PYRAMUS AND THISBE.
I was taking exercise one forenoon in the yard of the prison. It was
the last black “Prairial” of the “Terror”--the month, like the girl La
Lune, once dedicate to Mary--and its blue eyes curiously scrutinised,
as Cleopatra’s of old, the processes amongst us slaves of that poison
that is called despair.
As for myself, I yet a little consorted with Hope--the fond clinging
mistress I had dreaded to find banished with the rest of the dear
creatures whose company had long now been denied us;--for five months
had passed since my incarceration, and I was still, it seemed,
forgotten.
I trod the flags--fifty paces hither and thither. Going one way, I had
always before my eyes the frowzy stone rampart and barred windows of
the prison. Going the other, an execrable statue of M.
Rousseau--surmounting an altar to Liberty, the very cement of which
was marbled with the blood of the massacres--closed my perspective. To
my either hand was a lofty wall--the first giving upon the jailers’
quarters; the second dividing the men’s yard from that in which the
women were permitted to walk; and a foul open sewer, tunnelled through
the latter about its middle, traversed the entire area, and offered
the only means by which the sexes could now communicate with each
other.
“M. Thibaut,” said a voice at my ear; and a gentleman, detaching
himself from the aimless and loitering crowd of prisoners, adapted his
pace to mine and went with me to and fro.
I knew this oddity--M. the Admiral de St Prest--though he had no
recognition of me. That, however, was small wonder. By this time I was
worse than a _sans-culotte_, by so much as that my bareness was
suggested rather than revealed. My face was sunk away from my eyes,
like soft limestone from a couple of ammonites; my ribs were loose
hoops on a decayed cask; laughter rattled in my stomach like a pea in
a whistle. Besides, I had come, I think, to be a little jealous of my
title to neglect, for I had made that my grievance against Fate.
Nevertheless, M. de St Prest and I had been slightly acquainted once
upon a time, and it had grieved me to see this red month marked by the
advent in La Force of the dubious old fop.
He had been a macaroni of Louis XV.’s Court, and the ancient _rôle_
he had never learnt to forego. The poor puppies of circumstance--the
fops of a more recent date, to whom the particular cut of a lapel
would figure as the standard of reason--bayed him in the prison as
they would have bayed him in the streets. To them, with their high
top-boots _à l’Anglaise_, poor St Prest’s spotted breeches and
knee-ribbons were a source of profound amusement. To them, affecting
the huskiness of speech of certain rude islanders (my very good
friends), his mincing falsetto was a perpetual incitement to laughter.
Swaggering with their cudgels that they called “constitutions,” they
would strike from under him the elaborate tasselled staff on which he
leaned; tossing their matted manes, they would profess to find
something exquisitely exhilarating in the complicated _toupet_ that
embraced and belittled his lean physiognomy. I held them all poor
apes; yet, I confess, it was a ridiculous and pathetic sight, this
posturing of an old wrecked man in the tatters of a bygone generation;
and it gave me shame to see him lift his plate of a hat to me with a
little stick, as the fashion was in his younger days.
“M. Thibaut,” he said, falling into step with me, “these young bloods”
(he signified with his cane a group that had been baiting him)--“they
worry me, monsieur. _Mort de ma vie!_ what manners! what a presence!
It shall need a butcher’s steel to bring their wits to an edge.”
“Oh, monsieur,” said I--“have you not the self-confidence to despise
personalities? The fool hath but a narrow world of conventions, and
everything outside it is to him abnormal. His head is a drumstick to
produce hollow sounds within a blank little area. For my part, I never
hear one holding the great up to ridicule without thinking, There is
wasted a good stone-cutter of epitaphs.”
“_Eh bien_, monsieur! but I have been accustomed to leave the study of
philosophy to my lackeys.”
He spoke in a lofty manner, waving his hand at me; and he took snuff
from a battered wooden box, and flipped his fingers to his thumb
afterwards as if he were scattering largesse of fragrance.
“So, you have a royal contempt of personalities?” he said, with a
little amused tolerance.
“Why,” said I--“I am not to be put out of conceit with myself because
an ass brays at me.”
“Or out of countenance, monsieur?”
“Oh, M. de St Prest! That would be to lose my head on small
provocation. Besides, one must admit the point of view. M. Malseigne
there surveys the world over the edge of a great stock; you, monsieur,
regard it with your chin propped upon a fine fichu. No doubt Sanson
thinks a wooden cravat _comme il faut_; and I--_fichtre!_ I cry in my
character of patriot, ‘There is nothing like the collar of a
carmagnole to keep one’s neck in place!’ Truly, M. l’Amiral, I for one
am not touchy about my appearance.”
His old eyes blinked out a diluted irony.
“And that is very natural,” he said; “but then, _mort de ma vie!_ you
are a philosopher--like him there.”
He pointed to the statue of Rousseau. The libellous block wrought in
him, it seemed, a mood of piping retrospection.
“I saw the rascal once,” he said--“a mean, common little man, in a
round wig. He was without air or presence. It was at the theatre. The
piece was one of M. de Sauvigny’s, and he sat in the author’s box, a
_loge grillée_. That was a concession to his diffidence; but his
diffidence had been too much consulted, it seemed. He would have the
grate opened, and then the house recognised and applauded him, and
finally forgot him for the _Persiffleur_. He was very angry at that,
I believe. We heard it lost the author his friendship. He accused him
of having made a show of him, and--_Mort de ma vie!_ that is to be a
philosopher.”
He ogled and bowed to a stout kindly-looking woman who, coming from
the jailers’ quarters, passed us at the moment. It was Madame Beau,
the keeper of La Force--the only one there in authority whose sense of
humanity had not gone by the board. A ruffianly warder, leading a
great wolf-hound, preceded her. She nodded to us brightly and
stopped--
“Ah, M. Thibaut! but soon we shall call you the father of La Force.”
“As you are its mother, madame.”
“Poor children. But, after all, if one considers it as a club----”
“True; where one may feast like Belshazzar. Yet, I find, one may have
a surfeit of putrid herrings, even though one is to die on the
morrow.”
Madame shrugged her shoulders.
“Ah, bah! the stuff is supplied by contract. I am not to blame, my
little fellows. Yet some of you manage better.” (She pointed to the
retreating hound.) “_Voilà le délinquent!_ He was caught
red-handed--discussing the bribe of a sheep’s trotter; and his
sentence is five hours in a cell.”
She nodded again and jingled her keys.
“But, yes,” she said, “consider it as a club----” and off she went
across the yard.
“A club? Oh, _mon Dieu_!” murmured St Prest.
“Well,” said I, “I am inclined to fall in with the idea. What livelier
places of sojourn are there, in these days of gravity and decorum,
than the prisons?”
He pursed his lips and wagged his old head like a mandarin.
“At least,” he said, leeringly, “she is a fine figure of a woman. She
dates, like myself, from the era of the _Bien-aimé_, when women knew
how to walk and to hold themselves; and to reveal themselves, too.
_Oh, je m’entends bien!_ I have been entertained in the _Parc aux
cerfs_, M. Thibaut.”
I could certainly believe it. This effete old carpet-admiral? Had he
ever smelt salt water? I could understand, perhaps, that he had
crossed in the packet to the land of fogs. But now he was to exhibit
himself to me in a more honourable aspect--to confess the man under
the powder and the rubbish.
We stood close by where the wall was pierced by the running sewer. The
whole yard was alive with laughter and babble; and now and again one
would leave a friend or party of triflers and, kneeling down over the
infected sink, would call some name through the opening. Then,
summoned to the other side, Lucille, poor _ange déchu_, would
exchange a few earnest pitiful words with husband or brother or lover,
and her tears, perhaps, would fall into the gushing drain and sanctify
its abomination to him. Was not that for love to justify itself in the
eyes of the most unnatural misogynist?
Now there came up to the trap a pale little fellow--the merest child.
It was little Foucaud, the son of Madame Kolly. This poor lad must be
held a man (God save him!) when misfortune overtook his family; but
the scoundrels had the grace to consign his younger brother to the
company of his mother on the woman’s side. And here, through this sink
opening, the two babes would converse in their sad little trebles two
or three times a-day.
“How now, my man?” said St Prest; for the boy stood wistfully watching
us, his hands picking together and his throat swelling. Then all at
once he was weeping.
The old fop gently patted the heaving shoulders.
“Oh, monsieur,” said the youngster, in a hoarse little voice, “the
cold of the stones is in my throat and on my chest.”
“What then, child! That is not to be guillotined.”
“But I cannot cry out so that he shall hear me; and if we do not talk
I know nothing.”
In a paroxysm of agitation he threw himself down by the sewer.
“Lolo, Lolo!” he tried to call; but his voice would not obey his will.
And then M. de St Prest did a thing, the self-sacrificing quality of
which shall be known in full, perhaps, only to the angels. He took the
lad under the arms and, lifting him away, himself knelt down in all
his nicety by the sink and put his mouth to the opening.
“The little Foucaud,” he piped, “desires to see his brother!”
Presently he looked up.
“He is here, child.”
“Oh, monsieur! will you explain that I cannot speak, and ask him how
is _maman_?”
The message was given. I heard the poor little voice answer through
the wall: “_Maman_ sends her love to you. She has not wept so much the
last night, and she has been sleeping a little. It is Lolo, who loves
you well, that tells you this.”
I assisted St Prest to rise.
“I will ask the honour,” I said, “of dusting M. l’Amiral’s coat for
him.”
* * * * * * *
That same afternoon, as I was again, during the hour of exercise,
standing near the sewer, of a sudden I heard a most heartrending voice
calling from the other side of the wall.
“Messieurs! messieurs!” it cried. “Will no one send to me my darling?”
I dropped upon my knees (I give all honour to M. de St Prest), and,
with a shudder of nausea, lowered my face to the opening.
“Who speaks?” I said. “I am at madame’s service.”
The voice caught in a sob.
“_Je vous rends grâce_--whoever you are, I thank you from my heart.
It is my little Foucaud, my dearest, that must come to his _maman_,
and quickly.”
I answered that I would summon him, and I rose to my feet. I had no
difficulty in finding the boy. He came, white-faced and wondering, and
knelt down.
“_Maman, maman_--canst thou hear me? My throat is a little hoarse,
_maman_.”
“Oh, my baby, my little son! Thou wilt be sweet and tender with Lolo
in the happy days that are coming. And thou wilt never forget
_maman_--say it, say it, lest her heart should break.”
God of mercy! Who was I to stand and listen to these pitiful
confidences! I drew aside, watchful only of the boy lest his grief and
terror should drive him mad. In a moment a white hand, laden with a
dark thick coil of hair, was thrust through the opening. It was all
the unhappy woman could leave her darling to remember her by. No
glimpse of her face--no touch of her lips on his. From the dark into
the dark she must go, and his very memory of her should be associated
with the most dreadful period of his life. When they came for her in
another instant, I heard the agony of her soul find vent in a single
cry: “My lambs, alone amongst the wolves!”
Kind Madame Beau was there beside me.
“Lift him up,” she whispered. “He will be motherless in an hour.”
As I stooped to take the sobbing and hysterical child in my arms, I
heard a voice speak low on the other side of the wall--
“It is only an interruption, madame.”
Gardel’s words--but the speaker!
I stumbled with my burden--recovered myself, and consigned the boy to
the good soul that awaited him. Then hurriedly I leaned down again,
and hurriedly cried, “Carinne! Carinne!”
* * * * * * *
There was no answer. Probably the speaker had retreated when the
wretched Madame Kolly was withdrawn from the wall. I called again. I
dwelt over the noxious gutter in excitement and anguish until I was
convinced it was useless to remain. Was it this, then? that out of all
the voices of France one voice could set my heart vibrating like a
glass vessel that responds only to the striking of its single
sympathetic note? I had thought to depose this idol of an hour from
its shrine; I had cried shame upon myself for ever submitting my
independence to the tyranny of a woman, and here a half-dozen words
from her addressed to a stranger had reinfected me with the fever of
desire.
I got out a scrap of paper and wrote thereon, “_Jacob to Rachel.
Jean-Louis is still in the service of Mademoiselle de Lâge._”
I found a fragment of stick, notched the paper into the end of it, and
gingerly passed my billet through the hole in the wall. On the instant
a great voice uttered a malediction behind me, and I was jerked
roughly down upon the flags. My end of the stick dropped into the
gutter and wedged itself in slime. I looked up. Above me were Cabochon
and a yellow-faced rascal. This last wore a sword by his side and on
his head a high-crowned hat stuffed with plumes. I had seen him
before--Maillard, l’Abbaye Maillard, a hound with a keen enough scent
for blood to make himself a lusty living. He and his colleague Héron
would often come to La Force to count their victims before following
them to the scaffold.
“Plots--plots!” he muttered, shaking his head tolerantly, as if he
were rebuking a child. “See to it, Citizen Cabochon.”
The jailer fetched back the stick. The paper, however, was gone from
the end of it.
“It will be in the sewer,” said Maillard, quietly.
Cabochon had no scruples. He groped with his fingers.
“It is not here,” he said after a time, eyeing me and very malignant.
“Well,” said the other, “who is this fellow?”
“_Mordi_, Citizen President; he is a forgotten jackass that eats his
head off in the revolutionary stable.”
“_Vraiment?_ Then, it follows, his head must fall into the
revolutionary manger.”
He nodded pleasantly twice or thrice; then turned and, beckoning
Cabochon to walk by him, strode away.
I sat in particular cogitation against the wall. For the present, it
seemed, I enjoyed a distinction that was not attractive to my
fellow-prisoners; and I was left religiously to myself.
“Now,” said I aloud, “I have grown such a beard that at last the
national barber must take me in hand.”
“M. Jean-Louis,” said a voice the other side of the trap, “will you
keep me kneeling here for ever?”
I started and flung myself face downwards with a cry of joy. My heart
swelled in a moment so that it drove the tears up to my eyes.
“Carinne!” I cried, choking and half-sobbing; “is it thou indeed?”
“Creep through the little hole,” she said, “and thou shalt see.”
I laughed and I cried in a single breath.
“Say what thou wilt, _ma fillette_. Yes, I will call thee as I choose.
Didst thou hear but now? I think it is a dying man that speaks to
thee. Carinne, say after all you keep a place in your heart for the
little odd Thibaut.”
“Insidious! thou wouldst seek to devour the whole, like a little worm
in a gall.”
“To hear your voice again! We are always shadows to one another now.
As a shadow I swear that I love you dearly. Oh, _ma mie, ma mie_, I
love you so dearly. And why were you cruel to leave me for that small
gust of temper I soon repented of? Carinne! My God! she is gone away!”
“I am here, little Thibaut.”
“There is a sound in your voice. Oh, this savage unyielding wall! I
will kiss it a foot above the trap. Will you do the same on the other
side?”
“Monsieur forgets himself, I think.”
“He is light-headed with joy. But he never forgets Mademoiselle de
Lâge--not though she punished him grievously for an indifferent
offence in the forests of Chalus.”
“Jean-Louis, listen well to this: I was abducted.”
“My God! by whom?”
“By a vile citizen Representative journeying to Paris.”
“By a----”
“I had emerged from the trees after you left me, and was sitting very
passionate by the road, when he passed with his escort and discovered
me.”
I kneeled voiceless as if I were stunned.
“What would you!” said Carinne. “There was no Thibaut at hand to throw
him to the pigs. He forced me to go with him, and----”
I vented a groan that quite rumbled in the gutter; and at that her
voice came through the hole a little changed--
“Monsieur has a delicate faith in what he professes to love.”
I beat my hands on the wall. I cried upon Heaven in my agony to let me
reach through this inexorable veil of stone.
“You talked once of the wicked licence of the times. How could I know,
oh, _ma mie_! And now all my heart is melting with love and rapture.”
“But I had a knife, Jean-Louis. Well, but he was courteous to me; and
at that I told him who I was--no jill-flirt, but an unhappy waif of
fortune. Now, _mon Dieu_!--it turned out that this was the very man
that had come _en mission_ to Pierrettes.”
“Lacombe?”
“No--a creature of the name of Crépin----”
I uttered a cry.
“Crépin! It was he that carried thee away?”
“Truly; and who has, for my obduracy, consigned me to prison. Ever
since, little Thibaut, ever since--now at Les Carmes; now in the Rue
de Sèvres; at last, no later than yesterday, to this ‘extraordinary
question’ of La Force.”
“Now thou art a sweet-souled Carinne! Send me something of thine
through the evil passage that I may mumble it with my lips. Carinne,
listen,”--and I told her the story of my connection with the villain.
“I would wring his neck if they would spare mine,” I said. “But, alas!
I fear I am doomed, Carinne.”
She had from me all the details in brief of my captivity. _Mon Dieu!_
but it was ecstasy this dessert to my long feast of neglect. At the
end she was silent a space; then she said very low--
“He communicates with me; but I never answer. Now I will do so, and
perhaps thou shalt not die.”
“Carinne.”
“Hush, thou small citizen! The time is up; we must talk no longer.”
I breathed all my heart out in a sigh of farewell. I thought she had
already gone, when suddenly she spoke again--
“Jean-Louis, Jean-Louis, do you hear?”
“Yes.”
“I would have thee just the height for thine eyes to look into mine.”
“Carinne? And what should they read there?”
Again there was a pause, again I thought she had gone; and then once
more her voice came to me--
“Little Thibaut, I _did_ kiss the wall a foot above the trap.”
* * * * * * *
“Madame Beau,” said I, “when you shall be nearing old age--that is to
say, when your present years double themselves--it is very certain
that your lines will fall in pleasant places.”
“And where will they be?” said she.
“Where, but round your fine eyes and the dimples of your mouth!”
She cried, “_Oh, qu’il est malin!_” and tapped my shoulder archly with
a great key she held in her hand.
“And what is the favour you design to ask of me?” she said.
“Firstly your permission to me to dedicate some verses to you,” said
I. “After that, that you will procure me the immediate delivery of
this little tube of paper.”
“To whom is it addressed?”
“To one Crépin, who lives in the Rue de Jouy, St Antoine.”
“_Croyez m’en!_” she cried. “Do you not see I have dropped my key?”
Then, as I stooped to pick up the instrument which she had let fall on
the pavement, “Slip the little paper into the barrel!” she muttered.
I did so; and these were the words I had written on it:--
“_I am imprisoned in La Force for any reason or none. It concerns me
only in that I am thereby debarred from vindicating upon your body the
honour of Mademoiselle de Lâge. If it gives you any shame to hear
that towards this victim of your base persecution, I, your one-time
comrade, entertain and have long entertained sentiments of the most
profound regard, prevail with yourself, I beseech you, to procure the
enlargement of a lady whose only crimes--as things are judged
nowadays--are her innocence and her beauty._
“_Jean-Louis Thibaut_.”
* * * * * * *
Of all the degradations to which we in the prison were subjected, none
equalled that that was a common condition of our nightly herding.
Then--so early as eight o’clock during the darker months--would appear
the foul Cabochon--with his satellites and three or four brace of
hounds--to drive us like cattle to our sleeping-pens. Bayed into the
corridors, from which our cells opened, we must answer to our names
bawled out by a crapulous turnkey, who held in his jerking hands, and
consulted with his clouded eyes, a list that at his soberest he could
only half decipher. He calls a name--probably of one that has already
paid the penalty. There is no answer. The ruffian bullies and curses,
while the survivors explain the matter to him. He sulkily acquiesces;
shouts the tally once more, regardless of the hiatus--of course only
to repeat the error. Amidst a storm of menaces we are all ordered out
of our rooms, and this again and yet again, perhaps, until the beast
satisfies himself or is satisfied that none is skulking, and that
nothing is in error but his own drunken vision. Then at last the dogs
are withdrawn, the innumerable doors clanged to and barred, and we are
left, sealed within a fetid atmosphere, to salve our wounded dignity
as we can with the balm of spiritual self-possession.
But now, on this particular evening, conscious of something in my
breast that overcrowed the passionless voice of philosophy, I felt
myself uplifted and translated--an essence impressionable to no
influence that was meaner than divine.
“And who knows,” I said to myself, as we were summoned from the yard,
“but that Quatremains-Quatrepattes might have pronounced Carinne to be
the bright star in my horoscope?”
“Not so fast, citizen,” growled Cabochon, who stood, list in hand, at
the door.
“Rest content,” said I; “I am never in a hurry.”
“_Par exemple!_ you grow a little rusty, perhaps, for a notable actor.
It is well, then, that you have an engagement at last.”
“To perform? And where, M. Cabochon?”
“In the Palais de Justice. That is a theatre with a fine box, citizen;
and the verdict of those that sit in it is generally favourable--to
the public.”