‘And you, Camusot, are afraid! You’ll be chairman of your own court sooner than I thought!…’ cried Madame Camusot, her face alight. ‘Look, you must act in such a way as to keep everybody happy, for this is becoming so big a matter that if we don’t watch out somebody’ll steal it from us!… When Madame d’Espard instituted proceedings to deprive her husband of control over his estate, weren’t they taken out of Popinot’s hands and given to you!’ she said in reply to a sign of astonishment from Camusot. ‘ Well, since he takes so lively an interest in the honour of Monsieur and Madame Sérisy, couldn’t the Attorney General evoke this cause in the King’s Court and get a councillor attached to start the judicial inquiry all over again?…’
‘Oh, my dear, where ever did you do your criminal law?’ cried Camusot. ‘You know everything, you’re better at it than I am…’
‘What! you imagine that by tomorrow morning Monsieur de Granville won’t be afraid of the pleading of some liberal lawyer whom this Jacques Collin will soon find, for they’ll come offering him money to be allowed to defend him!… These ladies know the danger they stand in as well, not to say better, than you think; they’ll see that the Attorney General knows, too, and he already sees these families brought very close to the bench of the accused, in consequence of the convict’s connection with Lucien de Rubempré, fiancé of Mademoiselle de Grandlieu, Lucien, Esther’s lover, former lover of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, Madame de Sérisy’s darling. So you have to behave in such a way as to gain for yourself your Procurator’s affection, the gratitude of Monsieur de Sérisy, that also of the Marquise d’Espard and Countess Châtelet, adding the protection of the house of Grandlieu to that of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, then your chairman will pay you compliments. I’ll take care of Mesdames d’Espard, Maufrigneuse and Grandlieu. Tomorrow morning, you should go straight to the Procureur Général. Monsieur de Granville is a man who doesn’t live with his wife; his mistress for ten years or so has been a Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille, isn’t that so, who has borne him adulterine children? Well, then, he’s no saint, that leader of your profession, he’s just a man like any other; he can be won over, a hold can be got on him, you find out his weak spot, you flatter him; ask his advice, make him see how dangerous the thing is; in short, see that other people are compromised with you, and you will be…’
‘Truly, I ought to kiss the print of your footsteps,’ said Camusot interrupting his wife, taking her by the waist and folding her to his heart. ‘Amélie! I owe my salvation to you!’
‘It was I who took you in tow from Alençon to Mantes, and from Mantes to the tribunal of Paris,’ replied Amélie. ‘Well, then, don’t worry!… I want to be called Madame la Présidente five years from now; but, my lamb, always take time to think before you make up your mind. A magistrate’s job isn’t like a fireman’s, your papers aren’t going to flare up, you have time to reflect; in places like yours, stupid actions are inexcusable…’
‘The strength of my position lies entirely in the identity of the sham Spanish priest with Jacques Collin,’ the magistrate continued after a long pause. ‘Once that identity has been established, even if the Court should take this case out of my hands, it will always be a solid fact which no magistrate, judge or councillor can put aside. I shall have done what a child does when it ties a tin can to a cat’s tail; the proceedings, no matter who conducts the inquiry, will always give off the sound of Jacques Collin’s irons.’
‘Bravo!’ said Amélie.
‘And the Attorney General will prefer to come to an understanding with me, who alone could remove this sword of Damocles suspended over the heart of the Faubourg Saint Germain, than with anyone else!… But you don’t know how difficult it will be to produce this magnificent result… The A.G. and I, just now, in his office, agreed to treat Jacques Collin as what he claims to be, a canon of the chapter of Toledo, Carlos Herrera; we agreed to acknowledge him as diplomatic envoy, and allow the Spanish embassy to claim him. It was as a consequence of this plan that I made out the report which set Lucien de Rubempré at liberty, and that I started to dictate new versions of the interrogation of my prisoners, showing them both as white as snow. Tomorrow, Messieurs de Rastignac, Bianchon and I don’t know who else, are to be confronted with the supposed canon of the royal chapter of Toledo, they won’t say he’s Jacques Collin, whose arrest took place in their presence, ten years ago, at a boarding house, where they knew him under the name of Vautrin.'
A moment of silence reigned during which Madame Camusot reflected.
‘Are you sure that the prisoner is Jacques Collin?’ she asked.
‘Quite sure,’ the magistrate replied, ‘and so is the Attorney General.’
‘Well, without letting pussy’s claws be seen, try to provoke a rumpus at the Palais de Justice! If your man is still in solitary, go at once to the governor of the Conciergerie and arrange things so that the convict shall be recognized there in public. Before you think about children and their tin cans, do what police chiefs do in states under absolute rule, inventing conspiracies against the sovereign so as to have the merit of foiling them and making themselves seem indispensable; put three families in peril so as to gain credit for saving them.’
‘Ah, there we’re in luck!’ exclaimed Camusot. ‘My head is in such a muddle I’d forgotten one little circumstance. The order to release Jacques Collin from solitary and transfer him to the pistole was taken by Coquart to Monsieur Gault, governor of the Conciergerie. Now, at the suggestion of Bibi-Lupin, an enemy of Jacques Collin, they’ve transferred from La Force to the Conciergerie three criminals who know him; and, if tomorrow morning he goes down into the prison yard, terrible scenes are expected…’
‘Why?’
‘Jacques Collin, my dear, holds in trust the fortunes possessed by the convict stations, which amount to very considerable sums; now, they say that he dispersed these to entertain the late Lucien in luxury, and accounts will be demanded of him. According to what Bibi-Lupin told me, it will come to the point of butchery, the guards will have to step in, and the secret will stand revealed. Jacques Collin’s life is at stake. If I go to the Palais in good time, I shall be able to draw up a report on the identification.’
‘If only his clients would finish him off! you would be thought a very capable man! Don’t go to see Monsieur de Granville, wait for him in his office armed with this formidable weapon! It is a cannon trained on the three most important families at Court and in the Peerage. Be bold, suggest to Monsieur de Granville that he should rid you of Jacques Collin by transferring him to La Force, where the convicts know how to deal with informers. I shall go see the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, who will take me to the Grandlieus. I may also call on Monsieur de Sérisy. Trust me to raise the alarm in every quarter. Send me a little note to let me know whether the Spanish priest has been formally recognized as Jacques Collin. Arrange to leave the Law Courts at two o’clock. I shall have fixed a private interview for you with the Keeper of the Seals; it may be at the Marquise d’Espard’s house.’
Camusot stood firmly planted in a pose of admiration which made the subtle Amelia smile.
‘Come, let’s to dinner, and be gay,’ she said in conclusion. ‘Look! we’ve been in Paris only two years, and here you are in a fair way to becoming a councillor by the end of the year …From that point, my pet, to a chairmanship of your own court, the distance to be covered is only a service performed in some political affair.’
These secret deliberations show to what point the actions and least words of Jacques Collin, the final character in our study, concerned the honour of the families in whose bosom he had placed his deceased favourite.
Observation on the subject of magnetism
LUCIEN’ s death and the invasion of the Conciergerie by Countess Sérisy had so upset the functioning of the machine, that the governor had forgotten to release the pretended Spanish priest from solitary confinement.
Although examples may be found in the juridical annals, the death of a prisoner in the cou
rse of the preliminary investigation of his case is an episode rare enough to disturb the tranquillity in which clerk, warders and governor normally work. For them, nevertheless, the remarkable thing was not the sudden transformation of a handsome young man into a corpse, but the breaking by a society woman’s delicate hands of a wrought-iron bar in the first wicket-grating. Thus, as soon as the Procureur Général and Count Octave de Bauvan had departed in Count Sérisy’s carriage, taking away with them the inanimate wife of this last, the governor, his clerk and the prison staff were to be seen grouped before the wicket in company with Monsieur Lebrun, the prison doctor, called to attest the death of Lucien and now on his way to arrange matters with the dead persons’ doctor of the district in which that unfortunate young man resided.
The name dead persons’ doctor is given in Paris to the medical office, in each mayoralty, whose function it is to verify decease and examine its causes.
With characteristically rapid calculation, Monsieur de Granville had judged it desirable, for the honour of the families compromised, to have Lucien’s act of decease drawn up at the town hall for the Quai Malaquais, where the dead man had been living, and to have him taken from his residence to the church of Saint Germain des Prés, where the funeral service would be held. Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, Monsieur de Granville’s secretary, was called and received orders to this effect. Lucien was to be moved during the night. The young secretary was instructed to arrange matters with the town hall, the parish and the undertakers. Thus, in the eyes of the world, Lucien would have died at home in a state of freedom, the procession would leave from there, his friends be called there for the last farewells.
In consequence, just as Camusot, his mind at rest, sat down at table with his ambitious better half, the governor of the Conciergerie and Monsieur Lebrun, the prison doctor, were outside the wicket deploring the fragility of iron bars and the strength of women in love.
‘Few of us are aware, ‘ the doctor was saying as he departed to Monsieur Gault, ‘of how much nervous power there is in men excited by passion! Dynamics and mathematics lack the necessary symbols and calculations for registering that force. Only yesterday, for example, I observed an experiment which made me shudder and which shows the same kind of physical strength displayed a short while ago by the dear lady.’
‘Do tell me about it,’ said Monsieur Gault, ‘it is one of my little weaknesses to be interested in magnetism, not that I believe in it, but it intrigues me.’
‘A magnetizing doctor, for there are some among us who believe in magnetism,’ continued Dr Lebrun, ‘wanted me to try out on myself a phenomenon which he described and I was sceptical of. Curious to see for myself one of those strange nervous crises by which they demonstrate the existence of magnetism, I consented! This is what happened. I should very much like to know what our Academy of Medicine would say if its members were submitted, one after the other, to this experiment which affords no loophole to incredulity. My old friend…
‘This doctor,’ said Monsieur Lebrun opening a parenthesis, ‘is an old man who has been persecuted by the Faculty for his views, ever since Mesmer; he is seventy or seventy-two, and his name is Bouvard. He is in our time the patriarch of the doctrine of animal magnetism. I am like a son to him, I owe to him all that I am. Well, now, the ancient and respected Bouvard proposed to demonstrate to me that the nervous force brought into play by the mesmerist was not infinite, for man is subject to determinate laws, but that it emanated like the forces of nature whose final principles are beyond our calculation.
‘ “Thus,” he said to me, “if you abandoned your wrist to the grip of a somnambulist who in the waking state would not apply pressure beyond a measurable power, you would see that, in the condition foolishly called somnambulistic, his fingers would have the faculty of being able to act like a locksmith’s shearing machine!”
‘Well, sir, when I gave my wrist up to the grip of a woman, not asleep, for Bouvard does not accept that expression, but isolated, and the old man had commanded her to squeeze me unrestrainedly with all the force of her grip, I begged him to stop her just as blood was about to spurt from my finger-ends. But you can see for yourself! this mark will remain like a bracelet about my wrist for three months or more.’
‘Good Heavens!’ said Monsieur Gault examining a circular ecchymosis like that which burning might have produced.
‘My dear Gault,’ the doctor continued, ‘if my flesh had been clamped in an iron ring which a locksmith had tightened up with a screw, I should not have felt the metal collar as painfully as I felt the fingers of that woman; her grip was inflexible steel, and I truly believe that she could have broken the bone and separated my hand from its wrist. The pressure, at first barely sensible, continued without respite all the time adding new force to the pressure of a moment before; in short, a tourniquet could not have been applied with more precision than that hand changed into an instrument of torture. It seems to me clear, then, that, under the empire of passion which is will-power concentrated upon one point and brought to an incalculable degree of animal force, as the various types of electrical current may be, man’s entire vitality, whether for attack or for resistance, can be concentrated in any one of his organs… That slightly built woman, under the pressure of her despair, had brought all her vital power into her wrists.’
‘It needs a devilish amount to break a wrought iron bar,…’ said the head warder shaking his head.
‘There could have been some flaw in the metal!’ Monsieur Gault pointed out.
‘For my part,’ the doctor went on, ‘I no longer venture to assign any limit to nervous energy. It explains, you know, the way in which mothers, to save their children, mesmerize lions, walk into a fire or along cornices where a cat wouldn’t set foot, and bear the pain of a difficult childbirth. It explains the attempts prisoners and convicts make to recover their liberty… We still don’t know the extent of our vital forces, they derive from the underlying power of nature, and we draw upon them from unknown reservoirs!’
‘Monsieur,’ a warder came to whisper to the governor as he conducted Dr Lebrun to the outer gate of the Conciergerie, ‘Solitary No. 2 says he’s ill and wants the doctor; he claims to be at death’s door,’ added the turnkey.
‘Really?’ said the governor.
‘He’s at his last gasp!’ replied the warder.
‘It’s five o’clock,’ said the doctor, ‘I haven’t dined yet… Still, here I am, ready for anything, so never mind, come along…’
The man in the cell
‘SOLITARY Confinement Cell No. 2 means precisely the Spanish priest suspected of being Jacques Collin,’ said Monsieur Gault to the doctor, ‘one of the accused in the case in which that poor young man was implicated…’
‘I saw him already this morning,’ replied the doctor. ‘Monsieur Camusot instructed me to pronounce on the fellow’s state of health, and, between ourselves, he’s in excellent shape and, moreover, could easily make his living by posing as Hercules in a troupe of mountebanks.’
‘He might want to kill himself, too,’ said Monsieur Gault. Let’s take a stroll to the cells, the pair of us, I have to go there, if only to have him transferred. Monsieur Camusot has released this curious anonymity from solitary confinement…’
Jacques Collin, nicknamed Dodgedeath in the underworld, to whom from this point we shall give no other name than his own, had, from the moment of his return, by Camusot’s order, to the cells, fallen prey to an anxiety which he had never known during a life marked by so many crimes, by three escapes from the penitentiary and by two verdicts of guilty before a Court of Assize. About this man, in whom the world of the convict stations is summed up, with all its thoughts, its energies and its passions, himself their highest expression, is there not something monstrously beautiful in his attachment, worthy of the canine race, to the one whom he had made his friend? Damnable, infamous and horrible in so many ways, that absolute devotion to his idol renders him so truly interesting, that our present study, though alrea
dy long, would seem curtailed, incomplete, if the upshot of this criminal life were not added to Lucien de Rubempré’s end. The little spaniel dead, one is led to wonder whether his dreadful companion, the lion, can live!
In real life, in society, facts of one kind are so fatally linked with those of another, that hardly anything can be safely ignored. The water of the river forms a kind of travelling platform; the most rebellious wave, to whatever height its column rises, must presently sink into the general mass, whose onward course is stronger and more rapid than any whirl or eddy that forms within it. Just as the flow of the water may be clearly seen despite the incidents on its surface, you may wish to measure the action of social forces on the vortex called Vautrin? see how long it will be before the mutinous wave is engulfed, what must be the fate of this truly diabolical man, who is yet attached to humanity by love? with such difficulty does that divine principle die in the most cankered of hearts.
A Harlot High and Low Page 46
