“_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 to-day 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_ to-morrow
under the heading of Law Reports; you can compose the heading. Write
now.”