Having finished his reading, M. Bergeret folded up his manuscript and
put it in his pocket. M. Mazure, M. Paillot, and M. de Terremondre
nodded three times in silence.
Then the last-named placed a hand on Bergeret’s shoulder:
“What you have just read to us, my dear sir,” said he, “is truly …”
At this moment Léon flung himself into the shop and exclaimed with a
mixture of excitement and importance:
“Madame Houssieu has just been found strangled in her bed.”
“How extraordinary!” said M. de Terremondre.
“From the state of the body,” added Léon, “it is believed that death
took place three days ago.”
“Then,” remarked M. Mazure, the archivist, “that would make it Saturday
that the crime was committed.”
Paillot, the bookseller, who had remained silent up till now, with his
mouth wide open out of deference to death, now began to collect his
thoughts.
“On Saturday, about five o’clock in the afternoon, I plainly heard
stifled cries and the heavy thud produced by the fall of a body. I
even said to these gentlemen” (he turned towards M. de Terremondre
and M. Bergeret) “that something extraordinary was going on in Queen
Marguerite’s house.”
No one supported the claim that the bookseller was making that he
alone, by the keenness of his senses and the penetration of his mind,
had suspected the deed at the moment when it was taking place.
After a respectful silence, Paillot began again:
“During the night between Saturday and Sunday I said to Madame Paillot:
‘There isn’t a sound from Queen Marguerite’s house.’”
M. Mazure asked the age of the victim. Paillot replied that Madame
Houssieu was between seventy-nine and eighty years of age, that she
had been a widow fifty years, that she owned landed property, stocks
and shares, and a large sum of money, but that, being miserly and
eccentric, she kept no servant, and cooked her victuals herself over
the fireplace in her room, living alone amidst a wreckage of furniture
and crockery, covered with the dust of a quarter of a century. It was
actually more than twenty-five years since any one had wielded a broom
in Queen Marguerite’s house. Madame Houssieu went out but seldom,
bought a whole week’s supply of provisions for herself, and never let
any one into the house save the butcher-boy and two or three urchins
who ran errands for her.
“And the crime is supposed to have been committed on Saturday
afternoon?” asked M. de Terremondre.
“So it is believed, from the state of the body,” replied Léon. “It
appears that it is a ghastly sight.”
“On Saturday, in the afternoon,” replied M. de Terremondre, “we were
here, merely separated by a wall from the horrible scene, and we were
chatting about passing trifles.”
There was again a long silence. Then some one asked if the assassin had
been arrested, or if they even knew who it was. But, in spite of his
zeal, Léon could not answer these questions.
A shadow, which grew ever deeper and deeper and seemed funereal, began
to fall across the bookseller’s shop. It was caused by the dark crowd
of sightseers swarming in the square in front of the house of crime.
“Doubtless they are waiting for the inspector of police and the public
prosecutor,” said Mazure, the archivist.
Paillot, who was gifted with an exquisite caution, fearing lest the
eager people would break the window-panes, ordered Léon to close the
shutters.
“Don’t leave anything open,” said he, “save the window which looks on
the Rue des Tintelleries.”
This precautionary measure seemed to bear the stamp of a certain moral
delicacy. The gentlemen of the old-book corner approved of it. But
since the Rue des Tintelleries was narrow, and since on that side the
panes were covered with notices and drawing-copies, the shop became
plunged in darkness.
The murmur of the crowd, till then unnoticed, spread with the shadow
and became continuous, hollow, solemn, almost terrible, evidencing the
unanimity of the moral condemnation.
Much moved, M. de Terremondre gave fresh expression to the thought
which had struck him:
“It is strange,” said he, “that while the crime was being committed so
near us, we were talking quietly of unimportant affairs.”
At this M. Bergeret bent his head towards his left shoulder, gave a
far-away glance, and spoke thus:
“My dear sir, allow me to tell you that there is nothing strange in
that. It is not customary, when a criminal action is going on, that
conversations should stop of their own accord around the victim, either
within a radius of so many leagues or even of so many feet. A commotion
inspired by the most villainous thought only produces natural effects.”
M. de Terremondre made no reply to this speech, and the rest of his
hearers turned away from M. Bergeret with a vague sense of disquietude
and disapproval.
Still the professor of literature persisted:
“And why should an act so natural and so common as murder produce
strange and uncommon results? To kill is common to animals, and
especially to man. Murder was for long ages regarded in human
civilisation as a courageous action, and there still remain in our
morals and institutions certain traces of this ancient point of view.”
“What traces?” demanded M. de Terremondre.
“They are to be found in the honours,” replied M. Bergeret, “which are
paid to soldiers.”
“That is not the same thing,” said M. de Terremondre.
“Certainly it is,” said M. Bergeret. “For the motive force of all human
actions is hunger or love. Hunger taught savages murder, impelled
them to wars, to invasions. Civilised nations are like hunting-dogs.
A perverted instinct drives them to destroy without profit or reason.
The unreasonableness of modern wars disguises itself under dynastic
interest, nationality, balance of power, honour. This last pretext is
perhaps the most extravagant of all, for there is not a nation in the
world that is not sullied with every crime and loaded with every shame.
There is not one of them which has not endured all the humiliations
that fortune could inflict on a miserable band of men. If there
yet remains any honour among the nations, it is a strange means of
upholding it to make war—that is to say, to commit all the crimes by
which an individual dishonours himself: arson, robbery, rape, murder.
And as for the actions whose motive power is love, they are for the
most part as violent, as frenzied, as cruel as the actions inspired by
hunger; so much so that one must come to the conclusion that man is a
mischievous beast. But it still remains to inquire why I know this, and
whence it comes that the fact arouses grief and indignation in me. If
nothing but evil existed, it would not be visible, as the night would
have no name if the sun never rose.”
M. de Terremondre, however, had extended enough deference to the
religion of tenderness and human dignity by reproaching himself
with having conversed in a gay and careless fashion at the moment
of the crime and so near the victim. He began to regard the tragic
end of Madame Houssieu as a familiar incident which one might look
at straightforwardly and of which one might deduce the consequences.
He reflected that now there was nothing to prevent his buying Queen
Marguerite’s house as a storehouse for his collections of furniture,
china, and tapestry, and thus starting a sort of municipal museum. As
a reward for his zeal and munificence, he counted on receiving, along
with the applause of his fellow-countrymen, the Cross of the Legion of
Honour, and perhaps the title of correspondent of the Institute.
He had in the Academy of Inscriptions two or three comrades, old
bachelors like himself, with whom he sometimes lunched in Paris in some
wine-shop, and to whom he recounted many anecdotes about women. And
there was no correspondent for the district.
Hence he had already reached the point of depreciating the coveted
house.
“It won’t stand upright much longer,” said he, “that house of Queen
Marguerite. The beams of the floors used to fall in flakes of touchwood
on the poor old octogenarian. It will be necessary to spend an immense
sum in putting it in repair.”
“The best thing,” said Mazure, the archivist, “would be to pull it down
and remove the frontage to the courtyard of the museum. It would really
be a pity to abandon Philippe Tricouillard’s shield to the wreckers.”
They heard a great commotion among the crowd in the square. It was
the noise of the people whom the police were driving back to clear a
passage for the magistrates into the house of crime.
Paillot pushed his nose out of the half-open door.
“Here,” said he, “comes the examining judge, M. Roquincourt, with M.
Surcouf, his clerk. They have gone into the house.”
One after the other the academicians of the old-book corner had
slipped out behind the bookseller on to the pavement of the Rue des
Tintelleries, from which they watched the surging movements of the
people who crowded the Place Saint-Exupère.
Among the mob Paillot recognised M. Cassignol, the president in chief.
The old man was taking his daily constitutional. The excited crowd, in
which he had got entangled during his walk, impeded his short steps
and feeble sight. He went on, still upright and sturdy, carrying his
withered, white head erect.
When Paillot saw him, he ran up to him, doffed his velvet cap, and,
offering him his arm, invited him to come and sit down in the shop.
“How imprudent of you, Monsieur Cassignol, to venture into such a
crowd! It’s almost like a riot.”
At the word riot, the old man had a vision, as it were, of the century
of revolution, three parts of which he had seen. He was now in his
eighty-seventh year, and had already been on the retired list for
twenty-five years.
Leaning on the bookseller, Paillot, he crossed the doorstep of the shop
and sat down on a rush-bottomed chair, in the midst of the respectful
academicians. His malacca cane, with its silver top, trembled under
his hand between his hollow thighs. His spine was stiffer than the
back of his chair. He drew off his tortoiseshell spectacles to wipe
them, and it took him a long time to put them on again. He had lost his
memory for faces, and although he was hard of hearing, it was by the
voice that he recognised people.
He asked concisely for the cause of the crowds which had gathered in
the square, but he hardly listened to the answer given him by M. de
Terremondre. His brain, sound but ossified, steeped as it were in
myrrh, received no new impressions, although old ideas and passions
remained deeply embedded in it.
MM. de Terremondre, Mazure, and Bergeret stood up in a circle round
him. They were ignorant of his story, lost now in the immemorial
past. They only knew that he had been the disciple, the friend, and
the companion of Lacordaire and Montalembert, that he had opposed,
as far as the precise limits of his rights and his office permitted,
the establishment of the Empire, that in former days he had been
subjected to the insults of Louis Veuillot,[L] and that he went every
Sunday to mass, with a great book under his arm. Like all the town,
they recognised that he retained his old-world honesty and the glory
of having maintained the cause of liberty throughout his whole life.
But not one of them could have told of what type was his liberalism,
for none of them had read this sentence in a pamphlet, published by
M. Cassignol in 1852, on the affairs of Rome: “There is no liberty
save that of the man who believes in Jesus Christ, and in the moral
dignity of man.” It was said that, still remaining active in mind at
his age, he was classifying his correspondence and working at a book
on the relations between Church and State. He still spoke fluently and
brightly.
[L] Louis Veuillot, author and journalist, born 1813, and much
given to duels, both with words and swords.
During the conversation which he followed with difficulty, on hearing
a mention of the name of M. Garrand, the public prosecutor of the
Republic, he remarked, looking down at the knob of his stick as though
it were the solitary witness of those bygone days that still survived:
“In 1838 I knew at Lyons a public prosecutor for the Crown who had a
high idea of his duties. He used to maintain that one of the attributes
of public administration was infallibility, and that the king’s
prosecutor could no more be in the wrong than the king himself. His
name was M. de Clavel, and he left some valuable works on criminal
cross-examination.”
Then the old man was silent, alone with his memories in the midst of
men.
Paillot, on the doorstep, was watching what was going on outside.
“Here is M. Roquincourt coming out of the house.”