THE SCRAP OF PAPER
What did happen? The matter is very obscure. I cannot do better than
give Theophrastus Longuet's account of it in the actual words of his
memoirs in the sandalwood box.
"I am a man with a healthy mind in a healthy body," he writes, "and
a good citizen: that is, I have never transgressed the law. Laws are
necessary; and I have always kept them. At least I believe I have.
"I have always hated the imagination; and by that I mean that in all
circumstances, whether, for instance, it has been a case of conferring
my friendship on anyone, or of having to decide on a line of conduct,
I have always been careful to stick to common sense. The most simple
always seemed to me the best.
"I suffered deeply, for instance, when I discovered that my old College
friend Adolphe Lecamus was addicted to the study of Spiritualism.
"The man who says Spiritualism says rubbish. To try to question
spirits by turning tables is utterly absurd. I know what I am talking
about, for, wishing to prove the absurdities of his theories, I have
taken part in séances with Adolphe and my wife. We sat for hours round
a little table which absolutely refused to turn. I laughed at him
heartily; and that annoyed my wife, because women are always ready to
put faith in the impossible and believe in the mysterious.
"He used to bring her books which she read greedily; and sometimes he
would amuse himself by trying to send her to sleep by making passes
before her face. I have never seen anything sillier. I should not
indeed have stood it from anyone else; but I have a strong liking for
Adolphe. He has a powerful face; and he has been a great traveller.
"He and Marceline called me a sceptic. I answered that I was not
a sceptic in the sense of a man who believes in nothing or doubts
everything. I believe in everything worthy of belief; for example, I
believe in Progress. I am not a sceptic; I am a philosopher.
"During his travels Adolphe read a great deal; I manufactured rubber
stamps. I am what people call 'an earthy spirit.' I do not make a boast
of it; I merely state it.
"I thought it well to give this sketch of my character to make it
clear that what happened yesterday is no fault of mine. I went to see
the prison as I might have gone to buy a neck-tie at the Louvre. I
wished to improve my mind. I have plenty of spare time nowadays, since
we have sold the business. I said, 'Let us do as the English do and
see the sights of Paris.' It was a mere chance that we began with the
Conciergerie.
"I am very sorry indeed that we did.
"Am I really very sorry? I am not sure. I am not sure of anything. At
present I am quite calm. And I am going to write down what happened
exactly as if it had happened to someone else. All the same, what a
story it is!
"While we were going through the towers nothing happened worth setting
down here. I remember saying to myself in Bon Bec tower:
"'What, was it here in this little chamber, which looks just like
a grocery, that there were so many agonies and so many illustrious
victims martyred?'
"I tried honestly to picture to myself the horror of that chamber when
the executioner and his assistants with their horrible instruments came
to the prisoners with the intention of forcing them to confess crimes
affecting the state. But owing to the little labels on the drawers, on
which one reads 'Senna,' 'Hops,' I did not succeed.
"That Bon Bec tower! They used also to call it _The Prattler_ on
account of the horrible cries which burst from it and made the quiet
passer-by shudder and quicken his steps along the quay at the sound of
the King's justice.
"Now Bon Bec tower is peaceful and very still. I am not complaining of
it: it is Progress.
"But when we penetrated to that part of the Conciergerie which has
hardly changed for centuries and were walking quietly along between
those bare stone walls which no fresh facing, no profane plaster has
ever covered, an inexplicable fever began to fill my veins; and when we
were in the gloom at the end of Straw Alley, I cried, '_Zounds! It's
Straw Alley!_'
"At once I turned to see who had spoken those words. They were all
staring at me; and I perceived plainly that I had spoken them myself.
Indeed, my throat was still quivering from their utterance.
"The idiot of a guide asserted that we had passed Straw Alley.
I contradicted him; and he shut up. I was sure of my facts, you
understand, quite sure that it was Straw Alley. I told him that I
had slept on the straw in it. But it is absurd. How do you suppose I
could have slept on straw in Straw Alley when it was the first time I
had ever been in the Conciergerie? Besides, was I sure? That is what
worries me. I had an atrocious headache.
"My brow was burning even while I felt it swept by a strong current of
cold air. Outside I was cool; inside I was a furnace.
"What had we been doing? I had a moment before walked quietly through
the chapel of the Girondins; and while the guide was telling us the
history of it, I played with my green umbrella. I was not in the least
annoyed at having just behaved so oddly. I was my natural self. But as
for that, I have never ceased to be my natural self.
"That which befell me later was also quite natural, since it was not
the result of any effort. The unnatural is exactly what did not befall
me.
"I remember finding myself at the bottom of a staircase in front of a
grating. I was endowed with superhuman vigour; I shook the grating and
shouted, 'This way!' The others, _who did not know_, were slow coming.
I do not know what I should have done to the grating, if the guide had
not unlocked it for me. For that matter, I do not know what I should
have done to the guide. I was mad. No: I have no right to say that. I
was not mad; and that's a great pity. It is worse than if I had been
mad.
"Undoubtedly I was in a state of great nervous excitement; but my mind
was quite lucid. I do not believe that I have ever seen so clearly; and
yet I was in the dark. I do not believe that I have ever had clearer
recollections; and yet I was in a place I did not know. Heavens! I did
not recognise it and _I did recognise it_! I did not hesitate about my
way. My groping hands found the stones they reached out in the darkness
to find; and my feet trod a soil which could not have been strange to
them.
"Who will ever be able to tell the age of that soil; who will ever be
able to tell you the age of those stones? _I do not know it myself._
They talk of the origin of the palace. What is the origin of the old
Frankish palace? They may be able to say when those stones will end;
they will never be able to say when they began. And they are forgotten,
those stones, in the thousand-year night of the cellars. The odd thing
is that I remembered them.
"I crept along the damp walls as if the way were well known to me. I
expected certain rough places in the wall; and they came to the tips of
my fingers; I counted the edges of the stones and I knew that at the
end of a certain number I had only to turn to see at the far end of a
passage _a ray which the sun had forgotten there since the beginning of
the history of Paris_. I turned and saw the ray; _and I felt my heart
beat loudly from the bottom of the centuries_."
M. Longuet interrupts his narrative for a while to describe the whirl
of his mind during this singular hour. He has the greatest difficulty
in remaining master of his thought, the utmost difficulty in following
it. It rushes on in front of him like a bolting horse whose reins he
has let go. It leaves him behind and bounds ahead, leaving on the
paper, as traces of its passage, words of such profundity that when he
looks at them, he says, they make him giddy.
And he adds, in a paroxysm of dread:
"One must stop on the edge of these words as one stops on the edge of a
precipice."
And he guides the pen with a feverish hand, as he goes on burying
himself in the depths of these subterranean galleries:
"And that's the Prattler! These are the walls which have heard! It was
not up above, in the sunlight, that the Prattler spoke; it was here, in
this night of the underworld. Here are the rings in the walls. Is it
the ring of Ravaillac? _I no longer remember._
"But towards the ray, towards the unique ray, motionless and eternal,
the faint, square ray, which from the beginning of ages took and
preserved the form of the air-hole, I advance; I advance in a stumbling
hurry, while the fever consumes me, blazes, and dizzies my brain. My
feet stop, but with such a shock that one would believe them caught by
invisible hands, risen from the soil; my fingers run over the wall,
groping and fumbling that spot in the wall. What do my fingers want?
What is the thought of my fingers? I had a pen-knife in my pocket;
and all at once I let my green umbrella fall to the ground to take my
pen-knife from my pocket. And I scraped, with certainty, between two
stones. I cleared away the dust and mortar from between two stones.
Then my knife pierced a thing between the two stones and brought it out.
"That is why I know I am not mad. That thing is under my eyes. In my
quietest hours, I, Theophrastus Longuet, can look at it on my desk
between my latest models of rubber stamps. It is not I who am mad; it
is this thing that is mad. It is a scrap of paper, torn and stained--a
document whose age there is no telling and which is in every way
calculated to plunge a quiet manufacturer of rubber stamps into the
wildest consternation. The paper, as you can guess, is rotted by the
damp of the cellars. The damp has eaten away half the words, which seem
from their red hue to have been written in blood.
"But in these words before me, in this document which was certainly
written two centuries ago, which I passed under the square ray from
the air-hole and gazed at with my hair rising on end in horror, I
RECOGNISED MY OWN HANDWRITING."
Here copied clearly out is this precious and mysterious document:
"I rt uried
my treasures after betrayal
of April 1st
Go and take the air
at the Chopinettes
look at the Gall
look at the Cock
Dig on the spot and you
will be rich."