Justice in search of a pleader to whom he wished to speak, and who was
employed in the Police Court. As chance would have it, Derville went
into Court Number 6 at the moment when the Presiding Magistrate was
sentencing one Hyacinthe to two months’ imprisonment as a vagabond, and
subsequently to be taken to the Mendicity House of Detention, a sentence
which, by magistrates’ law, is equivalent to perpetual imprisonment. On
hearing the name of Hyacinthe, Derville looked at the deliquent, sitting
between two _gendarmes_ on the bench for the accused, and recognized in
the condemned man his false Colonel Chabert.
The old soldier was placid, motionless, almost absentminded. In spite
of his rags, in spite of the misery stamped on his countenance, it
gave evidence of noble pride. His eye had a stoical expression which no
magistrate ought to have misunderstood; but as soon as a man has fallen
into the hands of justice, he is no more than a moral entity, a matter
of law or of fact, just as to statists he has become a zero.
When the veteran was taken back to the lock-up, to be removed later
with the batch of vagabonds at that moment at the bar, Derville availed
himself of the privilege accorded to lawyers of going wherever they
please in the Courts, and followed him to the lock-up, where he stood
scrutinizing him for some minutes, as well as the curious crew of
beggars among whom he found himself. The passage to the lock-up at that
moment afforded one of those spectacles which, unfortunately, neither
legislators, nor philanthropists, nor painters, nor writers come to
study. Like all the laboratories of the law, this ante-room is a dark
and malodorous place; along the walls runs a wooden seat, blackened
by the constant presence there of the wretches who come to this
meeting-place of every form of social squalor, where not one of them is
missing.
A poet might say that the day was ashamed to light up this dreadful
sewer through which so much misery flows! There is not a spot on that
plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner
where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which
justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a
career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the pistol-snap of
the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against these
yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a speculator
might read a justification of the numerous suicides complained of by
hypocritical writers who are incapable of taking a step to prevent
them--for that justification is written in that ante-room, like a
preface to the dramas of the Morgue, or to those enacted on the Place de
la Greve.
At this moment Colonel Chabert was sitting among these men--men with
coarse faces, clothed in the horrible livery of misery, and silent at
intervals, or talking in a low tone, for three gendarmes on duty paced
to and fro, their sabres clattering on the floor.
“Do you recognize me?” said Derville to the old man, standing in front
of him.
“Yes, sir,” said Chabert, rising.
“If you are an honest man,” Derville went on in an undertone, “how could
you remain in my debt?”
The old soldier blushed as a young girl might when accused by her mother
of a clandestine love affair.
“What! Madame Ferraud has not paid you?” cried he in a loud voice.
“Paid me?” said Derville. “She wrote to me that you were a swindler.”
The Colonel cast up his eyes in a sublime impulse of horror and
imprecation, as if to call heaven to witness to this fresh subterfuge.
“Monsieur,” said he, in a voice that was calm by sheer huskiness, “get
the gendarmes to allow me to go into the lock-up, and I will sign an
order which will certainly be honored.”
At a word from Derville to the sergeant he was allowed to take his
client into the room, where Hyacinthe wrote a few lines, and addressed
them to the Comtesse Ferraud.
“Send her that,” said the soldier, “and you will be paid your costs and
the money you advanced. Believe me, monsieur, if I have not shown
you the gratitude I owe you for your kind offices, it is not the less
there,” and he laid his hand on his heart. “Yes, it is there, deep and
sincere. But what can the unfortunate do? They live, and that is all.”
“What!” said Derville. “Did you not stipulate for an allowance?”
“Do not speak of it!” cried the old man. “You cannot conceive how deep
my contempt is for the outside life to which most men cling. I was
suddenly attacked by a sickness--disgust of humanity. When I think
that Napoleon is at Saint-Helena, everything on earth is a matter of
indifference to me. I can no longer be a soldier; that is my only real
grief. After all,” he added with a gesture of childish simplicity, “it
is better to enjoy luxury of feeling than of dress. For my part, I fear
nobody’s contempt.”
And the Colonel sat down on his bench again.
Derville went away. On returning to his office, he sent Godeschal, at
that time his second clerk, to the Comtesse Ferraud, who, on reading the
note, at once paid the sum due to Comte Chabert’s lawyer.
In 1840, towards the end of June, Godeschal, now himself an attorney,
went to Ris with Derville, to whom he had succeeded. When they reached
the avenue leading from the highroad to Bicetre, they saw, under one
of the elm-trees by the wayside, one of those old, broken, and hoary
paupers who have earned the Marshal’s staff among beggars by living on
at Bicetre as poor women live on at la Salpetriere. This man, one of
the two thousand poor creatures who are lodged in the infirmary for the
aged, was seated on a corner-stone, and seemed to have concentrated all
his intelligence on an operation well known to these pensioners, which
consists in drying their snuffy pocket-handkerchiefs in the sun, perhaps
to save washing them. This old man had an attractive countenance. He was
dressed in a reddish cloth wrapper-coat which the work-house affords to
its inmates, a sort of horrible livery.
“I say, Derville,” said Godeschal to his traveling companion, “look at
that old fellow. Isn’t he like those grotesque carved figures we get
from Germany? And it is alive, perhaps it is happy.”
Derville looked at the poor man through his eyeglass, and with a little
exclamation of surprise he said:
“That old man, my dear fellow, is a whole poem, or, as the romantics
say, a drama.--Did you ever meet the Comtesse Ferraud?”
“Yes; she is a clever woman, and agreeable; but rather too pious,” said
Godeschal.
“That old Bicetre pauper is her lawful husband, Comte Chabert, the
old Colonel. She has had him sent here, no doubt. And if he is in
this workhouse instead of living in a mansion, it is solely because he
reminded the pretty Countess that he had taken her, like a hackney cab,
on the street. I can remember now the tiger’s glare she shot at him at
that moment.”
This opening having excited Godeschal’s curiosity, Derville related the
story here told.
Two days later, on Monday morning, as they returned to Paris, the two
friends looked again at Bicetre, and Derville proposed that they should
call on Colonel Chabert. Halfway up the avenue they found the old man
sitting on the trunk of a felled tree. With his stick in one hand, he
was amusing himself with drawing lines in the sand. On looking at him
narrowly, they perceived that he had been breakfasting elsewhere than at
Bicetre.
“Good-morning, Colonel Chabert,” said Derville.
“Not Chabert! not Chabert! My name is Hyacinthe,” replied the veteran.
“I am no longer a man, I am No. 164, Room 7,” he added, looking at
Derville with timid anxiety, the fear of an old man and a child.--“Are
you going to visit the man condemned to death?” he asked after a
moment’s silence. “He is not married! He is very lucky!”
“Poor fellow!” said Godeschal. “Would you like something to buy snuff?”
With all the simplicity of a street Arab, the Colonel eagerly held out
his hand to the two strangers, who each gave him a twenty-franc piece;
he thanked them with a puzzled look, saying:
“Brave troopers!”
He ported arms, pretended to take aim at them, and shouted with a smile:
“Fire! both arms! _Vive Napoleon_!” And he drew a flourish in the air
with his stick.
“The nature of his wound has no doubt made him childish,” said Derville.
“Childish! he?” said another old pauper, who was looking on. “Why, there
are days when you had better not tread on his corns. He is an old rogue,
full of philosophy and imagination. But to-day, what can you expect! He
has had his Monday treat.--He was here, monsieur, so long ago as 1820.
At that time a Prussian officer, whose chaise was crawling up the hill
of Villejuif, came by on foot. We two were together, Hyacinthe and I,
by the roadside. The officer, as he walked, was talking to another, a
Russian, or some animal of the same species, and when the Prussian saw
the old boy, just to make fun, he said to him, ‘Here is an old cavalry
man who must have been at Rossbach.’--‘I was too young to be there,’
said Hyacinthe. ‘But I was at Jena.’ And the Prussian made off pretty
quick, without asking any more questions.”
“What a destiny!” exclaimed Derville. “Taken out of the Foundling
Hospital to die in the Infirmary for the Aged, after helping Napoleon
between whiles to conquer Egypt and Europe.--Do you know, my dear
fellow,” Derville went on after a pause, “there are in modern society
three men who can never think well of the world--the priest, the doctor,
and the man of law? And they wear black robes, perhaps because they are
in mourning for every virtue and every illusion. The most hapless of
the three is the lawyer. When a man comes in search of the priest, he
is prompted by repentance, by remorse, by beliefs which make him
interesting, which elevate him and comfort the soul of the intercessor
whose task will bring him a sort of gladness; he purifies, repairs and
reconciles. But we lawyers, we see the same evil feelings repeated again
and again, nothing can correct them; our offices are sewers which can
never be cleansed.
“How many things have I learned in the exercise of my profession! I have
seen a father die in a garret, deserted by two daughters, to whom he had
given forty thousand francs a year! I have known wills burned; I have
seen mothers robbing their children, wives killing their husbands, and
working on the love they could inspire to make the men idiotic or mad,
that they might live in peace with a lover. I have seen women teaching
the child of their marriage such tastes as must bring it to the grave in
order to benefit the child of an illicit affection. I could not tell
you all I have seen, for I have seen crimes against which justice is
impotent. In short, all the horrors that romancers suppose they have
invented are still below the truth. You will know something of these
pretty things; as for me, I am going to live in the country with my
wife. I have a horror of Paris.”
“I have seen plenty of them already in Desroches’ office,” replied
Godeschal.
PARIS, February-March 1832.
ADDENDUM
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bonaparte, Napoleon
The Vendetta
The Gondreville Mystery
Domestic Peace
The Seamy Side of History
A Woman of Thirty
Crottat, Alexandre
Cesar Birotteau
A Start in Life
A Woman of Thirty
Cousin Pons
Derville
Gobseck
A Start in Life
The Gondreville Mystery
Father Goriot
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Desroches (son)
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Start in Life
A Woman of Thirty
The Commission in Lunacy
The Government Clerks
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Firm of Nucingen
A Man of Business
The Middle Classes
Ferraud, Comtesse
The Government Clerks
Godeschal, Francois-Claude-Marie
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Start in Life
The Commission in Lunacy
The Middle Classes
Cousin Pons
Grandlieu, Vicomtesse de
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Gobseck
Louis XVIII., Louis-Stanislas-Xavier
The Chouans
The Seamy Side of History
The Gondreville Mystery
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Ball at Sceaux
The Lily of the Valley
The Government Clerks
Murat, Joachim, Prince
The Vendetta
The Gondreville Mystery
Domestic Peace
The Country Doctor
Navarreins, Duc de
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Muse of the Department
The Thirteen
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Peasantry
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Country Parson
The Magic Skin
The Gondreville Mystery
The Secrets of a Princess
Cousin Betty
Vergniaud, Louis
The Vendetta