As we see, customs do not vary at different levels of society, except superficially. High society has its own slang, but that slang is known as form.
‘Are you quite certain, Madame, that there are indeed such letters written by Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu to this young man?’ said the Duc de Grandlieu. And the look he now cast on Madame Camusot was like a mariner’s lead.
‘I haven’t seen them, but it is to be feared,’ she replied nervously.
‘My daughter can have written nothing unavowable!’ cried the duchess.
‘Poor duchess!’ thought Diana looking at the duke in a way that made him tremble.
‘What do you think, dear little Diana?’ said the duke in the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse’s ear as he led her to a window embrasure.
‘Clotilde so doted on Lucien, my dear, that she arranged a meeting before her departure. But for little Lenoncourt, she might have fled with him in the forest of Fontainebleau! I know that Lucien wrote letters to Clotilde that would have turned the head of a saint! We are three daughters of Eve enveloped by the serpent of correspondence…’
The duke and Diana turned from the embrasure and came back to the duchess and Madame Camusot, who were talking in low voices. Amelia, who in this was following the advice of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, pretended to be extremely devout in order to win the heart of the proud Portuguese.
‘We are at the mercy of a vile escaped convict!’ said the duke with a peculiar shrug. ‘That is what comes of receiving in the house persons of whom one is not perfectly sure! Before anyone is admitted, one should know all about his means, his kinsfolk, his antecedents…’
From the aristocratic point of view, that is the moral of our story.
‘It is too late to think of that,’ said the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. ‘What we have to do now is save poor Madame de Sérisy, Clotilde, and me…’
‘We can only wait for Henry, I’ve sent for him; but everything depends on the individual Gentil has gone to look for. God grant the man be in Paris! Madame,’ he said addressing Madame Camusot, ‘I am grateful to you for having thought of us…’
This was Madame Camusot’s dismissal. The royal usher’s daughter had enough wit to understand the duke, she got up; but the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, with the adorable grace which won her so many friendships and secrets, took Amélie by the hand and turned her significantly to the duke and duchess.
‘On my own account, and as if she had not risen at dawn to save us all, I shall ask you to do more than remember my little Madame Camusot. First she has rendered me a service of the kind one doesn’t forget; then she is altogether on our side, she and her husband. I have promised to help her Camusot to get on, and I beg you to afford him your especial protection, for my sake.’
‘You have no need of such recommendation,’ said the duke to Madame Camusot. ‘The Grandlieus always remember the services they have been rendered. The King’s people will presently have an opportunity of distinguishing themselves, of proving their devotion, there will be an opening for your husband…’
Madame Camusot withdrew proud, swollen to the point of suffocation. She returned home triumphant, full of admiration for herself, she laughed at the hostility of the Procurator General. She said to herself: ‘Suppose we got Monsieur de Granville out!’
The obscure and powerful Corentin
IT was time for Madame Camusot to withdraw. The Duc de Chaulieu, one of the King’s favourites, passed this middle-class lady on the steps outside.
‘Henry,’ cried the Duc de Grandlieu when he heard his friend’s name announced, ‘hurry, I beg you, to the Palace, try to see the King, this is what it is all about.’ And he led the duke into the window embrasure where he had already talked with the light and graceful Diana.
From time to time the Duc de Chaulieu looked sideways at the flighty duchess, who, as she talked with the pious one and allowed herself to be sermonized, responded to the Duc de Chaulieu’s glances.
‘My dear child,’ said the Duc de Grandlieu when his talk aside was finally over, ‘do try to behave yourself! Look!’ he added taking Diana’s hands, ‘just keep the rules, don’t compromise yourself again, never write letters! Letters, my dear, have caused as much private grief as public misfortune… What might be forgiven to a girl like Clotilde, in love for the first time, is quite without excuse in…’
‘An old grenadier who has been under fire!’ said the duchess pouting at the duke. The joke and the play of expression on her face brought a smile to the grieved faces of the two dukes and the pious duchess herself. ‘I haven’t written a love-letter for four years!… Are we saved?’ asked Diana who was concealing a good deal of anxiety under this childish behaviour.
‘Not yet!’ said the Duc de Chaulieu. ‘You don’t know how difficult it is to perform an arbitrary action. To a constitutional monarch, it is much the same thing as infidelity in a married woman. That is his form of adultery.’
‘His besetting sin!’ said the Duc de Grandlieu.
‘Forbidden fruit! ’ answered Diana with a smile. ‘Oh! how I should like to be the government; for there’s no such fruit left for me now, I’ve eaten it all.’
‘Child! child!’ said the pious duchess, ‘you go too far.’
The two dukes, hearing a carriage draw to a halt before the outside steps with the noise and commotion of horses which have been put to a gallop, bowed to the two women and left them together, and went into the Duc de Grandlieu’s study, to which the dweller in the rue Honoré Chevalier was shown in. This was none other than the head of counter-espionage at the Palace, the obscure and powerful Corentin.
‘Come in,’ said the Duc de Grandlieu, ‘come in, Monsieur de Saint Denis.’
Corentin, surprised at the duke’s long memory, bowed deeply to the dukes and went in.
‘It still concerns the same person, at any rate it’s connected with him,’ said the Duc de Grandlieu.
‘But he’s dead,’ said Corentin.
‘There is still a companion,’ the Duc de Chaulieu observed, ‘a rough companion.’
‘The convict, Jacques Collin!’ answered Corentin.
‘Speak, Ferdinand,’ said the Duc de Chaulieu to the former ambassador.
‘The wretch is still to be feared,’ continued the Duc de Grandlieu, ‘he’s got hold, for purposes of blackmail, of the letters which Mesdames de Sérisy and Maufrigneuse wrote to this Lucien Chardon, his creature. It seems to have been a practice with this young man to obtain passionate letters in reply to his own; for Mademoiselle de Grandlieu, it appears, wrote one or two; we fear, at any rate, that it is so, and we can know nothing with certainty, she’s abroad…’
‘The young fellow himself,’ replied Corentin, ‘was quite incapable of so much forethought!… It was a precaution taken by Father Carlos Herrera!’ Corentin propped his elbow on the arm of the chair in which he was sitting, and put his head in his hand to reflect. ‘Money!… this man has more than we have,’ he said. ‘Esther Gobseck served him as bait to catch nearly two millions in that fishpond of gold pieces called Nucingen… Gentlemen, see that I am given full authority in the right quarter, and I will rid you of this man!…’
‘And… of the letters?’ the Duc de Grandlieu asked Corentin.
‘Listen, gentlemen,’ Corentin went on rising and showing his angry weasel’s face. He thrust his hands into the front pockets of his long, black-flannel trousers. This great actor in the historical drama of the time had put on only a waistcoat and frock coat, he hadn’t changed his trousers, so well did he know how appreciative the great are of promptitude on certain occasions. He walked familiarly up and down the study talking aloud, as though he had been alone. ‘He’s a convict! he could be thrown, without trial, into a cell at Bicêtre, deprived of all communication with the outside world, and left to rot… He might, of course, have left instructions with his followers, in case that happened!’
‘He was put in solitary confinement,’ said the Duc de Grandlieu, ‘at once, after he’d been taken
at the girl’s house, without warning.’
‘I wonder if any cell can confine that scoundrel?’ replied Corentin. ‘He is as full of tricks as… as I am!’
‘ What, then?’ the two dukes inquired of each other by a glance.
‘We can clap the rogue in the penitentiary at once,… at Rochefort, he’ll be dead in six months there! Oh! without violence!’ he said in reply to a gesture from the Duc de Grandlieu. ‘What do you expect? a convict doesn’t last more than six months in a hot summer when he’s really made to work in the mists off the Charente. But this will only do if our man has failed to take precautions about those letters. If the joker thought what his adversaries might be up to, and it seems likely he did, we shall have to find out what those precautions were. If the letters are in the keeping of somebody poor, he can be bought… So we must get Jacques Collin to talk! What a battle that would be, I should lose! No, the best thing will be to swap one sort of letters for another!… letters of pardon, and let me have that man in my shop. Jacques Collin is the only man with the capacity to become my successor, since poor Contenson and dear Peyrade are dead. Jacques Collin killed me those two incomparable spies as if to make a place for himself. You see, gentlemen, I shall have to be given a free hand. Jacques Collin is in the Conciergerie. I’m going to see Monsieur de Granville in his office. Let somebody in your confidence meet me there; either I need a letter to show Monsieur de Granville, who doesn’t know me, a letter which of course I should return to the head of the government, or else somebody important to speak for me… There’s half an hour to spare, it will take me about that to dress, that is to say to become what I need to be in the eyes of the Director of Public Prosecutions.’
‘Sir,’ said the Duc de Chaulieu, ‘I know how profoundly clever you are, and I only want a simple yes or no. Can you guarantee to succeed?’
‘Yes, with unlimited authority, and with your undertaking to see that I am never questioned on the subject. I have my plan ready.’
This sinister reply provoked a slight tremor in the two dukes.
‘Be off, then, sir!’ said the Duc de Chaulieu. ‘The matter is to be charged up to the accounts on which you usually draw in the course of your duties.’
Corentin saluted the two great lords and left.
Henri de Lenoncourt, for whom Ferdinand de Grandlieu had a carriage waiting, went round at once to the King, whom he was able to see at any time, by reason of his court functions.
Thus, the diverse interests caught up together, at the lowest and the highest levels, were all to meet in the Procurator General’s office, brought all together by necessity and represented by three men: the law by Monsieur de Granville, family interests by Corentin, faced by his terrible adversary, Jacques Collin, who embodied social evil in all its savage energy.
The duel lay between justice and governmental power, united against the underworld and its wiles! The underworld, the penitentiary, symbol of the daring which overrides calculation and reflection, to which all means are good, which can dispense with the hypocrisy of formally constituted authority, hideous representative of the interests of the empty belly, the bloody, swift protest of hunger! These were the attackers and the defenders, theft and property, the dreadful question of the social and the natural states confronting each other in the narrowest possible space. In short, this was to be a terrible, living image of the anti-social compromises into which the feeble embodiments of legally constituted authority are forced to enter with the forces of revolt.
Troubles of a public prosecutor
WHEN Monsieur Camusot was announced to the Procureur Général, the latter made a sign that he should be shown in. Monsieur de Granville, who expected this visit, wished to come to an understanding with the magistrate on the way of concluding Lucien’s affair. The arrangement he had made, with Camusot, the previous day, before the poor poet’s death, could no longer stand.
‘Sit down, Monsieur Camusot,’ said Monsieur de Granville, himself sitting down heavily.
Alone with his subordinate, the senior magistrate made no attempt to conceal his dejection. Camusot looked at Monsieur de Granville and saw on that strong face an almost livid pallor, and an extreme tiredness, an air of prostration which denoted suffering possibly more acute than that of a man condemned to death to whom the clerk has just read out the rejection of his appeal. Yet such a reading means, in the language of law: Prepare yourself, your last moments have come.
‘I will come back, Monsieur le Comte,’ said Camusot, ‘though the matter is rather urgent…’
‘No, stay,’ replied the Procurator with dignity. ‘True magistrates, sir, must accept their moments of anguish and know how to hide them. It was wrong of me, if you observed in me signs of perturbation…’
Camusot did not speak.
‘May God spare you, Monsieur Camusot, the worst of the necessities of our life! One might succumb to less! I have just spent the night with one of my dearest friends, I have only two such friends, Count Octave de Bauvan and Count Sérisy. We remained, Monsieur de Sérisy, Count Octave and I, from six o’clock yesterday evening till six this morning, taking it in turn to go from the drawing-room to the bedside of Madame de Sérisy, fearing each time to find her dead or irrecoverably mad! Desplein, Bianchon, Sinard with two attendants did not leave the bedroom. The count adores his wife. Think what a night I have spent between a woman mad with love and a friend mad with despair. A statesman does not show his despair like a fool! Sérisy, calm as though in his place at a meeting of the Council of State, writhed in his chair to show us a calm face. That forehead bent by such heavy labours was covered with sweat. I slept from five o’clock to half past seven, overcome by fatigue, and I had to be here at eight o’clock to give orders for an execution. Believe me, Monsieur Camusot, when a man in my position has lain all night in an abyss of grief, feeling the hand of God weigh heavy on human life and strike blow after blow on noble hearts, it is difficult for him to sit there, before his desk, and to say coldly: “Leta head fall at four! destroy one of God’s creatures full of life, of strength, of health.” Yet such is my duty!… Bowed down with grief, I must give the order for the scaffold to be raised…
‘The condemned man does not know that the magistrate feels an anguish no less great than his own. At this moment, linked to each other by a sheet of paper, myself representing a society which exacts vengeance, he the crime to be expiated, we are the two heads of a single duty, two existences joined for an instant by the knife of the law. Nobody pities, nobody consoles the magistrate’s sufferings. It is our glory to bury them deep in our hearts! The priest, with his life offered to God, the soldier and his thousand dead given to the country, seem to me happy beside the magistrate with his doubts, his fears, his terrible responsibility.
‘You know,’ continued the Procurator General, ‘that we have to execute a young man of twenty-seven, handsome like the one who died on us yesterday, fair like him, whose head became forfeit against our expectations; since the only charges against him were for receiving. Under sentence, this lad hasn’t confessed! For seventy days now, he’s resisted every test, insisting all the time that he’s innocent. For the past two months, I’ve had two heads on my shoulders! Oh, I’d give a year of my life to receive his confession, juries need reassuring!… Think what a blow it would be to Justice if one day it were discovered that the crime for which he is to die had been committed by somebody else.
‘In Paris, everything is a matter of great weight, the smallest judicial incidents take on a political importance.
‘The jury, that institution which our revolutionary legislators believed in so strongly, has become an instrument of social ruin; it fails in its purpose, it doesn’t afford society due protection. The jury refuses to take its function seriously. Jurors are divided into two schools, one of which wants to abolish capital punishment, and the result is to destroy all idea of equality before the law. With a dreadful crime like parricide, for instance, in one region a verdict of not-guilty will be brought in, whi
le elsewhere what we may describe as an ordinary crime is punished with death! What would be the result if, under our jurisdiction, here in Paris, we executed an innocent man?’
‘He is an escaped convict,’ observed Monsieur Camusot timidly.
‘In the hands of the Opposition and the Press, he’d be a Paschal lamb!’ cried Monsieur de Granville, ‘and the Opposition could whitewash him as it chose, for he’s a Corsican fanatic with all the notions of his country, his murders would be the results of a vendetta!… In that island, if you kill your enemy, you still consider yourself, and are considered, to be an excellent fellow.
‘ Ah, what an unfortunate man your true magistrate is! You know, they ought to live outside the community, as pontiffs once did. The world should only see them when they emerged from their cells at fixed times, solemn, ancient, venerable, pronouncing judgment like the high priests of antiquity, combining in themselves the judicial and the sacerdotal powers! We should only be visible on the bench… Nowadays we may be seen amusing ourselves or in difficulties like anybody else!… We may be seen in drawing-rooms, at home, citizens, creatures of passion, and instead of being terrible we are grotesque…’
This superb utterance, punctuated by rests and interjections, accompanied by gestures which gave it an eloquence difficult to set down on paper, made Camusot shiver.
What’s to be done?
‘MYSELF, sir,’ said Camusot, ‘yesterday I too began my apprenticeship to the pains of our condition!… The death of that young man almost killed me, he didn’t understand that I wanted to help him, the unfortunate fellow gave himself away…’
‘He shouldn’t have been interrogated at all,’ cried Monsieur de Granville, ‘the best way to help somebody is often to do nothing!…’