The Machiavelli of the hulks
As the first carriage which contained Jacques Collin reached the Arcade Saint Jean, a dark and narrow passage, an obstruction caused the post-boy to stop under the archway. The eyes of the prévenu shone through the grating like two carbuncles, despite the mask of a dying man which the evening before had made the governor of La Force think it necessary to call in a doctor. At that moment free, for neither the constable nor the usher turned round to look at their customer, those burning eyes spoke so clear a language that a clever examining magistrate, like Monsieur Popinot for example, would have recognized the convict beneath that sacrilegious attire. Ever since the salad basket had emerged from the gate of La Force, Jacques Collin had indeed been examining everything on the way. Despite the speed of their journey, his avid and all-seeing gaze took in the houses from top storey to ground floor. God’s grasp of his creation in its means and in its end was not more complete than this man’s perception of small variations in the mass of things and passers-by. Armed with hope, as the last of the Horatii was with his sword, he waited for help. To anyone else but this Machiavelli of the hulks, such a hope would have appeared so impossible of realization that he would have lapsed into a mechanical indifference, as the guilty invariably do. None of them thinks of resisting the situation in which Justice and the Police of Paris have plunged those who are duly charged, more especially when they are being kept in solitary confinement, as both Lucien and Jacques Collin were. The sudden isolation of such a man is difficult to conceive: the constables who have arrested him, the police superintendent who first questions him, those who take him to prison, the warders who conduct him to what in literature is called a dungeon, those who take him by the arms to force him to climb into a salad basket, all those who surround him from the moment of his arrest, are silent or make notes of what he says in order to repeat it to the police or the magistrate. This absolute separation, so easy to establish between the prévenu and the rest of the world, produces a total overthrow of his faculties, an utter prostration of the mind, above all when he is a man unaccustomed by his antecedents to the operations of the Law. The duel between criminal and judge is all the more dreadful in that among the allies of the Law are the silence of walls and the incorruptible indifference of its minions.
Nevertheless, Jacques Collin or Carlos Herrera (it is necessary to give him one or the other of these names according to the exigencies of the situation) had long been familiar with the ways of the police, the prisons and the legal authorities. This colossus of trickery and corruption had therefore employed all the strength of his wit and the resources of mimicry to act the astonishment, the foolishness of an innocent man, while playing out the comedy of his grave illness. As we have seen, Asia, that cunning Locust, had made him take a poison so tempered as to produce the semblance of a mortal sickness. The intentions of Monsieur Camusot, the police superintendent and the district attorney had thus been defeated by the action of what appeared to be an apoplectic stroke.
‘He has poisoned himself,’ had exclaimed Monsieur Camusot alarmed by the sufferings of the supposed priest when he had been brought down from the attic a prey to horrible convulsions.
Four policemen had had a great deal of trouble in conveying Father Carlos down the stairs to Esther’s bedroom where the magistrates and the constabulary were gathered.
‘It was the best thing he could do if he’s guilty,’ the district attorney had replied.
‘Do you think he’s ill, then?…’ had asked the police superintendent.
Policemen question everything. The three magistrates had then discussed the matter, as we might expect, in whispers, but Jacques Collin had divined from their facial expressions the tenor of their speculations, and he had taken advantage of what he perceived to render impossible or nugatory the summary interrogation which is conducted at the time of arrest; he had stammered phrases in which Spanish and French mingled in such a manner as to make nonsense.
At La Force, this play-acting had proved all the more successful in that the head of the detective force, Bibi-Lupin, who had formerly arrested Jacques Collin at Madame Vauquer’s boarding-house, was on a mission in the provinces, his place being taken by an agent designated as Bibi-Lupin’s successor, a man to whom the convict was unknown.
Bibi-Lupin, a former convict, Jacques Collin’s companion at the penal station, was his personal enemy. The source of this enmity lay in quarrels in which Jacques Collin had always come out on top, and in the prestige Dodgedeath had enjoyed among his comrades. Furthermore, for ten years, Jacques Collin had been the good angel of discharged convicts, their chief, their counsel in Paris, their trustee, and in consequence the antagonist of Bibi-Lupin.
A breach of enforced isolation
THUS, although he remained in solitary confinement, he counted on the intelligent and absolute devotion of Asia, his right hand, and perhaps on Paccard, his left, whom he flattered himself he would find once more at his orders when that careful lieutenant had put his seven hundred and fifty thousand stolen francs away. That was the reason for the concentrated attention he gave to everything on the way. A strange thing! his hope was to be fully satisfied.
The two massive walls of the Arcade Saint Jean were clothed up to a height of six feet with a permanent mantle of mud produced by splashes from the gutter; for in those days the only thing which protected passers-by from the incessant passing of carriages and what were called cart-kicks was a succession of posts long ago smashed by the hubs and pipe-boxes of wheels. More than once some quarryman’s cart had crushed inattentive people at that point. For long, many parts of Paris were like that. This detail may help to convey the narrowness of the Arcade Saint Jean and the ease with which it could be blocked. If a cab happened to enter from the Strand, while a costermonger was pushing his barrow loaded with apples from the rue du Martroi, the arrival of a third carriage would create an obstruction. Frightened pedestrians hurried by looking for a post to protect them against a blow from those old-fashioned wheel-blocks, which projected so absurdly far that legislation had to be passed to curtail them. When the salad basket arrived, the arcade was blocked by one of those female costermongers whose survival in Paris is all the more remarkable in view of the increasing number of fruiterers. She was so perfectly representative of her kind that a town sergeant, if such had existed at that time, would have let her circulate without making her show her permit, despite her sinister physiognomy which sweated criminality. Her head, tied up in a ragged scarf of cotton check, bristled with rebellious tufts of hair like hog’s bristles. Her red, wrinkled neck was horrible to see, and her shawl did little to conceal a skin tanned by sun, dust and mud. Her dress was like dilapidated tapestry. Her shoes grinned in a way to suggest that they were making fun of her face, as pitted and pocked as her dress. And what a stomacher!… old sticking-plaster would have been less filthy. From ten paces away, the nostrils of the delicate were affected by this ambulant, foetid scarecrow. Those hands had grubbed everywhere! Either the woman had just attended a witches’ sabbath, or she had been discharged from a beggars’ hostel. But what looks!… what audacious intelligence, what secret life when the magnetic rays of her eyes and those of Jacques Collin met to exchange a thought.
‘Get out of the way, you old home for vermin, will you!…’ cried the post-boy in a hoarse voice.
‘Don’t you start running into me, gallows lackey,’ she replied, ‘your wares are worse than mine.’
And in the attempt to squeeze herself between two posts to make way, the barrow-woman obstructed the road long enough for the accomplishment of her plan.
‘O Asia!’ said Jacques Collin to himself, at once recognizing his accomplice, ‘now all will be well.’
The postillion was still exchanging courtesies with Asia and carriages accumulated in the rue du Martroi.
‘Ahé!… pecaire fermati. Souni lá. Vedrem! …’ old Asia called out with those war-whooping intonations peculiar to street vendors which so effectively distort the
ir words that these become forms of onomatopeia intelligible to Parisians alone.
In the hubbub of the street and amid the cries of all the coachmen who were now held up, nobody paid attention to this wild cry which was taken for that of a street trader. But in Jacques Collin’s ear, the clamour of that agreed lingo made up of corrupt Italian and Provencal distinctly conveyed its dreadful meaning:
‘Your poor boy has been arrested; but I shall be there to look after you both. You will see me again…’
In the midst of the infinite joy which his triumph over the Law brought him, for now he could expect to maintain contact with the world outside, Jacques Collin was stricken by a reaction which might have killed anyone but him.
‘Lucien under arrest!…’ he said to himself. And he came near fainting. This piece of news was more appalling to him than the rejection of his appeal would have been had he lain under sentence of death.
Historical, archeological, biographical, anecdotal and physiological history of the Palais de Justice
NOW that the two salad baskets are rolling along the quays, the interest of this story requires a few words about the Conciergerie during the time they will take to get there. The Conciergerie, a historical name, a terrible word, a thing yet more terrible, is a part of revolutionary France. It has seen most of the great criminals. If of all the monuments of Paris it is the most interesting, it is also the least known… to people who belong to the upper classes of society; but despite the immense interest of this historical digression, it will be as rapid as the course of the salad baskets.
What Parisian, foreigner or provincial is there, though he may have spent a mere two days in Paris, who has not noticed the black walls flanked by three big pepper-pot towers, two of them almost joined together, sombre and mysterious adornments of that stretch of riverside known as the Quai des Lunettes? This embankment begins at the Pont au Change and ends at the Pont Neuf. A square tower, called the Tour de l’Horloge, from which the signal for Saint Bartholomew was given, almost as high as the tower of Saint Jacques-la-Boucherie, indicates the Law Courts and forms the corner of this quayside. The four towers and the walls are clothed with that shroud of black which all northward-facing fronts acquire in Paris. Half way along the embankment, by a blank archway, begin those private establishments which went with the building of the Pont Neuf in the reign of Henry IV. The Place Royale was a replica of the Place Dauphine. It had the same style of architecture, in brick framed with freestone piers. The archway and the rue de Harlay mark the west side of the Law Courts. Formerly, the police Prefecture, residence of the speakers of the high judicial court, was attached to the palace. The Audit Office and the Board of Excise there complemented supreme law, that of the sovereign. It may thus be seen that before the Revolution the palace enjoyed that isolation which attempts are being made to create about it once more.
This block of buildings, this island of houses and monuments, where the Sainte Chapelle stands, the most magnificent jewel in the casket of Saint Louis, this area is the sanctuary of Paris; this is the holy place, the sacred ark. To begin with, indeed, this was the whole of the original city, for the site of the Place Dauphine was a meadow within the royal domain and on it was built a mill for the striking of coin. Thence comes the name of the rue de la Monnaie, which leads to the Pont Neuf. Thence also the name of one of the three round towers, the second, which is called the Tour d’Argent, evident proof that it was once used for minting. The famous mill, which may be seen on the original plans of Paris, must have been set up after a time during which money was coined in the palace itself, and was no doubt due to some improvement in the process of minting. The first tower, almost contiguous with the Tour d’Argent, is called the Montgommery Tower. The third and smallest, but best preserved, for it retains its battlements is the Bonbec Tower. The Sainte Chapelle and these four towers (counting the Tour de l’Horloge) precisely demarcate the extent, the perimeter, as a surveyor would say, of the palace, from the time of the Merovingians to the first of the Valois; but to us, in consequence of its many transformations, it represents more particularly the age of Saint Louis.
It was Charles V who, in the first place, gave up the palace to the high judicial court, a newly created institution, and went, under the protection of the Bastille, to live in the Saint Pol house to which the Tournelles palace was presently attached. Then, under the last of the Valois, royalty returned from the Bastille to its earlier bastille or small fortress, the Louvre. The first abode of the kings of France, Saint Louis’s palace, which is remembered as simply the Palace, the greatest palace of all, is totally buried under the Law Courts, whose cellars it forms, for, like the cathedral, it was built down into the Seine, with such care that the highest water in the river barely covers its lowest steps. The Quai de l’Horloge lies some twenty feet above this structure ten centuries old. Carriages bowl along at the height of the capitals of the supporting pillars of those three towers, whose elevation must formerly have harmonized with the elegance of the palace and created a picturesque effect over the water, since even now those towers stand as high as the tallest monuments in Paris. When one looks out over the vast capital city from the lantern of the Pantheon, the Law Courts, with Sainte Chapelle, still appear as the most monumental among so many monuments. That palace of our kings, over which you walk when you pace about the immense waiting hall, was an architectural wonder; it is still so to the perceptive eyes of the poet who gazes at it in the course of his visit to the Conciergerie. Alas! the Conciergerie has invaded the palace of the kings. The heart bleeds to see how gaolers’ lodges, wretched living quarters, corridors, public rooms without light or air, have been carved out of this magnificent composition in which the Byzantine, the Norman, the Gothic, those three faces of art in the old days, were brought together in the architecture of the twelfth century. This palace is to the monumental history of France’s earliest times what the Château de Blois is to the times which followed. Just as at Blois, from the same courtyard you can admire the castle of the counts of Blois and those of Louis XII, Francis I, Gaston; so at the Conciergerie you find, on the one site, traces of the earliest people and, in Sainte Chapelle, the architecture of Saint Louis. Municipal council, if you are putting up millions, appoint a few poets with the architects, if you wish to preserve the cradle of Paris, the cradle of kings, in your task of endowing Paris and the sovereign court with a palace worthy of France! The question is one worth pondering for several years before a beginning is made. Build one or two other prisons, like that of La Roquette, and the palace of Saint Louis will be saved.
Continuation of the same subject
A τ present this gigantic monument, buried beneath the Law Courts and the embankment, displays many wounds, like one of those antediluvian animals of which plaster casts may be seen at Montmartre; the worst of them is, to have become the Conciergerie! The word itself needs explaining. In the earliest days of the monarchy, important criminals, whether burgesses or villeins (for we must retain this spelling which gives the word its sense of peasant), belonging to urban or manorial jurisdictions, the possessors of great and small fiefs, were taken to the King and kept in the Conciergerie. As not many important criminals were seized, the Conciergerie sufficed for the King’s justice. It is difficult to determine precisely on what ground the primitive Conciergerie stood. Nevertheless, as the kitchens of Saint Louis still exist, and today form what is known as the Mousetrap, it may be presumed that the original Conciergerie occupied what was, until 1825, the position of the Conciergerie of the high judicial court, beneath the archway to the right of the great external staircase which leads to the Cour Royale. Thence, until 1825, the condemned proceeded to their place of punishment. Thence emerged all the great criminals, all those sentenced for political reasons, the Maréchale d’Ancre like the Queen of France, Semblançay like Malesherbes, Damien no less than Danton, Desrues and Castaing equally. Fouquier-Tinville’s office, occupied to this day by the King’s attorney, was so situated that the public procurat
or could see the carts taking away those newly condemned by the revolutionary tribunal. This man of blood could thus cast a last glance over his batches of victims.
After 1825, under the ministry of Monsieur de Peyronnet, a great change took place at the Palais. The old wicket of the Conciergerie, scene of all the ceremonies of committal and the neck-trimming of men for execution, was shut down and transferred to its present position, between the Tour de l’Horloge and the Montgommery tower, in an inner yard flanked by an arcade. To the left is the Mousetrap, to the right the wicket. The salad baskets drive into this irregularly shaped yard, where they may stand, turn easily and, in the case of a riot, take protection behind the strong grating of the archway; while formerly their movements were severely restricted by the narrow space which separates the great external staircase from the right wing of the court buildings. Nowadays the Conciergerie, which is hardly big enough for those on trial (there would have to be room for three hundred people, men and women), accommodates neither those first charged nor those already sentenced, except in exceptional circumstances, such as those which brought Jacques Collin and Lucien there. All those held prisoner there must appear before the court of assize. Exceptionally, the magistracy allows there convicted persons from high society who, already sufficiently dishonoured by a verdict in the court of assize, would be too heavily punished, if they served their sentence at Melun or Poissy. Ouvrard preferred his stay in the Conciergerie to that at Sainte Pélagie. At the present moment, Lehon the notary and the prince of Bergues are serving their terms of imprisonment there, by a quite arbitrary but humane dispensation.
A Harlot High and Low Page 34