and the police, rushed the approaches of the scaffold and chapel: a
dozen strong arms lifted Hélène Gillet and carried her, insensible, to
the shop of Maître Jacquin, the barber-surgeon.
“The crowd of people which flung itself on the chapel-door would soon
have forced it. But the two Capuchin brothers and the two Jesuit
fathers opened it, being terrified. And holding up their crosses with
outstretched arm, they made a way with great difficulty through the
riot.
“The headsman and his wife were stoned, and struck down with hammers,
and their bodies dragged through the streets. Hélène Gillet, however,
recovering consciousness at the surgeon’s, asked to drink. Then, while
Maître Jacquin was dressing her wound, she said:
“‘Shall I not have anything more to suffer?’
“It was found that she had suffered two blows with the sword, six
cuts from the shears, which had slashed her lips and throat, and that
her loins had been deeply cut by the sword, over which the headswoman
dragged her while trying to strangle her; and finally that her whole
body was bruised by the stones the crowd had thrown on the scaffold.
“Nevertheless she was healed of all her wounds. Left in the hands of
Jacquin the surgeon, under guard of a sheriff’s officer, she asked
continually:
“‘Is it not over? Will they kill me?’
“The surgeon, and some charitable people who stood by her, were urgent
in reassuring her. But only the king could grant her her life. Févret,
the advocate, drew up a petition which was signed by many notables of
Dijon, and carried to his Majesty. Festivities were being held at the
court at that moment on account of the marriage of Henrietta-Maria of
France with the King of England. On the score of this marriage, Louis
the Just granted the favour asked.
“He gave a full pardon to the poor girl, deeming, as the letters of
remission said, that she had suffered tortures which equalled, nay even
surpassed, the penalty of her sentence.
“Hélène Gillet, restored to life, withdrew into a convent at Brest
where she practised up to the time of her death, the strictest piety.
Such,” said the little official, “is the true history of Hélène Gillet,
as every one in Dijon knows. Do you not find it entertaining, Monsieur
l’Abbé?”
XX
JUSTICE (_continued_)
“Alas!” said my good master, “I cannot stomach my food. My heart
is as sick at this horrible scene, which you have described so
cold-bloodedly, sir, as at the sight of this servant of Madame Josse’s
whom they are taking to be hanged, when something better might be made
of her.”
“But, Monsieur,” retorted the beadle, “have I not told you that this
girl has stolen from her mistress; and do you not wish thieves to be
hanged?”
“Certainly,” said my good master, “it is customary; and as the force of
custom is irresistible, I pay no attention to it in my ordinary course
of life. In the same way Seneca, the philosopher, who nevertheless
inclined to mildness, put together treatises of consummate elegance,
even while near to him, at Rome, slaves were crucified for the
smallest fault, as we see in the case of the slave Mithridates, who
died, his hands nailed to the cross; merely guilty of having blasphemed
the divinity of his master, the infamous Trimalchio. We are so made
that nothing usual or customary either troubles or wounds us. And
habit wears away, if I may say so, our indignation as well as our
astonishment. I wake up every morning without thinking, I own, of the
unhappy beings who are to be hanged or broken upon the wheel during the
day. But when the thought of torture becomes more perceptible to me my
heart is troubled, and the sight of this handsome girl led to her death
contracts my throat to the point of refusing passage to this little
fish.”
“What is a handsome girl?” said the beadle. “There is not a street in
Paris where they don’t make them by the dozen every night. Why did this
one steal from her mistress, Madame Josse?”
“I know nothing of that, Monsieur,” gravely answered my good master,
“you know nothing, and the judges who condemned her knew no more, for
the reasons of our actions are obscure, and their springs remain deeply
hidden. I hold man free as regards his deeds, as my religion teaches
me to believe, but beyond the doctrine of the Church, which is sure,
there is so little ground for believing in the freedom of mankind, that
I tremble when I think of decrees of justice punishing actions whose
mainspring, sequence, and causes, all equally escape us, where the will
plays often but a small part, and which are sometimes accomplished
without consciousness. If, finally, we are responsible for our acts,
since the system of our holy religion is founded on the mysterious
accord between human free-will and divine grace, it is an error to
deduce from this obscure and delicate liberty all the troubles, all the
tortures, and all the suffering of which our laws are prodigal.”
“I perceive with sorrow, Monsieur,” said the dingy little man, “that
you are on the side of the rogues.”
“Alas! Monsieur,” said my good master, “they are part of suffering
humanity, and members like ourselves of Jesus Christ who died between
two thieves. I seem to perceive cruelties in our laws which will appear
more distinctly in the future, and over which our posterity will wax
indignant.”
“I do not agree with you, Monsieur,” said the other, drinking a little
gulp of wine. “All the gothic barbarity has been pared away from
our laws and customs, and justice is to-day restrained and humane
to excess. Punishment is exactly proportioned to crime, and you see
thieves hanged, murderers broken on the wheel, traitors torn by four
horses, atheists, sorcerers, and sodomites burnt, coiners boiled alive;
in all which criminal law exhibits extreme moderation and all possible
mildness.”
“Monsieur, in all times judges have believed themselves to be
benevolent, equitable, and gentle. In the gothic ages of St. Louis, and
even of Charlemagne, they admired their own benignity, which appears to
us to-day as savage. I divine that, in their turn, our sons will judge
us as savage, and that they will find still something more to pare away
from the tortures and punishments which we inflict.”
“Monsieur, you are not speaking as a magistrate. Torture is necessary
to extract confessions unobtainable by gentle means. As to punishments,
they are reduced to what is necessary to assure safety of their life
and goods to citizens.”
“You acknowledge then, Monsieur, that justice has for its object not
what is just, but what is useful, and that it is inspired only by the
interests and prejudices of peoples. Nothing is more true, and faults
are punished not in proportion to the malice attached to them, but
in view of the harm they cause, or which it is believed they cause,
to society in general. Thus, coiners are put into a copper of boiling
water, although, in reality, there is little malice in striking false
coins. But the public, and financiers in particular, suffer a marked
damage therefrom. It is this loss for which they avenge themselves with
pitiless cruelty. Thieves are hanged, less for the perversity that
lies in taking bread, and clothes, which is, by the way, excessively
small, than for the reason of the natural attachment men have for their
possessions. It is expedient to restore human justice to its true
reason—which is the material interest of men, and to disengage it from
all high philosophy—with which it pompously and hypocritically veils
itself.”
“Monsieur,” replied the little official, “I do not understand you. It
appears to me that justice is the more equitable the more useful it is,
and this usefulness itself, which makes you disdain it, ought to render
it august and sacred to you.”
“You do not understand me,” said my good master.
“Monsieur,” said the little official, “I notice that you are drinking
nothing. Your wine is good if I may judge by the colour of it. May I
not taste it?”
It is true that for the first time in his life my good master had left
some wine at the bottom of the bottle. He poured it into the little
official’s glass.
“Your health, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said the beadle. “Your wine is good,
but your arguments are worthless. Justice, I repeat, is the more
equitable the more useful it is, and this usefulness itself, which, you
say, is in its origin and foundation, should make it appear to you as
august and sacred. But you must acknowledge that the essence of justice
is to be _just_, as the word implies?”
“Monsieur,” said my good master, “when we have called beauty beautiful,
truth true, and justice just, we shall have said nothing at all. Your
Ulpian, who spoke with precision, asserted that justice is the firm
and perpetual desire to attribute to each what belongs to him, and
that laws are just when they sanction this desire. The misfortune
is, that men have nothing of their own, and thus the equity of law
does but guarantee to them the fruit of their inherited, or recent,
rapine. They resemble those childish agreements wherein after having
won some marbles, the winners say to those who wish to win them back
again, ‘That is not fair play.’ The sagacity of judges limits itself to
differentiating between usurpations which are not fair play and those
which were agreed upon in starting, and this distinction is equally
childish and thin. Above all, it is arbitrary. The strapping young
woman who at this very moment is hanging at the end of a hempen rope,
had stolen, you say, a lace head-dress from Councillor Josse’s wife.
But on what do you found your belief that this head-dress belonged
to Councillor Josse’s wife? You will tell me that she bought it with
her own money, or found it in her wedding-chest, or received it from
some lover—all good ways of acquiring lace. But however she may have
acquired it I merely see that she had the enjoyment of it, as one of
those gifts of fortune one finds, or loses perchance, and over which
one has no natural right. Nevertheless, I own that the lappets belonged
to her conformably to the rules of this game of possession, which
human society can play as children play at hop-scotch. She valued her
lappets, and in fact she had no less right to them than any other. Well
and good. It was justice to return them to her, but without putting
such a high price on them that for two wretched lappets of _point
d’Alençon_ a human creature should be destroyed.”
“Monsieur,” said the little official, “you keep in view but one side of
the justice of the matter. It was not enough to do right by Councillor
Josse’s wife by giving her back her lappets. It was necessary also to
do right by the servant in hanging her by the neck. For justice is to
render to each what is due to him. In which lies its majesty.”
“In that case,” said my good master, “justice is wickeder even than
I thought. This belief that she owes punishment to the guilty is
ferocious in the extreme. It is gothic barbarity.”
“Monsieur,” said the little official, “you misunderstand justice.
Justice strikes without anger, and it has no hatred for this girl it
sends to the gallows.”
“A good thing, too,” said my good master. “But I should prefer that
judges confess that they punish the guilty from pure necessity, and
only to make impressive examples. In that case they would merely hold
by what was actually necessary. But if they think, in punishing, to
give the guilty his due, one sees to what this delicate discrimination
will lead them, and their probity itself will make them inexorable;
for one knows not how to refuse people what is due to them. This maxim
horrifies me, Monsieur. It was laid down with the greatest severity
by an able philosopher of the name of Menardus, who pretends that to
fail to punish an ill-doer is to do him wrong, and wickedly to deprive
him of the right to expiate his fault. He held that the Athenian
magistrates had done excellently well by Socrates the sage, and that
they worked for the purification of his soul when they made him drink
the hemlock. But those are odious thoughts. I ask that criminal justice
should tend less to the sublime. The notion of pure revenge attached
more commonly to the punishment of malefactors, although base and bad
in itself, is less terrible in its consequences than the overweening
virtue of ingenuous philosophers. I knew in former days, in Séez, a
jovial and good sort of fellow, who took his children on his knee every
evening and told them tales. He led an exemplary life, went to the
sacraments, and prided himself on his scrupulous honesty in the corn
business he had carried on for more than sixty years. Now he happened
to be robbed by his servant of some doubloons, ducats, rose-nobles, and
some fine gold coins, which he, curious of such things, kept in a case
at the back of a drawer. As soon as he discovered this loss he carried
complaint to the police, whereupon the maidservant was questioned,
tried, condemned, and executed. The good man, who knew his rights,
exacted that the skin of the thief should be given to him, of which he
made a pair of pantaloons; and he would often smack his thigh and cry,
‘The hussy! the hussy!’ The girl had taken his gold pieces, he had
taken her skin; anyway he had his unphilosophical revenge in all the
simplicity of his rustic savagery. He had no notion of fulfilling a
lofty duty when he slapped his hand light-heartedly on his garment of
human skin. Better is it to acknowledge that if one hangs a thief it
is for prudence’ sake, and with the object of frightening the others
by his example, and not at all on the philosophical plea for the sake
of giving each man his due. For in true philosophy nothing belongs to
anyone if we except life itself. To pretend that we owe expiation to
criminals is to fall into mysticism of a ferocious description, worse
than naked violence and open anger. As to the punishment of thieves,
it is a right which has its origin in force, not in philosophy.
Philosophy teaches us, on the contrary, that all we possess is acquired
by violence or by cunning. And you see also that judges approve of our
being deprived of our possessions if the ravisher be powerful enough.
Thus it is permitted to the king to take our silver-plate to make war,
as was seen under Louis the Great, when the requisition was so exacting
that they even took away the fringe of the bed-hangings, to use the
gold woven with the silk. This prince put his hand on the goods of
individuals and on the treasures of the Church, and twenty years ago,
performing my devotions in Notre-Dame-de-Liesse in Picardy, I heard the
complaints of an old verger, who deplored that the late king had taken
away and melted down all the treasures of the church, and ravished even
the jewelled breast of gold, placed there some time before in great
pomp by the Princess Palatine, after she had been miraculously cured of
cancer. Justice seconded the prince in his requisition, and punished
severely those who hid away any article from the king’s commissaries.
Evidently she did not think that these things belonged so peculiarly to
their possessors that nothing could separate them.”
“Monsieur,” said the little official, “the commissaries acted in the
name of the king, who, possessing everything in the kingdom, can
dispose of it to his liking, either for war, or for naval armaments, or
in any other way.”
“That is true,” said my good master, “and that is one of the rules
of the game. The judges go about it as in the game of ‘goose,’
following one another and looking at what is written in the rules. The
sovereign’s rights, upheld by the Swiss Guard, and by all sorts of
soldiers, are written there. And this poor girl, who has been hanged,
had no Swiss Guard to inscribe in the rules of the game that she had
the right to wear Madame Josse’s lace. That is just how it is.”
“Monsieur,” said the little official, “I hope you do not liken Louis
the Great, who took his subjects’ plate to pay his soldiers, to this
creature who stole a head-dress to deck herself.”
“Monsieur,” said my good master, “it is less innocent to make war than
to go to Ramponneau’s in a lace head-dress. But justice gives to every
one what is his, according to the rules of this game played by man,
which is the wickedest, the most absurd, and the least amusing of all
games. And ’tis our misfortune that every man is obliged to take a hand
in it.”
“It is necessary,” said the little official.
“Laws are also of use,” said my good master. “But they are not just and
can never be so, for the judge assures to his fellow men the enjoyment
of the goods that belong to them, without distinction between the
beneficial and the hurtful: this distinction is not found in the rules
of the game, but in the book of Divine justice only, wherein no one may
read. Do you know the story of the angel and the anchorite? An angel
came down to earth with the face of a man and the dress of a pilgrim;
making his way through Egypt. He knocked, at eventide, at the door of
a good anchorite, who, taking him for a traveller, gave him supper, and
wine from a golden cup. Then he made him lie down on his bed whilst he
laid himself on the ground on some handfuls of maize-straw. While he
slept his celestial guest rose up, took the cup out of which he had
drunk, and, hiding it under his cloak, fled away. He acted thus, not
meaning any ill-will towards the good hermit, but, on the contrary, in
the interest of the host who had given him such a charitable welcome.
For he knew that this cup would have been the undoing of the holy man,
who had put his heart into its keeping, whereas God desires us to love
none but Him and does not brook that a man, devoted to religion, should
attach himself to the things of this world. The angel who had his share
of Divine wisdom, distinguished between goods that are good and goods
that are not. Judges do not make this distinction. Who knows but what
Madame Josse may not lose her soul along with the lappets of lace her
servant took, and which the judges have given back?”
“In the meanwhile,” said the little official, rubbing his hands, “there
is now a hussy the less in this world.”
He shook the crumbs from his coat, bowed to those present, and went off
jauntily.
XXI
JUSTICE (_continued_)
My good master, turning to me, continued in this manner:
“I only related the story of the angel and the hermit to show the abyss
which separates the temporal from the spiritual. Now it is only in
things temporal that human justice is exercised, and it is on a low
plane where high principles are not in favour. The cruellest offence
that could be possibly be done our Lord Jesus Christ is to place His
image in the courts of law, where judges pardon Pharisees who crucified
Him, and condemn the Magdalene whom He raised up with His Divine hands.
What does He—the Just One—among these men, who are unable to show
themselves just, even should they wish to, because their melancholy
duty is to consider the actions of their fellows, not for what they
are in their essence, but merely from the point of view of the social
interest; that is to say, on account of this mass of egoism, avarice,
error, and abuse which go to the making of cities, and of which they
are the purblind guardians. In weighing a fault they add to it the
weight of fear or anger it inspired in the cowardly public. And all
this is written in their book in such wise that the ancient reading and
dead letter stand in the stead of intelligence, heart, and a living
soul. And all these regulations, some of which go back to the infamous
time of Byzantium and Theodora, agree on this one point only, that all
must be perpetuated—virtues and vices alike, in a society which has no
desire for change. A fault, in itself, is of so little account in the
eyes of the law, and the surrounding circumstances are so considerable,
that the selfsame act allowable in one case becomes unpardonable in
another, as is shown in the instance of a slap in the face, which,
given by one man to another appears simply, in the case of a bourgeois,
the effect of an irascible temper, but, for a soldier, becomes a crime
punishable by death. This barbarity, which still exists, will be our
shame in centuries to come. We reck little of it, but one day they will
ask each other what sort of savages we can have been to send a man
to his death for a generous warmth of blood springing from his heart
when he is bound by law to suffer the perils of war and the miseries
of barrack-life. And it is clear that, if there were such a thing as
justice, we should not have two codes, one military, the other civil.
This military justice, whose results one sees daily, is atrociously
cruel; and men, if they ever establish law and order, will never
believe that formerly, in times of peace, courts-martial avenged the
majesty of corporals and sergeants by the death of a man. They will not
believe that unfortunate beings were ordered to be shot for the crime
of desertion before the enemy, in an expedition where the government of
France itself did not recognise a state of war. What is to be wondered
at is that such atrocities are committed by Christian people who do
honour to St. Sebastian, a mutinous soldier; and to those martyrs
of the Theban legion, whose sole glory is having, in a former age,
incurred the severity of courts-martial in refusing to fight against
the Bagaudes. But enough of this, let us talk no more of the justice of
these gentlemen of the sword, who will perish one day according to the
prophecy of the Son of God; let us return to our civil magistrates.
“Judges search not the reins, neither do they read the heart of man,
and their justest justice is rude and superficial. All the more then
must they cling to this coarse skin of the law on which the codes
are inscribed. They are men—that is to say weak and corruptible,
gentle to the strong, and pitiless to the weak. They sanction,
by their judgments, the cruellest social iniquities, and it is
difficult to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their
personal baseness from what is imposed on them by their duty to their
profession; which duty is, in reality, to uphold the State in what is
evil as well as in what is good; to see that public morality remains
unaltered, whether excellent or detestable; and to assure the rights
of citizens along with the tyrannical desires of the prince, to say
nothing of the ridiculous and cruel superstitions which find an
inviolable shelter under the lilies of France.
“The most austere magistrate may be brought, by his integrity itself,
to decrees as revolting, and perhaps even more inhuman, than those of
one who fails in his duty, and I do not know myself, which of the two
I should dread the most, the judge who has made a soul for himself out
of the text of the law, or he who makes use of a remnant of sentiment
to twist the text. The one would sacrifice me to his interests or his
passions, the other would immolate me coldly for the written word.
“Again, we must notice that the magistrate is the defender, through
his office, not of new prejudices to which we are all more or less
submissive, but of old prejudices which are preserved in our laws while
they are fading from our minds and our manners. And there is no one of
a thinking and liberal turn of mind who does not feel how much of the
barbarous there is in law, whereas the judge has not the right to feel
this.
“But I am speaking as if laws, clumsy and barbarous as they are, were
at least clear and precise. But much is necessary for them to become
so. The ‘gramarye’ of a wizard would be easy to understand compared
with many of the articles in our codes and case-law. This difficulty of
interpretation has greatly contributed to the establishing of divers
degrees of jurisdiction, and we admit that what the manorial court
has not understood the Parliamentary gentlemen will make clear. It is
expecting a great deal from five men in red robes and square caps,
who even after having recited the _Veni Creator_ are still subject to
error; and it is better to acknowledge that the highest court judges
without further appeal, for the sole reason, that the others were
exhausted before recourse was had to this. The prince is himself of
this opinion, for he has a judgment-seat[16] above the Parliament.”
FOOTNOTES:
[16] The institution styled _lit de justice_, bed of justice.
XXII
JUSTICE (_concluded_)
My good master looked sorrowfully at the flowing water, an image of
this life, where all things pass and nothing changes. He pondered for
some time and then continued in a low voice: