VAUTRIN’S LAST AVATAR

“What is it, Madeleine?” asked Madame Camusot, seeing her maid come

into the room with the particular air that servants assume in critical

moments.

“Madame,” said Madeleine, “monsieur has just come in from Court; but he

looks so upset, and is in such a state, that I think perhaps it would be

well for you to go to his room.”

“Did he say anything?” asked Madame Camusot.

“No, madame; but we never have seen monsieur look like that; he looks

as if he were going to be ill, his face is yellow--he seems all to

pieces----”

Madame Camusot waited for no more; she rushed out of her room and flew

to her husband’s study. She found the lawyer sitting in an armchair,

pale and dazed, his legs stretched out, his head against the back of it,

his hands hanging limp, exactly as if he were sinking into idiotcy.

“What is the matter, my dear?” said the young woman in alarm.

“Oh! my poor Amelie, the most dreadful thing has happened--I am still

trembling. Imagine, the public prosecutor--no, Madame de Serizy--that

is--I do not know where to begin.”

“Begin at the end,” said Madame Camusot.

“Well, just as Monsieur Popinot, in the council room of the first Court,

had put the last signature to the ruling of ‘insufficient cause’ for the

apprehension of Lucien de Rubempre on the ground of my report, setting

him at liberty--in fact, the whole thing was done, the clerk was going

off with the minute book, and I was quit of the whole business--the

President of the Court came in and took up the papers. ‘You are

releasing a dead man,’ said he, with chilly irony; ‘the young man is

gone, as Monsieur de Bonald says, to appear before his natural Judge. He

died of apoplexy----’

“I breathed again, thinking it was sudden illness.

“‘As I understand you, Monsieur le President,’ said Monsieur Popinot,

‘it is a case of apoplexy like Pichegru’s.’

“‘Gentlemen,’ said the President then, very gravely, ‘you must please

to understand that for the outside world Lucien de Rubempre died of an

aneurism.’

“We all looked at each other. ‘Very great people are concerned in this

deplorable business,’ said the President. ‘God grant for your sake,

Monsieur Camusot, though you did no less than your duty, that Madame de

Serizy may not go mad from the shock she has had. She was carried away

almost dead. I have just met our public prosecutor in a painful state of

despair.’--‘You have made a mess of it, my dear Camusot,’ he added in

my ear.--I assure you, my dear, as I came away I could hardly stand. My

legs shook so that I dared not venture into the street. I went back to

my room to rest. Then Coquart, who was putting away the papers of

this wretched case, told me that a very handsome woman had taken the

Conciergerie by storm, wanting to save Lucien, whom she was quite crazy

about, and that she fainted away on seeing him hanging by his necktie to

the window-bar of his room. The idea that the way in which I questioned

that unhappy young fellow--who, between ourselves, was guilty in many

ways--can have led to his committing suicide has haunted me ever since I

left the Palais, and I feel constantly on the point of fainting----”

“What next? Are you going to think yourself a murderer because a

suspected criminal hangs himself in prison just as you were about to

release him?” cried Madame Camusot. “Why, an examining judge in such a

case is like a general whose horse is killed under him!--That is all.”

“Such a comparison, my dear, is at best but a jest, and jesting is out

of place now. In this case the dead man clutches the living. All our

hopes are buried in Lucien’s coffin.”

“Indeed?” said Madame Camusot, with deep irony.

“Yes, my career is closed. I shall be no more than an examining judge

all my life. Before this fatal termination Monsieur de Granville was

annoyed at the turn the preliminaries had taken; his speech to our

President makes me quite certain that so long as Monsieur de Granville

is public prosecutor I shall get no promotion.”

Promotion! The terrible thought, which in these days makes a judge a

mere functionary.

Formerly a magistrate was made at once what he was to remain. The three

or four presidents’ caps satisfied the ambitions of lawyers in each

Parlement. An appointment as councillor was enough for a de Brosses or

a Mole, at Dijon as much as in Paris. This office, in itself a fortune,

required a fortune brought to it to keep it up.

In Paris, outside the Parlement, men of the long robe could hope only

for three supreme appointments: those of Controller-General, Keeper of

the Seals, or Chancellor. Below the Parlement, in the lower grades,

the president of a lower Court thought himself quite of sufficient

importance to be content to fill his chair to the end of his days.

Compare the position of a councillor in the High Court of Justice

in Paris, in 1829, who has nothing but his salary, with that of a

councillor to the Parlement in 1729. How great is the difference! In

these days, when money is the universal social guarantee, magistrates

are not required to have--as they used to have--fine private fortunes:

hence we see deputies and peers of France heaping office on office, at

once magistrates and legislators, borrowing dignity from other positions

than those which ought to give them all their importance.

In short, a magistrate tries to distinguish himself for promotion as men

do in the army, or in a Government office.

This prevailing thought, even if it does not affect his independence, is

so well known and so natural, and its effects are so evident, that the

law inevitably loses some of its majesty in the eyes of the public. And,

in fact, the salaries paid by the State makes priests and magistrates

mere _employes_. Steps to be gained foster ambition, ambition engenders

subservience to power, and modern equality places the judge and the

person to be judged in the same category at the bar of society. And so

the two pillars of social order, Religion and Justice, are lowered in

this nineteenth century, which asserts itself as progressive in all

things.

“And why should you never be promoted?” said Amelie Camusot.

She looked half-jestingly at her husband, feeling the necessity of

reviving the energies of the man who embodied her ambitions, and on whom

she could play as on an instrument.

“Why despair?” she went on, with a shrug that sufficiently expressed

her indifference as to the prisoner’s end. “This suicide will delight

Lucien’s two enemies, Madame d’Espard and her cousin, the Comtesse du

Chatelet. Madame d’Espard is on the best terms with the Keeper of the

Seals; through her you can get an audience of His Excellency and tell

him all the secrets of this business. Then, if the head of the law is on

your side, what have you to fear from the president of your Court or the

public prosecutor?”

“But, Monsieur and Madame de Serizy?” cried the poor man. “Madame de

Serizy is gone mad, I tell you, and her madness is my doing, they say.”

“Well, if she is out of her mind, O judge devoid of judgment,” said

Madame Camusot, laughing, “she can do you no harm.--Come, tell me all

the incidents of the day.”

“Bless me!” said Camusot, “just as I had cross-questioned the unhappy

youth, and he had deposed that the self-styled Spanish priest is really

Jacques Collin, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and Madame de Serizy

sent me a note by a servant begging me not to examine him. It was all

over!----”

“But you must have lost your head!” said Amelie. “What was to prevent

you, being so sure as you are of your clerk’s fidelity, from calling

Lucien back, reassuring him cleverly, and revising the examination?”

“Why, you are as bad as Madame de Serizy; you laugh justice to scorn,”

said Camusot, who was incapable of flouting his profession. “Madame de

Serizy seized the minutes and threw them into the fire.”

“That is the right sort of woman! Bravo!” cried Madame Camusot.

“Madame de Serizy declared she would sooner see the Palais blown up

than leave a young man who had enjoyed the favors of the Duchesse de

Maufrigneuse and her own to stand at the bar of a Criminal court by the

side of a convict!”

“But, Camusot,” said Amelie, unable to suppress a superior smile, “your

position is splendid----”

“Ah! yes, splendid!”

“You did your duty.”

“But all wrong; and in spite of the jesuitical advice of Monsieur de

Granville, who met me on the Quai Malaquais.”

“This morning!”

“This morning.”

“At what hour?”

“At nine o’clock.”

“Oh, Camusot!” cried Amelie, clasping and wringing her hands, “and I am

always imploring you to be constantly on the alert.--Good heavens! it

is not a man, but a barrow-load of stones that I have to drag on!--Why,

Camusot, your public prosecutor was waiting for you.--He must have given

you some warning.”

“Yes, indeed----”

“And you failed to understand him! If you are so deaf, you will indeed

be an examining judge all your life without any knowledge whatever of

the question.--At any rate, have sense enough to listen to me,” she went

on, silencing her husband, who was about to speak. “You think the matter

is done for?” she asked.

Camusot looked at his wife as a country bumpkin looks at a conjurer.

“If the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and Madame de Serizy are compromised,

you will find them both ready to patronize you,” said Amelie. “Madame de

Serizy will get you admission to the Keeper of the Seals, and you will

tell him the secret history of the affair; then he will amuse the King

with the story, for sovereigns always wish to see the wrong side of the

tapestry and to know the real meaning of the events the public stare

at open-mouthed. Henceforth there will be no cause to fear either the

public prosecutor or Monsieur de Serizy.”

“What a treasure such a wife is!” cried the lawyer, plucking up courage.

“After all, I have unearthed Jacques Collin; I shall send him to his

account at the Assize Court and unmask his crimes. Such a trial is a

triumph in the career of an examining judge!”

“Camusot,” Amelie began, pleased to see her husband rally from the

moral and physical prostration into which he had been thrown by Lucien’s

suicide, “the President told you that you had blundered to the wrong

side. Now you are blundering as much to the other--you are losing your

way again, my dear.”

The magistrate stood up, looking at his wife with a stupid stare.

“The King and the Keeper of the Seals will be glad, no doubt, to know

the truth of this business, and at the same time much annoyed at seeing

the lawyers on the Liberal side dragging important persons to the bar of

opinion and of the Assize Court by their special pleading--such people

as the Maufrigneuses, the Serizys, and the Grandlieus, in short, all who

are directly or indirectly mixed up with this case.”

“They are all in it; I have them all!” cried Camusot.

And Camusot walked up and down the room like Sganarelle on the stage

when he is trying to get out of a scrape.

“Listen, Amelie,” said he, standing in front of his wife. “An incident

recurs to my mind, a trifle in itself, but, in my position, of vital

importance.

“Realize, my dear, that this Jacques Collin is a giant of cunning, of

dissimulation, of deceit.--He is--what shall I say?--the Cromwell of

the hulks!--I never met such a scoundrel; he almost took me in.--But in

examining a criminal, a little end of thread leads you to find a ball,

is a clue to the investigation of the darkest consciences and obscurest

facts.--When Jacques Collin saw me turning over the letters seized in

Lucien de Rubempre’s lodgings, the villain glanced at them with the

evident intention of seeing whether some particular packet were

among them, and he allowed himself to give a visible expression of

satisfaction. This look, as of a thief valuing his booty, this movement,

as of a man in danger saying to himself, ‘My weapons are safe,’ betrayed

a world of things.

“Only you women, besides us and our examinees, can in a single

flash epitomize a whole scene, revealing trickery as complicated as

safety-locks. Volumes of suspicion may thus be communicated in a second.

It is terrifying--life or death lies in a wink.

“Said I to myself, ‘The rascal has more letters in his hands than

these!’--Then the other details of the case filled my mind; I overlooked

the incident, for I thought I should have my men face to face, and clear

up this point afterwards. But it may be considered as quite certain that

Jacques Collin, after the fashion of such wretches, has hidden in some

safe place the most compromising of the young fellow’s letters, adored

as he was by----”

“And yet you are afraid, Camusot? Why, you will be President of the

Supreme Court much sooner than I expected!” cried Madame Camusot, her

face beaming. “Now, then, you must proceed so as to give satisfaction

to everybody, for the matter is looking so serious that it might quite

possibly be snatched from us.--Did they not take the proceedings out of

Popinot’s hands to place them in yours when Madame d’Espard tried to get

a Commission in Lunacy to incapacitate her husband?” she added, in reply

to her husband’s gesture of astonishment. “Well, then, might not the

public prosecutor, who takes such keen interest in the honor of Monsieur

and Madame de Serizy, carry the case to the Upper Court and get a

councillor in his interest to open a fresh inquiry?”

“Bless me, my dear, where did you study criminal law?” cried Camusot.

“You know everything; you can give me points.”

“Why, do you believe that, by to-morrow morning, Monsieur de Granville

will not have taken fright at the possible line of defence that might

be adopted by some liberal advocate whom Jacques Collin would manage to

secure; for lawyers will be ready to pay him to place the case in their

hands!--And those ladies know their danger quite as well as you do--not

to say better; they will put themselves under the protection of the

public prosecutor, who already sees their families unpleasantly close

to the prisoner’s bench, as a consequence of the coalition between

this convict and Lucien de Rubempre, betrothed to Mademoiselle de

Grandlieu--Lucien, Esther’s lover, Madame de Maufrigneuse’s former

lover, Madame de Serizy’s darling. So you must conduct the affair in

such a way as to conciliate the favor of your public prosecutor, the

gratitude of Monsieur de Serizy, and that of the Marquise d’Espard

and the Comtesse du Chatelet, to reinforce Madame de Maufrigneuse’s

influence by that of the Grandlieus, and to gain the complimentary

approval of your President.

“I will undertake to deal with the ladies--d’Espard, de Maufrigneuse,

and de Grandlieu.

“You must go to-morrow morning to see the public prosecutor. Monsieur de

Granville is a man who does not live with his wife; for ten years he

had for his mistress a Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille, who bore him

illegitimate children--didn’t she? Well, such a magistrate is no saint;

he is a man like any other; he can be won over; he must give a hold

somewhere; you must discover the weak spot and flatter him; ask his

advice, point out the dangers of attending the case; in short, try to

get him into the same boat, and you will be----”

“I ought to kiss your footprints!” exclaimed Camusot, interrupting his

wife, putting his arm round her, and pressing her to his heart. “Amelie,

you have saved me!”

“I brought you in tow from Alencon to Mantes, and from Mantes to the

Metropolitan Court,” replied Amelie. “Well, well, be quite easy!--I

intend to be called Madame la Presidente within five years’ time. But,

my dear, pray always think over everything a long time before you come

to any determination. A judge’s business is not that of a fireman; your

papers are never in a blaze, you have plenty of time to think; so in

your place blunders are inexcusable.”

“The whole strength of my position lies in identifying the sham Spanish

priest with Jacques Collin,” the judge said, after a long pause. “When

once that identity is established, even if the Bench should take the

credit of the whole affair, that will still be an ascertained fact which

no magistrate, judge, or councillor can get rid of. I shall do like the

boys who tie a tin kettle to a cat’s tail; the inquiry, whoever carries

it on, will make Jacques Collin’s tin kettle clank.”

“Bravo!” said Amelie.

“And the public prosecutor would rather come to an understanding with

me than with any one else, since I am the only man who can remove the

Damocles’ sword that hangs over the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

“Only you have no idea how hard it will be to achieve that magnificent

result. Just now, when I was with Monsieur de Granville in his

private office, we agreed, he and I, to take Jacques Collin at his

own valuation--a canon of the Chapter of Toledo, Carlos Herrera. We

consented to recognize his position as a diplomatic envoy, and allow him

to be claimed by the Spanish Embassy. It was in consequence of this plan

that I made out the papers by which Lucien de Rubempre was released, and

revised the minutes of the examinations, washing the prisoners as white

as snow.

“To-morrow, Rastignac, Bianchon, and some others are to be confronted

with the self-styled Canon of Toledo; they will not recognize him as

Jacques Collin who was arrested in their presence ten years ago in a

cheap boarding-house, where they knew him under the name of Vautrin.”

There was a short silence, while Madame Camusot sat thinking.

“Are you sure your man is Jacques Collin?” she asked.

“Positive,” said the lawyer, “and so is the public prosecutor.”

“Well, then, try to make some exposure at the Palais de Justice without

showing your claws too much under your furred cat’s paws. If your man

is still in the secret cells, go straight to the Governor of the

Conciergerie and contrive to have the convict publicly identified.

Instead of behaving like a child, act like the ministers of police under

despotic governments, who invent conspiracies against the monarch to

have the credit of discovering them and making themselves indispensable.

Put three families in danger to have the glory of rescuing them.”

“That luckily reminds me!” cried Camusot. “My brain is so bewildered

that I had quite forgotten an important point. The instructions to

place Jacques Collin in a private room were taken by Coquart to Monsieur

Gault, the Governor of the prison. Now, Bibi-Lupin, Jacques Collin’s

great enemy, has taken steps to have three criminals, who know the man,

transferred from La Force to the Conciergerie; if he appears in the

prison-yard to-morrow, a terrific scene is expected----”

“Why?”

“Jacques Collin, my dear, was treasurer of the money owned by the

prisoners in the hulks, amounting to considerable sums; now, he is

supposed to have spent it all to maintain the deceased Lucien in

luxury, and he will be called to account. There will be such a battle,

Bibi-Lupin tells me, as will require the intervention of the warders,

and the secret will be out. Jacques Collin’s life is in danger.

“Now, if I get to the Palais early enough I may record the evidence of

identity.”

“Oh, if only his creditors should take him off your hands! You would

be thought such a clever fellow!--Do not go to Monsieur de Granville’s

room; wait for him in his Court with that formidable great gun. It is a

loaded cannon turned on the three most important families of the Court

and Peerage. Be bold: propose to Monsieur de Granville that he should

relieve you of Jacques Collin by transferring him to La Force, where the

convicts know how to deal with those who betray them.

“I will go to the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, who will take me to the

Grandlieus. Possibly I may see Monsieur de Serizy. Trust me to sound the

alarm everywhere. Above all, send me a word we will agree upon to let me

know if the Spanish priest is officially recognized as Jacques Collin.

Get your business at the Palais over by two o’clock, and I will have

arranged for you to have an interview with the Keeper of the Seals;

perhaps I may find him with the Marquise d’Espard.”

Camusot stood squarely with a look of admiration that made his knowing

wife smile.

“Now, come to dinner and be cheerful,” said she in conclusion. “Why,

you see! We have been only two years in Paris, and here you are on the

highroad to be made Councillor before the end of the year. From that

to the Presidency of a court, my dear, there is no gulf but what some

political service may bridge.”

This conjugal sitting shows how greatly the deeds and the lightest words

of Jacques Collin, the lowest personage in this drama, involved the

honor of the families among whom he had planted his now dead protege.

At the Conciergerie Lucien’s death and Madame de Serizy’s incursion had

produced such a block in the wheels of the machinery that the Governor

had forgotten to remove the sham priest from his dungeon-cell.

Though more than one instance is on record of the death of a prisoner

during his preliminary examination, it was a sufficiently rare event

to disturb the warders, the clerk, and the Governor, and hinder their

working with their usual serenity. At the same time, to them the

important fact was not the handsome young fellow so suddenly become a

corpse, but the breakage of the wrought-iron bar of the outer prison

gate by the frail hands of a fine lady. And indeed, as soon as the

public prosecutor and Comte Octave de Bauvan had gone off with Monsieur

de Serizy and his unconscious wife, the Governor, clerk, and turnkeys

gathered round the gate, after letting out Monsieur Lebrun, the prison

doctor, who had been called in to certify to Lucien’s death, in concert

with the “death doctor” of the district in which the unfortunate youth

had been lodging.

In Paris, the “death doctor” is the medical officer whose duty it is in

each district to register deaths and certify to their causes.

With the rapid insight for which he was known, Monsieur de Granville had

judged it necessary, for the honor of the families concerned, to

have the certificate of Lucien’s death deposited at the Mairie of the

district in which the Quai Malaquais lies, as the deceased had resided

there, and to have the body carried from his lodgings to the Church of

Saint-Germain des Pres, where the service was to be held. Monsieur de

Chargeboeuf, Monsieur de Granville’s private secretary, had orders to

this effect. The body was to be transferred from the prison during the

night. The secretary was desired to go at once and settle matters at the

Mairie with the parish authorities and with the official undertakers.

Thus, to the world in general, Lucien would have died at liberty in his

own lodgings, the funeral would start from thence, and his friends would

be invited there for the ceremony.

So, when Camusot, his mind at ease, was sitting down to dinner with his

ambitious better-half, the Governor of the Conciergerie and Monsieur

Lebrun, the prison doctor, were standing outside the gate bewailing the

fragility of iron bars and the strength of ladies in love.

“No one knows,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “what an amount

of nervous force there is in a man wound up to the highest pitch of

passion. Dynamics and mathematics have no formulas or symbols to express

that power. Why, only yesterday, I witnessed an experiment which gave me

a shudder, and which accounts for the terrible strength put forth just

now by that little woman.”

“Tell me about it,” said Monsieur Gault, “for I am so foolish as to take

an interest in magnetism; I do not believe in it, but it mystifies me.”

“A physician who magnetizes--for there are men among us who believe in

magnetism,” Lebrun went on, “offered to experiment on me in proof of a

phenomenon that he described and I doubted. Curious to see with my own

eyes one of the strange states of nervous tension by which the existence

of magnetism is demonstrated, I consented.

“These are the facts.--I should very much like to know what our College

of Medicine would say if each of its members in turn were subjected to

this influence, which leaves no loophole for incredulity.

“My old friend--this doctor,” said Doctor Lebrun parenthetically, “is

an old man persecuted for his opinions since Mesmer’s time by all the

faculty; he is seventy or seventy-two years of age, and his name is

Bouvard. At the present day he is the patriarchal representative of the

theory of animal magnetism. This good man regards me as a son; I owe my

training to him.--Well, this worthy old Bouvard it was who proposed to

prove to me that nerve-force put in motion by the magnetizer was, not

indeed infinite, for man is under immutable laws, but a power acting

like other powers of nature whose elemental essence escapes our

observation.

“‘For instance,’ said he, ‘if you place your hand in that of a

somnambulist who, when awake, can press it only up to a certain average

of tightness, you will see that in the somnambulistic state--as it is

stupidly termed--his fingers can clutch like a vise screwed up by a

blacksmith.’--Well, monsieur, I placed my hand in that of a woman, not

asleep, for Bouvard rejects the word, but isolated, and when the old man

bid her squeeze my wrist as long and as tightly as she could, I begged

him to stop when the blood was almost bursting from my finger tips.

Look, you can see the marks of her clutch, which I shall not lose for

these three months.”

“The deuce!” exclaimed Monsieur Gault, as he saw a band of bruised

flesh, looking like the scar of a burn.

“My dear Gault,” the doctor went on, “if my wrist had been gripped in

an iron manacle screwed tight by a locksmith, I should not have felt

the bracelet of metal so hard as that woman’s fingers; her hand was

of unyielding steel, and I am convinced that she could have crushed my

bones and broken my hand from the wrist. The pressure, beginning almost

insensibly, increased without relaxing, fresh force being constantly

added to the former grip; a tourniquet could not have been more

effectual than that hand used as an instrument of torture.--To me,

therefore, it seems proven that under the influence of passion, which is

the will concentrated on one point and raised to an incalculable power

of animal force, as the different varieties of electric force are also,

man may direct his whole vitality, whether for attack or resistance,

to one of his organs.--Now, this little lady, under the stress of her

despair, had concentrated her vital force in her hands.”

“She must have a good deal too, to break a wrought-iron bar,” said the

chief warder, with a shake of the head.

“There was a flaw in it,” Monsieur Gault observed.

“For my part,” said the doctor, “I dare assign no limits to nervous

force. And indeed it is by this that mothers, to save their children,

can magnetize lions, climb, in a fire, along a parapet where a cat would

not venture, and endure the torments that sometimes attend childbirth.

In this lies the secret of the attempts made by convicts and prisoners

to regain their liberty. The extent of our vital energies is as yet

unknown; they are part of the energy of nature itself, and we draw them

from unknown reservoirs.”

“Monsieur,” said the warder in an undertone to the Governor, coming

close to him as he was escorting Doctor Lebrun as far as the outer gates

of the Conciergerie, “Number 2 in the secret cells says he is ill, and

needs the doctor; he declares he is dying,” added the turnkey.

“Indeed,” said the Governor.

“His breath rattles in his throat,” replied the man.

“It is five o’clock,” said the doctor; “I have had no dinner. But, after

all, I am at hand. Come, let us see.”

“Number 2, as it happens, is the Spanish priest suspected of being

Jacques Collin,” said Monsieur Gault to the doctor, “and one of

the persons suspected of the crime in which that poor young man was

implicated.”

“I saw him this morning,” replied the doctor. “Monsieur Camusot sent for

me to give evidence as to the state of the rascal’s health, and I

may assure you that he is perfectly well, and could make a fortune by

playing the part of Hercules in a troupe of athletes.”

“Perhaps he wants to kill himself too,” said Monsieur Gault. “Let us

both go down to the cells together, for I ought to go there if only

to transfer him to an upper room. Monsieur Camusot has given orders to

mitigate this anonymous gentleman’s confinement.”

Jacques Collin, known as _Trompe-la-Mort_ in the world of the hulks,

who must henceforth be called only by his real name, had gone through

terrible distress of mind since, after hearing Camusot’s order, he had

been taken back to the underground cell--an anguish such as he had never

before known in the course of a life diversified by many crimes, by

three escapes, and two sentences at the Assizes. And is there not

something monstrously fine in the dog-like attachment shown to the man

he had made his friend by this wretch in whom were concentrated all the

life, the powers, the spirit, and the passions of the hulks, who was, so

to speak, their highest expression?

Wicked, infamous, and in so many ways horrible, this absolute worship of

his idol makes him so truly interesting that this Study, long as it

is already, would seem incomplete and cut short if the close of this

criminal career did not come as a sequel to Lucien de Rubempre’s end.

The little spaniel being dead, we want to know whether his terrible

playfellow the lion will live on.

In real life, in society, every event is so inevitably linked to other

events, that one cannot occur without the rest. The water of the great

river forms a sort of fluid floor; not a wave, however rebellious,

however high it may toss itself, but its powerful crest must sink to the

level of the mass of waters, stronger by the momentum of its course than

the revolt of the surges it bears with it.

And just as you watch the current flow, seeing in it a confused sheet

of images, so perhaps you would like to measure the pressure exerted

by social energy on the vortex called Vautrin; to see how far away the

rebellious eddy will be carried ere it is lost, and what the end will

be of this really diabolical man, human still by the power of loving--so

hardly can that heavenly grace perish, even in the most cankered heart.

This wretched convict, embodying the poem that has smiled on many a

poet’s fancy--on Moore, on Lord Byron, on Mathurin, on Canalis--the

demon who has drawn an angel down to hell to refresh him with dews

stolen from heaven,--this Jacques Collin will be seen, by the reader who

has understood that iron soul, to have sacrificed his own life for

seven years past. His vast powers, absorbed in Lucien, acted solely for

Lucien; he lived for his progress, his loves, his ambitions. To him,

Lucien was his own soul made visible.

It was _Trompe-la-Mort_ who dined with the Grandlieus, stole into

ladies’ boudoirs, and loved Esther by proxy. In fact, in Lucien he saw

Jacques Collin, young, handsome, noble, and rising to the dignity of an

ambassador.

_Trompe-la-Mort_ had realized the German superstition of a doppelganger

by means of a spiritual paternity, a phenomenon which will be quite

intelligible to those women who have ever truly loved, who have felt

their soul merge in that of the man they adore, who have lived his life,

whether noble or infamous, happy or unhappy, obscure or brilliant;

who, in defiance of distance, have felt a pain in their leg if he were

wounded in his; who if he fought a duel would have been aware of it;

and who, to put the matter in a nutshell, did not need to be told he was

unfaithful to know it.

As he went back to his cell Jacques Collin said to himself, “The boy is

being examined.”

And he shivered--he who thought no more of killing a man than a laborer

does of drinking.

“Has he been able to see his mistresses?” he wondered. “Has my aunt

succeeded in catching those damned females? Have the Duchesses and

Countesses bestirred themselves and prevented his being examined? Has

Lucien had my instructions? And if ill-luck will have it that he is

cross-questioned, how will he carry it off? Poor boy, and I have brought

him to this! It is that rascal Paccard and that sneak Europe who have

caused all this rumpus by collaring the seven hundred and fifty thousand

francs for the certificate Nucingen gave Esther. That precious pair

tripped us up at the last step; but I will make them pay dear for their

pranks.

“One day more and Lucien would have been a rich man; he might have

married his Clotilde de Grandlieu.--Then the boy would have been all

my own!--And to think that our fate depends on a look, on a blush of

Lucien’s under Camusot’s eye, who sees everything, and has all a judge’s

wits about him! For when he showed me the letters we tipped each other

a wink in which we took each other’s measure, and he guessed that I can

make Lucien’s lady-loves fork out.”

This soliloquy lasted for three hours. His torments were so great that

they were too much for that frame of iron and vitriol; Jacques Collin,

whose brain felt on fire with insanity, suffered such fearful thirst

that he unconsciously drank up all the water contained in one of the

pails with which the cell was supplied, forming, with the bed, all its

furniture.

“If he loses his head, what will become of him?--for the poor child

has not Theodore’s tenacity,” said he to himself, as he lay down on the

camp-bed--like a bed in a guard-room.

A word must here be said about this Theodore, remembered by Jacques

Collin at such a critical moment. Theodore Calvi, a young Corsican,

imprisoned for life at the age of eighteen for eleven murders, thanks to

the influential interference paid for with vast sums, had been made the

fellow convict of Jacques Collin, to whom he was chained, in 1819 and

1820. Jacques Collin’s last escape, one of his finest inventions--for he

had got out disguised as a gendarme leading Theodore Calvi as he was, a

convict called before the commissary of police--had been effected in the

seaport of Rochefort, where the convicts die by dozens, and where, it

was hoped, these two dangerous rascals would have ended their days.

Though they escaped together, the difficulties of their flight had

forced them to separate. Theodore was caught and restored to the hulks.

Indeed, a life with Lucien, a youth innocent of all crime, who had only

minor sins on his conscience, dawned on him as bright and glorious as a

summer sun; while with Theodore, Jacques Collin could look forward to no

end but the scaffold after a career of indispensable crimes.

The thought of disaster as a result of Lucien’s weakness--for his

experience of an underground cell would certainly have turned

his brain--took vast proportions in Jacques Collin’s mind; and,

contemplating the probabilities of such a misfortune, the unhappy

man felt his eyes fill with tears, a phenomenon that had been utterly

unknown to him since his earliest childhood.

“I must be in a furious fever,” said he to himself; “and perhaps if

I send for the doctor and offer him a handsome sum, he will put me in

communication with Lucien.”

At this moment the turnkey brought in his dinner.

“It is quite useless my boy; I cannot eat. Tell the governor of this

prison to send the doctor to see me. I am very bad, and I believe my

last hour has come.”

Hearing the guttural rattle that accompanied these words, the warder

bowed and went. Jacques Collin clung wildly to this hope; but when he

saw the doctor and the governor come in together, he perceived that

the attempt was abortive, and coolly awaited the upshot of the visit,

holding out his wrist for the doctor to feel his pulse.

“The Abbe is feverish,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “but it is

the type of fever we always find in inculpated prisoners--and to me,”

he added, in the governor’s ear, “it is always a sign of some degree of

guilt.”

Just then the governor, to whom the public prosecutor had intrusted

Lucien’s letter to be given to Jacques Collin, left the doctor and the

prisoner together under the guard of the warder, and went to fetch the

letter.

“Monsieur,” said Jacques Collin, seeing the warder outside the door,

and not understanding why the governor had left them, “I should think

nothing of thirty thousand francs if I might send five lines to Lucien

de Rubempre.”

“I will not rob you of your money,” said Doctor Lebrun; “no one in this

world can ever communicate with him again----”

“No one?” said the prisoner in amazement. “Why?”

“He has hanged himself----”

No tigress robbed of her whelps ever startled an Indian jungle with a

yell so fearful as that of Jacques Collin, who rose to his feet as a

tiger rears to spring, and fired a glance at the doctor as scorching

as the flash of a falling thunderbolt. Then he fell back on the bed,

exclaiming:

“Oh, my son!”

“Poor man!” said the doctor, moved by this terrific convulsion of

nature.

In fact, the first explosion gave way to such utter collapse, that the

words, “Oh, my son,” were but a murmur.

“Is this one going to die in our hands too?” said the turnkey.

“No; it is impossible!” Jacques Collin went on, raising himself and

looking at the two witnesses of the scene with a dead, cold eye. “You

are mistaken; it is not Lucien; you did not see. A man cannot hang

himself in one of these cells. Look--how could I hang myself here? All

Paris shall answer to me for that boy’s life! God owes it to me.”

The warder and the doctor were amazed in their turn--they, whom nothing

had astonished for many a long day.

On seeing the governor, Jacques Collin, crushed by the very violence of

this outburst of grief, seemed somewhat calmer.

“Here is a letter which the public prosecutor placed in my hands for

you, with permission to give it to you sealed,” said Monsieur Gault.

“From Lucien?” said Jacques Collin.

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Is not that young man----”

“He is dead,” said the governor. “Even if the doctor had been on

the spot, he would, unfortunately, have been too late. The young man

died--there--in one of the rooms----”

“May I see him with my own eyes?” asked Jacques Collin timidly. “Will

you allow a father to weep over the body of his son?”

“You can, if you like, take his room, for I have orders to remove

you from these cells; you are no longer in such close confinement,

monsieur.”

The prisoner’s eyes, from which all light and warmth had fled, turned

slowly from the governor to the doctor; Jacques Collin was examining

them, fearing some trap, and he was afraid to go out of the cell.

“If you wish to see the body,” said Lebrun, “you have no time to lose;

it is to be carried away to-night.”

“If you have children, gentlemen,” said Jacques Collin, “you will

understand my state of mind; I hardly know what I am doing. This blow

is worse to me than death; but you cannot know what I am saying. Even if

you are fathers, it is only after a fashion--I am a mother too--I--I am

going mad--I feel it!”

By going through certain passages which open only to the governor, it

is possible to get very quickly from the cells to the private rooms. The

two sets of rooms are divided by an underground corridor formed of two

massive walls supporting the vault over which Galerie Marchande, as it

is called, is built. So Jacques Collin, escorted by the warder, who took

his arm, preceded by the governor, and followed by the doctor, in a few

minutes reached the cell where Lucien was lying stretched on the bed.

On seeing the body, he threw himself upon it, seizing it in a desperate

embrace with a passion and impulse that made these spectators shudder.

“There,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “that is an instance of what

I was telling you. You see that man clutching the body, and you do not

know what a corpse is; it is stone----”

“Leave me alone!” said Jacques Collin in a smothered voice; “I have not

long to look at him. They will take him away to----”

He paused at the word “bury him.”

“You will allow me to have some relic of my dear boy! Will you be so

kind as to cut off a lock of his hair for me, monsieur,” he said to the

doctor, “for I cannot----”

“He was certainly his son,” said Lebrun.

“Do you think so?” replied the governor in a meaning tone, which made

the doctor thoughtful for a few minutes.

The governor gave orders that the prisoner should be left in this cell,

and that some locks of hair should be cut for the self-styled father

before the body should be removed.

At half-past five in the month of May it is easy to read a letter in the

Conciergerie in spite of the iron bars and the close wire trellis that

guard the windows. So Jacques Collin read the dreadful letter while he

still held Lucien’s hand.

The man is not known who can hold a lump of ice for ten minutes tightly

clutched in the hollow of his hand. The cold penetrates to the very

life-springs with mortal rapidity. But the effect of that cruel chill,

acting like a poison, is as nothing to that which strikes to the soul

from the cold, rigid hand of the dead thus held. Thus Death speaks

to Life; it tells many dark secrets which kill many feelings; for in

matters of feeling is not change death?

As we read through once more, with Jacques Collin, Lucien’s last letter,

it will strike us as being what it was to this man--a cup of poison:--

“_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.”

A little before one in the morning, when the men came to fetch away the

body, they found Jacques Collin kneeling by the bed, the letter on the

floor, dropped, no doubt, as a suicide drops the pistol that has shot

him; but the unhappy man still held Lucien’s hand between his own, and

was praying to God.

On seeing this man, the porters paused for a moment, for he looked like

one of those stone images, kneeling to all eternity on a mediaeval tomb,

the work of some stone-carver’s genius. The sham priest, with eyes

as bright as a tiger’s, but stiffened into supernatural rigidity, so

impressed the men that they gently bid him rise.

“Why?” he asked mildly. The audacious _Trompe-la-Mort_ was as meek as a

child.

The governor pointed him out to Monsieur de Chargeboeuf; and he,

respecting such grief, and believing that Jacques Collin was indeed

the priest he called himself, explained the orders given by Monsieur de

Granville with regard to the funeral service and arrangements, showing

that it was absolutely necessary that the body should be transferred

to Lucien’s lodgings, Quai Malaquais, where the priests were waiting to

watch by it for the rest of the night.

“It is worthy of that gentleman’s well-known magnanimity,” said Jacques

Collin sadly. “Tell him, monsieur, that he may rely on my gratitude.

Yes, I am in a position to do him great service. Do not forget these

words; they are of the utmost importance to him.

“Oh, monsieur! strange changes come over a man’s spirit when for seven

hours he has wept over such a son as he----And I shall see him no more!”

After gazing once more at Lucien with an expression of a mother bereft

of her child’s remains, Jacques Collin sank in a heap. As he saw

Lucien’s body carried away, he uttered a groan that made the men hurry

off. The public prosecutor’s private secretary and the governor of the

prison had already made their escape from the scene.

What had become of that iron spirit; of the decision which was a match

in swiftness for the eye; of the nature in which thought and action

flashed forth together like one flame; of the sinews hardened by three

spells of labor on the hulks, and by three escapes, the muscles which

had acquired the metallic temper of a savage’s limbs? Iron will yield to

a certain amount of hammering or persistent pressure; its impenetrable

molecules, purified and made homogeneous by man, may become

disintegrated, and without being in a state of fusion the metal had lost

its power of resistance. Blacksmiths, locksmiths, tool-makers sometimes

express this state by saying the iron is retting, appropriating a word

applied exclusively to hemp, which is reduced to pulp and fibre by

maceration. Well, the human soul, or, if you will, the threefold powers

of body, heart, and intellect, under certain repeated shocks, get into

such a condition as fibrous iron. They too are disintegrated. Science

and law and the public seek a thousand causes for the terrible

catastrophes on railways caused by the rupture of an iron rail, that of

Bellevue being a famous instance; but no one has asked the evidence

of real experts in such matters, the blacksmiths, who all say the same

thing, “The iron was stringy!” The danger cannot be foreseen. Metal

that has gone soft, and metal that has preserved its tenacity, both look

exactly alike.

Priests and examining judges often find great criminals in this state.

The awful experiences of the Assize Court and the “last toilet” commonly

produce this dissolution of the nervous system, even in the strongest

natures. Then confessions are blurted by the most firmly set lips; then

the toughest hearts break; and, strange to say, always at the moment

when these confessions are useless, when this weakness as of death

snatches from the man the mask of innocence which made Justice

uneasy--for it always is uneasy when the criminal dies without

confessing his crime.

Napoleon went through this collapse of every human power on the field of

Waterloo.

At eight in the morning, when the warder of the better cells entered the

room where Jacques Collin was confined, he found him pale and calm, like

a man who has collected all his strength by sheer determination.

“It is the hour for airing in the prison-yard,” said the turnkey;

“you have not been out for three days; if you choose to take air and

exercise, you may.”

Jacques Collin, lost in his absorbing thoughts, and taking no interest

in himself, regarding himself as a garment with no body in it, a perfect

rag, never suspected the trap laid for him by Bibi-Lupin, nor the

importance attaching to his walk in the prison-yard.

The unhappy man went out mechanically, along the corridor, by the cells

built into the magnificent cloisters of the Palace of the Kings, over

which is the corridor Saint-Louis, as it is called, leading to the

various purlieus of the Court of Appeals. This passage joins that of the

better cells; and it is worth noting that the cell in which Louvel was

imprisoned, one of the most famous of the regicides, is the room at

the right angle formed by the junction of the two corridors. Under the

pretty room in the Tour Bonbec there is a spiral staircase leading from

the dark passage, and serving the prisoners who are lodged in these

cells to go up and down on their way from or to the yard.

Every prisoner, whether committed for trial or already sentenced, and

the prisoners under suspicion who have been reprieved from the closest

cells--in short, every one in confinement in the Conciergerie takes

exercise in this narrow paved courtyard for some hours every day,

especially the early hours of summer mornings. This recreation ground,

the ante-room to the scaffold or the hulks on one side, on the other

still clings to the world through the gendarme, the examining judge,

and the Assize Court. It strikes a greater chill perhaps than even the

scaffold. The scaffold may be a pedestal to soar to heaven from; but the

prison-yard is every infamy on earth concentrated and unavoidable.

Whether at La Force or at Poissy, at Melun or at Sainte-Pelagie, a

prison-yard is a prison-yard. The same details are exactly repeated,

all but the color of the walls, their height, and the space enclosed. So

this Study of Manners would be false to its name if it did not include

an exact description of this Pandemonium of Paris.

Under the mighty vaulting which supports the lower courts and the Court

of Appeals there is, close to the fourth arch, a stone slab, used by

Saint-Louis, it is said, for the distribution of alms, and doing duty

in our day as a counter for the sale of eatables to the prisoners. So as

soon as the prison-yard is open to the prisoners, they gather round this

stone table, which displays such dainties as jail-birds desire--brandy,

rum, and the like.

The first two archways on that side of the yard, facing the fine

Byzantine corridor--the only vestige now of Saint-Louis’ elegant

palace--form a parlor, where the prisoners and their counsel may meet,

to which the prisoners have access through a formidable gateway--a

double passage, railed off by enormous bars, within the width of the

third archway. This double way is like the temporary passages arranged

at the door of a theatre to keep a line on occasions when a great

success brings a crowd. This parlor, at the very end of the vast

entrance-hall of the Conciergerie, and lighted by loop-holes on the

yard side, has lately been opened out towards the back, and the opening

filled with glass, so that the interviews of the lawyers with their

clients are under supervision. This innovation was made necessary by the

too great fascinations brought to bear by pretty women on their counsel.

Where will morality stop short? Such precautions are like the ready-made

sets of questions for self-examination, where pure imaginations are

defiled by meditating on unknown and monstrous depravity. In this

parlor, too, parents and friends may be allowed by the authorities to

meet the prisoners, whether on remand or awaiting their sentence.

The reader may now understand what the prison-yard is to the two hundred

prisoners in the Conciergerie: their garden--a garden without trees,

beds, or flowers--in short, a prison-yard. The parlor, and the stone of

Saint-Louis, where such food and liquor as are allowed are dispensed,

are the only possible means of communication with the outer world.

The hour spent in the yard is the only time when the prisoner is in

the open air or the society of his kind; in other prisons those who

are sentenced for a term are brought together in workshops; but in

the Conciergerie no occupation is allowed, excepting in the privileged

cells. There the absorbing idea in every mind is the drama of the Assize

Court, since the culprit comes only to be examined or to be sentenced.

This yard is indeed terrible to behold; it cannot be imagined, it must

be seen.

In the first place, the assemblage, in a space forty metres long by

thirty wide, of a hundred condemned or suspected criminals, does not

constitute the cream of society. These creatures, belonging for the most

part to the lowest ranks, are poorly clad; their countenances are base

or horrible, for a criminal from the upper sphere of society is happily,

a rare exception. Peculation, forgery, or fraudulent bankruptcy, the

only crimes that can bring decent folks so low, enjoy the privilege of

the better cells, and then the prisoner scarcely ever quits it.

This promenade, bounded by fine but formidable blackened walls, by a

cloister divided up into cells, by fortifications on the side towards

the quay, by the barred cells of the better class on the north, watched

by vigilant warders, and filled with a herd of criminals, all meanly

suspicious of each other, is depressing enough in itself; and it becomes

terrifying when you find yourself the centre of all those eyes full of

hatred, curiosity, and despair, face to face with that degraded crew.

Not a gleam of gladness! all is gloom--the place and the men. All is

speechless--the walls and men’s consciences. To these hapless creatures

danger lies everywhere; excepting in the case of an alliance as ominous

as the prison where it was formed, they dare not trust each other.

The police, all-pervading, poisons the atmosphere and taints everything,

even the hand-grasp of two criminals who have been intimate. A convict

who meets his most familiar comrade does not know that he may not have

repented and have made a confession to save his life. This absence

of confidence, this dread of the nark, marks the liberty, already so

illusory, of the prison-yard. The “nark” (in French, le Mouton or le

coqueur) is a spy who affects to be sentenced for some serious offence,

and whose skill consists in pretending to be a chum. The “chum,” in

thieves’ slang, is a skilled thief, a professional who has cut himself

adrift from society, and means to remain a thief all his days, and

continues faithful through thick and thin to the laws of the swell-mob.

Crime and madness have a certain resemblance. To see the prisoners of

the Conciergerie in the yard, or the madmen in the garden of an asylum,

is much the same thing. Prisoners and lunatics walk to and fro, avoiding

each other, looking up with more or less strange or vicious glances,

according to the mood of the moment, but never cheerful, never grave;

they know each other, or they dread each other. The anticipation of

their sentence, remorse, and apprehension give all these men exercising,

the anxious, furtive look of the insane. Only the most consummate

criminals have the audacity that apes the quietude of respectability,

the sincerity of a clear conscience.

As men of the better class are few, and shame keeps the few whose crimes

have brought them within doors, the frequenters of the prison-yard

are for the most part dressed as workmen. Blouses, long and short,

and velveteen jackets preponderate. These coarse or dirty

garments, harmonizing with the coarse and sinister faces and brutal

manner--somewhat subdued, indeed, by the gloomy reflections that weigh

on men in prison--everything, to the silence that reigns, contributes to

strike terror or disgust into the rare visitor who, by high influence,

has obtained the privilege, seldom granted, of going over the

Conciergerie.

Just as the sight of an anatomical museum, where foul diseases are

represented by wax models, makes the youth who may be taken there

more chaste and apt for nobler and purer love, so the sight of the

Conciergerie and of the prison-yard, filled with men marked for the

hulks or the scaffold or some disgraceful punishment, inspires many, who

might not fear that Divine Justice whose voice speaks so loudly to the

conscience, with a fear of human justice; and they come out honest men

for a long time after.

As the men who were exercising in the prison-yard, when _Trompe-la-Mort_

appeared there, were to be the actors in a scene of crowning importance

in the life of Jacques Collin, it will be well to depict a few of the

principal personages of this sinister crowd.

Here, as everywhere when men are thrown together, here, as at school

even, force, physical and moral, wins the day. Here, then, as on the

hulks, crime stamps the man’s rank. Those whose head is doomed are

the aristocracy. The prison-yard, as may be supposed, is a school of

criminal law, which is far better learned there than at the Hall on the

Place du Pantheon.

A never-failing pleasantry is to rehearse the drama of the Assize Court;

to elect a president, a jury, a public prosecutor, a counsel, and to

go through the whole trial. This hideous farce is played before almost

every great trial. At this time a famous case was proceeding in the

Criminal Court, that of the dreadful murder committed on the persons

of Monsieur and Madame Crottat, the notary’s father and mother, retired

farmers who, as this horrible business showed, kept eight hundred

thousand francs in gold in their house.

One of the men concerned in this double murder was the notorious

Dannepont, known as la Pouraille, a released convict, who for five years

had eluded the most active search on the part of the police, under the

protection of seven or eight different names. This villain’s disguises

were so perfect, that he had served two years of imprisonment under the

name of Delsouq, who was one of his own disciples, and a famous

thief, though he never, in any of his achievements, went beyond the

jurisdiction of the lower Courts. La Pouraille had committed no less

than three murders since his dismissal from the hulks. The certainty

that he would be executed, not less than the large fortune he was

supposed to have, made this man an object of terror and admiration to

his fellow-prisoners; for not a farthing of the stolen money had ever

been recovered. Even after the events of July 1830, some persons may

remember the terror caused in Paris by this daring crime, worthy

to compare in importance with the robbery of medals from the Public

Library; for the unhappy tendency of our age is to make a murder the

more interesting in proportion to the greater sum of money secured by

it.

La Pouraille, a small, lean, dry man, with a face like a ferret,

forty-five years old, and one of the celebrities of the prisons he had

successively lived in since the age of nineteen, knew Jacques Collin

well, how and why will be seen.

Two other convicts, brought with la Pouraille from La Force within

these twenty-four hours, had at once acknowledged and made the whole

prison-yard acknowledge the supremacy of this past-master sealed to the

scaffold. One of these convicts, a ticket-of-leave man, named Selerier,

alias l’Avuergnat, Pere Ralleau, and le Rouleur, who in the sphere

known to the hulks as the swell-mob was called Fil-de-Soie (or silken

thread)--a nickname he owed to the skill with which he slipped through

the various perils of the business--was an old ally of Jacques Collin’s.

_Trompe-la-Mort_ so keenly suspected Fil-de-Soie of playing a double

part, of being at once in the secrets of the swell-mob and a spy laid by

the police, that he had supposed him to be the prime mover of his arrest

in the Maison Vauquer in 1819 (_Le Pere Goriot_). Selerier, whom we must

call Fil-de-Soie, as we shall also call Dannepont la Pouraille, already

guilty of evading surveillance, was concerned in certain well-known

robberies without bloodshed, which would certainly take him back to the

hulks for at least twenty years.

The other convict, named Riganson, and his kept woman, known as

la Biffe, were a most formidable couple, members of the swell-mob.

Riganson, on very distant terms with the police from his earliest years,

was nicknamed le Biffon. Biffon was the male of la Biffe--for nothing is

sacred to the swell-mob. These fiends respect nothing, neither the law

nor religions, not even natural history, whose solemn nomenclature, it

is seen, is parodied by them.

Here a digression is necessary; for Jacques Collin’s appearance in the

prison-yard in the midst of his foes, as had been so cleverly contrived

by Bibi-Lupin and the examining judge, and the strange scenes to ensue,

would be incomprehensible and impossible without some explanation as to

the world of thieves and of the hulks, its laws, its manners, and above

all, its language, its hideous figures of speech being indispensable in

this portion of my tale.

So, first of all, a few words must be said as to the vocabulary of

sharpers, pickpockets, thieves, and murderers, known as Argot, or

thieves’ cant, which has of late been introduced into literature with so

much success that more than one word of that strange lingo is familiar

on the rosy lips of ladies, has been heard in gilded boudoirs, and

become the delight of princes, who have often proclaimed themselves

“done brown” (floue)! And it must be owned, to the surprise no doubt of

many persons, that no language is more vigorous or more vivid than that

of this underground world which, from the beginnings of countries with

capitals, has dwelt in cellars and slums, in the third limbo of society

everywhere (le troisieme dessous, as the expressive and vivid slang of

the theatres has it). For is not the world a stage? Le troisieme dessous

is the lowest cellar under the stage at the Opera where the machinery

is kept and men stay who work it, whence the footlights are raised, the

ghosts, the blue-devils shot up from hell, and so forth.

Every word of this language is a bold metaphor, ingenious or horrible.

A man’s breeches are his kicks or trucks (montante, a word that need not

be explained). In this language you do not sleep, you snooze, or doze

(pioncer--and note how vigorously expressive the word is of the sleep of

the hunted, weary, distrustful animal called a thief, which as soon as

it is in safety drops--rolls--into the gulf of deep slumber so necessary

under the mighty wings of suspicion always hovering over it; a fearful

sleep, like that of a wild beast that can sleep, nay, and snore, and yet

its ears are alert with caution).

In this idiom everything is savage. The syllables which begin or end

the words are harsh and curiously startling. A woman is a trip or a moll

(une largue). And it is poetical too: straw is la plume de Beauce, a

farmyard feather bed. The word midnight is paraphrased by twelve leads

striking--it makes one shiver! Rincer une cambriole is to “screw the

shop,” to rifle a room. What a feeble expression is to go to bed in

comparison with “to doss” (piausser, make a new skin). What picturesque

imagery! Work your dominoes (jouer des dominos) is to eat; how can men

eat with the police at their heels?

And this language is always growing; it keeps pace with civilization,

and is enriched with some new expression by every fresh invention. The

potato, discovered and introduced by Louis XVI. and Parmentier, was at

once dubbed in French slang as the pig’s orange (Orange a Cochons)[the

Irish have called them bog oranges]. Banknotes are invented; the “mob”

at once call them Flimsies (fafiots garotes, from “Garot,” the name of

the cashier whose signature they bear). Flimsy! (fafiot.) Cannot you

hear the rustle of the thin paper? The thousand franc-note is male

flimsy (in French), the five hundred franc-note is the female; and

convicts will, you may be sure, find some whimsical name for the hundred

and two hundred franc-notes.

In 1790 Guillotin invented, with humane intent, the expeditious machine

which solved all the difficulties involved in the problem of capital

punishment. Convicts and prisoners from the hulks forthwith investigated

this contrivance, standing as it did on the monarchical borderland of

the old system and the frontier of modern legislation; they instantly

gave it the name of _l’Abbaye de Monte-a-Regret_. They looked at the

angle formed by the steel blade, and described its action as repeating

(faucher); and when it is remembered that the hulks are called the

meadow (le pre), philologists must admire the inventiveness of these

horrible vocables, as Charles Nodier would have said.

The high antiquity of this kind of slang is also noteworthy. A tenth

of the words are of old Romanesque origin, another tenth are the old

Gaulish French of Rabelais. Effondrer, to thrash a man, to give him what

for; otolondrer, to annoy or to “spur” him; cambrioler, doing anything

in a room; aubert, money; Gironde, a beauty (the name of a river of

Languedoc); fouillousse, a pocket--a “cly”--are all French of the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The word affe, meaning life, is of

the highest antiquity. From affe anything that disturbs life is called

affres (a rowing or scolding), hence affreux, anything that troubles

life.

About a hundred words are derived from the language of Panurge, a

name symbolizing the people, for it is derived from two Greek words

signifying All-working.

Science is changing the face of the world by constructing railroads. In

Argot the train is le roulant Vif, the Rattler.

The name given to the head while still on the shoulders--la

Sorbonne--shows the antiquity of this dialect which is mentioned by

very early romance-writers, as Cervantes, the Italian story-tellers, and

Aretino. In all ages the moll, the prostitute, the heroine of so many

old-world romances, has been the protectress, companion, and comfort of

the sharper, the thief, the pickpocket, the area-sneak, and the burglar.

Prostitution and robbery are the male and female forms of protest made

by the natural state against the social state. Even philosophers,

the innovators of to-day, the humanitarians with the communists and

Fourierists in their train, come at last, without knowing it, to the

same conclusion--prostitution and theft. The thief does not argue out

questions of property, of inheritance, and social responsibility,

in sophistical books; he absolutely ignores them. To him theft is

appropriating his own. He does not discuss marriage; he does not

complain of it; he does not insist, in printed Utopian dreams, on the

mutual consent and bond of souls which can never become general; he

pairs with a vehemence of which the bonds are constantly riveted by the

hammer of necessity. Modern innovators write unctuous theories, long

drawn, and nebulous or philanthropical romances; but the thief acts. He

is as clear as a fact, as logical as a blow; and then his style!

Another thing worth noting: the world of prostitutes, thieves, and

murders of the galleys and the prisons forms a population of about

sixty to eighty thousand souls, men and women. Such a world is not to be

disdained in a picture of modern manners and a literary reproduction of

the social body. The law, the gendarmerie, and the police constitute

a body almost equal in number; is not that strange? This antagonism of

persons perpetually seeking and avoiding each other, and fighting a vast

and highly dramatic duel, are what are sketched in this Study. It has

been the same thing with thieving and public harlotry as with the stage,

the police, the priesthood, and the gendarmerie. In these six walks of

life the individual contracts an indelible character. He can no longer

be himself. The stigmata of ordination are as immutable as those of the

soldier are. And it is the same in other callings which are strongly

in opposition, strong contrasts with civilization. These violent,

eccentric, singular signs--sui generis--are what make the harlot, the

robber, the murderer, the ticket-of-leave man, so easily recognizable

by their foes, the spy and the police, to whom they are as game to the

sportsman: they have a gait, a manner, a complexion, a look, a color, a

smell--in short, infallible marks about them. Hence the highly-developed

art of disguise which the heroes of the hulks acquire.

One word yet as to the constitution of this world apart, which the

abolition of branding, the mitigation of penalties, and the silly

leniency of furies are making a threatening evil. In about twenty

years Paris will be beleaguered by an army of forty thousand reprieved

criminals; the department of the Seine and its fifteen hundred thousand

inhabitants being the only place in France where these poor wretches can

be hidden. To them Paris is what the virgin forest is to beasts of prey.

The swell-mob, or more exactly, the upper class of thieves, which is

the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the aristocracy of the tribe, had, in

1816, after the peace which made life hard for so many men, formed an

association called les grands fanandels--the Great Pals--consisting

of the most noted master-thieves and certain bold spirits at that time

bereft of any means of living. This word pal means brother, friend, and

comrade all in one. And these “Great Pals,” the cream of the thieving

fraternity, for more than twenty years were the Court of Appeal, the

Institute of Learning, and the Chamber of Peers of this community. These

men all had their private means, with funds in common, and a code of

their own. They knew each other, and were pledged to help and succor

each other in difficulties. And they were all superior to the tricks or

snares of the police, had a charter of their own, passwords and signs of

recognition.

From 1815 to 1819 these dukes and peers of the prison world had formed

the famous association of the Ten-thousand (see _le Pere Goriot_), so

styled by reason of an agreement in virtue of which no job was to be

undertaken by which less than ten thousand francs could be got.

At that very time, in 1829-30, some memoirs were brought out in which

the collective force of this association and the names of the leaders

were published by a famous member of the police-force. It was terrifying

to find there an army of skilled rogues, male and female; so numerous,

so clever, so constantly lucky, that such thieves as Pastourel,

Collonge, or Chimaux, men of fifty and sixty, were described as outlaws

from society from their earliest years! What a confession of the

ineptitude of justice that rogues so old should be at large!

Jacques Collin had been the cashier, not only of the “Ten-thousand,” but

also of the “Great Pals,” the heroes of the hulks. Competent authorities

admit that the hulks have always owned large sums. This curious fact is

quite conceivable. Stolen goods are never recovered but in very singular

cases. The condemned criminal, who can take nothing with him, is obliged

to trust somebody’s honesty and capacity, and to deposit his money; as

in the world of honest folks, money is placed in a bank.

Long ago Bibi-Lupin, now for ten years a chief of the department of

Public Safety, had been a member of the aristocracy of “Pals.” His

treason had resulted from offended pride; he had been constantly

set aside in favor of _Trompe-la-Mort’s_ superior intelligence and

prodigious strength. Hence his persistent vindictiveness against Jacques

Collin. Hence, also, certain compromises between Bibi-Lupin and his old

companions, which the magistrates were beginning to take seriously.

So in his desire for vengeance, to which the examining judge had given

play under the necessity of identifying Jacques Collin, the chief of the

“Safety” had very skilfully chosen his allies by setting la Pouraille,

Fil-de-Soie, and le Biffon on the sham Spaniard--for la Pouraille and

Fil-de-Soie both belonged to the “Ten-thousand,” and le Biffon was a

“Great Pal.”

La Biffe, le Biffon’s formidable trip, who to this day evades all the

pursuit of the police by her skill in disguising herself as a lady, was

at liberty. This woman, who successfully apes a marquise, a countess,

a baroness, keeps a carriage and men-servants. This Jacques Collin in

petticoats is the only woman who can compare with Asie, Jacques Collin’s

right hand. And, in fact, every hero of the hulks is backed up by a

devoted woman. Prison records and the secret papers of the law courts

will tell you this; no honest woman’s love, not even that of the bigot

for her spiritual director, has ever been greater than the attachment of

a mistress who shares the dangers of a great criminal.

With these men a passion is almost always the first cause of

their daring enterprises and murders. The excessive love

which--constitutionally, as the doctors say--makes woman irresistible

to them, calls every moral and physical force of these powerful natures

into action. Hence the idleness which consumes their days, for excesses

of passion necessitate sleep and restorative food. Hence their loathing

of all work, driving these creatures to have recourse to rapid ways

of getting money. And yet, the need of a living, and of high living,

violent as it is, is but a trifle in comparison with the extravagance

to which these generous Medors are prompted by the mistress to whom they

want to give jewels and dress, and who--always greedy--love rich food.

The baggage wants a shawl, the lover steals it, and the woman sees in

this a proof of love.

This is how robbery begins; and robbery, if we examine the human soul

through a lens, will be seen to be an almost natural instinct in man.

Robbery leads to murder, and murder leads the lover step by step to the

scaffold.

Ill-regulated physical desire is therefore, in these men, if we may

believe the medical faculty, at the root of seven-tenths of the crimes

committed. And, indeed, the proof is always found, evident, palpable

at the post-mortem examination of the criminal after his execution. And

these monstrous lovers, the scarecrows of society, are adored by their

mistresses. It is this female devotion, squatting faithfully at the

prison gate, always eagerly balking the cunning of the examiner, and

incorruptibly keeping the darkest secrets which make so many trials

impenetrable mysteries.

In this, again, lies the strength as well as the weakness of the

accused. In the vocabulary of a prostitute, to be honest means to break

none of the laws of this attachment, to give all her money to the man

who is nabbed, to look after his comforts, to be faithful to him in

every way, to undertake anything for his sake. The bitterest insult one

of these women can fling in the teeth of another wretched creature is

to accuse her of infidelity to a lover in quod (in prison). In that case

such a woman is considered to have no heart.

La Pouraille was passionately in love with a woman, as will be seen.

Fil-de-Soie, an egotistical philosopher, who thieved to provide for the

future, was a good deal like Paccard, Jacques Collin’s satellite, who

had fled with Prudence Servien and the seven hundred and fifty thousand

francs between them. He had no attachment, he condemned women, and loved

no one but Fil-de-Soie.

As to le Biffon, he derived his nickname from his connection with

la Biffe. (La Biffe is scavenging, rag-picking.) And these three

distinguished members of _la haute pegre_, the aristocracy of roguery,

had a reckoning to demand of Jacques Collin, accounts that were somewhat

hard to bring to book.

No one but the cashier could know how many of his clients were still

alive, and what each man’s share would be. The mortality to which

the depositors were peculiarly liable had formed a basis for

_Trompe-la-Mort’s_ calculations when he resolved to embezzle the funds

for Lucien’s benefit. By keeping himself out of the way of the police

and of his pals for nine years, Jacques Collin was almost certain to

have fallen heir, by the terms of the agreement among the associates,

to two-thirds of the depositors. Besides, could he not plead that he had

repaid the pals who had been scragged? In fact, no one had any hold

over these _Great Pals_. His comrades trusted him by compulsion, for the

hunted life led by convicts necessitates the most delicate confidence

between the gentry of this crew of savages. So Jacques Collin, a

defaulter for a hundred thousand crowns, might now possibly be quit for

a hundred thousand francs. At this moment, as we see, la Pouraille,

one of Jacques Collin’s creditors, had but ninety days to live. And la

Pouraille, the possessor of a sum vastly greater, no doubt, than that

placed in his pal’s keeping, would probably prove easy to deal with.

One of the infallible signs by which prison governors and their agents,

the police and warders, recognize old stagers (chevaux de retour), that

is to say, men who have already eaten beans (les gourganes, a kind of

haricots provided for prison fare), is their familiarity with prison

ways; those who have been _in_ before, of course, know the manners and

customs; they are at home, and nothing surprises them.

And Jacques Collin, thoroughly on his guard, had, until now, played his

part to admiration as an innocent man and stranger, both at La Force and

at the Conciergerie. But now, broken by grief, and by two deaths--for

he had died twice over during that dreadful night--he was Jacques Collin

once more. The warder was astounded to find that the Spanish priest

needed no telling as to the way to the prison-yard. The perfect actor

forgot his part; he went down the corkscrew stairs in the Tour Bonbec as

one who knew the Conciergerie.

“Bibi-Lupin is right,” said the turnkey to himself; “he is an old

stager; he is Jacques Collin.”

At the moment when _Trompe-la-Mort_ appeared in the sort of frame to his

figure made by the door into the tower, the prisoners, having made their

purchases at the stone table called after Saint-Louis, were scattered

about the yard, always too small for their number. So the newcomer was

seen by all of them at once, and all the more promptly, because

nothing can compare for keenness with the eye of a prisoner, who in a

prison-yard feels like a spider watching in its web. And this comparison

is mathematically exact; for the range of vision being limited on all

sides by high dark walls, the prisoners can always see, even without

looking at them, the doors through which the warders come and go, the

windows of the parlor, and the stairs of the Tour Bonbec--the only exits

from the yard. In this utter isolation every trivial incident is an

event, everything is interesting; the tedium--a tedium like that of a

tiger in a cage--increases their alertness tenfold.

It is necessary to note that Jacques Collin, dressed like a priest who

is not strict as to costume, wore black knee breeches, black stockings,

shoes with silver buckles, a black waistcoat, and a long coat of

dark-brown cloth of a certain cut that betrays the priest whatever he

may do, especially when these details are completed by a characteristic

style of haircutting. Jacques Collin’s wig was eminently ecclesiastical,

and wonderfully natural.

“Hallo!” said la Pouraille to le Biffon, “that’s a bad sign! A rook!

(sanglier, a priest). How did he come here?”

“He is one of their ‘narks’” (trucs, spies) “of a new make,”

replied Fil-de-Soie, “some runner with the bracelets” (marchand de

lacets--equivalent to a Bow Street runner) “looking out for his man.”

The gendarme boasts of many names in French slang; when he is after a

thief, he is “the man with the bracelets” (marchand de lacets); when he

has him in charge, he is a bird of ill-omen (hirondelle de la Greve);

when he escorts him to the scaffold, he is “groom to the guillotine”

(hussard de la guillotine).

To complete our study of the prison-yard, two more of the prisoners

must be hastily sketched in. Selerier, alias l’Auvergnat, alias le Pere

Ralleau, called le Rouleur, alias Fil-de-Soie--he had thirty names, and

as many passports--will henceforth be spoken of by this name only, as he

was called by no other among the swell-mob. This profound philosopher,

who saw a spy in the sham priest, was a brawny fellow of about five

feet eight, whose muscles were all marked by strange bosses. He had

an enormous head in which a pair of half-closed eyes sparkled like

fire--the eyes of a bird of prey, with gray, dull, skinny eyelids. At

first glance his face resembled that of a wolf, his jaws were so broad,

powerful, and prominent; but the cruelty and even ferocity suggested by

this likeness were counterbalanced by the cunning and eagerness of his

face, though it was scarred by the smallpox. The margin of each scar

being sharply cut, gave a sort of wit to his expression; it was seamed

with ironies. The life of a criminal--a life of danger and thirst, of

nights spent bivouacking on the quays and river banks, on bridges

and streets, and the orgies of strong drink by which successes are

celebrated--had laid, as it were, a varnish over these features.

Fil-de-Soie, if seen in his undisguised person, would have been marked

by any constable or gendarme as his prey; but he was a match for Jacques

Collin in the arts of make-up and dress. Just now Fil-de-Soie, in

undress, like a great actor who is well got up only on the stage, wore a

sort of shooting jacket bereft of buttons, and whose ripped button-holes

showed the white lining, squalid green slippers, nankin trousers now

a dingy gray, and on his head a cap without a peak, under which an old

bandana was tied, streaky with rents, and washed out.

Le Biffon was a complete contrast to Fil-de-Soie. This famous robber,

short, burly, and fat, but active, with a livid complexion, and deep-set

black eyes, dressed like a cook, standing squarely on very bandy

legs, was alarming to behold, for in his countenance all the features

predominated that are most typical of the carnivorous beast.

Fil-de-Soie and le Biffon were always wheedling la Pouraille, who had

lost all hope. The murderer knew that he would be tried, sentenced,

and executed within four months. Indeed, Fil-de-Soie and le Biffon,

la Pouraille’s chums, never called him anything but _le Chanoine de

l’Abbaye de Monte-a-Regret_ (a grim paraphrase for a man condemned to

the guillotine). It is easy to understand why Fil-de-Soie and le Biffon

should fawn on la Pouraille. The man had somewhere hidden two hundred

and fifty thousand francs in gold, his share of the spoil found in

the house of the Crottats, the “victims,” in newspaper phrase. What a

splendid fortune to leave to two pals, though the two old stagers would

be sent back to the galleys within a few days! Le Biffon and Fil-de-Soie

would be sentenced for a term of fifteen years for robbery with

violence, without prejudice to the ten years’ penal servitude on a

former sentence, which they had taken the liberty of cutting short. So,

though one had twenty-two and the other twenty-six years of imprisonment

to look forward to, they both hoped to escape, and come back to find la

Pouraille’s mine of gold.

But the “Ten-thousand man” kept his secret; he did not see the use of

telling it before he was sentenced. He belonged to the “upper ten” of

the hulks, and had never betrayed his accomplices. His temper was well

known; Monsieur Popinot, who had examined him, had not been able to get

anything out of him.

This terrible trio were at the further end of the prison-yard, that is

to say, near the better class of cells. Fil-de-Soie was giving a lecture

to a young man who was IN for his first offence, and who, being certain

of ten years’ penal servitude, was gaining information as to the various

convict establishments.

“Well, my boy,” Fil-de-Soie was saying sententiously as Jacques Collin

appeared on the scene, “the difference between Brest, Toulon, and

Rochefort is----”

“Well, old cock?” said the lad, with the curiosity of a novice.

This prisoner, a man of good family, accused of forgery, had come down

from the cell next to that where Lucien had been.

“My son,” Fil-de-Soie went on, “at Brest you are sure to get some beans

at the third turn if you dip your spoon in the bowl; at Toulon you never

get any till the fifth; and at Rochefort you get none at all, unless you

are an old hand.”

Having spoken, the philosopher joined le Biffon and la Pouraille, and

all three, greatly puzzled by the priest, walked down the yard, while

Jacques Collin, lost in grief, came up it. _Trompe-la-Mort_, absorbed in

terrible meditations, the meditations of a fallen emperor, did not

think of himself as the centre of observation, the object of general

attention, and he walked slowly, gazing at the fatal window where Lucien

had hanged himself. None of the prisoners knew of this catastrophe,

since, for reasons to be presently explained, the young forger had not

mentioned the subject. The three pals agreed to cross the priest’s path.

“He is no priest,” said Fil-de-Soie; “he is an old stager. Look how he

drags his right foot.”

It is needful to explain here--for not every reader has had a fancy to

visit the galleys--that each convict is chained to another, an old one

and a young one always as a couple; the weight of this chain riveted

to a ring above the ankle is so great as to induce a limp, which the

convict never loses. Being obliged to exert one leg much more than the

other to drag this fetter (manicle is the slang name for such irons),

the prisoner inevitably gets into the habit of making the effort.

Afterwards, though he no longer wears the chain, it acts upon him still;

as a man still feels an amputated leg, the convict is always conscious

of the anklet, and can never get over that trick of walking. In police

slang, he “drags his right.” And this sign, as well known to convicts

among themselves as it is to the police, even if it does not help to

identify a comrade, at any rate confirms recognition.

In _Trompe-la Mort_, who had escaped eight years since, this trick had

to a great extent worn off; but just now, lost in reflections, he walked

at such a slow and solemn pace that, slight as the limp was, it was

strikingly evident to so practiced an eye as la Pouraille’s. And it is

quite intelligible that convicts, always thrown together, as they must

be, and never having any one else to study, will so thoroughly have

watched each other’s faces and appearance, that certain tricks will have

impressed them which may escape their systematic foes--spies, gendarmes,

and police-inspectors.

Thus it was a peculiar twitch of the maxillary muscles of the left

cheek, recognized by a convict who was sent to a review of the Legion

of the Seine, which led to the arrest of the lieutenant-colonel of that

corps, the famous Coignard; for, in spite of Bibi-Lupin’s confidence,

the police could not dare believe that the Comte Pontis de Sainte-Helene

and Coignard were one and the same man.

“He is our boss” (dab or master) said Fil-de-Soie, seeing in Jacques

Collin’s eyes the vague glance a man sunk in despair casts on all his

surroundings.

“By Jingo! Yes, it is _Trompe-la-Mort_,” said le Biffon, rubbing his

hands. “Yes, it is his cut, his build; but what has he done to himself?

He looks quite different.”

“I know what he is up to!” cried Fil-de-Soie; “he has some plan in his

head. He wants to see the boy” (sa tante) “who is to be executed before

long.”

The persons known in prison as tantes or aunts may be best described in

the ingenious words of the governor of one of the great prisons to the

late Lord Durham, who, during his stay in Paris, visited every prison.

So curious was he to see every detail of French justice, that he even

persuaded Sanson, at that time the executioner, to erect the scaffold

and decapitate a living calf, that he might thoroughly understand the

working of the machine made famous by the Revolution. The governor

having shown him everything--the yards, the workshops, and the

underground cells--pointed to a part of the building, and said, “I need

not take your Lordship there; it is the quartier des tantes.”--“Oh,”

said Lord Durham, “what are they!”--“The third sex, my Lord.”

“And they are going to scrag Theodore!” said la Pouraille, “such a

pretty boy! And such a light hand! such cheek! What a loss to society!”

“Yes, Theodore Calvi is yamming his last meal,” said le Biffon. “His

trips will pipe their eyes, for the little beggar was a great pet.”

“So you’re here, old chap?” said la Pouraille to Jacques Collin. And,

arm-in-arm with his two acolytes, he barred the way to the new arrival.

“Why, Boss, have you got yourself japanned?” he went on.

“I hear you have nobbled our pile” (stolen our money), le Biffon added,

in a threatening tone.

“You have just got to stump up the tin!” said Fil-de-Soie.

The three questions were fired at him like three pistol-shots.

“Do not make game of an unhappy priest sent here by mistake,” Jacques

Collin replied mechanically, recognizing his three comrades.

“That is the sound of his pipe, if it is not quite the cut of his mug,”

said la Pouraille, laying his hand on Jacques Collin’s shoulder.

This action, and the sight of his three chums, startled the “Boss” out

of his dejection, and brought him back to a consciousness of reality;

for during that dreadful night he had lost himself in the infinite

spiritual world of feeling, seeking some new road.

“Do not blow the gaff on your Boss!” said Jacques Collin in a hollow

threatening tone, not unlike the low growl of a lion. “The reelers are

here; let them make fools of themselves. I am faking to help a pal who

is awfully down on his luck.”

He spoke with the unction of a priest trying to convert the wretched,

and a look which flashed round the yard, took in the warders under the

archways, and pointed them out with a wink to his three companions.

“Are there not narks about? Keep your peepers open and a sharp lookout.

Don’t know me, Nanty parnarly, and soap me down for a priest, or I will

do for you all, you and your molls and your blunt.”

“What, do you funk our blabbing?” said Fil-de-Soie. “Have you come to

help your boy to guy?”

“Madeleine is getting ready to be turned off in the Square” (the Place

de Greve), said la Pouraille.

“Theodore!” said Jacques Collin, repressing a start and a cry.

“They will have his nut off,” la Pouraille went on; “he was booked for

the scaffold two months ago.”

Jacques Collin felt sick, his knees almost failed him; but his three

comrades held him up, and he had the presence of mind to clasp his

hands with an expression of contrition. La Pouraille and le Biffon

respectfully supported the sacrilegious _Trompe-la-Mort_, while

Fil-de-Soie ran to a warder on guard at the gate leading to the parlor.

“That venerable priest wants to sit down; send out a chair for him,”

said he.

And so Bibi-Lupin’s plot had failed.

_Trompe-la-Mort_, like a Napoleon recognized by his soldiers, had won

the submission and respect of the three felons. Two words had done it.

Your molls and your blunt--your women and your money--epitomizing

every true affection of man. This threat was to the three convicts an

indication of supreme power. The Boss still had their fortune in his

hands. Still omnipotent outside the prison, their Boss had not betrayed

them, as the false pals said.

Their chief’s immense reputation for skill and inventiveness stimulated

their curiosity; for, in prison, curiosity is the only goad of these

blighted spirits. And Jacques Collin’s daring disguise, kept up even

under the bolts and locks of the Conciergerie, dazzled the three felons.

“I have been in close confinement for four days and did not know that

Theodore was so near the Abbaye,” said Jacques Collin. “I came in to

save a poor little chap who scragged himself here yesterday at four

o’clock, and now here is another misfortune. I have not an ace in my

hand----”

“Poor old boy!” said Fil-de-Soie.

“Old Scratch has cut me!” cried Jacques Collin, tearing himself free

from his supporters, and drawing himself up with a fierce look. “There

comes a time when the world is too many for us! The beaks gobble us up

at last.”

The governor of the Conciergerie, informed of the Spanish priest’s weak

state, came himself to the prison-yard to observe him; he made him sit

down on a chair in the sun, studying him with the keen acumen which

increases day by day in the practise of such functions, though hidden

under an appearance of indifference.

“Oh! Heaven!” cried Jacques Collin. “To be mixed up with such creatures,

the dregs of society--felons and murders!--But God will not desert His

servant! My dear sir, my stay here shall be marked by deeds of charity

which shall live in men’s memories. I will convert these unhappy

creatures, they shall learn they have souls, that life eternal awaits

them, and that though they have lost all on earth, they still may win

heaven--Heaven which they may purchase by true and genuine repentance.”

Twenty or thirty prisoners had gathered in a group behind the three

terrible convicts, whose ferocious looks had kept a space of three

feet between them and their inquisitive companions, and they heard this

address, spoken with evangelical unction.

“Ay, Monsieur Gault,” said the formidable la Pouraille, “we will listen

to what this one may say----”

“I have been told,” Jacques Collin went on, “that there is in this

prison a man condemned to death.”

“The rejection of his appeal is at this moment being read to him,” said

Monsieur Gault.

“I do not know what that means,” said Jacques Collin, artlessly looking

about him.

“Golly, what a flat!” said the young fellow, who, a few minutes since,

had asked Fil-de-Soie about the beans on the hulks.

“Why, it means that he is to be scragged to-day or to-morrow.”

“Scragged?” asked Jacques Collin, whose air of innocence and ignorance

filled his three pals with admiration.

“In their slang,” said the governor, “that means that he will suffer the

penalty of death. If the clerk is reading the appeal, the executioner

will no doubt have orders for the execution. The unhappy man has

persistently refused the offices of the chaplain.”

“Ah! Monsieur le Directeaur, this is a soul to save!” cried Jacques

Collin, and the sacrilegious wretch clasped his hands with the

expression of a despairing lover, which to the watchful governor seemed

nothing less than divine fervor. “Ah, monsieur,” _Trompe-la-Mort_ went

on, “let me prove to you what I am, and how much I can do, by allowing

me to incite that hardened heart to repentance. God has given me a power

of speech which produces great changes. I crush men’s hearts; I open

them.--What are you afraid of? Send me with an escort of gendarmes, of

turnkeys--whom you will.”

“I will inquire whether the prison chaplain will allow you to take his

place,” said Monsieur Gault.

And the governor withdrew, struck by the expression, perfectly

indifferent, though inquisitive, with which the convicts and the

prisoners on remand stared at this priest, whose unctuous tones lent a

charm to his half-French, half-Spanish lingo.

“How did you come in here, Monsieur l’Abbe?” asked the youth who had

questioned Fil-de-Soie.

“Oh, by a mistake!” replied Jacques Collin, eyeing the young gentleman

from head to foot. “I was found in the house of a courtesan who had

died, and was immediately robbed. It was proved that she had killed

herself, and the thieves--probably the servants--have not yet been

caught.”

“And it was for that theft that your young man hanged himself?”

“The poor boy, no doubt, could not endure the thought of being blighted

by his unjust imprisonment,” said _Trompe-la-Mort_, raising his eyes to

heaven.

“Ay,” said the young man; “they were coming to set him free just when he

had killed himself. What bad luck!”

“Only innocent souls can be thus worked on by their imagination,” said

Jacques Collin. “For, observe, he was the loser by the theft.”

“How much money was it?” asked Fil-de-Soie, the deep and cunning.

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand francs,” said Jacques Collin blandly.

The three convicts looked at each other and withdrew from the group that

had gathered round the sham priest.

“He screwed the moll’s place himself!” said Fil-de-Soie in a whisper to

le Biffon, “and they want to put us in a blue funk for our cartwheels”

(thunes de balles, five-franc pieces).

“He will always be the boss of the swells,” replied la Pouraille. “Our

pieces are safe enough.”

La Pouraille, wishing to find some man he could trust, had an interest

in considering Jacques Collin an honest man. And in prison, of all

places, a man believes what he hopes.

“I lay you anything, he will come round the big Boss and save his chum!”

said Fil-de-Soie.

“If he does that,” said le Biffon, “though I don’t believe he is really

God, he must certainly have smoked a pipe with old Scratch, as they

say.”

“Didn’t you hear him say, ‘Old Scratch has cut me’?” said Fil-de-Soie.

“Oh!” cried la Pouraille, “if only he would save my nut, what a time

I would have with my whack of the shiners and the yellow boys I have

stowed.”

“Do what he bids you!” said Fil-de Soie.

“You don’t say so?” retorted la Pouraille, looking at his pal.

“What a flat you are! You will be booked for the Abbaye!” said le

Biffon. “You have no other door to budge, if you want to keep on your

pins, to yam, wet your whistle, and fake to the end; you must take his

orders.”

“That’s all right,” said la Pouraille. “There is not one of us that will

blow the gaff, or if he does, I will take him where I am going----”

“And he’ll do it too,” cried Fil-de-Soie.

The least sympathetic reader, who has no pity for this strange race, may

conceive of the state of mind of Jacques Collin, finding himself between

the dead body of the idol whom he had been bewailing during five hours

that night, and the imminent end of his former comrade--the dead body

of Theodore, the young Corsican. Only to see the boy would demand

extraordinary cleverness; to save him would need a miracle; but he was

thinking of it.

For the better comprehension of what Jacques Collin proposed to attempt,

it must be remarked that murderers and thieves, all the men who people

the galleys, are not so formidable as is generally supposed. With a

few rare exceptions these creatures are all cowards, in consequence no

doubt, of the constant alarms which weigh on their spirit. The faculties

being perpetually on the stretch in thieving, and the success of a

stroke of business depending on the exertion of every vital force, with

a readiness of wit to match their dexterity of hand, and an alertness

which exhausts the nervous system; these violent exertions of will

once over, they become stupid, just as a singer or a dancer drops quite

exhausted after a fatiguing pas seul, or one of those tremendous duets

which modern composers inflict on the public.

Malefactors are, in fact, so entirely bereft of common sense, or so much

oppressed by fear, that they become absolutely childish. Credulous to

the last degree, they are caught by the bird-lime of the simplest snare.

When they have done a successful _job_, they are in such a state of

prostration that they immediately rush into the debaucheries they crave

for; they get drunk on wine and spirits, and throw themselves madly into

the arms of their women to recover composure by dint of exhausting their

strength, and to forget their crime by forgetting their reason.

Then they are at the mercy of the police. When once they are in custody

they lose their head, and long for hope so blindly that they believe

anything; indeed, there is nothing too absurd for them to accept it. An

instance will suffice to show how far the simplicity of a criminal

who has been _nabbed_ will carry him. Bibi-Lupin, not long before, had

extracted a confession from a murderer of nineteen by making him believe

that no one under age was ever executed. When this lad was transferred

to the Conciergerie to be sentenced after the rejection of his appeal,

this terrible man came to see him.

“Are you sure you are not yet twenty?” said he.

“Yes, I am only nineteen and a half.”

“Well, then,” replied Bibi-Lupin, “you may be quite sure of one

thing--you will never see twenty.”

“Why?”

“Because you will be scragged within three days,” replied the police

agent.

The murderer, who had believed, even after sentence was passed, that a

minor would never be executed, collapsed like an omelette soufflee.