A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  The turnkey ran up.

  ‘Open! I’ve been sent by the Attorney General,to save the dead man!…’

  While the countess was on her way round by the rue de la Barillerie and the Quai de l’Horloge, Monsieur de Granville and Monsieur de Sérisy went down to the Conciergerie through the interior of the Palais divining the countess’s purpose; but, in spite of their haste, they arrived only as she fell fainting at the first grill, and was lifted up by constables from the guardroom. At sight of the governor of the Conciergerie, the wicket was opened, the countess was carried into the record-office; but she pulled herself up, and fell on her knees with her hands joined.

  ‘To see him!… only to see him!… Oh! gentlemen, I shan’t do any harm! but unless you want to see me die where I am… let me look at Lucien, dead or alive… Ah! there you are, my friend, choose between my death or…’ She sank down.

  ‘You are very kind,’ she continued, ‘I will love you!…’

  ‘Take her away?…’ said Monsieur de Bauvan.

  ‘No, let’s go to the cell where Lucien is!’ Monsieur Granville answered reading in Monsieur de Sérisy’s distracted eyes what his wishes were.

  And he took hold of the countess, raised her up, held her by one arm; while Monsieur de Bauvan held her by the other.

  ‘Sir! ’ said Monsieur de Sérisy to the governor, ‘the silence of the grave about all this.’

  ‘There’s no need to worry,’ replied the governor. ‘You’ve chosen the right course. This lady…’

  ‘‘She is my wife…’

  ‘Ah! forgive me, sir. Well! she will certainly faint at sight of the young man, and while she’s in a swoon she can be taken away in a carriage.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said the count, ‘send one of your men to tell my people, in the Cour de Harlay, to come round to the wicket, my carriage is the only one there…’

  ‘We can save him,’ said the countess walking forward with a courage and a strength which astonished the guards. ‘There are ways of bringing people back to life…’ And she dragged the two magistrates with her crying out to the warder: ‘Faster, hurry, every second may mean the lives of three people!’

  When the cell door had been opened, and the countess saw Lucien hanging as though his garments had been placed on a coat-hook, at first she sprang forward to kiss and enfold him; but she fell face down on the tiled floor, uttering cries that were stifled by a kind of dying gasp. Five minutes later, she was taken home in the count’s carriage and laid on cushions, her husband on his knees beside her. Count Bauvan had gone off for a doctor to bring the countess first aid.

  A tactful conclusion

  THE governor of the Conciergerie examined the outer grating of the wicket, and said to his clerk: ‘Nothing was spared! the bars were of wrought iron, they were tried, it was all very costly, and now it turns out there was a cleft in that bar?…’

  The Attorney General, back in his office, was obliged to give new instructions to his secretary.

  Luckily, Massol hadn’t appeared yet.

  A few moments after Monsieur de Granville had left to hurry round to Monsieur de Sérisy’s, Massol arrived and found Chareboeuf in the Attorney General’s office.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said the young secretary, ‘if you’d be so kind, perhaps I could dictate something to you and you’d put it in tomorrow’s issue of your Gazette, in the column for News from the Law Courts; head it as please.’

  ‘Right you are!’

  And he dictated the following:

  It is recognized that the Demoiselle Esther voluntarily took her own life.

  Monsieur Lucien de Rubempré’s arrest is all the more to be deplored in that he died suddenly while the examining magistrate was making out an order for his release, his alibi having been confirmed and his innocence established.

  ‘There is no need, I imagine, my friend,’ said the young probationer to Massol, ‘to recommend the greatest discretion about the small service which is being asked of you.’

  ‘Since you do me the honour of taking me into your confidence, I shall take the liberty,’ replied Massol, ‘of venturing a comment. This note will give rise to observations uncomplimentary to the Courts…’

  ‘No doubt we shall survive them,’ rejoined the young man attached to the Attorney General’s office, with the arrogance of a future magistrate trained by Monsieur de Granville himself.

  ‘Allow me, sweetheart, a couple of sentences will straighten that out,’ said the man trained to the other side of the bar.

  And he wrote:

  This sad event is unrelated to the processes of Law. An immediate autopsy demonstrated that death was due to the rupture of an aneurism in its last stages. If Monsieur Lucien de Rubempré had been upset by his arrest, death would have ensued at an earlier stage. Indeed, we believe ourselves able to affirm that, far from being worried by his arrest, this regrettable young man laughed noisily and said to those who accompanied him from Fontainebleau to Paris that his innocence would become evident as soon as he had seen the examining magistrate.

  ‘That puts it in perspective, doesn’t it?…’ the barrister-journalist inquired with an air of no less innocence.

  ‘You are right, maître.’

  ‘The Attorney General will be very pleased with you in the morning,’ said Massol craftily.

  Thus, as we see, the greatest events of life are translated into little Paris news items bearing some relation to the truth. It is the same with things on a far greater scale than this.

  But even now, for the greater number, as indeed for the more select reader, this Study may perhaps seem not entirely to be completed by the deaths of Esther and Lucien; perhaps Jacques Collin, Asia, Europe and Paccard, despite the infamy of their lives, may be thought sufficiently interesting for us to want to know what became of them. This last act of the drama may further serve to round out our portrayal of the customs of the time and disentangle those interests which Lucien’s life had so strangely brought together, mingling some of the most ignoble figures of the Underworld with others drawn from the very highest spheres.

  PART FOUR

  THE LAST INCARNATION OF VAUTRIN

  Two kinds of robe

  ‘WHAT is the matter, Madeleine?’ said Madame Camusot seeing her maid enter with the air which servants know how to adopt in critical situations.

  ‘Madame,’ replied Madeleine, ‘Monsieur is just back from the Palais; but he looks so upset, really, he’s in such a state, that Madame might do well to go and see him in his study.’

  ‘Is he ill?’ asked Madame Camusot.

  ‘No, Madame; but we’ve never seen Monsieur with such a face, I think he may be sickening for something; he looks yellow, as if he was falling to pieces, and…’

  Without waiting for the end of the sentence, Madame Camusot rushed out of the room and ran to her husband. She saw the examining magistrate sitting in an armchair, his legs stretched out, his head leaning back, hands hanging down, face pale, eyes vacant, absolutely as though about to pass out.

  ‘What’s the matter, my dear?’ said the worried young wife.

  ‘Ah! my poor Amélie, the most frightful thing has happened… I am still all of a tremble. Just think, the Attorney General,… no, Madame de Sérisy… I,… I don’t know where to begin…’

  ‘Begin at the end!…’ said Madame Camusot.

  ‘Yes, well, just as Monsieur Popinot, in the summary jurisdiction council chamber, had appended a final signature at the bottom of the nonsuit made out on my report discharging Lucien de Rubempré… At any rate, that was complete! the clerk was taking the minute-book away; I should have been quit of the whole affair… The chairman of the tribunal comes in and casts a cold eye on the bill and laughs a mocking laugh and says:

  ‘ “You’re ordering the release of a dead man. The young fellow, as M. de Bonald puts it, must now appear before his natural judge. He has succumbed to a fatal seizure… ”

  ‘I breathed again, supposing that there had been an
accident.

  ‘ “If I understand you, Mr Chairman,” said Monsieur Popinot, “it must be a case of Pichegru’s apoplexy…”

  ‘ “Gentlemen,” the chairman went on with a solemn air, “you had better understand that, for public consumption, young Lucien de Rubempré died of a ruptured aneurism.”

  ‘We all looked at each other.

  ‘ “Important persons are mixed up with this deplorable affair,” said the chairman. “May it please God, Monsieur Camusot, for your sake, though of course you have done nothing but your duty, that Madame de Sérisy shall not stay out of her mind as a result of the blow she has received! they have carried her out as though dead. Just now I met our dear Attorney General in a state of despair which really upset me. You boobed a bit, my dear Camusot!” he added in a private whisper to me.

  ‘No, I must say, my dearest, on my way out, I found it difficult to walk. My legs were so shaky, that I simply daren’t venture out into the street, I went back to my office to sit down. Coquart, who was putting the documents on this wretched case in order, told me that a fine lady had taken the Conciergerie by assault, that she’d hoped to save the life of Lucien with whom she was madly in love, and that she fainted on finding him hanged by his necktie from the window of his cell. The thought of the manner in which I questioned this unfortunate young man, who, as a matter of fact, between ourselves, was entirely guilty, has pursued me ever since I left the Law Courts, and I’m still very near fainting myself…’

  ‘What, you mean you think you’re a murderer, because a prisoner hangs himself in gaol just as you were going to discharge him?…’ cried Madame Camusot. ‘Why, in a case like that, an examining magistrate is like a general who has a horse shot under him!… That’s all.’

  ‘Comparisons like that, my dear, are at best good for a joke, and joking is out of place as things are. The quick and the dead have reversed roles in this instance. Lucien takes our hopes with him into the tomb.’

  ‘Truly?…’ said Madame Camusot in a tone of profound irony.

  ‘Yes, my career is finished. For the rest of my life I shall be nothing more than a simple magstrate on the Seine bench. Even before its fatal outcome, Monsieur de Granville was somewhat discontented with the turn the inquiry was taking; what he said to our chairman made it quite clear that, while he remains at the head of Prosecutions, there will be no promotion for me.’

  Promotion! that is the dread word now, the obsession which turns a magistrate into a civil servant.

  Formerly to be a magistrate was itself sufficient. Three or four High Court presidential caps were all that the ambitious could expect under any one government. To be named councillor was enough for a de Brosses or a Molé, at Dijon no less than in Paris. Such a jurisdiction, a fortune in itself, required a private fortune in its holder. In Paris, outside Parliament, the gentlemen of the robe could aspire to no more than three superior modes of existence: as inspector general, at Seals and in chancery. Outside parliament, at a lower level, the incumbent of a presidial was a person of sufficient importance to keep him happy on his bench for a lifetime. Compare the position of a councillor at the royal court of Paris in 1829, who had nothing but his salary to live on, with a parliamentary councillor in 1729. Great is the difference! In modern times, when money is the sole guarantee of social position, magistrates don’t, as formerly, need to be men of fortune; so they become deputies, peers of France, piling one form of magistracy on another, judges and legislators at the same time, borrowing importance from positions other than the one in which they ought to shine.

  In short, magistrates think to distinguish themselves through promotion, as others do in the army or the civil service.

  This thought, even if it does not weaken the independence of the magistrate, is too widely known and too understandably common, its effect too clearly visible, for the magistracy not to lose in majesty before the public gaze. The salaries paid by the State make the priest and the magistrate its employees. The grades to be scaled develop ambition; ambition engenders a subservience to power; modern equalitarianism then places the ordinary man and the judge on the same social footing. The two pillars of social order, Religion and the Law, are thus diminished in the nineteenth century, where the notion of progress takes precedence over all else.

  ‘What’s to stop you gaining promotion?’ said Amélie Camusot.

  She looked at her husband with a mocking air, feeling the need to restore energy to the man upon whom her own ambition rested, and upon whom she played as on an instrument.

  ‘Why despair so easily?’ she went on with a gesture which vividly depicted her lack of interest in the death of a prisoner. ‘That suicide will please two women who are Lucien’s enemies, Madame d’Espard and her cousin, Countess Châtelet. Madame d’Espard is on the best of terms with the Keeper of the Seals; and, through her, you will be able to obtain an audience of His Highness, at which you can tell him the inwardness of this matter. Once the Minister of Justice is on your side, what have you to fear from your chairman or the Procurator?’

  ‘But what about Monsieur and Madame de Sérisy!…’ cried the poor magistrate. ‘Madame de Sérisy, I tell you, is out of her mind! and she has been driven out of her mind by me, or so they say!’

  ‘Well, if she’s mad, she can’t judge, can she?’ cried Madame Camusot laughing, ‘so she can’t do you any harm! Look, tell me all that happened today.’

  ‘Good God,’ replied Camusot, ‘just as I’d taken this young man’s confession, including a declaration that the supposed Spanish priest was Jacques Collin, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and Madame de Sérisy sent in a message, by a footman, requesting me not to interrogate him. But it was too late…’

  ‘So you lost your head!’ said Amélie; ‘you can trust your clerk, can’t you? all you had to do was call Lucien back, calm him down tactfully, and alter the report! ’

  ‘You’re just like Madame de Sérisy, you don’t take the Law seriously!’ said Camusot who did. ‘Madame de Sérisy picked up the report and threw it on the fire!’

  ‘There’s a woman for you I bravo!’ cried Madame Camusot.

  ‘Madame de Sérisy told me she’d sooner blow up the Palais than allow a young man, who’d been accepted socially by herself and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, to appear on the benches of the Court of Assize in the company of a convict!…’

  ‘But, Camusot,’ said Amélie, unable to restrain a smile of superiority, ‘you’re in a superb position…’

  ‘O-ho, yes, superb!’

  ‘You did your duty…’

  ‘Unfortunately, and despite the jesuitical advice of Monsieur de Granville, who met me on the Quai Malaquais…’

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘This morning!’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘At nine o‘clock.’

  ‘Oh, Camusot!’ said Amélie joining her hands together and wringing them, ‘I who never stop telling you to be on your guard all the time… Good Lord, it isn’t a man, it’s a cart-load of rubble I’m dragging!… Camusot, that Procurator General of yours was waiting for you on your way, he must have offered you advice.’

  ‘Of course…’

  ‘And you didn’t understand! If you’re deaf, you’ll always be an examining magistrate who’s examined nothing. At least have the wit to listen to me!’ she said silencing her husband who had made as if to reply. ‘Do you think this matter is finished with?’ said Amélie.

  Camusot looked at his wife like a country bumpkin gaping at a quack.

  Amelia’s plan

  ‘IF the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and Countess Sérisy are compromised, you’ll have to see that they are both on your side,’ Amélie went on. ‘Look, Madame d’Espard will make the Keeper of the Seals grant you an audience at which you let him into the secret of this matter, and he will use it to amuse the King; for all sovereigns like to know what goes on behind the curtains, and to be told the real motives for events which the public watches pass by open-mouthed. From that point, neither t
he Procurator, nor Monsieur de Sérisy are to be feared…’

  ‘What a treasure a wife like yourself is!’ exclaimed the magistrate picking up courage. ‘After all, I have smoked out Jacques Collin, I shall send him to render accounts with the Assize Court, I shall unmask all his crimes. A case like that is always a triumph in an examining magistrate’s career…’

  ‘Camusot,’ continued Amélie pleased to see her husband step out of the mental and physical prostration into which Lucien de Rubempré’s suicide had cast him, ‘the chairman told you just now that you had blundered; but you’re still right off the track my friend,… in the opposite direction!’

  The examining magistrate remained standing, looking at his wife with stupefaction.

  ‘The King, the Keeper of the Seals will be very happy to know the inwardness of this affair, but they won’t like to see lawyers with liberal notions dragging people as important as the Sérisys, the Maufrigneuses and the Grandlieus before the bar of public opinion and the Assize Court, with everybody who’s involved directly or indirectly with the case.’

  ‘They’re all in it!… so I have them?’ exclaimed Camusot.

  Now on his feet, the magistrate paced about his study, like Sganarelle on the stage when he’s seeking the way out of an awkward situation.

  ‘Listen, Amélie!’ he continued placing himself before his wife, ‘I’ve just remembered something, an insignificant detail you might think, but really of capital importance. This Jacques Collin, try to imagine him, a man of quite colossal subtlety, dissimulation, trickery,… a man of such depth… Oh, he is… what?… the Cromwell of the convict settlements!… I have never met a rogue his equal, he very nearly caught me!… But, in criminal investigation, when you pick up what may look like a mere loose thread, you often find yourself with a whole clue with which you walk through the labyrinth of the most sinister consciences, or the most obscure facts. When Jacques Collin saw me turning over the letters seized at the domicile of Lucien de Rubempré, the scoundrel watched me like a man who wanted to see whether such-and-such a packet was among them, and when I’d finished he positively sighed with satisfaction. That look of a thief evaluating a haul, that mark of a prisoner saying: “I still hold trump cards,” taught me a great deal. You women are rather like us and our prisoners, you can detect, in an exchange of glances, the enactment of whole scenes of deceit as complicated as security locks. Whole volumes of suspicions, you know, may pass through one’s mind in a second! It is terrifying, a matter of life or death, in the blink of an eye. The fellow has other letters in his hands! I thought. Then I was preoccupied with countless other details of the affair. I passed over the incident, for I was thinking that I had to bring the two prisoners face to face and could return to that little matter later. But let us regard it as certain that Jacques Collin had deposited in a safe place, as these wretches always do, the most compromising of the letters addressed to this handsome young man by so many…’