A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  The reader must already have noticed how excessively out of proportion are the armaments deployed in these battles between prisoner and examining magistrate. Certainly a denial intelligently persisted in contains no defect of form and may be a prisoner’s best defence; but plate armour of that kind may become crushing if the questioner’s dagger finds a joint in it. The moment denial fails to account for certain evident facts, the prisoner is entirely at the judge’s mercy. Take the case of a half-criminal, like Lucien, who, preserved from the initial shipwreck of his virtue, might amend and become useful to his country; he may yet perish in the pitfalls of a judicial inquiry. The magistrate draws up a bare report, a faithful verbal analysis of the questions and answers; but of his insidiously paternal speeches, of misleading admonishments like the one we have heard, nothing remains. The judges of higher jurisdiction and their juries see or hear the results without knowing the means. Thus, to the minds of some worthy people, the jury itself, as in England, might well conduct inquiries. France enjoyed this system for a period. Under the code of Brumaire, year IV, the institution was known as a jury d’accusation by contrast with the later jury de jugement. At the public hearing itself, if we returned to ‘juries of accusation’, the trial would be conducted before a royal court, without the presence of jurymen.

  In which all those who may have committed some misdemeanour will tremble at the thought of appearing before any court whatever

  ‘Now,’ said Camusot after a pause, ‘what is your name? Monsieur Coquart take note!…’ he said to the clerk.

  ‘Lucien Chardon, de Rubempré.’

  ‘You were born?’

  ‘At Angoulême…’

  And Lucien gave day, month and year.

  ‘You received no patrimony?’

  ‘None.’.

  ‘You nevertheless, during your first stay in Paris, spent a fair amount of money, in view of your relative lack of fortune?’

  ‘Yes, sir; but at that time, I had in Mademoiselle Coralie a friend who was almost too devoted to me and whom I had the misfortune to lose. It was the grief caused by her death which led me to return to my place of birth.’

  ‘Good, sir,’ said Camusot. ‘I commend your frankness, it will be properly appreciated.’

  Lucien was, as we may see, embarked upon a general confession.

  ‘ You spent a great deal more on your return from Angoulême to Paris,’ continued Camusot, ‘you lived like a man who should have, say, an income of sixty thousand francs.’

  ‘Yes, sir…’

  ‘Who provided you with this money?’

  ‘My patron, Father Carlos Herrera.’

  ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘I met him on the highway, at a moment when I was planning to do away with my life by suicide…’

  ‘You’d never heard him spoken of in your family, by your mother?…’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Your mother never spoke to you of meeting a Spaniard?’

  ‘Never…’

  ‘Can you remember in what month, what year you became attached to the Demoiselle Esther?’

  ‘Towards the end of 1823, at a little theatre on the outskirts.’

  ‘In the first place, she was a charge on you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Latterly, in the hope of marrying Mademoiselle de Grand-lieu, you bought up what remained of the old Rubempré house, with land to the value of a million, you told the Grand-lieu family that your sister and brother-in-law had just come into a fortune and that you owed these sums to their generosity?… Is that what you told the Grandlieu family, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know why the marriage was broken off?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Well, the Grandlieu family sent one of the best-known solicitors in Paris to see your brother-in-law. In Angoulême this solicitor learned, from the avowals of your sister and brother-in-law themselves, that not only had they loaned you very little, but that what they had inherited consisted of land and buildings, of some value but hardly amounting to more than two hundred thousand francs… It won’t surprise you that a family like the Grandlieus draws back in face of a fortune whose origins can’t be shown… That, sir, was the point to which you were led by telling a lie…’

  Lucien was chilled by this revelation, and the little strength of mind which had remained left him.

  ‘The Police and the Courts know all they need to know,’ said Camusot, ‘remember that. And now,’ he went on thinking of the father’s part adopted by Jacques Collin, ‘do you know who this supposed Carlos Herrera is?’

  ‘Yes, sir, but I learned it too late…’

  ‘How do you mean, too late? Explain yourself!’

  ‘He isn’t a priest, he isn’t a Spaniard, he’s…’

  ‘An escaped convict,’ said the magistrate briskly.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Lucien. ‘When the dreadful secret was revealed to me, I was indebted to him, I had thought I was associated with a respectable churchman…’

  ‘Jacques Collin…’ began the magistrate.

  ‘Yes, Jacques Collin,’ Lucien echoed, ‘that’s his name.’

  ‘Good. Jacques Collin,’ Monsieur Camusot went on, ‘has just now been identified by a certain person, and if he continues to deny his identity, it is, I believe, in your interest. But my purpose in asking you whether you knew who the man is was to bring out another piece of imposture on Jacques Collin’s part.’

  When Lucien heard this terrifying observation, it was as though a red-hot iron penetrated his entrails.

  ‘Did you know,’ said the judge continuing, ‘that he claims to be your father by way of accounting for the extraordinary affection of which you are the object?’

  ‘He! my father!… oh! sir!… he said that!’

  ‘Did you suspect where the sums he gave you came from; for, according to the letter you have in your hand, that poor girl, Demoiselle Esther, seems to have rendered you the same services as Demoiselle Coralie did earlier; but, for some years, as you have just said, you lived, very handsomely, without receiving anything from her.’

  ‘I shall ask you, sir,’ exclaimed Lucien, ‘to tell me where convicts get their money from!… A man like Jacques Collin my father!… Oh! my poor mother…’

  And he burst into tears.

  ‘Clerk, read over to the prisoner that part of the interrogation of the pretended Carlos Herrera in which he said that he was the father of Lucien de Rubempré.’

  The poet listened to the reading in silence and with a look on his face which it was pitiful to see.

  ‘I am lost!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘One does not lose oneself along the way of honour and truth,’ said the magistrate.

  ‘But you will send Jacques Collin before the Court of Assize?’ asked Lucien.

  ‘Certainly,’ replied Camusot who wanted Lucien to go on talking. ‘Finish what you were saying.’

  Two schools of morality

  BUT, in spite of the magistrate’s insistence, Lucien made no further reply. Reflection had come too late, as it commonly does to men who are slaves of sensation. That is the difference between the poet and the man of action: one abandons himself to feeling in order to reproduce it in living images, judgment follows; while the other feels and judges in a single operation. Lucien remained gloomy, pale, he saw himself at the bottom of the precipice, pitched there by the examining-magistrate, whose friendly manner had beguiled him, the poet. He had just betrayed not his benefactor, but his accomplice who, for his part, had defended their position with the courage of a lion, and with skill of the same order. Where Jacques Collin had saved everything by his boldness, Lucien, the clever one, had lost it all unintelligently through lack of reflection. The foul lie which had stirred him to indignation screened a much fouler truth. Confused by the judge’s subtlety, frightened by the speed with which the admitted faults of his life had been turned into hooks to drag his conscience, Lucien sat there like an animal which has escaped the slaughterhouse choppi
ng-block. Free and innocent at his entry into this office, in a moment he had become a criminal by his own avowal. Finally, as a concluding piece of grim mockery, the magistrate calmly and coldly pointed out to Lucien that his revelations had been the fruit of a misunderstanding. Camusot had been thinking of Jacques Collin’s claim to paternity, while Lucien, fearing above all lest his alliance with an escaped convict should be made public, had imitated the legendary inadvertence of the murderers of Ibycus.

  It is to the glory of Royer-Collard that he proclaimed the regular victory of natural over dictated feelings, to have maintained the cause of the anteriority of oaths by insisting that the law of hospitality, for instance, was binding on a man to the point of annulling the virtue of a juridical oath. He announced this theory in the face of all, before a French court of law; he courageously praised the conspirators, he showed that human obedience was due rather to friendship than to tyrannical laws brought from society’s arsenal to meet such and such a case. In Natural Law there are statutes which have never been promulgated, but which are more efficacious than those forged by society. Lucien had disregarded, to his own detriment, the law of solidarity which obliged him to be silent and to let Jacques Collin defend himself; nay, he had brought the charge! In his own interest, that man should, for him, have been and remained Carlos Herrera.

  Monsieur Camusot rejoiced in his triumph, he held two guilty men, beneath the hand of the Law he had crushed one of the darlings of fashion, and discovered the undiscoverable Jacques Collin. He would be proclaimed one of the cleverest of examining magistrates. And so he did not harass his prisoner; but he studied that silence of consternation, he watched the drops of sweat on that crumpled face start, grow and finally fall mingled with two streams of tears.

  The bludgeon stroke

  ‘WHY weep, Monsieur de Rubempré? you are, as I told you, the sole heir of Mademoiselle Esther, who is without either collateral or direct heirs, and whose estate amounts to almost eight millions, if we can only find the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs which have gone astray.’

  This was the final blow to the guilty man. Ten minutes’ firm control, as Jacques Collin said in his note, and Lucien would have attained the goal of all his desires! he would have settled up with Jacques Collin, and the two could have separated, he would have been rich, he would have married Mademoiselle de Grandlieu. Nothing displays more eloquently than this scene the power with which examining magistrates are armed by the isolation or by the separation of prisoners, and the value of such a communication as Asia had made to Jacques Collin.

  ‘Ah! sir,’ replied Lucien with the bitterness and the irony of the man who makes a pedestal of his crowning misfortune, ‘how right you are in your language to speak of undergoing interrogation!… Between the physical torture of olden days and the present day’s moral torture, for my part I shouldn’t hesitate, I’d prefer the sufferings formerly inflicted by the headsman. What do you still want of me?’ he went on proudly.

  ‘In this place,’ said the magistrate meeting the poet’s sudden arrogance with a haughtiness of his own to which he added a bantering smile, ‘only I have the right to put questions.’

  ‘And I had the right not to reply,’ murmured poor Lucien whose intelligence had returned to him in all its clarity.

  ‘Clerk, read this interrogation over to the prisoner…’

  ‘I am still a prisoner!’ Lucien said to himself.

  While the clerk read, Lucien formed a resolution which obliged him to woo Monsieur Camusot. When the murmur of Coquart’s voice came to an end, the poet started as a sleeper may when a noise to which his organs have become accustomed stops.

  ‘You have to sign the report of your interrogation,’ said the judge.

  ‘And then you are setting me at liberty?’ asked Lucien becoming ironical in his turn.

  ‘Not yet,’ replied Camusot; ‘but tomorrow, after your confrontation with Jacques Collin, no doubt I shall be able to let you go. The Law still wants to know whether you were or were not an accessory to such crimes as this individual may have committed since his escape, which dates from 1820. However, you are no longer in solitary confinement. I shall write to the governor to put you in the best room he has in the pistole.’

  ‘Will it contain writing materials…?’

  ‘You will be provided with whatever you need, I’ll send an order to that effect with the usher who will take you back.’

  Lucien mechanically signed the transcription, and he initialled the marginal alterations as Coquart directed with all the docility of a resigned victim. A single detail will indicate the state he was in more clearly than any large description. The announcement of his confrontation with Jacques Collin had dried up the drops of sweat on his face, his eyes also dry shone with an insupportable glitter. Suddenly, with the speed of lightning, he became, like Jacques Collin, a man of bronze.

  Among those of a character like Lucien, so well analysed by Jacques, these sudden transitions from a state of complete demoralization to one in which the human forces so tauten it is almost metallic, are a distinct phenomenon of the life of thought. The will returns, as water may to a spring; it infuses itself into the constitution prepared for the play of its unknown constitutive substance; and, then, the corpse becomes a man, and the man springs forth full of strength to do battle at whatever cost.

  Lucien put Esther’s letter to his heart with the portrait she had sent him. Then he bowed curtly to Monsieur Camusot, and walked with a firm step along the corridor between two constables.

  ‘There’s a blackguard for you!’ said the magistrate to his clerk to avenge himself for the crushing scorn which the poet had just shown him. ‘He thought to save himself by giving his accomplice away.’

  ‘Of the two,’ said Coquart timidly, ‘the convict is of stouter material…’

  Torture for the judge

  ‘WELL, I can let you go for today, Coquart,’ said the magistrate. ‘That will do. Send away those who are waiting, they will have to come back tomorrow. Ah! but you’d better go at once to the Attorney General’s office to see if he’s still there; if he is, ask if he can see me for a moment. Oh! he’ll be there,’ he went on after consulting a wretched clock of wood painted green with a gilt filigree. ‘It is a quarter past three.’

  These interrogations, which are so quickly read, being entirely written down, the questions as well as the replies take up an enormous amount of time. This is one of the causes of the slowness of criminal investigations and the length of time which may be spent in preventive detention. For small people, it means ruin, for the rich, it means disgrace; though for them immediate release may largely repair the misfortune of arrest. That is why the two scenes which have just been faithfully recounted had taken up all the time consumed by Asia in deciphering her master’s instructions, rousing a duchess out of her boudoir and giving energy to Madame de Sérisy.

  At that moment, Camusot, who was thinking of the benefits likely to accrue from his cleverness, took the two reports, read them over and was meaning to show them to the Procurator and ask his further advice. while he was deliberating on this point, his usher returned to say that Madame la Comtesse de Sérisy’s personal manservant insisted on speaking to him. At a sign from Camusot, a servant, dressed like one of his betters, entered, looked from usher to magistrate and from magistrate to usher, and said: ‘It is indeed to Monsieur Camusot that I have the honour…’

  ‘Yes,’ replied usher and judge together.

  Camusot took a letter handed to him by the domestic, and read what follows :

  For a variety of good reasons which you will understand, my dear Camusot, don’t question Monsieur de Rubempré; we are bringing you proofs of his innocence, so that he may be immediately set at liberty.

  D. DE MAUFRIGNEUSE, L. DE SÉRISY.

  P.S. Burn this letter.

  Camusot understood that he had committed a gross blunder in setting traps for Lucien, and he began by doing what the two great ladies said. He lighted a candle and d
estroyed the letter written by the duchess. The manservant bowed respectfully.

  ‘Madame de Sérisy is coming here?’ he asked.

  ‘They were bringing the carriage round,’ replied the man.

  At that moment, Coquart came to tell Monsieur Camusot that the Attorney General was waiting for him.

  Weighed down by the mistake he had made in putting the interests of the Law before his private ambition, the magistrate, in whom seven years’ practice had developed the cunning which comes easily to any man who has measured himself against shopgirls as a student of Law, felt the need to arm himself against the resentment of the two great ladies. The candle at which he had burnt the letter was still alight, he made use of it to seal the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse’ thirty notes to Lucien and the sufficient correspondence of Madame de Sérisy. Then he went to the Attorney General’s office.

  Monsieur le Procureur-Général

  THE Palais de Justice is a confused mass of buildings superimposed one on another, some very splendid, others decidedly shabby, the general effect being spoilt by a lack of any composition among them. The waiting hall is the largest of all known rooms; but its bareness appals and discourages the eyes. This vast cathedral of pettifoggery obliterates what was once a royal court. The Marchande gallery leads to two places of horror. In the vestibule may be seen a double staircase, somewhat broader than that connected with the courts of summary jurisdiction, while folding doors open off the space beneath it. The staircase leads to the Court of Assize, and the door below to a second Court of Assize. There are years when the crimes committed in the Seine department require two courts to be in session at the same time. In that direction lie the Attorney General’s office, the barristers‘ room, their library, the offices of the prosecuting lawyers, those of the Attorney General’s substitutes. All these places, for we can only use a generic term, are connected by turret staircases, or by dark corridors which are a disgrace to architecture, to the city of Paris and to France. In its settings, the chief abode of our sovereign justice surpasses the prisons in its hideousness. The chronicler of this time recoils before the necessity of describing the ignoble corridor some four feet wide where the witnesses sit for the upper court of assize. As to the stove which serves to heat the audience chamber, it would do little credit to a bar in the boulevard Montparnasse.