‘But the law!’ replied Camusot, ‘he had been under arrest for two days!…’
‘Well, it is all over now,’ the Public Prosecutor went on. ‘I’ve done what I could to set things right. My carriage and my servants will be in the poor, weak poet’s funeral procession. Sérisy’s done the same, in fact more, he’s undertaken what the unfortunate young man’s last wishes asked him to do, he will be executor of the will. This promise elicited from his wife a look full of sense. Furthermore, Count Octave is to be present at the funeral himself.’
‘Then, Monsieur le Comte,’ said Camusot, ‘let us finish the work! There is still a dangerous prisoner on our hands. You know as well as I do, he is Jacques Collin. This wretch will be revealed for what he is…’
‘Then we are lost!’ Monsieur de Granville cried.
‘At this moment he is with your condemned man, who was formerly, at the penitentiary, for him, what Lucien was in Paris,… his… young friend! Bibi-Lupin has disguised himself as one of the constabulary to be present at their interview.’
‘What are the judicial police mixing themselves up with now?’ said the Procurator, ‘they must act only on orders from me!…’
‘The whole Conciergerie will know that we hold Jacques Collin… Well, what I came to tell you is that this powerful and daring criminal is supposed to have in his possession the most dangerous of the letters in the correspondence of Madame de Sérisy, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu.’
‘Are you sure of that?…’ asked Monsieur de Granville with an expression of troubled surprise.
‘Judge for yourself, Monsieur le Comte, whether my fear is justified. When I went through the bundle of letters seized on the unfortunate young man’s premises, Jacques Collin’s eyes followed me incisively, and I saw on his face a smile of satisfaction, the significance of which could hardly escape an examining magistrate. A scoundrel as deep as Jacques Collin is very careful not to yield up weapons as useful as those. Can you not see those documents in the hands of some defence lawyer whom the rascal will pick from among the enemies of the government and the aristocracy? My wife, to whom the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse has shown kindness, went to warn her, and, at this moment, they are no doubt in consultation with the Grandlieus…’
‘Then we can’t put the man on trial!’ cried the Attorney General rising and striding about his office. ‘The documents will be in a place of safety…’
‘I know where,’ said Camusot. With these three words, the examining magistrate removed all the prejudices which the Public Prosecutor had conceived against him.
‘Ah!…’ said Monsieur de Granville again sitting down.
‘On my way from home to the Palais, I thought very deeply about this distressing affair. Jacques Collin has an aunt, a real one, a woman, about whom the political police have sent a note to the Prefecture. He is the pupil and the deity of this woman, his father’s sister, she is called Jacqueline Collin. The jade has a clothes dealer’s business, and through trade contacts she picks up a great many family secrets. If Jacques Collin has confided those papers, which are to be his salvation, to anybody, it is to that creature; let us arrest her…’
The Procureur Général looked at Camusot with a quizzical glance which said: ‘This man is not such a fool as I thought him yesterday; he is young after all, he doesn’t yet know how to hold the reins of the law.’
‘… However,’ said Camusot as he went on, ‘in order to achieve this, we must countermand all the measures that were taken yesterday, and I wanted your advice on that, your orders…’
The Procurator picked up his paper-knife and gently tapped the edge of the table with it, in one of those gestures familiar to all thinkers, when they abandon themselves completely to reflection.
‘Three families in danger!’ he cried… ‘We can’t make one false step!… You’re right, the main thing, to follow Fouché’s maxim, is: Arrest them! Jacques Collin must be put back into solitary confinement at once.’
‘That makes him an avowed convict! The memory of Lucien will suffer…’
‘What a frightful business!’ said Monsieur de Granville, ‘danger at every turn.’
At that moment, the governor of the Conciergerie entered, not without having knocked; but an office like that of the Attorney General is so well guarded, that only those known to the Parquet can knock at the door.
‘Monsieur le Comte,’ said Monsieur Gault, ‘the prisoner bearing the name of Carlos Herrera is asking to see you.’
‘Has he been in communication with anybody?’ asked the Procurator.
‘With the other prisoners, for he went out into the yard at about half past seven. He’s seen the condemned man, who appears to have talked to him.’
Monsieur de Granville, at a word from Monsieur Camusot which came to him like a sudden glimpse of light, perceived just how much advantage could be taken, in the way of laying hands on the letters, of a confession of intimacy between Jacques Collin and Théodore Calvi.
A good entrance
GLAD of a reason for putting the execution off, the Procurator with a gesture called Monsieur Gault to him.
‘I intend,’ he said, ‘to put the execution off until tomorrow; but I don’t want this delay to be suspected at the Conciergerie. Total discretion. Let the executioner appear to be making everything ready. Send to me here, under a stout guard, that Spanish priest, the Spanish embassy is making inquiries. The constabulary will bring Don Carlos up by way of your communicating staircase, so that he sees nobody. Warn your men, and see that two of them come up with him, one holding each arm; they are to leave him only at the door to my office. Are you quite sure, Monsieur Gault, that this dangerous foreigner has not had the opportunity of talking to anyone but the other prisoners?’
‘Oh, just as he came out of the condemned man’s room, someone appeared wanting to see him, a lady…’
Here the two magistrates exchanged a look, and what a look!
‘What lady?’ said Camusot.
‘One of his penitents,… some marchioness,’ replied Monsieur Gault.
‘Worse and worse!’ cried Monsieur de Granville looking at Camusot.
‘She gave the warders and the constables a headache,’ Monsieur Gault concluded lamely.
‘No part of your functions will permit slackness,’ averred severely the Attorney General. ‘The Conciergerie is not surrounded by walls for nothing. How did this lady get in?’
‘With a valid permit, Monsieur,’ replied the governor. ‘This lady, perfectly attired, accompanied by a footman and a runner, in a splendid equipage, came to see her confessor before going to the funeral of the unfortunate young man you had taken away…’
‘Bring me the Prefecture’s permit,’ said Monsieur de Granville.
‘It was made out on the recommendation of His Excellency the Comte de Sérisy.’
‘What was this woman like?’ asked the Procurator.
‘It seemed to us that she was the most respectable of women.’
‘Did you see her face?’
‘She wore a black veil.’
‘What did they say?’
‘A pious lady with a prayer-book!… what could she say?… She asked the priest’s blessing, kneeled…’
‘Did they talk long?’ asked the judge.
‘Not five minutes; but none of us understood a word of what they were saying, they were clearly talking Spanish.’
‘Tell us everything, sir,’ the Procurator insisted. ‘I repeat, the smallest detail is, to us, of capital interest. Let this be an example to you!’
‘She was weeping, Monsieur.’
‘Was she really weeping?’
‘We couldn’t see her, she was hiding her face in her handkerchief. She left three hundred francs in gold for the prisoners.’
‘It must be someone else!’ cried Camusot.
‘Bibi-Lupin,’ Monsieur Gault continued, ‘cried out: “She’s a known thief.” ’
‘He would know,’ said Monsie
ur de Granville. ‘Make out a warrant,’ he added looking at Camusot, ‘and affix seals everywhere in her dwelling, at once! How did she obtain Monsieur de Sérisy’s authorization?… Bring me the Prefecture’s permit,… go at once, Monsieur Gault! Send the priest to me promptly. So long as we leave him there, the danger could not be greater. In two hours’ talk, one may go far in a man’s soul.’
‘Especially a man of your authority,’ said Camusot with delicacy.
‘There’ll be two of us,’ replied the Procurator politely. And he resumed his reflections.
‘In all prison visiting-rooms, there should be a position created for a supervisor, a well-paid job given on retirement to the cleverest and most conscientious police officers,’ he said after a long pause. ‘That’s where Bibi-Lupin should end his days. Those places need closer supervision than they receive, we need eyes and ears there. Monsieur Gault could tell us nothing of the slightest use.’
‘He is so busy,’ said Camusot; ‘but between the solitary cells and us, there is indeed a lacuna, which should not exist. When we come from the Conciergerie to our offices, we pass along corridors, through yards, up staircases. The attention of our agents can’t be everywhere, while the prisoner is thinking all the time of his own case.’
‘I’m told that a woman was already there in Jacques Collin’s path, when he left the cells to be interrogated. This woman reached as far as the guardroom, at the top of the little stairway to the Mousetrap, the ushers told me, and I’ve scolded the constabulary about it.’
‘Oh, the Palais needs altogether rebuilding,’ said Monsieur de Granville; ‘but it will cost twenty or thirty millions!… See if you can get thirty millions out of the two Houses for the convenience of the Law.’
The footsteps of several persons and the sound of arms were heard. It must be Jacques Collin.
The Attorney General covered his features with a mask of solemnity beneath which the man disappeared. Camusot imitated the head of the Parquet.
As they had anticipated, an office messenger opened the door, Jacques Collin appeared, tranquil and quite unsurprised.
‘You wanted to speak to me,’ said the magistrate, ‘I am listening.’
‘Monsieur le Comte, I am Jacques Collin, I give myself up!’ Camusot gave a start, the Procurator remained calm.
Conversation between Crime and Justice
‘You must think that I have a motive for acting like this,’ Jacques Collin continued, embracing the two magistrates with a mocking look. ‘It must be a great embarrassment to you; for if I’d remained a Spanish priest, you could have had the constabulary take me to the frontier at Bayonne, and Sanish bayonets would then have relieved you of me.’
The two magistrates remained impassively silent.
‘Monsieur le Comte,’ the convict went on, ‘my reasons for acting thus are graver even than that, though they’re devilishly personal to me; but I can only speak of them to yourself… If ou were afraid…’
‘Afraid of whom? of what?’ said the Comte de Granville.
At that moment, the stance, the facial expression, the carriage of the head, the gesture, the look, of that great Attorney General presented a living image of the Magistrature, which should give the finest examples of civic courage. Then, briefly, he stood at the level of the old judges of the ancient parliament, at the time of the civil wars when the presidents of courts faced death like the marble of which their statues were to be made.
‘Afraid of being alone with an escaped convict.’
‘Leave us, Monsieur Camusot,’ the Procurator said briskly.
‘I was going to suggest that my hands and feet should be tied,’ Jacques Collin persisted coldly, his gaze upon the two magistrates formidable. He paused, then continued solemnly: ‘Count, I only esteemed you before, now I admire you…’
‘Do you then think yourself redoubtable?’ asked the magistrate with a look of contempt.
‘Think myself redoubtable!’ said the convict, ‘what use would that be? I am and I know it.’ Jacques Collin took a chair and sat down with all the ease of manner of a man who knows himself to be his adversary’s equal in a discussion in which he is to speak from a position of strength.
Just then, Monsieur Camusot, about to close the door on whose threshold he stood, came back into the room, went up to Monsieur de Granville, and handed him two papers, folded…
‘There we are,’ said the judge to his Director of Prosecutions showing him one of the papers.
‘Recall Monsieur Gault,’ cried Count Granville as soon as he had read the name of Madame de Maufrigneuse’s maid, whom he knew.
The governor of the Conciergerie entered.
‘The woman who came to see the prisoner,’ the Procurator said in his ear, ‘describe her.’
‘Short, strongly built, stout, stocky,’ replied Monsieur Gault.
‘The person for whom the permit was made out is tall and thin,’ said Monsieur de Granville. ‘What age was she?’
‘Sixty.’
‘Does this concern me, gentlemen?’ said Jacques Collin.
‘Look,’ he went on cheerfully, ‘there’s no need to make inquiries. The person in question is my aunt, my real aunt, a woman, an old woman. I can spare you a lot of embarrassment… You’ll only find my aunt when I mean you to… If we flounder about in this way, we shall never make any progress.’
‘Monsieur l’Abbé no longer speaks French like a Spaniard,’ said Monsieur Gault. ‘He’s given up jabbering.’
‘Because things are jumbled up enough without that, my dear Monsieur Gault!’ replied Jacques Collin with a bitter smile and addressing the governor by name.
Monsieur Gault hurriedly went up to the Procurator and said in his ear :
‘Watch out for yourself, Count, the man is in a rage!’
Monsieur de Granville studied Jacques Collin deliberately and found him calm; but he very soon recognized the truth of what the governor said. That deceptive attitude concealed the frigid and terrible nervous irritation of a savage. In Jacques Collin’s eyes a volcanic eruption brooded, his fists were clenched. He was very much the tiger gathering itself to spring at its prey.
‘Leave us,’ went on the Director of Prosecutions with a solemn air addressing the governor of the Conciergerie and the examining magistrate.
‘You did well to send Lucien’s murderer away!…’ said Jacques Collin without caring whether Camusot heard or not, ‘I could stand it no longer, I was about to strangle him…’
And Monsieur de Granville shuddered. Never had he seen so much blood in a man’s eyes, cheeks so drained, forehead so covered with sweat, and so great a contraction of the muscles.
‘What good would such a murder have done you?’ the Procurator asked the criminal quietly.
‘Every day you avenge or believe you’re avenging Society, sir, and you want me to reason about revenge!… You never felt vengeance, then, sharpening its knives in your veins… Don’t you realize that that idiot of a judge killed him for us; for you loved him, my Lucien, and he loved you! That dear child told me all, every evening, when he came in; I put him to bed, as a serving woman puts her brat to bed, and I made him tell me everything… He confided everything to me, even his slightest sensations… Ah! never did a good mother tenderly love her only son as I loved that angel. If only you knew! goodness was born in that heart as the flowers spring in the fields. He was weak, that was his only fault, weak like the string of a lyre, so strong when it’s stretched… The finest natures are like that, their weakness is a blend of tenderness, wonder, the gift of expanding in the sun of art, of love, of the beauty which God has made for man under so many forms!… In short, Lucien should have been a woman. Ah, when I think of all I said to the brute beast who has just gone out… Ah! sir, what I did, as an accused person before a judge, was what God would have done to save His Son, if He had wanted to save him and gone before Pilate with him!…’
Théodore’s innocence
TEARS flooded from the convict’s pale, yellow eyes wh
ich till then had burned like those of a wolf famished by six months’ snow in the heart of the ukraine. He continued: ‘That blockhead wouldn’t listen, and he destroyed the child!… Sir, I washed the lad’s body with my tears, imploring Him Whom I don’t know but Who is over us! I who don’t believe in God!… (If I were not a materialist, I shoudn’t be what I am!…) I’ve told you all there in a word 1 You can’t know, no man can know what grief is; I alone know it. The fire of grief so dried up my tears, that last night I could not weep. I’m weeping now, because I feel that you understand me. I saw you there just now, the very figure of justice. Ah! sir, may God,… (I am beginning to believe in Him!) may God keep you from becoming like me… That damned judge has taken my soul from me. Monsieur! sir! at this very moment, my life, my beauty, my virtue, my conscience, all my strength, are being buried! Imagine a dog whose blood is drained off by a chemist… Look at me! I am that dog… That is why I came to you and said: I am Jacques Collin, I give myself up!…” I had decided to do that this morning when they came to take away from me the body I was kissing like a madman, like a mother, as the Virgin must have kissed Jesus at the entombment… I wanted to place myself unconditionally in the service of Justice… That is what I must now do, and you shall learn why…’
‘Are you speaking to Monsieur de Granville or to the King’s Attorney General?’ said the man of law.
These two men, CRIME and JUSTIC E, regarded each other. The convict had profoundly moved the magistrate who was seized with divine pity for the man of misfortune, aware of his life and his feelings. Finally, the magistrate (a magistrate is always a magistrate) who knew nothing of Jacques Collin’s conduct since his escape, thought he knew how to make himself the master of this criminal, against whom after all nothing more than a single forgery had been proved. And what he proposed was to exercise generosity upon a nature variously composed, like bronze, of the metals of good and evil. A man who, moreover, had reached the age of fifty-three without ever having succeeded in inspiring love, Monsieur de Granville admired sensitive natures, like all men who have never been loved. It was perhaps that despair, the lot of many men to whom women grant only their friendship and esteem, whose intimate bond secretly united Messieurs de Bauvan, de Granville and de Sérisy; for a shared misfortune, like shared happiness, tunes souls to its own diapason.