The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

  “Messieurs, the Court is here; silence please!” cries the usher.

  The Court makes its solemn entrance; the accused is introduced, and a vivid movement of curiosity takes possession of the spectators. People cry: “Sit down!” One might think that they were in a theater.

  The clerk immediately reads the charge sheet. Everyone knows the facts, no one listens; all gazes are fixed on the accused. His attire is modest but correct and proper; his goatee, his moustache and his short hair are all white. His forehead is broad, his face very thin; in his profound ringed eyes a dark gleam vacillates. A first sight, one might believe oneself to be in the presence of a retired subaltern officer, but the intellectual expression of the gaze impresses and quickly deflects the veritable observers.

  The clerk finishes his litany and the President proceeds with the interrogation. The facts already known return to the floor. The accused, with more deference for the Court than he showed the examining magistrate, nevertheless gives analogous answers. All the honorable magistrate’s efforts to trap him in contradiction are devoid of result. The accused, while refusing to clarify the mystery that envelops him, limits himself to telling the exact truth, only pointing out that certain implausibilities are too flagrant, and it is merely in a spirit amorous of rectitude that he does so.

  “You admit to having used various names?” the President asks him.

  “Yes, Monsieur,” he relies.

  “You had in that epoch an important reason for hiding your identity. Jacques Bilan, condemned to death by a court martial in 1871, did not want to return to Paris under his true name.”

  “An infantile precaution that the veritable Jacques Bilan, the author of the crime, were he not dead, would not have failed to make if he had taken it into his head to return to Paris.”

  “There is, indeed, a lacuna in your intelligence that it is difficult to explain, but criminals are subject to such absences; we have evidence of that every day. You were also unaware that the law knew the authors of the crime.”

  “I was unaware of the crime itself.”

  “Naturally. You didn’t even know that anarchists existed.”

  “Oh, that Monsieur President I learned and understood one night when I was about to die of hunger and desired to live.”

  “So you are an anarchist?”

  “I might well become one if Monsieur Deibler32 does not do his job,” he sniggers.

  A shiver runs through the auditorium.

  “You have a macabre sense of humor,” observes the President.

  “It’s a product of circumstance, Monsieur. Forgive me—it’s me who will bear all the expenses.”

  “The reports of the expert chemists inform us that the bomb in the Café Mansard was loaded with an unknown and very powerful explosive; it was not one of those primitive devices fabricated by inexperienced hands. You are very occupied with chemistry.”

  “Almost all my life.”

  “Did you not play a certain role in an explosion that took place in 18**?”

  “A very active role; I was experimenting with a powder of my own invention.”

  A murmur rises in the hall.

  “Admit, then that you are Jacque Bilan. Everything proves it.”

  “I have only been using that name for three months.”

  “Once again, that system of defense does not hold up, Messieurs the jurors will have immediate proof of it. If you are not Jacques Bilan, who are you?”

  “I cannot reply to you.”

  “It would be very easy, if you are neither Jacques Liban, nor Charles Balin, nor Jacques Bilan, to tell us who you are, with supporting evidence. The accusation would fail of its own accord and you would not be pursuit fir the usurpation of titles. You have no response? Thus, you are Companion Bilan, and if you are not the author of the abominable crime of the eighteenth of December, you are someone worse, since, in that case, you would be judging the identity of the murderer to be preferable to yours. A mysterious and singularly accusatory letter found on you ten years ago seems to prove that.”

  “The reasoning has appearances of logic,” observes the accused, imperturbably—a further rumor rises up in the audience—but adds immediately: “but it is false. Apart from one fact, which is not in your competence because you would consider it an act of madness, I am a very honest man—in the relative sense of the word, of course.”

  “If you were an honest man you would prove it to us, but the evidence and the accusation demonstrate to us that you are the anarchist Jacques Bilan and that a sentiment of vengeance moved you to accomplish the deadly work of the Café Mansard.”

  They pass on to the hearing of experts and witnesses.

  The manager of the Café Mansard recounts the incident of the fifth of May 18**. He has seen the accused twice under different appearances; the first time he had a check suit and blond hair; the second time, he came in the appearance of a petty employee or tradesman to settle the bill of seventeen francs that he had owed for two years. That fact had seemed extraordinary to him.

  Laughter bursts out in the hall; the President calls for order.

  “All the more extraordinary,” the witness goes on, “because he had already served three months in prison for it. There was, in consequence, something shady about that action; perhaps he was already meditating his revenge and wanted to allay suspicions?”

  Unfortunately, he had not seen the man who was carrying the bomb, but he had no doubt that it must have been him.

  “Why don’t you doubt it?” asks the defender.

  “Because I had him arrested.”

  “Is he the only client you’ve had sent to the police station for reasons of that sort?”

  The manager replies, bitterly, that crooks have never inspired tenderness in him.

  The waiters and regular of the café contradict one another. Some recognize the accused, other hesitate; the anarchist had a full white beard.

  It is the same with the agents charged with surveillance of foreigners. One of them affirms categorically that he has seen the accused in the company of an anarchist in an ill-famed tavern in London. There were two men of a certain age in the group, one of whom was Jacques Bilan; unfortunately, the English agents charged with guiding him only had a vague description based on the age of the companion.

  “You took your meals at the Dauphin Tavern?” asks the President.

  “I went there once.”

  The other agents are unanimous in saying that they have rarely had the opportunity to glimpse Jacques Bilan, that he gave them the slip every time they pursued him, and that he disguised himself with surprising skill.

  “You have often changed names, appearances and costumes?” the magistrate interrogates.

  “Yes, Monsieur,” the accused replied, tranquilly.

  The manager and guests of the Hôtel St-Germain recount the cries of rage and hatred that they heard through the walls.

  “You burned a quantity of papers and pronounced the words that the witnesses heard?”

  “Yes, Monsieur.”

  “And you say that you are not Jacques Bilan?”

  “No, Monsieur, I am not Jacques Bilan.”

  A few exclamations and bursts of immediately-stifled laughter are heard.

  “Messieurs the jurors will decide,” adds the judge.

  The hearing of the witnesses continues.

  A police commissaire testifies to his insolence; he arrested the accused for fraudulent misdemeanor, and the accused had insulted the authority.

  Monsieur Béguinard, the director of an education institution, hastened to throw him out after a fortnight.

  Maître Lampe, entrepreneur of copies, whose establishment he entered in the capacity of an honest retired customs officer, recounts that Monsieur Balin accused him of exploiting his staff and wanted to commit acts of violence on his person. He had for a companion a certain Raphael, whose shameful mores were publicly notorious.

  A concierge in the Rue Vavin certifies that he came back late at
night every evening.

  An agent of the Sûreté, who has made enquiries several times, gives the most detestable information about his antecedents. His mistress, who maintained him, has disappeared. He has never been able to find any trace of her.

  For the first time, the accused shivers and emerges from him impassivity. “Wretch!” he shouts, forcefully. “You’re the one who killed her!”

  The policeman, momentarily disconcerted, emphasizes his accusations. He was so convinced that the man was a murderer that he had not investigated a single crime without first making enquiries in his direction.

  “Which permitted the veritable guilty parties to escape the law,” sniggers the defender.

  Several registered prostitutes vaguely recognize him as the man who collapsed one night on a bench, and whom they helped. One of them, Eugénie Bourette, alias Nini Nichon, whose appearance at the bar obtains a great success, affirms that he lived off the earnings of Mariette Gantron, who thought her lover was a curé. She saw him one evening distributing louis on the boulevard; doubtless he had pulled off some good coup.

  “What do you respond to all that?” the President asks him.

  “That the majority of those accusations are stupid, and the rest despicable,” replies the accused, having become utterly calm again

  “That’s not a response.”

  “It’s sufficient for me, Monsieur Président.”

  “It will doubtless not be sufficient for Messieurs the jurors.”

  “I’ve made the sacrifice of my life; there is no longer any judge but one that I care about, and that is myself,” declares the accused, whose imperious voice impresses the audience.

  Other witnesses report a series of facts doubtless relating to the real Jacques Bilan, and which, distantly or closely, represent him as soiled by all shames and capable of all crimes. He makes the decision not to reply any longer.

  Three witnesses for the defense appear. The first, a merchant of liquids on whose account Charles Balin manipulated explosives, comes to declare that the envisaged goal was the fabrication of a new powder which they intended to present to the Ministry of War. The President makes the severe remark that before any dangerous experiment and to avoid all suspicion, he ought to have made a declaration to the Prefecture of Police.

  The second, an obese second-hand clothes dealer of morbid aspect recounts that Charles Balin treated him and cured him while he was a stationer in Bellevue, and that he greatly regretted his departure.

  The entire audience writhes with laughter. The President dismisses him and reminds him that, having already had two convictions for receiving, his testimony is more harmful than helpful to the accused.

  The third, a former federate under the orders of Jacques Bilan, summoned by the prosecution to recognize his battalion leader, initially swore that the accused was not Jacques Bilan. In a spirit of justice, he was summoned as a witness for the defense, but the Communard, perhaps influenced by the milieu, is much less categorical; previously, he had affirmed; now, he limits himself to emitting doubts.

  “When was the last time you saw Jacques Bilan?” the President asks him.

  “On the last day of the Commune we separated at the Porte de Romainville; he headed for Lilas, I went to the Prés Saint-Gervais.”

  The advocate general stands up. His speech for the prosecution, a kind of biography decorated by oratorical movements, can be summarized as follows;

  “Jacques Bilan,” he says, pointing at the accused, “for the man you see before you is not an cannot be anyone by Companion Bilan, as I shall prove, is the accomplished type specimen of the individual come down in the world whom Pride, disappointments and bad conduct have fatally pushed him to anarchism.

  “The son of a cobbler, raised with the aid of the clergy, was single out for his keen intelligence; endowed, it seems, with an exceptional memory, he won a number of initial successes that his relatives and friends must have made the mistake of exaggerating, and entered a small seminary in his native town

  “We are in 1851; the coup d’état has just erupted. This time, the people take to the streets to defend legality. Jacques Bilan, a fifteen year old insurgent, takes up the rifle.33 Certainly, Messieurs, our opinions are known; we are Republicans and like him, we would have been defenders of the law.”

  Sniggers depart from the group of young advocates, whom the President regards with a severe expression. The advocate general has turned toward them.

  “Yes, Messieurs, we would have defended the law. However,” he resumes, “what we would have one in the name of true principles, he, as his precocity and his entire life prove, determines to do purely for love of trouble and disorder. The young revolutionary is taken prisoner. A powerful compatriot and the director of the seminary intervene; his recklessness is attributed to his youth; the victors are content to send him to a house of correction, from which the same influences, moreover, soon obtain his release.

  “He resumes his studies. Anyone else would be grateful to his protector for the services they have just rendered him. He, driven by pride, scorning the sacred habit for which he is destined, believing himself destined to play a great role one day, obtains his baccalaureate, comes to Paris, which attracts him, and begins medical studies.

  “Note that particularity well, Messieurs the jurors, it will explain to you why the accused subsequently became a medical orderly and a bone-setter; and if the anthropometric service does not have of Jacques Bilan, it has that of Charles Balin and Jacques Liban, two anagrams under which the identity of Jacques Balin is concealed.

  “The indomitable nature of the medical student does not take long to get the upper hand. Serious incidents occur at the school. An illustrious professor is jeered, insulted, even struck in his pulpit, and who is at the head of the young rebels? Jacques Bilan. The police try to arrest him, but the young student has sensed that he is menaced by an exemplary punishment and that his past ingratitude will receive a striking lesson. He avoids all research and succeeds in reaching Brussels.

  “Here we lose sight of him for a considerable lapse of time. Where did he spend the next fifteen years? What did he do to earn a living? He alone could tell us. Doubtless he wanders from city to city, country to country, poverty to poverty, for we only find him again at the end of the Empire, irreconcilable, embittered, cited among the most restless agitators. The majority found honorable and even fortunate positions in exile; Jacques Bilan comes back to us poorer than ever.

  “The war breaks out, the Prussians surround Paris; others run to the front and die gloriously at the hands of the enemy; he is in the first rank of the fanatics who invade the Hôtel-de-Ville. The Commune, as was fatal, could not have a more enthusiastic defender; he it is who instigates the massacres of the Rue Haxo. He is the leader of the Bilan battalion, which, from the heights of Belleville, resists the defenders of order to the end. Luck favors him again; he escapes and disappears; but Jacques Bilan of sinister memory has left memories too bloody for the law to forget him; a court martial puts him on trial in his absence and condemns him to death.

  “A few years pass; he changes his name and face, and we would lose track of him again if the taverns of London did not resound with his diatribes full of bile. There again, while many others, having become wiser with experience and age, have reformed, the irreducible revolutionary, grouping around him all the international scum, stimulates rancor and preaches conflict.

  “Political passions having eased, the vanquished of yesteryear begin to raise their heads again. He experiences the need to see France again, to judge for himself the state of minds, and as he cannot return to France under his real name, he borrows a mask His name is Jacques Bilan; a simple inversion of syllables appears to him to be sufficient, so he calls himself Jacques Liban. Note well, Messieurs the jurors, that correlation of names; it is characteristic; it is called an anagram.

  “What does he do in that epoch? What abominable and mysterious crime has he committed? The law has not been able to disc
over it. What we know is that he collected a sum of five hundred thousand francs in a financial establishment in May 18**, that he entered the Café Mansard immediately afterwards, spent seventeen francs there and refused to pay the bill, claiming that he had been robbed

  “The manager had him sent to the police station; the Commissaire de Police interrogated him; he was searched and this damning letter was found on him.”

  The prosecutor reads and comments on the letter found on the legionnaire.

  “Although the examining magistrate was unable to clarify the mystery,” the prosecutor resumes, “this letter proves, at least, that Jacques Bilan, under an assumed name, and after committing a nameless crime that alone might legitimate your verdict, enlisted in the Foreign Legion and was then sent to Tonkin, thus playing the comedy of despair and remorse.

  “Thousands of heroes fell out there for the Fatherland; an illustrious surgeon left honors and wealth to water that distant earth with his noble blood. He, instead of dying, deserted at the height of the struggle, comes back to Paris and is arrested, thanks to the manager of the Café Mansard—you will not have forgotten, Messieurs the jurors, that it was the manager of the Café Mansard who had him arrested. He is taken to the police cells; the anthropometric service did not exist at the time of his first arrests; he is not recognized, and is only sentenced to three months in prison.

  “He comes out. Here, witnesses to whom I cannot attach any real moral value, represent him playing the comedy of hunger, then having himself maintained by a registered prostitute; I only cite them for the sake of memory; you will make of the circumstance what you please. As for the deposition of the entrepreneur of copies whom the accused reproached or the odious exploitation of his personnel, the reproach is so well-merited that I am far from wanting to make a weapon of it If the majority of employers, I must confess, resembled Monsieur Lampe, we would all be socialists.”

  A burst of ironic laughter ripples through the hall; the President, with a pained expression, recalls the auditorium to order. “I am astonished,” he observes, gravely, “that you have the courage to laugh when the life of a man is at stake.”