Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  This bitter cry, broken by pauses and interjections, and emphasized by gestures which gave it an eloquence impossible to reduce to writing, made Camusot’s blood run chill.

  “And I, monsieur,” said he, “began yesterday my apprenticeship to the sufferings of our calling. — I could have died of that young fellow’s death. He misunderstood my wish to be lenient, and the poor wretch committed himself.”

  “Ah, you ought never to have examined him!” cried Monsieur de Granville; “it is so easy to oblige by doing nothing.”

  “And the law, monsieur?” replied Camusot. “He had been in custody two days.”

  “The mischief is done,” said the public prosecutor. “I have done my best to remedy what is indeed irremediable. My carriage and servants are following the poor weak poet to the grave. Serizy has sent his too; nay, more, he accepts the duty imposed on him by the unfortunate boy, and will act as his executor. By promising this to his wife he won from her a gleam of returning sanity. And Count Octave is attending the funeral in person.”

  “Well, then, Monsieur le Comte,” said Camusot, “let us complete our work. We have a very dangerous man on our hands. He is Jacques Collin — and you know it as well as I do. The ruffian will be recognized — — ”

  “Then we are lost!” cried Monsieur de Granville.

  “He is at this moment shut up with your condemned murderer, who, on the hulks, was to him what Lucien has been in Paris — a favorite protege. Bibi-Lupin, disguised as a gendarme, is watching the interview.”

  “What business has the superior police to interfere?” said the public prosecutor. “He has no business to act without my orders!”

  “All the Conciergerie must know that we have caught Jacques Collin. — Well, I have come on purpose to tell you that this daring felon has in his possession the most compromising letters of Lucien’s correspondence with Madame de Serizy, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu.”

  “Are you sure of that?” asked Monsieur de Granville, his face full of pained surprise.

  “You shall hear, Monsieur le Comte, what reason I have to fear such a misfortune. When I untied the papers found in the young man’s rooms, Jacques Collin gave a keen look at the parcel, and smiled with satisfaction in a way that no examining judge could misunderstand. So deep a villain as Jacques Collin takes good care not to let such a weapon slip through his fingers. What is to be said if these documents should be placed in the hands of counsel chosen by that rascal from among the foes of the government and the aristocracy! — My wife, to whom the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse has shown so much kindness, is gone to warn her, and by this time they must be with the Grandlieus holding council.”

  “But we cannot possibly try the man!” cried the public prosecutor, rising and striding up and down the room. “He must have put the papers in some safe place — — ”

  “I know where,” said Camusot.

  These words finally effaced every prejudice the public prosecutor had felt against him.

  “Well, then — — ” said Monsieur de Granville, sitting down again.

  “On my way here this morning I reflected deeply on this miserable business. Jacques Collin has an aunt — an aunt by nature, not putative — a woman concerning whom the superior police have communicated a report to the Prefecture. He is this woman’s pupil and idol; she is his father’s sister, her name is Jacqueline Collin. This wretched woman carries on a trade as a wardrobe purchaser, and by the connection this business has secured her she gets hold of many family secrets. If Jacques Collin has intrusted those papers, which would be his salvation, to any one’s keeping, it is to that of this creature. Have her arrested.”

  The public prosecutor gave Camusot a keen look, as much as to say, “This man is not such a fool as I thought him; he is still young, and does not yet know how to handle the reins of justice.”

  “But,” Camusot went on, “in order to succeed, we must give up all the plans we laid yesterday, and I came to take your advice — your orders — — ”

  The public prosecutor took up his paper-knife and tapped it against the edge of the table with one of the tricky movements familiar to thoughtful men when they give themselves up to meditation.

  “Three noble families involved!” he exclaimed. “We must not make the smallest blunder! — You are right: as a first step let us act on Fouche’s principle, ‘Arrest!’ — and Jacques Collin must at once be sent back to the secret cells.”

  “That is to proclaim him a convict and to ruin Lucien’s memory!”

  “What a desperate business!” said Monsieur de Granville. “There is danger on every side.”

  At this instant the governor of the Conciergerie came in, not without knocking; and the private room of a public prosecutor is so well guarded, that only those concerned about the courts may even knock at the door.

  “Monsieur le Comte,” said Monsieur Gault, “the prisoner calling himself Carlos Herrera wishes to speak with you.”

  “Has he had communication with anybody?” asked Monsieur de Granville.

  “With all the prisoners, for he has been out in the yard since about half-past seven. And he has seen the condemned man, who would seem to have talked to him.”

  A speech of Camusot’s, which recurred to his mind like a flash of light, showed Monsieur de Granville all the advantage that might be taken of a confession of intimacy between Jacques Collin and Theodore Calvi to obtain the letters. The public prosecutor, glad to have an excuse for postponing the execution, beckoned Monsieur Gault to his side.

  “I intend,” said he, “to put off the execution till to-morrow; but let no one in the prison suspect it. Absolute silence! Let the executioner seem to be superintending the preparations.

  “Send the Spanish priest here under a strong guard; the Spanish Embassy claims his person! Gendarmes can bring up the self-styled Carlos by your back stairs so that he may see no one. Instruct the men each to hold him by one arm, and never let him go till they reach this door.

  “Are you sure, Monsieur Gault, that this dangerous foreigner has spoken to no one but the prisoners!”

  “Ah! just as he came out of the condemned cell a lady came to see him — — ”

  The two magistrates exchanged looks, and such looks!

  “What lady was that!” asked Camusot.

  “One of his penitents — a Marquise,” replied Gault.

  “Worse and worse!” said Monsieur de Granville, looking at Camusot.

  “She gave all the gendarmes and warders a sick headache,” said Monsieur Gault, much puzzled.

  “Nothing can be a matter of indifference in your business,” said the public prosecutor. “The Conciergerie has not such tremendous walls for nothing. How did this lady get in?”

  “With a regular permit, monsieur,” replied the governor. “The lady, beautifully dressed, in a fine carriage with a footman and a chasseur, came to see her confessor before going to the funeral of the poor young man whose body you had had removed.”

  “Bring me the order for admission,” said Monsieur de Granville.

  “It was given on the recommendation of the Comte de Serizy.”

  “What was the woman like?” asked the public prosecutor.

  “She seemed to be a lady.”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “She wore a black veil.”

  “What did they say to each other?”

  “Well — a pious person, with a prayer-book in her hand — what could she say? She asked the Abbe’s blessing and went on her knees.”

  “Did they talk together a long time?”

  “Not five minutes; but we none of us understood what they said; they spoke Spanish no doubt.”

  “Tell us everything, monsieur,” the public prosecutor insisted. “I repeat, the very smallest detail is to us of the first importance. Let this be a caution to you.”

  “She was crying, monsieur.”

  “Really weeping?”

  “That we could not see, she
hid her face in her handkerchief. She left three hundred francs in gold for the prisoners.”

  “That was not she!” said Camusot.

  “Bibi-Lupin at once said, ‘She is a thief!’” said Monsieur Gault.

  “He knows the tribe,” said Monsieur de Granville. — ”Get out your warrant,” he added, turning to Camusot, “and have seals placed on everything in her house — at once! But how can she have got hold of Monsieur de Serizy’s recommendation? — Bring me the order — and go, Monsieur Gault; send me that Abbe immediately. So long as we have him safe, the danger cannot be greater. And in the course of two hours’ talk you get a long way into a man’s mind.”

  “Especially such a public prosecutor as you are,” said Camusot insidiously.

  “There will be two of us,” replied Monsieur de Granville politely.

  And he became discursive once more.

  “There ought to be created for every prison parlor, a post of superintendent, to be given with a good salary to the cleverest and most energetic police officers,” said he, after a long pause. “Bibi-Lupin ought to end his days in such a place. Then we should have an eye and ear on the watch in a department that needs closer supervision than it gets. — Monsieur Gault could tell us nothing positive.”

  “He has so much to do,” said Camusot. “Still, between these secret cells and us there lies a gap which ought not to exist. On the way from the Conciergerie to the judges’ rooms there are passages, courtyards, and stairs. The attention of the agents cannot be unflagging, whereas the prisoner is always alive to his own affairs.

  “I was told that a lady had already placed herself in the way of Jacques Collin when he was brought up from the cells to be examined. That woman got into the guardroom at the top of the narrow stairs from the mousetrap; the ushers told me, and I blamed the gendarmes.”

  “Oh! the Palais needs entire reconstruction,” said Monsieur de Granville. “But it is an outlay of twenty to thirty million francs! Just try asking the Chambers for thirty millions for the more decent accommodation of Justice.”

  The sound of many footsteps and a clatter of arms fell on their ear. It would be Jacques Collin.

  The public prosecutor assumed a mask of gravity that hid the man. Camusot imitated his chief.

  The office-boy opened the door, and Jacques Collin came in, quite calm and unmoved.

  “You wished to speak to me,” said Monsieur de Granville. “I am ready to listen.”

  “Monsieur le Comte, I am Jacques Collin. I surrender!”

  Camusot started; the public prosecutor was immovable.

  “As you may suppose, I have my reasons for doing this,” said Jacques Collin, with an ironical glance at the two magistrates. “I must inconvenience you greatly; for if I had remained a Spanish priest, you would simply have packed me off with an escort of gendarmes as far as the frontier by Bayonne, and there Spanish bayonets would have relieved you of me.”

  The lawyers sat silent and imperturbable.

  “Monsieur le Comte,” the convict went on, “the reasons which have led me to this step are yet more pressing than this, but devilish personal to myself. I can tell them to no one but you. — If you are afraid — — ”

  “Afraid of whom? Of what?” said the Comte de Granville.

  In attitude and expression, in the turn of his head, his demeanor and his look, this distinguished judge was at this moment a living embodiment of the law which ought to supply us with the noblest examples of civic courage. In this brief instant he was on a level with the magistrates of the old French Parlement in the time of the civil wars, when the presidents found themselves face to face with death, and stood, made of marble, like the statues that commemorate them.

  “Afraid to be alone with an escaped convict!”

  “Leave us, Monsieur Camusot,” said the public prosecutor at once.

  “I was about to suggest that you should bind me hand and foot,” Jacques Collin coolly added, with an ominous glare at the two gentlemen. He paused, and then said with great gravity:

  “Monsieur le Comte, you had my esteem, but you now command my admiration.”

  “Then you think you are formidable?” said the magistrate, with a look of supreme contempt.

  “Think myself formidable?” retorted the convict. “Why think about it? I am, and I know it.”

  Jacques Collin took a chair and sat down, with all the ease of a man who feels himself a match for his adversary in an interview where they would treat on equal terms.

  At this instant Monsieur Camusot, who was on the point of closing the door behind him, turned back, came up to Monsieur de Granville, and handed him two folded papers.

  “Look!” said he to Monsieur de Granville, pointing to one of them.

  “Call back Monsieur Gault!” cried the Comte de Granville, as he read the name of Madame de Maufrigneuse’s maid — a woman he knew.

  The governor of the prison came in.

  “Describe the woman who came to see the prisoner,” said the public prosecutor in his ear.

  “Short, thick-set, fat, and square,” replied Monsieur Gault.

  “The woman to whom this permit was given is tall and thin,” said Monsieur de Granville. “How old was she?”

  “About sixty.”

  “This concerns me, gentlemen?” said Jacques Collin. “Come, do not puzzle your heads. That person is my aunt, a very plausible aunt, a woman, and an old woman. I can save you a great deal of trouble. You will never find my aunt unless I choose. If we beat about the bush, we shall never get forwarder.”

  “Monsieur l’Abbe has lost his Spanish accent,” observed Monsieur Gault; “he does not speak broken French.”

  “Because things are in a desperate mess, my dear Monsieur Gault,” replied Jacques Collin with a bitter smile, as he addressed the Governor by name.

  Monsieur Gault went quickly up to his chief, and said in a whisper, “Beware of that man, Monsieur le Comte; he is mad with rage.”

  Monsieur de Granville gazed slowly at Jacques Collin, and saw that he was controlling himself; but he saw, too, that what the governor said was true. This treacherous demeanor covered the cold but terrible nervous irritation of a savage. In Jacques Collin’s eyes were the lurid fires of a volcanic eruption, his fists were clenched. He was a tiger gathering himself up to spring.

  “Leave us,” said the Count gravely to the prison governor and the judge.

  “You did wisely to send away Lucien’s murderer!” said Jacques Collin, without caring whether Camusot heard him or no; “I could not contain myself, I should have strangled him.”

  Monsieur de Granville felt a chill; never had he seen a man’s eyes so full of blood, or cheeks so colorless, or muscles so set.

  “And what good would that murder have done you?” he quietly asked.

  “You avenge society, or fancy you avenge it, every day, monsieur, and you ask me to give a reason for revenge? Have you never felt vengeance throbbing in surges in your veins? Don’t you know that it was that idiot of a judge who killed him? — For you were fond of my Lucien, and he loved you! I know you by heart, sir. The dear boy would tell me everything at night when he came in; I used to put him to bed as a nurse tucks up a child, and I made him tell me everything. He confided everything to me, even his least sensations!

  “The best of mothers never loved an only son so tenderly as I loved that angel! If only you knew! All that is good sprang up in his heart as flowers grow in the fields. He was weak; it was his only fault, weak as the string of a lyre, which is so strong when it is taut. These are the most beautiful natures; their weakness is simply tenderness, admiration, the power of expanding in the sunshine of art, of love, of the beauty God has made for man in a thousand shapes! — In short, Lucien was a woman spoiled. Oh! what could I not say to that brute beast who had just gone out of the room!

  “I tell you, monsieur, in my degree, as a prisoner before his judge, I did what God A’mighty would have done for His Son if, hoping to save Him, He had gone with Him befor
e Pilate!”

  A flood of tears fell from the convict’s light tawny eyes, which just now had glared like those of a wolf starved by six months’ snow in the plains of the Ukraine. He went on:

  “That dolt would listen to nothing, and he killed the boy! — I tell you, sir, I bathed the child’s corpse in my tears, crying out to the Power I do not know, and which is above us all! I, who do not believe in God! — (For if I were not a materialist, I should not be myself.)

  “I have told everything when I say that. You don’t know — no man knows what suffering is. I alone know it. The fire of anguish so dried up my tears, that all last night I could not weep. Now I can, because I feel that you can understand me. I saw you, sitting there just now, an Image of Justice. Oh! monsieur, may God — for I am beginning to believe in Him — preserve you from ever being as bereft as I am! That cursed judge has robbed me of my soul, Monsieur le Comte! At this moment they are burying my life, my beauty, my virtue, my conscience, all my powers! Imagine a dog from which a chemist had extracted the blood. — That’s me! I am that dog — —

  “And that is why I have come to tell you that I am Jacques Collin, and to give myself up. I made up my mind to it this morning when they came and carried away the body I was kissing like a madman — like a mother — as the Virgin must have kissed Jesus in the tomb.

  “I meant then to give myself up to justice without driving any bargain; but now I must make one, and you shall know why.”

  “Are you speaking to the judge or to Monsieur de Granville?” asked the magistrate.

  The two men, Crime and Law, looked at each other. The magistrate had been strongly moved by the convict; he felt a sort of divine pity for the unhappy wretch; he understood what his life and feelings were. And besides, the magistrate — for a magistrate is always a magistrate — knowing nothing of Jacques Collin’s career since his escape from prison, fancied that he could impress the criminal who, after all, had only been sentenced for forgery. He would try the effect of generosity on this nature, a compound, like bronze, of various elements, of good and evil.