined first as a privilege to his state of health, Camusot’s suspicions were aroused once more. Allowing his vague doubts to make themselves heard, he noticed that the self-styled dying man was walking off with the strength of a Hercules, having abandoned all the tricks he had aped so well on appearing before the magistrate.
“Monsieur!”
Jacques Collin turned round.
“Notwithstanding your refusal to sign the document, my clerk will read you the minutes of your examination.”
The prisoner was evidently in excellent health; the readiness with which he came back, and sat down by the clerk, was a fresh light to the magistrate’s mind.
“You have got well very suddenly!” said Camusot.
“Caught!” thought Jacques Collin; and he replied:
“Joy, monsieur, is the only panacea.—That letter, the proof of innocence of which I had no doubt—these are the grand remedy.”
The judge kept a meditative eye on the prisoner when the usher and the gendarmes again took him in charge. Then, with a start like a waking man, he tossed Esther’s letter across to the table where his clerk sat, saying:
“Coquart, copy that letter.”
If it is natural to man to be suspicious as to some favor required of him when it is antagonistic to his interests or his duty, and sometimes even when it is a matter of indifference, this feeling is law to an examining magistrate. The more this prisoner—whose identity was not yet ascertained—pointed to clouds on the horizon in the event of Lucien’s being examined, the more necessary did the interrogatory seem to Camusot. Even if this formality had not been required by the Code and by common practice, it was indispensable as bearing on the identification of the Abbe Carlos. There is in every walk of life the business conscience. In default of curiosity Camusot would have examined Lucien as he had examined Jacques Collin, with all the cunning which the most honest magistrate allows himself to use in such cases. The services he might render and his own promotion were secondary in Camusot’s mind to his anxiety to know or guess the truth, even if he should never tell it.
He stood drumming on the window-pane while following the river-like current of his conjectures, for in these moods thought is like a stream flowing through many countries. Magistrates, in love with truth, are like jealous women; they give way to a thousand hypotheses, and probe them with the dagger-point of suspicion, as the sacrificing priest of old eviscerated his victims; thus they arrive, not perhaps at truth, but at probability, and at last see the truth beyond. A woman cross-questions the man she loves as the judge cross-questions a criminal. In such a frame of mind, a glance, a word, a tone of voice, the slightest hesitation is enough to certify the hidden fact—treason or crime.
“The style in which he depicted his devotion to his son—if he is his son—is enough to make me think that he was in the girl’s house to keep an eye on the plunder; and never suspecting that the dead woman’s pillow covered a will, he no doubt annexed, for his son, the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs as a precaution. That is why he can promise to recover the money.
“M. de Rubempre owes it to himself and to justice to account for his father’s position in the world——
“And he offers me the protection of his Order—His Order!—if I do not examine Lucien——”
As has been seen, a magistrate conducts an examination exactly as he thinks proper. He is at liberty to display his acumen or be absolutely blunt. An examination may be everything or nothing. Therein lies the favor.
Camusot rang. The usher had returned. He was sent to fetch Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre with an injunction to prohibit his speaking to anybody on his way up. It was by this time two in the afternoon.
“There is some secret,” said the judge to himself, “and that secret must be very important. My amphibious friend—since he is neither priest, nor secular, nor convict, nor Spaniard, though he wants to hinder his protege from letting out something dreadful—argues thus: ‘The poet is weak and effeminate; he is not like me, a Hercules in diplomacy, and you will easily wring our secret from him.’—Well, we will get everything out of this innocent.”
And he sat tapping the edge of his table with the ivory paper-knife, while Coquart copied Esther’s letter.
How whimsical is the action of our faculties! Camusot conceived of every crime as possible, and overlooked the only one that the prisoner had now committed—the forgery of the will for Lucien’s advantage. Let those whose envy vents itself on magistrates think for a moment of their life spent in perpetual suspicion, of the torments these men must inflict on their minds, for civil cases are not less tortuous than criminal examinations, and it will occur to them perhaps that the priest and the lawyer wear an equally heavy coat of mail, equally furnished with spikes in the lining. However, every profession has its hair shirt and its Chinese puzzles.
It was about two o’clock when Monsieur Camusot saw Lucien de Rubempre come in, pale, worn, his eyes red and swollen, in short, in a state of dejection which enabled the magistrate to compare nature with art, the really dying man with the stage performance. His walk from the Conciergerie to the judge’s chambers, between two gendarmes, and preceded by the usher, had put the crowning touch to Lucien’s despair. It is the poet’s nature to prefer execution to condemnation.
As he saw this being, so completely bereft of the moral courage which is the essence of a judge, and which the last prisoner had so strongly manifested, Monsieur Camusot disdained the easy victory; and this scorn enabled him to strike a decisive blow, since it left him, on the ground, that horrible clearness of mind which the marksman feels when he is firing at a puppet.
“Collect yourself, Monsieur de Rubempre; you are in the presence of a magistrate who is eager to repair the mischief done involuntarily by the law when a man is taken into custody on suspicion that has no foundation. I believe you to be innocent, and you will soon be at liberty.—Here is the evidence of your innocence; it is a letter kept for you during your absence by your porter’s wife; she has just brought it here. In the commotion caused by the visitation of justice and the news of your arrest at Fontainebleau, the woman forgot the letter which was written by Mademoiselle Esther Gobseck.—Read it!”
Lucien took the letter, read it, and melted into tears. He sobbed, and could not say a single word. At the end of a quarter of an hour, during which Lucien with great difficulty recovered his self-command, the clerk laid before him the copy of the letter and begged him to sign a footnote certifying that the copy was faithful to the original, and might be used in its stead “on all occasions in the course of this preliminary inquiry,” giving him the option of comparing the two; but Lucien, of course, took Coquart’s word for its accuracy.
“Monsieur,” said the lawyer, with friendly good nature, “it is nevertheless impossible that I should release you without carrying out the legal formalities, and asking you some questions.—It is almost as a witness that I require you to answer. To such a man as you I think it is almost unnecessary to point out that the oath to tell the whole truth is not in this case a mere appeal to your conscience, but a necessity for your own sake, your position having been for a time somewhat ambiguous. The truth can do you no harm, be it what it may; falsehood will send you to trial, and compel me to send you back to the Conciergerie; whereas if you answer fully to my questions, you will sleep to-night in your own house, and be rehabilitated by this paragraph in the papers: ‘Monsieur de Rubempre, who was arrested yesterday at Fontainebleau, was set at liberty after a very brief examination.’”
This speech made a deep impression on Lucien; and the judge, seeing the temper of his prisoner, added:
“I may repeat to you that you were suspected of being accessory to the murder by poison of this Demoiselle Esther. Her suicide is clearly proved, and there is an end of that; but a sum of seven hundred and fifty thousand francs has been stolen, which she had disposed of by will, and you are the legatee. This is a felony. The crime was perpetrated before the discovery of the will.
“Now there is reason to suppose that a person who loves you as much as you loved Mademoiselle Esther committed the theft for your benefit. —Do not interrupt me,” Camusot went on, seeing that Lucien was about to speak, and commanding silence by a gesture; “I am asking you nothing so far. I am anxious to make you understand how deeply your honor is concerned in this question. Give up the false and contemptible notion of the honor binding two accomplices, and tell the whole truth.”
The reader must already have observed the extreme disproportion of the weapons in this conflict between the prisoner under suspicion and the examining judge. Absolute denial when skilfully used has in its favor its positive simplicity, and sufficiently defends the criminal; but it is, in a way, a coat of mail which becomes crushing as soon as the stiletto of cross-examination finds a joint to it. As soon as mere denial is ineffectual in face of certain proven facts, the examinee is entirely at the judge’s mercy.
Now, supposing that a sort of half-criminal, like Lucien, might, if he were saved from the first shipwreck of his honesty, amend his ways, and become a useful member of society, he will be lost in the pitfalls of his examination.
The judge has the driest possible record drawn up of the proceedings, a faithful analysis of the questions and answers; but no trace remains of his insidiously paternal addresses or his captious remonstrances, such as this speech. The judges of the superior courts see the results, but see nothing of the means. Hence, as some experienced persons have thought, it would be a good plan that, as in England, a jury should hear the examination. For a short while France enjoyed the benefit of this system. Under the Code of Brumaire of the year IV., this body was known as the examining jury, as distinguished from the trying jury. As to the final trial, if we should restore the examining jury, it would have to be the function of the superior courts without the aid of a jury.
“And now,” said Camusot, after a pause, “what is your name? —Attention, Monsieur Coquart!” said he to the clerk.
“Lucien Chardon de Rubempre.”
“And you were born——?”
“At Angouleme.” And Lucien named the day, month, and year.
“You inherited no fortune?”
“None whatever.”
“And yet, during your first residence in Paris, you spent a great deal, as compared with your small income?”
“Yes, monsieur; but at that time I had a most devoted friend in Mademoiselle Coralie, and I was so unhappy as to lose her. It was my grief at her death that made me return to my country home.”
“That is right, monsieur,” said Camusot; “I commend your frankness; it will be thoroughly appreciated.”
Lucien, it will be seen, was prepared to make a clean breast of it.
“On your return to Paris you lived even more expensively than before,” Camusot went on. “You lived like a man who might have about sixty thousand francs a year.”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Who supplied you with the money?”
“My protector, the Abbe Carlos Herrera.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“We met when traveling, just as I was about to be quit of life by committing suicide.”
“You never heard him spoken of by your family—by your mother?”
“Never.”
“Can you remember the year and the month when you first became connected with Mademoiselle Esther?”
“Towards the end of 1823, at a small theatre on the Boulevard.”
“At first she was an expense to you?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Lately, in the hope of marrying Mademoiselle de Grandlieu, you purchased the ruins of the Chateau de Rubempre, you added land to the value of a million francs, and you told the family of Grandlieu that your sister and your brother-inlaw had just come into a considerable fortune, and that their liberality had supplied you with the money. —Did you tell the Grandlieus this, monsieur?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“You do not know the reason why the marriage was broken off?”
“Not in the least, monsieur.”
“Well, the Grandlieus sent one of the most respectable attorneys in Paris to see your brother-inlaw and inquire into the facts. At Angouleme this lawyer, from the statements of your sister and brother-inlaw, learned that they not only had hardly lent you any money, but also that their inheritance consisted of land, of some extent no doubt, but that the whole amount of invested capital was not more than about two hundred thousand francs.—Now you cannot wonder that such people as the Grandlieus should reject a fortune of which the source is more than doubtful. This, monsieur, is what a lie has led to——”
Lucien was petrified by this revelation, and the little presence of mind he had preserved deserted him.
“Remember,” said Camusot, “that the police and the law know all they want to know.—And now,” he went on, recollecting Jacques Collin’s assumed paternity, “do you know who this pretended Carlos Herrera is?”
“Yes, monsieur; but I knew it too late.”
“Too late! How? Explain yourself.”
“He is not a priest, not a Spaniard, he is——”
“An escaped convict?” said the judge eagerly.
“Yes,” replied Lucien, “when he told me the fatal secret, I was already under obligations to him; I had fancied I was befriended by a respectable priest.”
“Jacques Collin——” said Monsieur Camusot, beginning a sentence.
“Yes,” said Lucien, “his name is Jacques Collin.”
“Very good. Jacques Collin has just now been identified by another person, and though he denies it, he does so, I believe, in your interest. But I asked whether you knew who the man is in order to prove another of Jacques Collin’s impostures.”
Lucien felt as though he had hot iron in his inside as he heard this alarming statement.
“Do you not know,” Camusot went on, “that in order to give color to the extraordinary affection he has for you, he declares that he is your father?”
“He! My father?—Oh, monsieur, did he tell you that?”
“Have you any suspicion of where the money came from that he used to give you? For, if I am to believe the evidence of the letter you have in your hand, that poor girl, Mademoiselle Esther, must have done you lately the same services as Coralie formerly rendered you. Still, for some years, as you have just admitted, you lived very handsomely without receiving anything from her.”
“It is I who should ask you, monsieur, whence convicts get their money! Jacques Collin my father!—Oh, my poor mother!” and Lucien burst into tears.
“Coquart, read out to the prisoner that part of Carlos Herrera’s examination in which he said that Lucien de Rubempre was his son.”
The poet listened in silence, and with a look that was terrible to behold.
“I am done for!” he cried.
“A man is not done for who is faithful to the path of honor and truth,” said the judge.
“But you will commit Jacques Collin for trial?” said Lucien.
“Undoubtedly,” said Camusot, who aimed at making Lucien talk. “Speak out.”
But in spite of all his persuasion and remonstrances, Lucien would say no more. Reflection had come too late, as it does to all men who are the slaves of impulse. There lies the difference between the poet and the man of action; one gives way to feeling to reproduce it in living images, his judgement comes in after; the other feels and judges both at once.
Lucien remained pale and gloomy; he saw himself at the bottom of the precipice, down which the examining judge had rolled him by the apparent candor which had entrapped his poet’s soul. He had betrayed, not his benefactor, but an accomplice who had defended their position with the courage of a lion, and a skill that showed no flaw. Where Jacques Collin had saved everything by his daring, Lucien, the man of brains, had lost all by his lack of intelligence and reflection. This infamous lie against which he revolted had screened a yet more infamous truth.
Utterly confounded by the judge’s skill, overpowered by his cruel dexterity, by the swiftness of the blows he had dealt him while making use of the errors of a life laid bare as probes to search his conscience, Lucien sat like an animal which the butcher’s pole-axe had failed to kill. Free and innocent when he came before the judge, in a moment his own avowal had made him feel criminal.
To crown all, as a final grave irony, Camusot, cold and calm, pointed out to Lucien that his self-betrayal was the result of a misapprehension. Camusot was thinking of Jacques Collin’s announcing himself as Lucien’s father; while Lucien, wholly absorbed by his fear of seeing his confederacy with an escaped convict made public, had imitated the famous inadvertency of the murderers of Ibycus.
One of Royer–Collard’s most famous achievements was proclaiming the constant triumph of natural feeling over engrafted sentiments, and defending the cause of anterior oaths by asserting that the law of hospitality, for instance, ought to be regarded as binding to the point of negativing the obligation of a judicial oath. He promulgated this theory, in the face of the world, from the French tribune; he boldly upheld conspirators, showing that it was human to be true to friendship rather than to the tyrannical laws brought out of the social arsenal to be adjusted to circumstances. And, indeed, natural rights have laws which have never been codified, but which are more effectual and better known than those laid down by society. Lucien had misapprehended, to his cost, the law of cohesion, which required him to be silent and leave Jacques Collin to protect himself; nay, more, he had accused him. In his own interests the man ought always to be, to him, Carlos Herrera.
Monsieur Camusot was rejoicing in his triumph; he had secured two criminals. He had crushed with the hand of justice one of the favorites of fashion, and he had found the undiscoverable Jacques Collin. He would be regarded as one of the cleverest of examining judges. So he left his prisoner in peace; but he was studying this speechless consternation, and he saw drops of sweat collect on the miserable face, swell and fall, mingled with two streams of tears.
“Why should you weep, Monsieur de Rubempre? You are, as I have told you, Mademoiselle Esther’s legatee, she having no heirs nor near relations, and her property amounts to nearly eight millions of francs if the lost seven hundred and fifty thousand francs are recovered.”
This was the last blow to the poor wretch. “If you do not lose your head for ten minutes,” Jacques Collin had said in his note, and Lucien by keeping cool would have gained all his desire. He might have paid his debt to Jacques Collin and have cut him adrift, have been rich, and have married Mademoiselle de Grandlieu. Nothing could more eloquently demonstrate the power with which the examining judge is armed, as a consequence of the isolation or separation of persons under suspicion, or the value of such a communication as Asie had conveyed to Jacques Collin.
“Ah, monsieur!” replied Lucien, with the satirical bitterness of a man who makes a pedestal of his utter overthrow, “how appropriate is the phrase in legal slang ‘to UNDERGO examination.’ For my part, if I had to choose between the physical torture of past ages and the moral torture of our day, I would not hesitate to prefer the sufferings inflicted of old by the executioner.—What more do you want of me?” he added haughtily.
“In this place, monsieur,” said the magistrate, answering the poet’s pride with mocking arrogance, “I alone have a right to ask questions.”
“I had the right to refuse to answer them,” muttered the hapless Lucien, whose wits had come back to him with perfect lucidity.
“Coquart, read the minutes to the prisoner.”
“I am the prisoner once more,” said Lucien to himself.
While the clerk was reading, Lucien came to a determination which compelled him to smooth down Monsieur Camusot. When Coquart’s drone ceased, the poet started like a man who has slept through a noise to which his ears are accustomed, and who is roused by its cessation.
“You have to sign the report of your examination,” said the judge.
“And am I at liberty?” asked Lucien, ironical in his turn.
“Not yet,” said Camusot; “but tomorrow, after being confronted with Jacques Collin, you will no doubt be free. Justice must now ascertain whether or no you are accessory to the crimes this man may have committed since his escape so long ago as 1820. However, you are no longer in the secret cells. I will write to the Governor to give you a better room.”
“Shall I find writing materials?”
“You can have anything supplied to you that you ask for; I will give orders to that effect by the usher who will take you back.”
Lucien mechanically signed the minutes and initialed the notes in obedience to Coquart’s indications with the meekness of a resigned victim. A single fact will show what a state he was in better than the minutest description. The announcement that he would be confronted with Jacques Collin had at once dried the drops of sweat from his brow, and his dry eyes glittered with a terrible light. In short, he became, in an instant as brief as a lightning flash, what Jacques Collin was—a man of iron.
In men whose nature is like Lucien’s, a nature which Jacques Collin had so thoroughly fathomed, these sudden transitions from a state of absolute demoralization to one that is, so to speak, metallic,—so extreme is the tension of every vital force,—are the most startling phenomena of mental vitality. The will surges up like the lost waters of a spring; it diffuses itself throughout the machinery that lies ready for the action of the unknown matter that constitutes it; and then the corpse is a man again, and the man rushes on full of energy for a supreme struggle.
Lucien laid Esther’s letter next his heart, with the miniature she had returned to him. Then he haughtily bowed to Monsieur Camusot, and went off with a firm step down the corridors, between two gendarmes.
“That is a deep scoundrel!” said the judge to his clerk, to avenge himself for the crushing scorn the poet had displayed. “He thought he might save himself by betraying his accomplice.”
“Of the two,” said Coquart timidly, “the convict is the most thorough-paced.”
“You are free for the rest of the day, Coquart,” said the lawyer. “We have done enough. Send away any case that is waiting, to be called tomorrow.—Ah! and you must go at once to the public prosecutor’s chambers and ask if he is still there; if so, ask him if he can give me a few minutes. Yes; he will not be gone,” he added, looking at a common clock in a wooden case painted green with gilt lines. “It is but a quarter-past three.”
These examinations, which are so quickly read, being written down at full length, questions and answers alike, take up an enormous amount of time. This is one of the reasons of the slowness of these preliminaries to a trial and of these imprisonments “on suspicion.” To the poor this is ruin, to the rich it is disgrace; to them only immediate release can in any degree repair, so far as possible, the disaster of an arrest.
This is why the two scenes here related had taken up the whole of the time spent by Asie in deciphering her master’s orders, in getting a Duchess out of her boudoir, and putting some energy into Madame de Serizy.
At this moment Camusot, who was anxious to get the full benefit of his cleverness, took the two documents, read them through, and promised himself that he would show them to the public prosecutor and take his opinion on them. During this meditation, his usher came back to tell him that Madame la Comtesse de Serizy’s man-servant insisted on speaking with him. At a nod from Camusot, a servant out of livery came in, looked first at the usher, and then at the magistrate, and said, “I have the honor of speaking to Monsieur Camusot?”
“Yes,” replied the lawyer and his clerk.
Camusot took a note which the servant offered him, and read as follows:—
“For the sake of many interests which will be obvious to you, my dear Camusot, do not examine Monsieur de Rubempre. We have brought ample proofs of his innocence that he may be released forthwith.
“D. DE MAUFRIGNEUSE. “L. DE SERIZY.
“_P. S._—Burn this note.”
Camusot understood at once that he had blundered preposterously in laying snares for Lucien, and he began by obeying the two fine ladies —he lighted a taper, and burned the letter written by the Duchess. The man bowed respectfully.
“Then Madame de Serizy is coming here?” asked Camusot.
“The carriage is being brought round.”
At this moment Coquart came in to tell Monsieur Camusot that the public prosecutor expected him.
Oppressed by the blunder he had committed, in view of his ambitions, though to the better ends of justice, the lawyer, in whom seven years’ experience had perfected the sharpness that comes to a man who in his practice has had to measure his wits against the grisettes of Paris, was anxious to have some shield against the resentment of two women of fashion. The taper in which he had burned the note was still alight, and he used it to seal up the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse’s notes to Lucien—about thirty in all—and Madame de Serizy’s somewhat voluminous correspondence.
Then he waited on the public prosecutor.
The Palais de Justice is a perplexing maze of buildings piled one above another, some fine and dignified, others very mean, the whole disfigured by its lack of unity. The _Salle des Pas–Perdus_ is the largest known hall, but its nakedness is hideous, and distresses the eye. This vast Cathedral of the Law crushes the Supreme Court. The Galerie Marchande ends in two drain-like passages. From this corridor there is a double staircase, a little larger than that of the Criminal Courts, and under it a large double door. The stairs lead down to one of the Assize Courts, and the doors open into another. In some years the number of crimes committed in the circuit of the Seine is great enough to necessitate the sitting of two Benches.
Close by are the public prosecutor’s offices, the attorney’s room and library, the chambers of the attorney-general, and those of the public prosecutor’s deputies. All these purlieus, to use a generic term, communicate by narrow spiral stairs and the dark passages, which are a disgrace to the architecture not of Paris only, but of all France. The interior arrangement of the sovereign court of justice outdoes our prisons in all that is most hideous. The writer describing our manners and customs would shrink from the necessity of depicting the squalid corridor of about a metre in width, in which the witnesses wait in the Superior Criminal Court. As to the stove which warms the court itself, it would disgrace a cafe on the Boulevard Mont–Parnasse.
The public prosecutor’s private room forms part of an octagon wing flanking the Galerie Marchande, built out recently in regard to the age of the structure, over the prison yard, outside the women’s quarters. All this part of the Palais is overshadowed by the lofty and noble edifice of the Sainte–Chapelle. And all is solemn and silent.
Monsieur de Granville, a worthy successor of the great magistrates of the ancient Parlement, would not leave Paris without coming to some conclusion in the matter of Lucien. He expected to hear from Camusot, and the judge’s message had plunged him into the involuntary suspense which waiting produces on even the strongest minds. He had been sitting in the window-bay of his private room; he rose, and walked up and down, for having lingered in the morning to intercept Camusot, he had found him dull of apprehension; he was vaguely uneasy and worried.
And this was why.
The dignity of his high functions forbade his attempting to fetter the perfect independence of the inferior judge, and yet this trial nearly touched the honor and good name of his best friend and warmest supporter, the Comte de Serizy, Minister of State, member of the Privy Council, Vice–President of the State Council, and prospective Chancellor of the Realm, in the event of the death of the noble old man who held that august office. It was Monsieur de Serizy’s misfortune to adore his wife “through fire and water,” and he always shielded her with his protection. Now the public prosecutor fully understood the terrible fuss that would be made in the world and at court if a crime should be proved against a man whose name had been so often and so malignantly linked with that of the Countess.
“Ah!” he sighed, folding his arms, “formerly the supreme authority could take refuge in an appeal. Nowadays our mania for equality”—he dared not say _for Legality_, as a poetic orator in the Chamber courageously admitted a short while since—“is the death of us.”
This noble magistrate knew all the fascination and the miseries of an illicit attachment. Esther and Lucien, as we have seen, had taken the rooms where the Comte de Granville had lived secretly on connubial terms with Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille, and whence she had fled one day, lured away by a villain. (See _A Double Marriage_.)
At the very moment when the public prosecutor was saying to himself, “Camusot is sure to have done something silly,” the examining magistrate knocked twice at the door of his room.
“Well, my dear Camusot, how is that case going on that I spoke of this morning?”
“Badly, Monsieur le Comte; read and judge for yourself.”
He held out the minutes of the two examinations to Monsieur de Granville, who took up his eyeglass and went to the window to read them. He had soon run through them.
“You have done your duty,” said the Count in an agitated voice. “It is all over. The law must take its course. You have shown so much skill, that you need never fear being deprived of your appointment as examining judge——”
If Monsieur de Granville had said to Camusot, “You will remain an examining judge to your dying day,” he could not have been more explicit than in making this polite speech. Camusot was cold in the very marrow.
“Madame la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, to whom I owe much, had desired me . . .”
“Oh yes, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse is Madame de Serizy’s friend,” said Granville, interrupting him. “To be sure.—You have allowed nothing to influence you, I perceive. And you did well, sir; you will be a great magistrate.”
At this instant the Comte Octave de Bauvan opened the door without knocking, and said to the Comte de Granville:
“I have brought you a fair lady, my dear fellow, who did not know which way to turn; she was on the point of losing herself in our labyrinth——”
And Comte Octave led in by the hand the Comtesse de Serizy, who had been wandering about the place for the last quarter of an hour.
“What, you here, madame!” exclaimed the public prosecutor, pushing forward his own armchair, “and at this moment! This, madame, is Monsieur Camusot,” he added, introducing the judge.—“Bauvan,” said he to the distinguished ministerial orator of the Restoration, “wait for me in the president’s chambers; he is still there, and I will join you.”
Comte Octave de Bauvan understood that not merely was he in the way, but that Monsieur de Granville wanted an excuse for leaving his room.
Madame de Serizy had not made the mistake of coming to the Palais de Justice in her handsome carriage with a blue hammer-cloth and coats-of-arms, her coachman in gold lace, and two footmen in breeches and silk stockings. Just as they were starting Asie impressed on the two great ladies the need for taking the hackney coach in which she and the Duchess had arrived, and she had likewise insisted on Lucien’s mistress adopting the costume which is to women what a gray cloak was of yore to men. The Countess wore a plain brown dress, an old black shawl, and a velvet bonnet from which the flowers had been removed, and the whole covered up under a thick lace veil.
“You received our note?” said she to Camusot, whose dismay she mistook for respectful admiration.
“Alas! but too late, Madame la Comtesse,” replied the lawyer, whose tact and wit failed him excepting in his chambers and in presence of a prisoner.
“Too late! How?”
She looked at Monsieur de Granville, and saw consternation written in his face. “It cannot be, it must not be too late!” she added, in the tone of a despot.
Women, pretty women, in the position of Madame de Serizy, are the spoiled children of French civilization. If the women of other countries knew what a woman of fashion is in Paris, a woman of wealth and rank, they would all want to come and enjoy that splendid royalty. The women who recognize no bonds but those of propriety, no law but the petty charter which has been more than once alluded to in this _Comedie Humaine_ as the ladies’ Code, laugh at the statutes framed by men. They say everything, they do not shrink from any blunder or hesitate at any folly, for they all accept the fact that they are irresponsible beings, answerable for nothing on earth but their good repute and their children. They say the most preposterous things with a laugh, and are ready on every occasion to repeat the speech made in the early days of her married life by pretty Madame de Bauvan to her husband, whom she came to fetch away from the Palais: “Make haste and pass sentence, and come away.”
“Madame,” said the public prosecutor, “Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre is not guilty either of robbery or of poisoning; but Monsieur Camusot has led him to confess a still greater crime.”
“What is that?” she asked.
“He acknowledged,” said Monsieur Camusot in her ear, “that he is the friend and pupil of an escaped convict. The Abbe Carlos Herrera, the Spaniard with whom he has been living for the last seven years, is the notorious Jacques Collin.”
Madame de Serizy felt as if it were a blow from an iron rod at each word spoken by the judge, but this name was the finishing stroke.
“And the upshot of all this?” she said, in a voice that was no more than a breath.
“Is,” Monsieur de Granville went on, finishing the Countess’ sentence in an undertone, “that the convict will be committed for trial, and that if Lucien is not committed with him as having profited as an accessory to the man’s crimes, he must appear as a witness very seriously compromised.”
“Oh! never, never!” she cried aloud, with amazing firmness. “For my part, I should not hesitate between death and the disaster of seeing a man whom the world has known to be my dearest friend declared by the bench to be the accomplice of a convict.—The King has a great regard for my husband——”
“Madame,” said the public prosecutor, also aloud, and with a smile, “the King has not the smallest power over the humblest examining judge in his kingdom, nor over the proceedings in any court of justice. That is the grand feature of our new code of laws. I myself have just congratulated M. Camusot on his skill——”
“On his clumsiness,” said the Countess sharply, though Lucien’s intimacy with a scoundrel really disturbed her far less than his attachment to Esther.
“If you will read the minutes of the examination of the two prisoners by Monsieur Camusot, you will see that everything is in his hands——”
After this speech, the only thing the public prosecutor could venture to say, and a flash of feminine—or, if you will, lawyer-like —cunning, he went to the door; then, turning round on the threshold, he added:
“Excuse me, madame; I have two words to say to Bauvan.” Which, translated by the worldly wise, conveyed to the Countess: “I do not want to witness the scene between you and Camusot.”
“What is this examination business?” said Leontine very blandly to Camusot, who stood downcast in the presence of the wife of one of the most important personages in the realm.
“Madame,” said Camusot, “a clerk writes down all the magistrate’s questions and the prisoner’s replies. This document is signed by the clerk, by the judge, and by the prisoner. This evidence is the raw material of the subsequent proceedings; on it the accused are committed for trial, and remanded to appear before the Criminal Court.”
“Well, then,” said she, “if the evidence were suppressed——?”
“Oh, madame, that is a crime which no magistrate could possibly commit —a crime against society.”
“It is a far worse crime against me to have ever allowed it to be recorded; still, at this moment it is the only evidence against Lucien. Come, read me the minutes of his examination that I may see if there is still a way of salvation for us all, monsieur. I do not speak for myself alone—I should quite calmly kill myself—but Monsieur de Serizy’s happiness is also at stake.”
“Pray, madame, do not suppose that I have forgotten the respect due you,” said Camusot. “If Monsieur Popinot, for instance, had undertaken this case, you would have had worse luck than you have found with me; for he would not have come to consult Monsieur de Granville; no one would have heard anything about it. I tell you, madame, everything has been seized in Monsieur Lucien’s lodging, even your letters——”
“What! my letters!”
“Here they are, madame, in a sealed packet.”
The Countess in her agitation rang as if she had been at home, and the office-boy came in.
“A light,” said she.
The boy lighted a taper and placed it on the chimney-piece, while the Countess looked through the letters, counted them, crushed them in her hand, and flung them on the hearth. In a few minutes she set the whole mass in a blaze, twisting up the last note to serve as a torch.
Camusot stood, looking rather foolish as he watched the papers burn, holding the legal documents in his hand. The Countess, who seemed absorbed in the work of destroying the proofs of her passion, studied him out of the corner of her eye. She took her time, she calculated her distance; with the spring of a cat she seized the two documents and threw them on the flames. But Camusot saved them; the Countess rushed on him and snatched back the burning papers. A struggle ensued, Camusot calling out: “Madame, but madame! This is contempt—madame!”
A man hurried into the room, and the Countess could not repress a scream as she beheld the Comte de Serizy, followed by Monsieur de Granville and the Comte de Bauvan. Leontine, however, determined to save Lucien at any cost, would not let go of the terrible stamped documents, which she clutched with the tenacity of a vise, though the flame had already burnt her delicate skin like a moxa.
At last Camusot, whose fingers also were smarting from the fire, seemed to be ashamed of the position; he let the papers go; there was nothing left of them but the portions so tightly held by the antagonists that the flame could not touch them. The whole scene had taken less time than is needed to read this account of it.
“What discussion can have arisen between you and Madame de Serizy?” the husband asked of Camusot.
Before the lawyer could reply, the Countess held the fragments in the candle and threw them on the remains of her letters, which were not entirely consumed.
“I shall be compelled,” said Camusot, “to lay a complaint against Madame la Comtesse——”
“Heh! What has she done?” asked the public prosecutor, looking alternately at the lady and the magistrate.
“I have burned the record of the examinations,” said the lady of fashion with a laugh, so pleased at her high-handed conduct that she did not yet feel the pain of the burns, “If that is a crime—well, monsieur must get his odious scrawl written out again.”
“Very true,” said Camusot, trying to recover his dignity.
“Well, well, ‘All’s well that ends well,’” said Monsieur de Granville. “But, my dear Countess, you must not often take such liberties with the Law; it might fail to discern who and what you are.”
“Monsieur Camusot valiantly resisted a woman whom none can resist; the Honor of the Robe is safe!” said the Comte de Bauvan, laughing.
“Indeed! Monsieur Camusot was resisting?” said the public prosecutor, laughing too. “He is a brave man indeed; I should not dare resist the Countess.”
And thus for the moment this serious affair was no more than a pretty woman’s jest, at which Camusot himself must laugh.
But Monsieur de Granville saw one man who was not amused. Not a little alarmed by the Comte de Serizy’s attitude and expression, his friend led him aside.
“My dear fellow,” said he in a whisper, “your distress persuades me for the first and only time in my life to compromise with my duty.”
The public prosecutor rang, and the office-boy appeared.
“Desire Monsieur de Chargeboeuf to come here.”
Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, a sucking barrister, was his private secretary.
“My good friend,” said the Comte de Granville to Camusot, whom he took to the window, “go back to your chambers, get your clerk to reconstruct the report of the Abbe Carlos Herrera’s depositions; as he had not signed the first copy, there will be no difficulty about that. To-morrow you must confront your Spanish diplomate with Rastignac and Bianchon, who will not recognize him as Jacques Collin. Then, being sure of his release, the man will sign the document.
“As to Lucien de Rubempre, set him free this evening; he is not likely to talk about an examination of which the evidence is destroyed, especially after such a lecture as I shall give him.
“Now you will see how little justice suffers by these proceedings. If the Spaniard really is the convict, we have fifty ways of recapturing him and committing him for trial—for we will have his conduct in Spain thoroughly investigated. Corentin, the police agent, will take care of him for us, and we ourselves will keep an eye on him. So treat him decently; do not send him down to the cells again.
“Can we be the death of the Comte and Comtesse de Serizy, as well as of Lucien, for the theft of seven hundred and fifty thousand francs as yet unproven, and to Lucien’s personal loss? Will it not be better for him to lose the money than to lose his character? Above all, if he is to drag with him in his fall a Minister of State, and his wife, and the Duchesse du Maufrigneuse.
“This young man is a speckled orange; do not leave it to rot.
“All this will take you about half an hour; go and get it done; we will wait for you. It is half-past three; you will find some judges about. Let me know if you can get a rule of insufficient evidence—or Lucien must wait till tomorrow morning.”
Camusot bowed to the company and went; but Madame de Serizy, who was suffering a good deal from her burns, did not return his bow.
Monsieur de Serizy, who had suddenly rushed away while the public prosecutor and the magistrate were talking together, presently returned, having fetched a small jar of virgin wax. With this he dressed his wife’s fingers, saying in an undertone:
“Leontine, why did you come here without letting me know?”
“My dear,” replied she in a whisper, “forgive me. I seem mad, but indeed your interests were as much involved as mine.”
“Love this young fellow if fatality requires it, but do not display your passion to all the world,” said the luckless husband.
“Well, my dear Countess,” said Monsieur de Granville, who had been engaged in conversation with Comte Octave, “I hope you may take Monsieur de Rubempre home to dine with you this evening.”
This half promise produced a reaction; Madame de Serizy melted into tears.
“I thought I had no tears left,” said she with a smile. “But could you not bring Monsieur de Rubempre to wait here?”
“I will try if I can find the ushers to fetch him, so that he may not be seen under the escort of the gendarmes,” said Monsieur de Granville.
“You are as good as God!” cried she, with a gush of feeling that made her voice sound like heavenly music.
“These are the women,” said Comte Octave, “who are fascinating, irresistible!”
And he became melancholy as he thought of his own wife. (See _Honorine_.)
As he left the room, Monsieur de Granville was stopped by young Chargeboeuf, to whom he spoke to give him instructions as to what he was to say to Massol, one of the editors of the _Gazette des Tribunaux_.
While beauties, ministers, and magistrates were conspiring to save Lucien, this was what he was doing at the Conciergerie. As he passed the gate the poet told the keeper that Monsieur Camusot had granted him leave to write, and he begged to have pens, ink, and paper. At a whispered word to the Governor from Camusot’s usher a warder was instructed to take them to him at once. During the short time that it took for the warder to fetch these things and carry them up to Lucien, the hapless young man, to whom the idea of facing Jacques Collin had become intolerable, sank into one of those fatal moods in which the idea of suicide—to which he had yielded before now, but without succeeding in carrying it out—rises to the pitch of mania. According to certain mad-doctors, suicide is in some temperaments the closing phase of mental aberration; and since his arrest Lucien had been possessed by that single idea. Esther’s letter, read and reread many times, increased the vehemence of his desire to die by reminding him of the catastrophe of Romeo dying to be with Juliet.
This is what he wrote:—
“_This is my Last Will and Testament_.
“AT THE CONCIERGERIE, May 15th, 1830.
“I, the undersigned, give and bequeath to the children of my sister, Madame Eve Chardon, wife of David Sechard, formerly a printer at Angouleme, and of Monsieur David Sechard, all the property, real and personal, of which I may be possessed at the time of my decease, due deduction being made for the payments and legacies, which I desire my executor to provide for.
“And I earnestly beg Monsieur de Serizy to undertake the charge of being the executor of this my will.
“First, to Monsieur l’Abbe Carlos Herrera I direct the payment of the sum of three hundred thousand francs. Secondly, to Monsieur le Baron de Nucingen the sum of fourteen hundred thousand francs, less seven hundred and fifty thousand if the sum stolen from Mademoiselle Esther should be recovered.
“As universal legatee to Mademoiselle Esther Gobseck, I give and bequeath the sum of seven hundred and sixty thousand francs to the Board of Asylums of Paris for the foundation of a refuge especially dedicated to the use of public prostitutes who may wish to forsake their life of vice and ruin.
“I also bequeath to the Asylums of Paris the sum of money necessary for the purchase of a certificate for dividends to the amount of thirty thousand francs per annum in five per cents, the annual income to be devoted every six months to the release of prisoners for debts not exceeding two thousand francs. The Board of Asylums to select the most respectable of such persons imprisoned for debt.
“I beg Monsieur de Serizy to devote the sum of forty thousand francs to erecting a monument to Mademoiselle Esther in the Eastern cemetery, and I desire to be buried by her side. The tomb is to be like an antique tomb—square, our two effigies lying thereon, in white marble, the heads on pillows, the hands folded and raised to heaven. There is to be no inscription whatever.
“I beg Monsieur de Serizy to give to Monsieur de Rastignac a gold toilet-set that is in my room as a remembrance.
“And as a remembrance, I beg my executor to accept my library of books as a gift from me.
“LUCIEN CHARDON DE RUBEMPRE.”
This Will was enclosed in a letter addressed to Monsieur le Comte de Granville, Public Prosecutor in the Supreme Court at Paris, as follows:
“MONSIEUR LE COMTE,—
“I place my Will in your hands. When you open this letter I shall be no more. In my desire to be free, I made such cowardly replies to Monsieur Camusot’s insidious questions, that, in spite of my innocence, I may find myself entangled in a disgraceful trial. Even if I were acquitted, a blameless life would henceforth be impossible to me in view of the opinions of the world.
“I beg you to transmit the enclosed letter to the Abbe Carlos Herrera without opening it, and deliver to Monsieur Camusot the formal retraction I also enclose.
“I suppose no one will dare to break the seal of a packet addressed to you. In this belief I bid you adieu, offering you my best respects for the last time, and begging you to believe that in writing to you I am giving you a token of my gratitude for all the kindness you have shown to your deceased humble servant,
“LUCIEN DE R.”
“_To the Abbe Carlos Herrera_.
“MY DEAR ABBE,—I have had only benefits from you, and I have betrayed you. This involuntary ingratitude is killing me, and when you read these lines I shall have ceased to exist. You are not here now to save me.
“You had given me full liberty, if I should find it advantageous, to destroy you by flinging you on the ground like a cigar-end; but I have ruined you by a blunder. To escape from a difficulty, deluded by a clever question from the examining judge, your son by adoption and grace went over to the side of those who aim at killing you at any cost, and insist on proving an identity, which I know to be impossible, between you and a French villain. All is said.
“Between a man of your calibre and me—me of whom you tried to make a greater man than I am capable of being—no foolish sentiment can come at the moment of final parting. You hoped to make me powerful and famous, and you have thrown me into the gulf of suicide, that is all. I have long heard the broad pinions of that vertigo beating over my head.
“As you have sometimes said, there is the posterity of Cain and the posterity of Abel. In the great human drama Cain is in opposition. You are descended from Adam through that line, in which the devil still fans the fire of which the first spark was flung on Eve. Among the demons of that pedigree, from time to time we see one of stupendous power, summing up every form of human energy, and resembling the fevered beasts of the desert, whose vitality demands the vast spaces they find there. Such men are as dangerous as lions would be in the heart of Normandy; they must have their prey, and they devour common men and crop the money of fools. Their sport is so dangerous that at last they kill the humble dog whom they have taken for a companion and made an idol of.
“When it is God’s will, these mysterious beings may be a Moses, an Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet, or Napoleon; but when He leaves a generation of these stupendous tools to rust at the bottom of the ocean, they are no more than a Pugatschef, a Fouche, a Louvel, or the Abbe Carlos Herrera. Gifted with immense power over tenderer souls, they entrap them and mangle them. It is grand, it is fine —in its way. It is the poisonous plant with gorgeous coloring that fascinates children in the woods. It is the poetry of evil. Men like you ought to dwell in caves and never come out of them. You have made me live that vast life, and I have had all my share of existence; so I may very well take my head out of the Gordian knot of your policy and slip it into the running knot of my cravat.
“To repair the mischief I have done, I am forwarding to the public prosecutor a retraction of my deposition. You will know how to take advantage of this document.
“In virtue of a will formally drawn up, restitution will be made, Monsieur l’Abbe, of the moneys belonging to your Order which you so imprudently devoted to my use, as a result of your paternal affection for me.
“And so, farewell. Farewell, colossal image of Evil and Corruption; farewell—to you who, if started on the right road, might have been greater than Ximenes, greater than Richelieu! You have kept your promises. I find myself once more just as I was on the banks of the Charente, after enjoying, by your help, the enchantments of a dream. But, unfortunately, it is not now in the waters of my native place that I shall drown the errors of a boy; but in the Seine, and my hole is a cell in the Conciergerie.
“Do not regret me: my contempt for you is as great as my admiration.
“LUCIEN.”
“_Recantation_.
“I, the undersigned, hereby declare that I retract, without reservation, all that I deposed at my examination today before Monsieur Camusot.
“The Abbe Carlos Herrera always called himself my spiritual father, and I was misled by the word father used in another sense by the judge, no doubt under a misapprehension.
“I am aware that, for political ends, and to quash certain secrets concerning the Cabinets of Spain and of the Tuileries, some obscure diplomatic agents tried to show that the Abbe Carlos Herrera was a forger named Jacques Collin; but the Abbe Carlos Herrera never told me anything about the matter excepting that he was doing his best to obtain evidence of the death or of the continued existence of Jacques Collin.
“LUCIEN DE RUBEMPRE.
“AT THE CONCIERGERIE, May 15th, 1830.”
The fever for suicide had given Lucien immense clearness of mind, and the swiftness of hand familiar to authors in the fever of composition. The impetus was so strong within him that these four documents were all written within half an hour; he folded them in a wrapper, fastened with wafers, on which he impressed with the strength of delirium the coat-of-arms engraved on a seal-ring he wore, and he then laid the packet very conspicuously in the middle of the floor.
Certainly it would have been impossible to conduct himself with greater dignity, in the false position to which all this infamy had led him; he was rescuing his memory from opprobrium, and repairing the injury done to his accomplice, so far as the wit of a man of the world could nullify the result of the poet’s trustfulness.
If Lucien had been taken back to one of the lower cells, he would have been wrecked on the impossibility of carrying out his intentions, for those boxes of masonry have no furniture but a sort of camp-bed and a pail for necessary uses. There is not a nail, not a chair, not even a stool. The camp-bed is so firmly fixed that it is impossible to move it without an amount of labor that the warder would not fail to detect, for the iron-barred peephole is always open. Indeed, if a prisoner under suspicion gives reason for uneasiness, he is watched by a gendarme or a constable.
In the private rooms for which prisoners pay, and in that whither Lucien had been conveyed by the judge’s courtesy to a young man belonging to the upper ranks of society, the movable bed, table, and chair might serve to carry out his purpose of suicide, though they hardly made it easy. Lucien wore a long blue silk necktie, and on his way back from examination he was already meditating on the means by which Pichegru, more or less voluntarily, ended his days. Still, to hang himself, a man must find a purchase, and have a sufficient space between it and the ground for his feet to find no support. Now the window of his room, looking out on the prison-yard, had no handle to the fastening; and the bars, being fixed outside, were divided from his reach by the thickness of the wall, and could not be used for a support.
This, then, was the plan hit upon by Lucien to put himself out of the world. The boarding of the lower part of the opening, which prevented his seeing out into the yard, also hindered the warders outside from seeing what was done in the room; but while the lower portion of the window was replaced by two thick planks, the upper part of both halves still was filled with small panes, held in place by the cross pieces in which they were set. By standing on his table Lucien could reach the glazed part of the window, and take or break out two panes, so as to have a firm point of attachment in the angle of the lower bar. Round this he would tie his cravat, turn round once to tighten it round his neck after securing it firmly, and kick the table from under his feet.
He drew the table up under the window without making any noise, took off his coat and waistcoat, and got on the table unhesitatingly to break a pane above and one below the iron cross-bar. Standing on the table, he could look out across the yard on a magical view, which he then beheld for the first time. The Governor of the prison, in deference to Monsieur Camusot’s request that he should deal as leniently as possible with Lucien, had led him, as we have seen, through the dark passages of the Conciergerie, entered from the dark vault opposite the Tour d’Argent, thus avoiding the exhibition of a young man of fashion to the crowd of prisoners airing themselves in the yard. It will be for the reader to judge whether the aspect of the promenade was not such as to appeal deeply to a poet’s soul.
The yard of the Conciergerie ends at the quai between the Tour d’Argent and the Tour Bonbec; thus the distance between them exactly shows from the outside the width of the plot of ground. The corridor called the Galerie de Saint–Louis, which extends from the Galerie Marchande to the Courts of Appeals and the Tour Bonbec—in which, it is said, Saint–Louis’ room still exists—may enable the curious to estimate the depths of the yard, as it is of the same length. Thus the dark cells and the private rooms are under the Galerie Marchande. And Queen Marie Antoinette, whose dungeon was under the present cells, was conducted to the presence of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which held its sittings in the place where the Court of Appeals now performs its solemn functions, up a horrible flight of steps, now never used, in the very thickness of the wall on which the Galerie Marchande is built.
One side of the prison-yard—that on which the Hall of Saint–Louis forms the first floor—displays a long row of Gothic columns, between which the architects of I know not what period have built up two floors of cells to accommodate as many prisoners as possible, by choking the capitals, the arches, and the vaults of this magnificent cloister with plaster, barred loopholes, and partitions. Under the room known as the Cabinet de Saint–Louis, in the Tour Bonbec, there is a spiral stair leading to these dens. This degradation of one of the immemorial buildings of France is hideous to behold.
From the height at which Lucien was standing he saw this cloister, and the details of the building that joins the two towers, in sharp perspective; before him were the pointed caps of the towers. He stood amazed; his suicide was postponed to his admiration. The phenomena of hallucination are in these days so fully recognized by the medical faculty that this mirage of the senses, this strange illusion of the mind is beyond dispute. A man under the stress of a feeling which by its intensity has become a monomania, often finds himself in the frame of mind to which opium, hasheesh, or the protoxyde of azote might have brought him. Spectres appear, phantoms and dreams take shape, things of the past live again as they once were. What was but an image of the brain becomes a moving or a living object. Science is now beginning to believe that under the action of a paroxysm of passion the blood rushes to the brain, and that such congestion has the terrible effects of a dream in a waking state, so averse are we to regard thought as a physical and generative force. (See _Louis Lambert_.)
Lucien saw the building in all its pristine beauty; the columns were new, slender and bright; Saint–Louis’ Palace rose before him as it had once appeared; he admired its Babylonian proportions and Oriental fancy. He took this exquisite vision as a poetic farewell from civilized creation. While making his arrangements to die, he wondered how this marvel of architecture could exist in Paris so utterly unknown. He was two Luciens—one Lucien the poet, wandering through the Middle Ages under the vaults and the turrets of Saint–Louis, the other Lucien ready for suicide.
Just as Monsieur de Granville had ended giving his instructions to the young secretary, the Governor of the Conciergerie came in, and the expression of his face was such as to give the public prosecutor a presentiment of disaster.
“Have you met Monsieur Camusot?” he asked.
“No, monsieur,” said the Governor; “his clerk Coquart instructed me to give the Abbe Carlos a private room and to liberate Monsieur de Rubempre—but it is too late.”
“Good God! what has happened?”
“Here, monsieur, is a letter for you which will explain the catastrophe. The warder on duty in the prison-yard heard a noise of breaking glass in the upper room, and Monsieur Lucien’s next neighbor shrieking wildly, for he heard the young man’s dying struggles. The warder came to me pale from the sight that met his eyes. He found the prisoner hanged from the window bar by his necktie.”
Though the Governor spoke in a low voice, a fearful scream from Madame de Serizy showed that under stress of feeling our faculties are incalculably keen. The Countess heard, or guessed. Before Monsieur de Granville could turn round, or Monsieur de Bauvan or her husband could stop her, she fled like a flash out of the door, and reached the Galerie Marchande, where she ran on to the stairs leading out to the Rue de la Barillerie.
A pleader was taking off his gown at the door of one of the shops which from time immemorial have choked up this arcade, where shoes are sold, and gowns and caps kept for hire.
The Countess asked the way to the Conciergerie.
“Go down the steps and turn to the left. The entrance is from the Quai de l’Horloge, the first archway.”
“That woman is crazy,” said the shop-woman; “some one ought to follow her.”
But no one could have kept up with Leontine; she flew.
A physician may explain how it is that these ladies of fashion, whose strength never finds employment, reveal such powers in the critical moments of life.
The Countess rushed so swiftly through the archway to the wicket-gate that the gendarme on sentry did not see her pass. She flew at the barred gate like a feather driven by the wind, and shook the iron bars with such fury that she broke the one she grasped. The bent ends were thrust into her breast, making the blood flow, and she dropped on the ground, shrieking, “Open it, open it!” in a tone that struck terror into the warders.
The gatekeepers hurried out.
“Open the gate—the public prosecutor sent me—to save the dead man!——”
While the Countess was going round by the Rue de la Barillerie and the Quai de l’Horloge, Monsieur de Granville and Monsieur de Serizy went down to the Conciergerie through the inner passages, suspecting Leontine’s purpose; but notwithstanding their haste, they only arrived in time to see her fall fainting at the outer gate, where she was picked up by two gendarmes who had come down from the guardroom.
On seeing the Governor of the prison, the gate was opened, and the Countess was carried into the office, but she stood up and fell on her knees, clasping her hands.
“Only to see him—to see him! Oh! I will do no wrong! But if you do not want to see me die on the spot, let me look at Lucien dead or living.—Ah, my dear, are you here? Choose between my death and——”
She sank in a heap.
“You are kind,” she said; “I will always love you——”
“Carry her away,” said Monsieur de Bauvan.
“No, we will go to Lucien’s cell,” said Monsieur de Granville, reading a purpose in Monsieur de Serizy’s wild looks.
And he lifted up the Countess, and took her under one arm, while Monsieur de Bauvan supported her on the other side.
“Monsieur,” said the Comte de Serizy to the Governor, “silence as of the grave about all this.”
“Be easy,” replied the Governor; “you have done the wisest thing.—If this lady——”
“She is my wife.”
“Oh! I beg your pardon. Well, she will certainly faint away when she sees the poor man, and while she is unconscious she can be taken home in a carriage.
“That is what I thought,” replied the Count. “Pray send one of your men to tell my servants in the Cour de Harlay to come round to the gate. Mine is the only carriage there.”
“We can save him yet,” said the Countess, walking on with a degree of strength and spirit that surprised her friends. “There are ways of restoring life——”
And she dragged the gentlemen along, crying to the warder:
“Come on, come faster—one second may cost three lives!”
When the cell door was opened, and the Countess saw Lucien hanging as though his clothes had been hung on a peg, she made a spring towards him as if to embrace him and cling to him; but she fell on her face on the floor with smothered shrieks and a sort of rattle in her throat.
Five minutes later she was being taken home stretched on the seat in the Count’s carriage, her husband kneeling by her side. Monsieur de Bauvan went off to fetch a doctor to give her the care she needed.
The Governor of the Conciergerie meanwhile was examining the outer gate, and saying to his clerk:
“No expense was spared; the bars are of wrought iron, they were properly tested, and cost a large sum; and yet there was a flaw in that bar.”
Monsieur de Granville on returning to his room had other instructions to give to his private secretary. Massol, happily had not yet arrived.
Soon after Monsieur de Granville had left, anxious to go to see Monsieur de Serizy, Massol came and found his ally Chargeboeuf in the public prosecutor’s Court.
“My dear fellow,” said the young secretary, “if you will do me a great favor, you will put what I dictate to you in your _Gazette_ tomorrow under the heading of Law Reports; you can compose the heading. Write now.”
And he dictated as follows:—
“It has been ascertained that the Demoiselle Esther Gobseck killed herself of her own free will.
“Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre satisfactorily proved an alibi, and his innocence leaves his arrest to be regretted, all the more because just as the examining judge had given the order for his release the young gentleman died suddenly.”
“I need not point out to you,” said the young lawyer to Massol, “how necessary it is to preserve absolute silence as to the little service requested of you.”
“Since it is you who do me the honor of so much confidence,” replied Massol, “allow me to make one observation. This paragraph will give rise to odious comments on the course of justice——”
“Justice is strong enough to bear them,” said the young attache to the Courts, with the pride of a coming magistrate trained by Monsieur de Granville.
“Allow me, my dear sir; with two sentences this difficulty may be avoided.”
And the journalist-lawyer wrote as follows:—
“The forms of the law have nothing to do with this sad event. The post-mortem examination, which was at once made, proved that sudden death was due to the rupture of an aneurism in its last stage. If Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre had been upset by his arrest, death must have ensued sooner. But we are in a position to state that, far from being distressed at being taken into custody, the young man, whom all must lament, only laughed at it, and told those who escorted him from Fontainebleau to Paris that as soon as he was brought before a magistrate his innocence would be acknowledged.”
“That saves it, I think?” said Massol.
“You are perfectly right.”
“The public prosecutor will thank you for it tomorrow,” said Massol slyly.
Now to the great majority, as to the more choice reader, it will perhaps seem that this Study is not completed by the death of Esther and of Lucien; Jacques Collin and Asie, Europe and Paccard, in spite of their villainous lives, may have been interesting enough to make their fate a matter of curiosity.
The last act of the drama will also complete the picture of life which this Study is intended to present, and give the issue of various interests which Lucien’s career had strangely tangled by bringing some ignoble personages from the hulks into contact with those of the highest rank.
Thus, as may be seen, the greatest events of life find their expression in the more or less veracious gossip of the Paris papers. And this is the case with many things of greater importance than are here recorded.
Last updated on Tue Aug 7 16:18:37 2007 for eBooks@Adelaide.