“We’re saying, then,” the judge summarized, “that in the month of July 1900, when you went to Montmorency to see Monsieur D***, you were without resources?”
“I beg your pardon! I had novels, comedies, dramas, and three volumes’ worth of verse”—Monsieur Meynadier sketched a indulgent smile—“and only needed to place them.”
“Yes, except that you hadn’t succeeded. You were, therefore, as I said, quite without the means of existence.” After a pause, he added: “Since then, what have you lived on?”
I started, exclaiming indignantly: “Are you subjecting me to an interrogation?”
“I’m exercising the authority that the law confers on me to discover the truth,” the judge replied, dryly.
“It’s quite unnecessary, for that, for me to tell you everything I’ve done.”
“I deem, on the contrary, that such an account is absolutely indispensable to the continuation my enquiries, because it seems to me very surprising that you, Pierre Labrique, should be so well-informed about the motive for the murder in question, when the police know so little.”
“Then…you think, Monsieur le Juge…?” I said, genuinely amazed .
“I don’t think anything. Long practice in examination has taught me that you must obtain information about people who know a great deal about what has happened, and I want to know what your relationship to the affair is.”
“I repeat to you, Monsieur, that it’s purely a matter of hypothesis, and that no one has ever spoken to me about the affair.”
“You’re contradicting yourself—just now you affirmed that someone had talked to you about it in the home of Monsieur D***.”
“As one speaks in a drawing room about the day’s events.”
“It really was the thirty-first of July, then?”
I had noticed that the simpler and more accurate my denials were, the more deeply the conviction of my guilt became anchored in the judge’s mind. Let anyone tell me know about the omnipotent force of the truth! The energy that I put into defending myself against that unjustifiable accusation was replete with compromising irascibility, and my exasperation against Monsieur Meynadier’s revoltingly cynical methods. It’s true that indifference or despondency might equally well have been turned to my disadvantage. The quite natural refusal to name the people to whom I attributed the version of the crime—since they did not exist—completed my ruination.
“You persist, Labrique, in not wanting to reply?” the magistrate concluded, his lips pinched and his gaze menacing, with a categorical hand-gesture.
“I persist, having no reply to make, any more at present than I had just now.”
“Well, my friend”—at this sympathetic word I sensed that my goose was cooked—“I shall find a means of making you talk. Firstly, I shall change your summons as a witness into an order for your detention.”
And he began to fill in the blanks on an official form.
“This is odious!” I cried. “Abominable! We’re back in the Middle Ages, the Inquisition! If you pursue the imagination, you’ll have to arrest all the novelists, playwrights and poets!”
Monsieur Meynadier’s affirmative smile suggested that one could do worse.
“And individual liberty?” I continued. “What becomes of that? It’s not permissible for a magistrate to incarcerate a citizen for his own amusement; the Garde des Sceaux has issued a circular on precisely that point; it’s an abuse of power, a denial of justice.”
“Shut up, Labrique,” growled the judge, rapping on his desk. “Don’t make things worse for yourself!”
“I’ll shut up, not because you have the right, but because you have the strength, and it’s necessary to yield to strength; but I admire the revolting arbitrariness with which you attack a poor penniless devil of a writer.”
“It’s certain that if you were Monsieur Rothschild, you probably wouldn’t be being charged with having killed Monsieur Hurelle in order to steal the cash from his wallet.”
“What, me? I’m being charged?”
“Guards! Take the accused away.”
For Monsieur Meynadier the matter could not be clearer. My brilliant poetic imagination, led astray by poverty, had conceived the crime. Informed by his neighbor, Monsieur D***, of Monsieur Hurelle’s habits, I had taken the last train with him, leaving Enghien at 12.32 a.m.—a train that, on 31 July, would doubtless not have many passengers. Once my victim was drowsy, I had stuck him, stolen his wallet and, before reaching Paris, had thrown him on to the embankment on the Plaine Saint-Denis. That same evening I had returned to Montmorency, as much to create an alibi as to hear what was being said about the crime—which was very audacious, but accorded well with what was known of the psychology of murderers.
That having been posited, it only remained to find evidence. That was the A-B-C of the profession. The examination of my affair was, however, very laborious. I must also say that I became irritated by the game and that, in spite of my keen desire to be guillotined, I did my best to make my innocence obvious.
Everything was against me. In spite of everyone’s good will I had not been able to establish my whereabouts in the day of 31 July 1900, while the judge, aided by police notes and the testimony of witnesses, established them hour by hour in an irreproachable fashion. A search of my room produced astonishing results.
First, all my rough drafts and manuscripts were put under seal in order to be searched minutely at a later date. Then all my letters and the like, which I had had the misfortune to throw pell-mell into a drawer, were seized. A few of them immediately caught Monsieur Meynadier’s attention. Written on school notepaper, they bore no date or signature, but one could read sentences such as: I’ll meet you at the brasserie this evening to talk about it; Make sure that no one finds out about it; No, no, no sentimentalism; get straight to it; and No more hesitation; it’s absolutely necessary to kill the fellow.
It did no good to tell the judge that these notes had been sent to me by the novelists for whom I worked; he didn’t want to believe it. He kept repeating to me incessantly: “Tell me who they are, then!” as if, even admitting that I had been able to tell him their names, the dear masters wouldn’t have been the first to deny all knowledge of me!
A more serious discovery was that of a timetable for the northern railway bearing the date 1 July 1900. I remembered, in fact, that I had bought it at the time when I was going to see Monsieur D***. Finally, a crushing blow, there was a rusty knife with a slender blade and a safety-guard, which I used for scraping mud off my shoes. Engraved on the knife’s safety-guard were the words: Souvenir of the 1900 Exposition. It had been given to me for a sou—for not severing the relationship—by the little Muse, one day when she had won it throwing rings at a stall in the Avenue de Suffren.
With regard to the possession of these objects and many others, I was obliged to furnish numerous explanations, of which the judge did not believe a word. When one attempts to dissuade a man haunted by a preconceived opinion, it’s curious to see how everything that one might say only serves to confirm that opinion. In my case, the investigation of my past provided further corroboration.
The judge thus learned that a short time after the crime I had paid a few debts and had indulged in some expenditure that he qualified as foolish with a registered prostitute. The prostitute in question was none other than the little Muse, who had become very fashionable after leaving me. I succeeded in remembering that at that time I had sold the celebrated playwright the comedy that had made his name. I told Monsieur Meynadier that—who, on that occasion, could not help laughing, and replied, paternally: “Come on, Labrique, find something more plausible to tell me; you’re doing no credit to your imagination, I assure you.”
The task of defending me had been given to Maître Dupillet, a young advocate full of talent, but with an exaggerated politeness with regard to highly-placed people. Without believing in it overmuch, he protested my innocence fervently, and then always conceded the judge’s arguments out of defe
rence. He made, however, one reply that went straight to my heart. When my tormentor mocked my verses, he affirmed that our best poets could have signed certain passages of Lights in the Darkness—a eulogy that was, however, immediately turned against me.
“Do you recall, Maître,” countered Monsieur Meynadier, “that great criminals have often been true poets. The most banal crime—Monsieur Labrique’s, for example—does not exclude a certain poetry. I will even say that it is sometimes the result of it!”
Maître Dupillet conceded the point.
One day, when we were alone in my cell, he said: “Come on, Labrique, you’re not unaware of how devoted to you I am, how passionate in the defense of your case, but permit me to tell you that your strategy of defense is detestable. You deny everything systematically; that’s very bad. It’s necessary to hold fire, throw off some ballast, confess a few peccadilloes. Monsieur Meynadier will be grateful to you, and we’ll be more easily able to throw him off the scent with respect to the major charge.”
“What the devil do you want me to confess, since I’m innocent?”
“It’s all right,” he said, tautly. “I’ll plead irresponsibility.”
“Oh no, no!” I cried, swiftly, seeing myself locked up in a lunatic asylum until the end of my days. “I claim full responsibility for my actions!”
“Do you know that premeditated murder, without extenuating circumstances, means the guillotine?”
“I’m well aware of that, since...”
I stopped dead. The idea had occurred to me of revealing my suicide plan, and I perceived almost immediately that my advocate the truth would appear to be a wretched and ridiculous invented defense. He would have demanded a mental examination there and then!
“All right,” he said, misinterpreting the reason for my reticence. “I can see that I don’t have your confidence. Do as you wish; I shall act according to my conscience.”
When an advocate at the Assizes talks to you about his conscience, no matter how prepared one may be, one experiences a slight chill at the back of the neck. The last word pronounced by Maître Dupillet was all the more striking because I was subject to a singular phenomenon. Until then, having the certainty of being able to reveal, sooner or later, how I had given birth to the suspicions, I had not paid much attention to the outcome. Now that I recognized the absolute impossibility of having the plausibility of my plan admitted, that outcome annoyed me. I would enter the annals of judiciary error, an everyday gaffe, a subject of scorn and ridicule.
I became less sarcastic, less mocking, more self-enclosed. Monsieur Meynadier observed that with satisfaction, and declared that after a few more days “cuisinage”—I don’t know whether the word is French, but the thing is very judiciary—I’d be done to a turn.64
I won’t mention either the young vagabonds or the old malefactors that were locked in my cell in order to discover my secrets. I shall also pass over in silence my successive confrontations with all the prisons of the Seine, containing bandits, cut-throats and pimps. I shall pass on to the witnesses.
After the procession of employees of the Hurelle bank, three-quarters of whom thought they recognized me as an individual who had come to solicit help from their employer, that of the employees of the northern railway began. Here I must remark on the extent to which punching tickets or closing carriage doors improves one’s memory for faces. A good half dozen remembered having seen me on the train going to or coming from Montmorency—in which there was nothing extraordinary—and a controller affirmed that he had caught me one day in a first-class compartment with a second-class ticket (which was untrue) but that he could not say whether it was on the thirty-first of July 1900. The special commissioner at the Gare du Nord declared that my signature corresponded exactly with that of the supposed murderer furnished by the guard on the 12.32 train, who had since died.
Another dead man gave a crushing deposition against me—I mean the examining magistrate who had opened the first investigation after the crime. Among the pieces of evidence collected by him, a piece of paper was found to which he had not paid any attention and on that paper some lines of verse had been written, in my handwriting!!! There was no doubt about it; I remembered them perfectly, and it really was my handwriting.
At the sight of that piece of paper, a terrifying hallucination took possession of my mind. I wonder whether I really had killed the banker Hurelle, in a crisis of somnambulism. It had been repeated to me so often and so firmly from all sides that I almost ended up believing it. On reflection, I realized that an over-zealous police officer had removed the piece of paper while searching my residence, and had slipped it into the file to add a little spice to it.
When I gave that explanation to Monsieur Meynadier, he had a blue fit. “It is not permissible to doubt the honesty of the modest and devoted auxiliaries of Justice!” I really was the most cynical and shameless of wretches.
The deposition of Monsieur D***, the stockbroker, was an agreeable diversion. Very simple and very correct, it declared that not only did he hold my poetry but also my character in high esteem. (I would never have thought that Monsieur D*** had so high an opinion of me.) To be sure, I had bold and subversive ideas that were not always to his liking, but he believed me to be absolutely incapable of committing the crime of which I was accused.
The judge paid no attention to this declaration, nor to those of my employers, comrades or eulogists, which were, for the most part, sympathetic. I say “for the most part” because a few did not miss the opportunity to play to the gallery, claiming that they had divined the soul of a villain in me a long time ago, citing in support insignificant facts that took on frightful proportions in their mouths.
The masters whose letters I possessed or in whose homes I had presented myself as a beggar, summoned to appear, did not take the trouble; either they had nothing to say or did not know me. And the little Muse, who had entered, as I have said, into the demi-monde, presented a certificate issued by a medical committee in order to excuse her from appearing. Talk about little Muses who would cut off your head serenely! Poor girl, I had showed her all the beauty of my dreams, and she was nothing but a wretched creature devoid of intelligence and heart!
I was also subjected to the physicians. They’re more terrible than the magistrates. Judges always seem to be discussing hypotheses; doctors pronounce irrevocably. The first, an expert, affirmed that, according to the official autopsy of the late Hurelle and experiments that he had carried out on cadavers, the knife with the safety-guard found in my home could easily, by means of an abrupt half-turn, have caused the wound that had been attributed to a dagger.
The second was commissioned to examine my mental state. He carried out that task, the animal, in such a way as to render me absolutely insane, if I had had the slightest disposition. For him, I was a “lyric degenerate,” probably the child of an alcoholic and a hysteric (my father never drank anything but water and my mother was exemplary in her gentleness and virtue throughout her life). He accorded me nevertheless the consciousness of my acts, but concluded that my responsibility was slightly attenuated.
The cuisinage finished by becoming exasperating. Replying fifty thousand times to the same questions in the same way, hearing discussions of verbal divergences rather than factual contradictions—which is those gentlemen’s forte—and sensing that the truth I possessed would never succeed in piercing the mesh of error that was increasingly tightening around me, was a mental torture of which no one who has not been arbitrarily detained can have any idea.
The moderns have invented a torture more cruel than those of the boot, the rack, the water and red-hot irons: the slowness of the procedure. In the past, at least it was over in a single session, while I got to the point twenty times over of saying to Monsieur Meynadier: “Well yes, it was me—there! Let’s not talk about it anymore and get it over with!”
Finally, the authorities decided that I would go to the assizes at the next session.
There is no need t
o describe that memorable sitting in detail. There is much exaggeration with regard to trials; personally, I was profoundly disappointed. Instead of being imposing, the apparatus of justice seemed to me to be grotesque, and the gravity with which the men clad in red or black approved the implausible fable imagined by Monsieur Meynadier appeared to me to be enormously comical.
Poor humanity, I thought. How many errors as gross as the one of which I am the victim have scholars, pontiffs and the great not approved with regard to you? Who would dare to affirm, after the heavy scorn of these high competences, that the laws and principles that rule our society are not a tissue of lies?
For I had no doubt that, from the president to the guard seated beside me, there was not one person who had not made up his mind about my culpability before the arguments began.
I was obliged once again to hear in detail the story of the Mystery of the Plaine Saint-Denis, heightened by dramatic phrases intended to impress the jury. Then came the multiple reports presented during the initial examination, and then the formal accusation. Finally, the president proceeded to my interrogation.
As there was a very good crowd, including quite a few ladies dressed up to the nines, the president—who, in order to seek the genesis of the crime, went back to the era before I was weaned—thought it as well to show off, by means of a few ironic pleasantries, the sparkling facets of his intelligence. Naturally, I served as the butt of his gibes, and bore all the expenses of that amiable diversion. The method seemed to me a trifle sharp, and I told him roundly that he had “the right to cut off my head, but not to poke fun at it.”
That interjection had an effect on the audience akin to that of a cold shower. My advocate raised his despairing arms to the heavens, and the president conducted my interrogation rudely. He presented me as a third-rate actor of crime, avid for fame. I could not bear the idea, he said, that the author of a murder so cleverly conceived and so skillfully executed should remain unknown, and that, stuffed with vanity as others ere were remorse, it had been inevitable that, sooner or later, I would boast publicly of having committed it. The proof of that was that I had hoped, by having called as witnesses the greatest names in literature and the theater, to transform this vulgar murder, whose motive was theft, into a cause célèbre, or at least a “very Parisian affair.”
Investigations of the Future Page 23
