Prostitution and theft are two forms of vital protest, male and female, of the state of nature against society. The philosophers of the eighteenth century, the reformers of today, all those humanitarians in whose rear trail the communists and syndicalists, agree, uncritically, on these two conclusions: prostitution and theft. It is not in sophistical books that the thief calls property, heredity, the social safeguards, into question: he suppresses them sharply. For him, to steal is to enter into his own. He doesn’t discuss marriage, he doesn’t denounce it, he doesn’t, in printed Utopias, demand that mutual consent, that intimate alliance of souls about which it is useless to generalize; he couples with a violence whose links are incessantly hammered ever closer by necessity. Modern reformers write woolly, long-drawn, nebulous treatises, or philanthropic novels; but the thief acts! he is clear as a fact, he is logical as a blow with the fist. And what style!…
A further observation! The world of prostitutes, thieves and murderers, the hulks and the prisons comprise a population of some sixty to eighty thousand individuals, male and female. This world can hardly be ignored when the state of our society is depicted, when a literal reproduction of our way of life is attempted. The law, the constabulary, the police employ much the same number of people, is that not strange? The antagonism between all these people who reciprocally seek and evade each other constitutes an immense duel, eminently dramatic, sketched in these pages. Theft and the traffic in public prostitutes have much in common with the theatre, the police, the priesthood and the military. In these six conditions of life, the individual takes on an indelible character. He can no longer be other than he is. The stigmata of the sacerdotal function are ineffaceable, and so are those of the soldiery. It is the same with other conditions which are in strong opposition, the contraries in civilization. Their violent, strange, singular diagnostics, wholly sui generis, make the prostitute and the thief, the murderer and the discharged prisoner, so easily recognized that, to their enemies, the spy and the constable, they are what his game is to the hunter; a colour, a smell, in short unmistakable properties. Whence that profound understanding of disguise among the celebrities of the underworld.
The big boys
A WORD more on the constitution of this world, which the abolition of branding, the softening of penalties and the foolish indulgence of juries renders so menacing. In twenty years, Paris will be surrounded by an army of forty thousand discharged prisoners. The department of the Seine and its fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants being the only point in France where these unfortunates can hide, Paris is, for them, what the virgin forest is for savage beasts.
The swell mob, which is that world’s Faubourg Saint Germain, its aristocracy, formed itself, in 1816, at the conclusion of a peace which put so many lives in question, into an association called the Grand Fanandels, which brought together the best-known gang chiefs and various bold individuals, then without other means of livelihood. The word fanandels means at the same time, brothers, friends, comrades. All thieves, convicts, prisoners are fanandels. The Grand Fanandels, the flower of the swell mob, were for twenty years and more the court of appeal, the academy, the house of peers, to these people. The Grand Fanandels had each his private fortune, capital funds in common and a code of behaviour of their own. They owed each other help-in-aid at need, they all knew each other. They were, moreover, beyond the ruses and seductions of the police, they had their own charter, their passwords, signs by which they recognized each other.
These dukes and peers of the underworld had founded, between 1815 and 1819, the famous society of the Ten Thou’, so called from the agreement by virtue of which none of them undertook an operation in which the loot was less than ten thousand francs. At the moment we have reached in our story, in 1829 and 1830, there were appearing in print memoirs in which the exact strength of that society, the names of its members, were indicated by one of the great names of the judicial police. It was seen with alarm that there existed an army fully organized, of men and women; but so formidable, so clever, so frequently successful, that thieves like the Lévys, the Pastourels, the Collonges, the Chimaux, men aged between fifty and sixty, were there described as having been in revolt against society from childhood!… The existence of thieves of that age was an avowal of impotence on the part of the Law!
Jacques Collin was the banker, not only of the society of the Ten Thou’ but also of the Grand Fanandels, the heroes of the criminal underworld. It is admitted by competent authorities that the convict settlements have always had their funds. This curious fact is easily believed. Thefts are never recovered, except in unusual circumstances. Condemned prisoners, since they can’t take anything with them to the hulks, are forced to have recourse to men of proved capacity and trust, to deposit their funds, as in society they are deposited with banking houses.
At one time, Bibi-Lupin, head of the detective force these ten years past, had belonged to the aristocracy of the Grand Fanandels. His betrayal had resulted from wounded pride; he had regularly seen Dodgedeath’s high intelligence and prodigious strength preferred to his own. Hence the criminal investigation chief’s unrelenting feud against Jacques Collin. Hence also certain compromising dealings between Bibi-Lupin and his former comrades, in which the magistracy had latterly begun to take an interest.
In his desire for revenge, to which the examining magistrate had given full rein in his need to establish the identity of Jacques Collin, the head of the detective force had therefore picked his helpers very cleverly, in setting against the bogus Spaniard La Pouraille, Hair’s Breadth and Biffon, for La Pouraille, like Hair’s Breadth, belonged to the Ten Thou’ and Biffon was a Grand Fanandel.
La Biffe, Biffon’s redoubtable largue, who was long to defy all the efforts of the Police, because of her capacity for disguising herself as a respectable woman, was at liberty. This woman, who could do you a marquise, a baroness, a countess to perfection, had her own carriage and servants. A sort of Jacques Collin in skirts, she was the only woman to rival Asia, Jacques Collin’s right hand. Every leader of the underworld has, indeed, his devoted female double. The judicial archives, the secret chronicle of the Palais will tell you: no honest woman’s passion, not even that of a church hen for her spiritual director, nothing surpasses the devotion of the mistress who shares the perils of a great criminal.
Passion is almost always, with these people, the original reason for their daring operations, their murders. The excessive love which draws them, constitutionally, say the doctors, towards woman, occupies the whole moral and physical strength of these energetic men. Thence the idleness which devours their days; for amatory excesses demand both rest and restoring meals. Thence that distaste for all, work, which compels such people to adopt quick means to procure money. Even so, the need to live and to live well, itself so violent, is nothing in comparison with the prodigalities inspired by the female to whom these noble Medaros want to give jewellery, clothes, and who, always ravenous, loves good cheer. The wench wants a shawl, her lover steals it, and the woman finds in that a proof of love! That is how one proceeds to theft, which, if the human is examined with a magnifying glass, must be regarded as an impulse almost natural to man. Theft leads to murder, and step by step murder leads the lover to the scaffold.
The unruly physical love of these men would therefore, according to the medical faculty, lie at the origin of seven tenths of the crimes which are committed. The proof, indeed, is always furnished, striking, palpable, at the autopsy of a man just executed. This it is which procures to these monstrous lovers, society’s scarecrows, the adoration of their mistresses. It is this female devotion squatting faithfully at the prison gates, constantly occupied in undoing the tangled ruses of the investigation, incorruptible guardian of the blackest secrets, which renders so many trials obscure, impenetrable. There lies the strength and also the weakness of the criminal. In prostitutes’ language, to keep one’s self-respect means not to fail in any of the rules of this attachment, to give every penny one has to the man i
nside, to see to his welfare, keep faith in every respect, do anything for him. The cruellest insult one tart can hurl into the dishonoured face of another is to accuse her of faithlessness to a lover under lock and key. A whore of whom that can be said is considered as a woman without heart!…
La Pouraille passionately loved a woman, as we shall see. Hair’s Breadth, a philosophical egoist, who stole as a way of life, greatly resembled Paccard, Jacques Collin’s henchman, who had gone off with Prudence Servien, the two of them richer by seven hundred and fifty thousand francs. He was unattached, he despised women, he only loved Hair’s Breadth. As to Biffon, as we now know, he owed his very nickname to his attachment to la Biffe. These three exemplars of the swell mob had accounts to demand of Jacques Collin, accounts not to be established without difficulty.
Only the cashier knew how many of his clients survived, or what fortune each one had. The special mortality rate among his clients had entered into Dodgedeath’s calculations, when he decided to make off with the cash to Lucien’s benefit. Concealing himself both from his comrades and from the Police for nine years, Jacques Collin had a near-certainty of having inherited, by the terms of the Grand Fanandels’ charter, two thirds of the principal. Could he not, furthermore, allege payments made to chums who were subsequently topped? No system of inspection could touch the head of the Grand Fanandels. He had to be trusted implicitly, for the wild animal’s life that a gaol-bird leads necessitated, among the more respectable denizens of their savage world, a high degree of delicacy. Of the hundred thousand crowns he had made away with, Jacques Collin could perhaps acquit himself at that moment with a hundred thousand francs or so. As we have seen, La Pouraille, one of his creditors, had only ninety days to live. Provided elsewhere with a sum no doubt considerably in excess of that which his leader kept for him, La Pouraille might in any case be expected to be not unaccommodating.
One of the infallible signs by which prison governors and their minions, the Police and those in its pay, and even examining magistrates recognized the old lag, the horse back in its stall, the man who has already been fed on horse-beans, is his way of settling down in prison; the hardened offender naturally knows how things are done; he feels at home, nothing surprises him.
And so Jacques Collin, carefully watching his step, had till that moment played to perfection the part of an innocent and an alien, whether to La Force or the Conciergerie. But, stricken by grief, crushed by his double death, for on that fatal night he had twice died, he became Jacques Collin once more. The warder was stupefied not to have to tell the Spanish priest the way down to the prison yard. The accomplished actor forgot his part, he descended the winding stairs of the Bonbec tower as one accustomed to the Conciergerie.
‘Bibi-Lupin is right,’ the warder said to himself, ‘he’s an old lag, he is Jacques Collin.’
The boar at bay
Aτ the moment at which Dodgedeath appeared framed in the door of the turret, the prisoners, having made their purchases at the stone table called after Saint Louis, disposed themselves about the prison yard, never big enough for them: the new inmate was thus perceived by everyone at the same time, with all the more speed in that nothing can equal the precision of a prisoner’s glance, when each stands or squats in the yard like a spider at the centre of its web. The comparison is mathematically exact, for the eye being closed in on every side by high, black walls, the prisoner is always aware, even without looking, of the door through which the warders enter, of the parlour windows and of the staircase of the Tour Bonbec, the only ways out of the yard. In the profound isolation in which he exists, everything is an event to the man awaiting trial, everything engages his interest; his boredom, which may be compared with that of a tiger in its cage at the Zoo, multiplies his faculty of attention tenfold. It is not perhaps unnecessary to point out that Jacques Collin, dressed like an ecclesiastic not altogether suited to the cloth, wore black breeches, black stockings, shoes with silver buckles, a black waistcoat, and a certain type of dark maroon frock coat, whose cut betrayed the cleric at any time, especially when these indications are completed by the characteristic haircut. Jacques Collin wore a superlatively ecclesiastical and wholly convincing wig.
‘Look, look!’ said La Pouraille to Biffon, ‘here comes a bit of bad luck! a wild boar! how does one of that lot come to be here?’
‘It’s one of their dodges, a new sort of kitchen-hand,’ replied Hair’s Breadth. ‘He’s some marshalsea old-rope merchant in disguise, plying a trade in snares and bootlaces.’
The armed constabulary had a variety of cant names: on the tracks of a thief, he was a marchand de lacets, a corruption of maréchaussée or marshalsea, ‘chaussé’ no doubt suggesting at once bootlaces and the snares in which a foot may be caught, as well as whipcord and the hangman’s rope; with a man in custody, he was something between a sea-swallow and a sand-martin, a hirondelle de la grève, but the Grève in Paris, like the Strand in London, was a place of assembly for malcontents by the river; then, taking his man to the scaffold, he became a guillotine hussar. A kitchen-hand, of course, is inevitably a spy, especially if he is also a sheep or prisoner planted to gain information among his fellows. In that infernal bestiary, the warder’s returned horse had, it will be noted, become a wild boar, that being the cant term for a priest, nobody knows why.
To complete this picture of the prison yard, it is perhaps necessary to sketch in the two other fanandels, and first Sélérier, known as the Auvergnat or man from Auvergne, alias Father Ralleau, alias the Roller, alias Hair’s Breadth (he had thirty names and as many passports), who will henceforth be known only by this last appellation, the one always used among the swell mob. This profound thinker, who detected a constable in the mock priest, was a merry fellow of five feet four, whose muscles bulged oddly. In an enormous head burned two small, heavily-lidded eyes, like those of a bird of prey, the pupils grey, dull and hard. At first sight, he looked like a wolf because of the breadth of his jaws, vigorously carved and delineated; but all that this similarity implied in cruelty, even in ferocity, was counterbalanced by the cunning, the vivacity of his features, badly pock-marked as they were. Even these scars added by their sharpness to the impression of keen wit. They gave out mockery. The criminal life, with all that it implies in the way of hunger, nights spent out of doors on quaysides, embankments, barges, bridges and streets, the orgies of strong liquor to celebrate some lucky stroke, had given this face as it were a coat of varnish. From a distance of thirty yards, if Hair’s Breadth had appeared undisguised, any kind of constable or policeman would have spotted his natural prey; but he was the equal of Jacques Collin in the art of costume and make-up. At that moment, Hair’s Breadth, in his everyday wear like an actor who troubles about his appearance only on the stage, wore a sort of hunting jacket without buttons, the frayed buttonholes showing the white of the lining, decayed green slippers, nankeen breeches turned grey, and on his head a cap without peak but with flaps through which passed the ends of a torn, much-washed, old Madras pinner.
Beside Hair’s Breadth, Biffon formed a perfect contrast. This celebrated prig, of small stature, broad and fat yet agile, of livid complexion, eyes black and deep-set, dressed like a butcher, planted on two bandy pins, inspired fear by a physiognomy in which predominated all the signs of the constitution peculiar to carnivorous beasts.
Hair’s Breadth and Biffon made a fuss of La Pouraille, who no longer had any hope. This double or triple murderer knew that he would be convicted, sentenced, executed within four months. Hair’s Breadth and Biffon therefore never addressed him except as Canon, i.e., canon of the Abbey of Mount Unwilling. It may be readily conceived why Hair’s Breadth and Biffon made much of La Pouraille. La Pouraille had buried two hundred and fifty thousand gold francs, his share of the loot collected from the Crottats husband and wife at the time of their demise, as the bill of indictment put it. What a magnificent legacy to leave to two fanandels, although these two former convicts must in a matter of days return to the chain-gang.
Biffon and Hair’s Breadth were to be sentenced for ‘qualified’ theft (i.e., for theft with aggravating circumstances) to fifteen years consecutive to, not concurrent with, the ten years of a previous sentence which they had taken the liberty of interrupting. Thus, although one of them had twenty-two and the other twenty-six years of hard labour to look forward to, they both hoped to escape and pick up La Pouraille’s gold hoard. But this Ten Thou’ man had so far kept his secret, it seemed pointless to him to give it away before sentence had been pronounced. Belonging to the high aristocracy of his calling, neither had he given his accomplices away. His character was known; Monsieur Popinot, the examining magistrate in that appalling affair, had got nothing out of him.
This terrible triumvirate stood at the upper end of the yard, under the pistole or privilege wing. Hair’s Breadth was just finishing a lesson he had been giving to a young man shopped for the first time, who, expecting a sentence of ten years’ hard labour, was seeking information about the various meadows.
‘Well, now, my child,’ Hair’s Breadth was telling him sententiously, at the moment at which Jacques Collin appeared, ‘the difference between Brest, Toulon and Rochefort is as follows.’
‘Right, old un’, carry on,’ said the young man with all a novice’s curiosity.
The young prisoner, son of a respectable family indicted on charges of forgery, had come down into the yard from the pistole adjoining that in which Lucien was.