Again, Monsieur de Granville, who had reached the age of fifty-three without ever having been loved, admired a tender soul, as all men do who have not been loved. This despair, the lot of many men to whom women can only give esteem and friendship, was perhaps the unknown bond on which a strong intimacy was based that united the Comtes de Bauvan, de Granville, and de Serizy; for a common misfortune brings souls into unison quite as much as a common joy.
“You have the future before you,” said the public prosecutor, with an inquisitorial glance at the dejected villain.
The man only expressed by a shrug the utmost indifference to his fate.
“Lucien made a will by which he leaves you three hundred thousand francs.”
“Poor, poor chap! poor boy!” cried Jacques Collin. “Always too honest! I was all wickedness, while he was goodness — noble, beautiful, sublime! Such lovely souls cannot be spoiled. He had taken nothing from me but my money, sir.”
This utter and complete surrender of his individuality, which the magistrate vainly strove to rally, so thoroughly proved his dreadful words, that Monsieur de Granville was won over to the criminal. The public prosecutor remained!
“If you really care for nothing,” said Monsieur de Granville, “what did you want to say to me?”
“Well, is it not something that I have given myself up? You were getting warm, but you had not got me; besides, you would not have known what to do with me — — ”
“What an antagonist!” said the magistrate to himself.
“Monsieur le Comte, you are about to cut off the head of an innocent man, and I have discovered the culprit,” said Jacques Collin, wiping away his tears. “I have come here not for their sakes, but for yours. I have come to spare you remorse, for I love all who took an interest in Lucien, just as I will give my hatred full play against all who helped to cut off his life — men or women!
“What can a convict more or less matter to me?” he went on, after a short pause. “A convict is no more in my eyes than an emmet is in yours. I am like the Italian brigands — fine men they are! If a traveler is worth ever so little more than the charge of their musket, they shoot him dead.
“I thought only of you. — I got the young man to make a clean breast of it; he was bound to trust me, we had been chained together. Theodore is very good stuff; he thought he was doing his mistress a good turn by undertaking to sell or pawn stolen goods; but he is no more guilty of the Nanterre job than you are. He is a Corsican; it is their way to revenge themselves and kill each other like flies. In Italy and Spain a man’s life is not respected, and the reason is plain. There we are believed to have a soul in our own image, which survives us and lives for ever. Tell that to your analyst! It is only among atheistical or philosophical nations that those who mar human life are made to pay so dearly; and with reason from their point of view — a belief only in matter and in the present.
“If Calvi had told you who the woman was from whom he obtained the stolen goods, you would not have found the real murderer; he is already in your hands; but his accomplice, whom poor Theodore will not betray because she is a woman — — Well, every calling has its point of honor; convicts and thieves have theirs!
“Now, I know the murderer of those two women and the inventors of that bold, strange plot; I have been told every detail. Postpone Calvi’s execution, and you shall know all; but you must give me your word that he shall be sent safe back to the hulks and his punishment commuted. A man so miserable as I am does not take the trouble to lie — you know that. What I have told you is the truth.”
“To you, Jacques Collin, though it is degrading Justice, which ought never to condescend to such a compromise, I believe I may relax the rigidity of my office and refer the case to my superiors.”
“Will you grant me this life?”
“Possibly.”
“Monsieur, I implore you to give me your word; it will be enough.”
Monsieur Granville drew himself up with offended pride.
“I hold in my hand the honor of three families, and you only the lives of three convicts in yours,” said Jacques Collin. “I have the stronger hand.”
“But you may be sent back to the dark cells: then, what will you do?” said the public prosecutor.
“Oh! we are to play the game out then!” said Jacques Collin. “I was speaking as man to man — I was talking to Monsieur de Granville. But if the public prosecutor is my adversary, I take up the cards and hold them close. — And if only you had given me your word, I was ready to give you back the letters that Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu — — ”
This was said with a tone, an audacity, and a look which showed Monsieur de Granville, that against such an adversary the least blunder was dangerous.
“And is that all you ask?” said the magistrate.
“I will speak for myself now,” said Jacques. “The honor of the Grandlieu family is to pay for the commutation of Theodore’s sentence. It is giving much to get very little. For what is a convict in penal servitude for life? If he escapes, you can so easily settle the score. It is drawing a bill on the guillotine! Only, as he was consigned to Rochefort with no amiable intentions, you must promise me that he shall be quartered at Toulon, and well treated there.
“Now, for myself, I want something more. I have the packets of letters from Madame de Serizy and Madame de Maufrigneuse. — And what letters! — I tell you, Monsieur le Comte, prostitutes, when they write letters, assume a style of sentiment; well, sir, fine ladies, who are accustomed to style and sentiment all day long, write as prostitutes behave. Philosophers may know the reasons for this contrariness. I do not care to seek them. Woman is an inferior animal; she is ruled by her instincts. To my mind a woman has no beauty who is not like a man.
“So your smart duchesses, who are men in brains only, write masterpieces. Oh! they are splendid from beginning to end, like Piron’s famous ode! — — ”
“Indeed!”
“Would you like to see them?” said Jacques Collin, with a laugh.
The magistrate felt ashamed.
“I cannot give them to you to read. But, there; no nonsense; this is business and all above board, I suppose? — You must give me back the letters, and allow no one to play the spy or to follow or to watch the person who will bring them to me.”
“That will take time,” said Monsieur de Granville.
“No. It is half-past nine,” replied Jacques Collin, looking at the clock; “well, in four minutes you will have a letter from each of these ladies, and after reading them you will countermand the guillotine. If matters were not as they are, you would not see me taking things so easy. — The ladies indeed have had warning.” — Monsieur de Granville was startled. — ”They must be making a stir by now; they are going to bring the Keeper of the Seals into the fray — they may even appeal to the King, who knows? — Come, now, will you give me your word that you will forget all that has passed, and neither follow, nor send any one to follow, that person for a whole hour?”
“I promise it.”
“Very well; you are not the man to deceive an escaped convict. You are a chip of the block of which Turennes and Condes are made, and would keep your word to a thief. — In the Salle des Pas-Perdus there is at this moment a beggar woman in rags, an old woman, in the very middle of the hall. She is probably gossiping with one of the public writers, about some lawsuit over a party-wall perhaps; send your office messenger to fetch her, saying these words, ‘Dabor ti Mandana’ (the Boss wants you). She will come.
“But do not be unnecessarily cruel. Either you accept my terms or you do not choose to be mixed up in a business with a convict. — I am only a forger, you will remember! — Well, do not leave Calvi to go through the terrors of preparation for the scaffold.”
“I have already countermanded the execution,” said Monsieur de Granville to Jacques Collin. “I would not have Justice beneath you in dignity.”
Jacques Collin looked at the public prosecutor with a sort of amazement,
and saw him ring his bell.
“Will you promise not to escape? Give me your word, and I shall be satisfied. Go and fetch the woman.”
The office-boy came in.
“Felix, send away the gendarmes,” said Monsieur de Granville.
Jacques Collin was conquered.
In this duel with the magistrate he had tried to be the superior, the stronger, the more magnanimous, and the magistrate had crushed him. At the same time, the convict felt himself the superior, inasmuch as he had tricked the Law; he had convinced it that the guilty man was innocent, and had fought for a man’s head and won it; but this advantage must be unconfessed, secret and hidden, while the magistrate towered above him majestically in the eye of day.
As Jacques Collin left Monsieur de Granville’s room, the Comte des Lupeaulx, Secretary-in-Chief of the President of the Council, and a deputy, made his appearance, and with him a feeble-looking, little old man. This individual, wrapped in a puce-colored overcoat, as though it were still winter, with powdered hair, and a cold, pale face, had a gouty gait, unsteady on feet that were shod with loose calfskin boots; leaning on a gold-headed cane, he carried his hat in his hand, and wore a row of seven orders in his button-hole.
“What is it, my dear des Lupeaulx?” asked the public prosecutor.
“I come from the Prince,” replied the Count, in a low voice. “You have carte blanche if you can only get the letters — Madame de Serizy’s, Madame de Maufrigneuse’s and Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu’s. You may come to some arrangement with this gentleman — — ”
“Who is he?” asked Monsieur de Granville, in a whisper.
“There are no secrets between you and me, my dear sir,” said des Lupeaulx. “This is the famous Corentin. His Majesty desires that you will yourself tell him all the details of this affair and the conditions of success.”
“Do me the kindness,” replied the public prosecutor, “of going to tell the Prince that the matter is settled, that I have not needed this gentleman’s assistance,” and he turned to Corentin. “I will wait on His Majesty for his commands with regard to the last steps in the matter, which will lie with the Keeper of the Seals, as two reprieves will need signing.”
“You have been wise to take the initiative,” said des Lupeaulx, shaking hands with the Comte de Granville. “On the very eve of a great undertaking the King is most anxious that the peers and the great families should not be shown up, blown upon. It ceases to be a low criminal case; it becomes an affair of State.”
“But tell the Prince that by the time you came it was all settled.”
“Really!”
“I believe so.”
“Then you, my dear fellow, will be Keeper of the Seals as soon as the present Keeper is made Chancellor — — ”
“I have no ambition,” replied the magistrate.
Des Lupeaulx laughed, and went away.
“Beg of the Prince to request the King to grant me ten minutes’ audience at about half-past two,” added Monsieur de Granville, as he accompanied the Comte des Lupeaulx to the door.
“So you are not ambitious!” said des Lupeaulx, with a keen look at Monsieur de Granville. “Come, you have two children, you would like at least to be made peer of France.”
“If you have the letters, Monsieur le Procureur General, my intervention is unnecessary,” said Corentin, finding himself alone with Monsieur de Granville, who looked at him with very natural curiosity.
“Such a man as you can never be superfluous in so delicate a case,” replied the magistrate, seeing that Corentin had heard or guessed everything.
Corentin bowed with a patronizing air.
“Do you know the man in question, monsieur?”
“Yes, Monsieur le Comte, it is Jacques Collin, the head of the ‘Ten Thousand Francs Association,’ the banker for three penal settlements, a convict who, for the last five years, has succeeded in concealing himself under the robe of the Abbe Carlos Herrera. How he ever came to be intrusted with a mission to the late King from the King of Spain is a question which we have all puzzled ourselves with trying to answer. I am now expecting information from Madrid, whither I have sent notes and a man. That convict holds the secrets of two kings.”
“He is a man of mettle and temper. We have only two courses open to us,” said the public prosecutor. “We must secure his fidelity, or get him out of the way.”
“The same idea has struck us both, and that is a great honor for me,” said Corentin. “I am obliged to have so many ideas, and for so many people, that out of them all I ought occasionally to meet a clever man.”
He spoke so drily, and in so icy a tone, that Monsieur de Granville made no reply, and proceeded to attend to some pressing matters.
Mademoiselle Jacqueline Collin’s amazement on seeing Jacques Collin in the Salle des Pas-Perdus is beyond imagining. She stood square on her feet, her hands on her hips, for she was dressed as a costermonger. Accustomed as she was to her nephew’s conjuring tricks, this beat everything.
“Well, if you are going to stare at me as if I were a natural history show,” said Jacques Collin, taking his aunt by the arm and leading her out of the hall, “we shall be taken for a pair of curious specimens; they may take us into custody, and then we should lose time.”
And he went down the stairs of the Galerie Marchande leading to the Rue de la Barillerie. “Where is Paccard?”
“He is waiting for me at la Rousse’s, walking up and down the flower market.”
“And Prudence?”
“Also at her house, as my god-daughter.”
“Let us go there.”
“Look round and see if we are watched.”
La Rousse, a hardware dealer living on the Quai aux Fleurs, was the widow of a famous murderer, one of the “Ten Thousand.” In 1819, Jacques Collin had faithfully handed over twenty thousand francs and odd to this woman from her lover, after he had been executed. Trompe-la-Mort was the only person who knew of his pal’s connection with the girl, at that time a milliner.
“I am your young man’s boss,” the boarder at Madame Vauquer’s had told her, having sent for her to meet him at the Jardin des Plantes. “He may have mentioned me to you, my dear. — Any one who plays me false dies within a year; on the other hand, those who are true to me have nothing to fear from me. I am staunch through thick and thin, and would die without saying a word that would compromise anybody I wish well to. Stick to me as a soul sticks to the Devil, and you will find the benefit of it. I promised your poor Auguste that you should be happy; he wanted to make you a rich woman, and he got scragged for your sake.
“Don’t cry; listen to me. No one in the world knows that you were mistress to a convict, to the murderer they choked off last Saturday; and I shall never tell. You are two-and-twenty, and pretty, and you have twenty-six thousand francs of your own; forget Auguste and get married; be an honest woman if you can. In return for peace and quiet, I only ask you to serve me now and then, me, and any one I may send you, but without stopping to think. I will never ask you to do anything that can get you into trouble, you or your children, or your husband, if you get one, or your family.
“In my line of life I often want a safe place to talk in or to hide in. Or I may want a trusty woman to carry a letter or do an errand. You will be one of my letter-boxes, one of my porters’ lodges, one of my messengers, neither more nor less.
“You are too red-haired; Auguste and I used to call you la Rousse; you can keep that name. My aunt, an old-clothes dealer at the Temple, who will come and see you, is the only person in the world you are to obey; tell her everything that happens to you; she will find you a husband, and be very useful to you.”
And thus the bargain was struck, a diabolical compact like that which had for so long bound Prudence Servien to Jacques Collin, and which the man never failed to tighten; for, like the Devil, he had a passion for recruiting.
In about 1821 Jacques Collin found la Rousse a husband in the person of the chief shopman under a rich whole
sale tin merchant. This head-clerk, having purchased his master’s house of business, was now a prosperous man, the father of two children, and one of the district Maire’s deputies. La Rousse, now Madame Prelard, had never had the smallest ground for complaint, either of Jacques Collin or of his aunt; still, each time she was required to help them, Madame Prelard quaked in every limb. So, as she saw the terrible couple come into her shop, she turned as pale as death.
“We want to speak to you on business, madame,” said Jacques Collin.
“My husband is in there,” said she.
“Very well; we have no immediate need of you. I never put people out of their way for nothing.”
“Send for a hackney coach, my dear,” said Jacqueline Collin, “and tell my god-daughter to come down. I hope to place her as maid to a very great lady, and the steward of the house will take us there.”
A shop-boy fetched the coach, and a few minutes later Europe, or, to be rid of the name under which she had served Esther, Prudence Servien, Paccard, Jacques Collin, and his aunt, were, to la Rousse’s great joy, packed into a coach, ordered by Trompe-la-Mort to drive to the Barriere d’Ivry.
Prudence and Paccard, quaking in presence of the boss, felt like guilty souls in the presence of God.
“Where are the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs?” asked the boss, looking at them with the clear, penetrating gaze which so effectually curdled the blood of these tools of his, these ames damnees, when they were caught tripping, that they felt as though their scalp were set with as many pins as hairs.
“The seven hundred and thirty thousand francs,” said Jacqueline Collin to her nephew, “are quite safe; I gave them to la Romette this morning in a sealed packet.”
“If you had not handed them over to Jacqueline,” said Trompe-la-Mort, “you would have gone straight there,” and he pointed to the Place de Greve, which they were just passing.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 660