“‘For instance,’ said he, ‘if you place your hand in that of a somnambulist who, when awake, can press it only up to a certain average of tightness, you will see that in the somnambulistic state — as it is stupidly termed — his fingers can clutch like a vise screwed up by a blacksmith.’ — Well, monsieur, I placed my hand in that of a woman, not asleep, for Bouvard rejects the word, but isolated, and when the old man bid her squeeze my wrist as long and as tightly as she could, I begged him to stop when the blood was almost bursting from my finger tips. Look, you can see the marks of her clutch, which I shall not lose for these three months.”
“The deuce!” exclaimed Monsieur Gault, as he saw a band of bruised flesh, looking like the scar of a burn.
“My dear Gault,” the doctor went on, “if my wrist had been gripped in an iron manacle screwed tight by a locksmith, I should not have felt the bracelet of metal so hard as that woman’s fingers; her hand was of unyielding steel, and I am convinced that she could have crushed my bones and broken my hand from the wrist. The pressure, beginning almost insensibly, increased without relaxing, fresh force being constantly added to the former grip; a tourniquet could not have been more effectual than that hand used as an instrument of torture. — To me, therefore, it seems proven that under the influence of passion, which is the will concentrated on one point and raised to an incalculable power of animal force, as the different varieties of electric force are also, man may direct his whole vitality, whether for attack or resistance, to one of his organs. — Now, this little lady, under the stress of her despair, had concentrated her vital force in her hands.”
“She must have a good deal too, to break a wrought-iron bar,” said the chief warder, with a shake of the head.
“There was a flaw in it,” Monsieur Gault observed.
“For my part,” said the doctor, “I dare assign no limits to nervous force. And indeed it is by this that mothers, to save their children, can magnetize lions, climb, in a fire, along a parapet where a cat would not venture, and endure the torments that sometimes attend childbirth. In this lies the secret of the attempts made by convicts and prisoners to regain their liberty. The extent of our vital energies is as yet unknown; they are part of the energy of nature itself, and we draw them from unknown reservoirs.”
“Monsieur,” said the warder in an undertone to the Governor, coming close to him as he was escorting Doctor Lebrun as far as the outer gates of the Conciergerie, “Number 2 in the secret cells says he is ill, and needs the doctor; he declares he is dying,” added the turnkey.
“Indeed,” said the Governor.
“His breath rattles in his throat,” replied the man.
“It is five o’clock,” said the doctor; “I have had no dinner. But, after all, I am at hand. Come, let us see.”
“Number 2, as it happens, is the Spanish priest suspected of being Jacques Collin,” said Monsieur Gault to the doctor, “and one of the persons suspected of the crime in which that poor young man was implicated.”
“I saw him this morning,” replied the doctor. “Monsieur Camusot sent for me to give evidence as to the state of the rascal’s health, and I may assure you that he is perfectly well, and could make a fortune by playing the part of Hercules in a troupe of athletes.”
“Perhaps he wants to kill himself too,” said Monsieur Gault. “Let us both go down to the cells together, for I ought to go there if only to transfer him to an upper room. Monsieur Camusot has given orders to mitigate this anonymous gentleman’s confinement.”
Jacques Collin, known as Trompe-la-Mort in the world of the hulks, who must henceforth be called only by his real name, had gone through terrible distress of mind since, after hearing Camusot’s order, he had been taken back to the underground cell — an anguish such as he had never before known in the course of a life diversified by many crimes, by three escapes, and two sentences at the Assizes. And is there not something monstrously fine in the dog-like attachment shown to the man he had made his friend by this wretch in whom were concentrated all the life, the powers, the spirit, and the passions of the hulks, who was, so to speak, their highest expression?
Wicked, infamous, and in so many ways horrible, this absolute worship of his idol makes him so truly interesting that this Study, long as it is already, would seem incomplete and cut short if the close of this criminal career did not come as a sequel to Lucien de Rubempre’s end. The little spaniel being dead, we want to know whether his terrible playfellow the lion will live on.
In real life, in society, every event is so inevitably linked to other events, that one cannot occur without the rest. The water of the great river forms a sort of fluid floor; not a wave, however rebellious, however high it may toss itself, but its powerful crest must sink to the level of the mass of waters, stronger by the momentum of its course than the revolt of the surges it bears with it.
And just as you watch the current flow, seeing in it a confused sheet of images, so perhaps you would like to measure the pressure exerted by social energy on the vortex called Vautrin; to see how far away the rebellious eddy will be carried ere it is lost, and what the end will be of this really diabolical man, human still by the power of loving — so hardly can that heavenly grace perish, even in the most cankered heart.
This wretched convict, embodying the poem that has smiled on many a poet’s fancy — on Moore, on Lord Byron, on Mathurin, on Canalis — the demon who has drawn an angel down to hell to refresh him with dews stolen from heaven, — this Jacques Collin will be seen, by the reader who has understood that iron soul, to have sacrificed his own life for seven years past. His vast powers, absorbed in Lucien, acted solely for Lucien; he lived for his progress, his loves, his ambitions. To him, Lucien was his own soul made visible.
It was Trompe-la-Mort who dined with the Grandlieus, stole into ladies’ boudoirs, and loved Esther by proxy. In fact, in Lucien he saw Jacques Collin, young, handsome, noble, and rising to the dignity of an ambassador.
Trompe-la-Mort had realized the German superstition of a doppelganger by means of a spiritual paternity, a phenomenon which will be quite intelligible to those women who have ever truly loved, who have felt their soul merge in that of the man they adore, who have lived his life, whether noble or infamous, happy or unhappy, obscure or brilliant; who, in defiance of distance, have felt a pain in their leg if he were wounded in his; who if he fought a duel would have been aware of it; and who, to put the matter in a nutshell, did not need to be told he was unfaithful to know it.
As he went back to his cell Jacques Collin said to himself, “The boy is being examined.”
And he shivered — he who thought no more of killing a man than a laborer does of drinking.
“Has he been able to see his mistresses?” he wondered. “Has my aunt succeeded in catching those damned females? Have the Duchesses and Countesses bestirred themselves and prevented his being examined? Has Lucien had my instructions? And if ill-luck will have it that he is cross-questioned, how will he carry it off? Poor boy, and I have brought him to this! It is that rascal Paccard and that sneak Europe who have caused all this rumpus by collaring the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs for the certificate Nucingen gave Esther. That precious pair tripped us up at the last step; but I will make them pay dear for their pranks.
“One day more and Lucien would have been a rich man; he might have married his Clotilde de Grandlieu. — Then the boy would have been all my own! — And to think that our fate depends on a look, on a blush of Lucien’s under Camusot’s eye, who sees everything, and has all a judge’s wits about him! For when he showed me the letters we tipped each other a wink in which we took each other’s measure, and he guessed that I can make Lucien’s lady-loves fork out.”
This soliloquy lasted for three hours. His torments were so great that they were too much for that frame of iron and vitriol; Jacques Collin, whose brain felt on fire with insanity, suffered such fearful thirst that he unconsciously drank up all the water contained in one of the pails wit
h which the cell was supplied, forming, with the bed, all its furniture.
“If he loses his head, what will become of him? — for the poor child has not Theodore’s tenacity,” said he to himself, as he lay down on the camp-bed — like a bed in a guard-room.
A word must here be said about this Theodore, remembered by Jacques Collin at such a critical moment. Theodore Calvi, a young Corsican, imprisoned for life at the age of eighteen for eleven murders, thanks to the influential interference paid for with vast sums, had been made the fellow convict of Jacques Collin, to whom he was chained, in 1819 and 1820. Jacques Collin’s last escape, one of his finest inventions — for he had got out disguised as a gendarme leading Theodore Calvi as he was, a convict called before the commissary of police — had been effected in the seaport of Rochefort, where the convicts die by dozens, and where, it was hoped, these two dangerous rascals would have ended their days. Though they escaped together, the difficulties of their flight had forced them to separate. Theodore was caught and restored to the hulks.
Indeed, a life with Lucien, a youth innocent of all crime, who had only minor sins on his conscience, dawned on him as bright and glorious as a summer sun; while with Theodore, Jacques Collin could look forward to no end but the scaffold after a career of indispensable crimes.
The thought of disaster as a result of Lucien’s weakness — for his experience of an underground cell would certainly have turned his brain — took vast proportions in Jacques Collin’s mind; and, contemplating the probabilities of such a misfortune, the unhappy man felt his eyes fill with tears, a phenomenon that had been utterly unknown to him since his earliest childhood.
“I must be in a furious fever,” said he to himself; “and perhaps if I send for the doctor and offer him a handsome sum, he will put me in communication with Lucien.”
At this moment the turnkey brought in his dinner.
“It is quite useless my boy; I cannot eat. Tell the governor of this prison to send the doctor to see me. I am very bad, and I believe my last hour has come.”
Hearing the guttural rattle that accompanied these words, the warder bowed and went. Jacques Collin clung wildly to this hope; but when he saw the doctor and the governor come in together, he perceived that the attempt was abortive, and coolly awaited the upshot of the visit, holding out his wrist for the doctor to feel his pulse.
“The Abbe is feverish,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “but it is the type of fever we always find in inculpated prisoners — and to me,” he added, in the governor’s ear, “it is always a sign of some degree of guilt.”
Just then the governor, to whom the public prosecutor had intrusted Lucien’s letter to be given to Jacques Collin, left the doctor and the prisoner together under the guard of the warder, and went to fetch the letter.
“Monsieur,” said Jacques Collin, seeing the warder outside the door, and not understanding why the governor had left them, “I should think nothing of thirty thousand francs if I might send five lines to Lucien de Rubempre.”
“I will not rob you of your money,” said Doctor Lebrun; “no one in this world can ever communicate with him again — — ”
“No one?” said the prisoner in amazement. “Why?”
“He has hanged himself — — ”
No tigress robbed of her whelps ever startled an Indian jungle with a yell so fearful as that of Jacques Collin, who rose to his feet as a tiger rears to spring, and fired a glance at the doctor as scorching as the flash of a falling thunderbolt. Then he fell back on the bed, exclaiming:
“Oh, my son!”
“Poor man!” said the doctor, moved by this terrific convulsion of nature.
In fact, the first explosion gave way to such utter collapse, that the words, “Oh, my son,” were but a murmur.
“Is this one going to die in our hands too?” said the turnkey.
“No; it is impossible!” Jacques Collin went on, raising himself and looking at the two witnesses of the scene with a dead, cold eye. “You are mistaken; it is not Lucien; you did not see. A man cannot hang himself in one of these cells. Look — how could I hang myself here? All Paris shall answer to me for that boy’s life! God owes it to me.”
The warder and the doctor were amazed in their turn — they, whom nothing had astonished for many a long day.
On seeing the governor, Jacques Collin, crushed by the very violence of this outburst of grief, seemed somewhat calmer.
“Here is a letter which the public prosecutor placed in my hands for you, with permission to give it to you sealed,” said Monsieur Gault.
“From Lucien?” said Jacques Collin.
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Is not that young man — — ”
“He is dead,” said the governor. “Even if the doctor had been on the spot, he would, unfortunately, have been too late. The young man died — there — in one of the rooms — — ”
“May I see him with my own eyes?” asked Jacques Collin timidly. “Will you allow a father to weep over the body of his son?”
“You can, if you like, take his room, for I have orders to remove you from these cells; you are no longer in such close confinement, monsieur.”
The prisoner’s eyes, from which all light and warmth had fled, turned slowly from the governor to the doctor; Jacques Collin was examining them, fearing some trap, and he was afraid to go out of the cell.
“If you wish to see the body,” said Lebrun, “you have no time to lose; it is to be carried away to-night.”
“If you have children, gentlemen,” said Jacques Collin, “you will understand my state of mind; I hardly know what I am doing. This blow is worse to me than death; but you cannot know what I am saying. Even if you are fathers, it is only after a fashion — I am a mother too — I — I am going mad — I feel it!”
By going through certain passages which open only to the governor, it is possible to get very quickly from the cells to the private rooms. The two sets of rooms are divided by an underground corridor formed of two massive walls supporting the vault over which Galerie Marchande, as it is called, is built. So Jacques Collin, escorted by the warder, who took his arm, preceded by the governor, and followed by the doctor, in a few minutes reached the cell where Lucien was lying stretched on the bed.
On seeing the body, he threw himself upon it, seizing it in a desperate embrace with a passion and impulse that made these spectators shudder.
“There,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “that is an instance of what I was telling you. You see that man clutching the body, and you do not know what a corpse is; it is stone — — ”
“Leave me alone!” said Jacques Collin in a smothered voice; “I have not long to look at him. They will take him away to — — ”
He paused at the word “bury him.”
“You will allow me to have some relic of my dear boy! Will you be so kind as to cut off a lock of his hair for me, monsieur,” he said to the doctor, “for I cannot — — ”
“He was certainly his son,” said Lebrun.
“Do you think so?” replied the governor in a meaning tone, which made the doctor thoughtful for a few minutes.
The governor gave orders that the prisoner should be left in this cell, and that some locks of hair should be cut for the self-styled father before the body should be removed.
At half-past five in the month of May it is easy to read a letter in the Conciergerie in spite of the iron bars and the close wire trellis that guard the windows. So Jacques Collin read the dreadful letter while he still held Lucien’s hand.
The man is not known who can hold a lump of ice for ten minutes tightly clutched in the hollow of his hand. The cold penetrates to the very life-springs with mortal rapidity. But the effect of that cruel chill, acting like a poison, is as nothing to that which strikes to the soul from the cold, rigid hand of the dead thus held. Thus Death speaks to Life; it tells many dark secrets which kill many feelings; for in matters of feeling is not change death?
As we re
ad through once more, with Jacques Collin, Lucien’s last letter, it will strike us as being what it was to this man — a cup of poison: —
“To the Abbe Carlos Herrera.
“MY DEAR ABBE, — I have had only benefits from you, and I have
betrayed you. This involuntary ingratitude is killing me, and when
you read these lines I shall have ceased to exist. You are not
here now to save me.
“You had given me full liberty, if I should find it advantageous,
to destroy you by flinging you on the ground like a cigar-end; but
I have ruined you by a blunder. To escape from a difficulty,
deluded by a clever question from the examining judge, your son by
adoption and grace went over to the side of those who aim at
killing you at any cost, and insist on proving an identity, which
I know to be impossible, between you and a French villain. All is
said.
“Between a man of your calibre and me — me of whom you tried to
make a greater man than I am capable of being — no foolish
sentiment can come at the moment of final parting. You hoped to
make me powerful and famous, and you have thrown me into the gulf
of suicide, that is all. I have long heard the broad pinions of
that vertigo beating over my head.
“As you have sometimes said, there is the posterity of Cain and
the posterity of Abel. In the great human drama Cain is in
opposition. You are descended from Adam through that line, in
which the devil still fans the fire of which the first spark was
flung on Eve. Among the demons of that pedigree, from time to time
we see one of stupendous power, summing up every form of human
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 650