‘Lucien is guilty,’ the magistrate continued, ‘but of what?’
‘A man loved by the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, Countess Sérisy, Clotilde de Grandlieu, can’t be guilty,’ Amelia replied, ‘it must be the other man who did it all.’
‘But Lucien was his accomplice!’ exclaimed Camusot.
‘Do you want to know what I think?…’ said Amelia. ‘Let the priest go back to diplomacy whose finest ornament he is, declare the young wretch not guilty, and look for the guilty parties elsewhere…’
‘How you go on!…’ replied the magistrate with a smile. ‘Women drive straight through the laws to get what they want, like birds in the air, stopped by nothing.’
‘Diplomatist or convict,’ Amelia went on, ‘Father Carlos will put his finger on somebody who can get you out of this.’
‘I’m only a cap, you’re the head,’ said Camusot to his wife.
‘Well, the discussion is closed, come and kiss Melia, it is one o’clock…’
And Madame Camusot went off to bed leaving her husband to put his papers and his thoughts in order for the interrogation he must put the two suspects through next day.
A product of the Palais
THUS, while the salad baskets were taking Jacques Collin and Lucien to the Conciergerie, the examining magistrate, after a substantial breakfast, was crossing Paris on foot, with the lack of ostentation common to Parisian judges, on the way to his office where all the documents in the case had arrived before him. This had come about as follows.
All examining magistrates have their clerks, a type of sworn judicial secretary, whose species perpetuates itself without bonuses, without encouragement, a first-rate kind of people to whom absolute discretion comes naturally. From the time of the old high judicial courts to the present day, not a single case of an indiscretion committed by a clerk appointed to judicial inquiries has ever been known at the Palais. Gentil sold the acquittance given to Semblançay by Louise of Savoy, a clerk at the war office sold to Czernicheff the plan of the Russian campaign; traitors like those have generally been quite rich. The prospect of a position at the Law Courts, an office of one’s own, professional conscience are enough to make an examining magistrate’s clerk a successful rival of the grave, for even graves speak since the introduction of forensic chemistry. Such an employee is the magistrate’s own pen. Many people will understand how one may be the spindle of a machine but wonder how one can remain content as a screw-nut; but the nut is content, perhaps it is afraid of the machine? Camusot’s clerk, a young man of twenty-two, called Coquart, had come early in the morning to pick up all the documents and the magistrate’s notes, and everything was laid out in his office, while the judge strolled along the embankment, looking at the curiosities in the shops, and pondering within himself: ‘How to set about a fellow as sharp as Jacques Collin, always supposing it is him? The head of the crime squad will know him, I must simply appear to be doing my job, if only in the eyes of the Police! So many possibilities are out of the question, the best thing might be to enlighten the marchioness and the duchess, by showing them the police notes, and so avenge my father from whom Lucien took Coralie… If I unmask such black scoundrels, everybody will think I am very clever, and Lucien will soon be disowned by all his friends. Well, I shall see where the interrogation takes me.’
He went into a curiosity shop, his eye caught by a Boule clock.
A form of influence
‘NOT to be untrue to my conscience and to serve the two great ladies, if I bring that off it’ll be a real feat,’ he thought. ‘Ah, you here, too Mr Attorney General,’ said Camusot aloud, ‘looking at medals, I see!’
‘It’s what’s on the other side,’ replied Count Granville with a laugh, ‘that appeals to all us legal dignitaries.’
And, after looking round the shop for a few moments longer, as though completing his examination, he led Camusot along the embankment, without Camusot being able to suppose that it was anything but a chance encounter.
‘I gather you’re questioning Monsieur de Rubempré this morning,’ said the Attorney General. ‘Poor young man, I was very fond of him…’
‘The charges against him are serious,’ said Camusot.
‘Yes, I’ve seen the police records; but they’re due, in part, to an agent who doesn’t belong to the Prefecture, the celebrated Corentin, a man who’s got more innocent necks chopped than you’ll ever send guilty men to the scaffold, and… But the rogue is out of our reach. Without wanting to influence the conscience of a judge like yourself, I can’t help pointing out to you that, if you could convince yourself that Lucien knew nothing about that tart’s will, it would show that he had no interest in her death, for she left him a prodigious amount of money!…’
‘He wasn’t there at the time this Esther was poisoned, we know that,’ said Camusot. ‘He was at Fontainebleau watching out for the passage of Mademoiselle de Grandlieu and the Duchesse de Lenoncourt.’
‘Oh!’ the Attorney General went on, ‘he placed such great hopes on his marriage with Mademoiselle de Grand-lieu (I have this from the Duchesse de Grandlieu herself), it simply can’t be imagined that a boy of his intelligence would compromise everything by a stupid crime.’
‘No,’ said Camusot, ‘especially if this Esther was giving him everything she earned.’
‘Derville and Nucingen say she died without knowing about the inheritance which had come to her some time ago,’ added the Attorney General.
‘What’s your theory, then?’ asked Camusot, ‘for something happened.’
‘I’d say a crime committed by servants,’ said the Attorney General
‘Unfortunately,’ Camusot pointed out, ‘it is quite in the style of Jacques Collin, for the Spanish priest is pretty certainly that escaped convict, to make away with the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs from the sale of the inscription for annual income at three per cent given her by Nucingen.’
‘You must weigh everything, my dear Camusot, but be prudent. Father Carlos Herrera claims diplomatic privilege,… but an ambassador who committed a crime wouldn’t be saved by his status. Is he or is he not the abbé Carlos Herrera, that’s the important question…’
And Monsieur de Granville went on his way like a man who does not expect a reply.
‘So he also wants to save Lucien,’ thought Camusot, who took the Quai des Lunettes while the Procurator went into the Law Courts by way of the Cour de Harlay.
A convict trap
ARRIVING in the courtyard of the Conciergerie, Camusot went to the prison governor’s office and led him out of earshot, on to the paved area.
‘My dear sir, do me the favour of going to La Force, and ask your colleague there whether by a lucky chance he possesses at the moment any convicts who, between 1810 and 1815, were at the penitentiary in Toulon; you might find out whether also you have any here. Those at La Force we’ll have transferred here for a few days, and you can let me know whether any of them recognize the supposed Spanish priest as Jacques Collin known as Dodgedeath.’
‘Very well, Monsieur Camusot; but Bibi-Lupin has arrived…’
‘Ah! already?’ exclaimed the magistrate.
‘He was at Melun. He was told that the matter concerned Dodgedeath, he smiled with pleasure and awaits your orders…’
‘Send him to me.’
The governor of the Conciergerie was then able to put Jacques Collin’s request before the examining magistrate, while depicting the former’s lamentable state.
‘I meant to examine him first,’ replied the judge, ‘but not on account of his health. I had a note this morning from the governor of La Force. It appears that this fellow, who describes himself as having been at death’s door these twenty-four hours, slept so well, that he didn’t hear the doctor, who’d been sent out for, when the latter entered his cell at La Force; the doctor didn’t even feel his pulse, he let him sleep; which proves that both his conscience and his health are good. I shall merely pretend to believe in this illness in order to stud
y my man’s game,’ said Monsieur Camusot with a smile.
‘There is always something new to learn about prisoners,’ observed the governor of the Conciergerie.
The Prefecture of Police communicates with the Concergerie, and the magistracy, like the prison governor, as a result of knowing those underground passages, can go from one to the other with great promptness. This explains the miraculous facility with which the public ministry and judges presiding at the Court of Assize may, while the court is sitting, find out whatever they may wish to know. Thus when Monsieur Camusot reached the head of the staircase leading to his office, he found Bibi-Lupin there with speed by way of the waiting hall.
‘Such zeal!’ the magistrate said to him with a smile.
‘Ah! if only it’s him,’ replied the head of the Sûreté, ‘you’ll see some terrible capers in the prison yard, given only there’s a few old lags there.’
‘How so?’
‘Dodgedeath has swallowed the funds, and I know they’ve sworn to do him.’
They signified the convicts whose loot entrusted to Dodgedeath over the past twenty years had been dispensed for Lucien, as we know.
‘Could you find witnesses to his last arrest?’
‘Sub poena me a couple, and I’ll bring them in today.’
‘Coquart,’ said the judge taking off his gloves, putting his stick and hat in a corner, ‘make out two subpoena forms to the inspector’s specifications.’
He looked at himself in the glass over the fireplace on the mantelpiece of which, instead of a clock, there stood a bowl and a water-jug, to one side of it a decanter of drinking water and a glass, to the other a lamp. The magistrate rang. After a few minutes his usher appeared.
‘Are there any visitors for me yet?’ he asked the usher whose job it was to receive witnesses, check their summonses and seat them in the order of their arrival.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Take the names of those who’ve come, and bring me the list.’
Examining magistrates, who must be sparing of their time, are sometimes obliged to conduct several judicial inquiries concurrently. That is the reason why witnesses are often kept waiting so long in the room where the ushers stand and where examining magistrates’ bells ring.
‘Then,’ said Camusot to his usher, ‘go and look for Father Carlos Herrera.’
‘Ah! so he’s a Spaniard now? a priest, they tell me. Bah! it’s the Colet trick all .over again, Monsieur Camusot,’ exclaimed the head of the C.I.D.
‘There’s nothing new under the sun,’ answered Camusot. And the magistrate signed two of those imposing summonses which so disturb everyone, even the most innocent witnesses whom the Law thus commands to appear under heavy penalties, if they fail to comply.
Jacques Collin in solitary confinement bestirs people
A T that moment Jacques Collin had, in the past half hour, concluded his profound deliberation, and was under arms. Nothing could better portray this man of the people in revolt against authority than the few lines he had traced on his filthy pieces of paper.
The sense of the first was as follows, for it was written in the language agreed between Asia and himself, a slang derived from slang, a thought in cipher.
Go and call on the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse or Madame de Sérisy, let one or the other see Lucien before his interrogation, and let her make sure that he reads the enclosed sheet. Then Europe and Paccard must be found, so that those two thieves are at my disposition, and ready to play the part I shall indicate to them.
Also call on Rastignac, tell him on behalf of the man he met at the Opera ball to come and testify that Father Carlos Herrera bears no resemblance to the Jacques Collin arrested at Ma Vauquer’s.
Get Bianchon to do the same.
Put both Lucien’s women to work to bring this about.
On the enclosed sheet, there was this in good French:
Lucien, don’t admit anything about me. To you, I am Father Carlos Herrera. Not only is that your justification; but just hold on a bit longer, and you’ve got seven millions, plus an unspotted reputation.
These two papers stuck together on the written side, in such a way as to make them seem only one sheet, were rolled up tightly in a manner known only to those at convict stations who’ve dreamed of being free. The whole object had the form and consistency of a ball of much the size of the wax heads thrifty women fasten to needles when the eye is broken.
‘If I go to school first, we’re all right; but if it’s the youngster, we’re lost,’ he said to himself while he waited.
The moment was so full of anguish that this formidable man’s face came out in a cold sweat. In the sphere of crime, this prodigious man’s instinct for the truth was as sure as Molière’s in dramatic poetry, like Cuvier’s among the relics of a vanished world. In all spheres, genius is intuition. At a lower level, talent will do. That is the difference between men of the first and those of the second order. Crime has its men of genius. Jacques Collin, at bay, was attuned like Madame Camusot by her ambition and Madame de Sérisy by the love sprung to life under the blow of the terrible catastrophe which threatened Lucien. This was the supreme effort of human intelligence against the steel armour of the Law.
Hearing the heavy ironwork of the locks and bolts of his door cry out, Jacques Collin once more assumed the mask of a dying man; in this he was helped by the intoxicating sensation of pleasure which the sound of the warder’s shoes in the corridor brought him. He did not know by what means Asia would make her way to him; but he counted on seeing her in his path, especially after the promise he had received from her in the Arcade Saint Jean.
Asia at work
AFTER that fortunate encounter, Asia had gone down to the Strand. Before 1830, the name Strand had a sense now lost. All that part of the embankment, from the Pont d’Arcole to the Pont Louis-Philippe, was then just as nature had made it, apart from the flagged path and the banking which supported it. Thus, at high water, one could go by boat alongside the houses and into the sloping streets which went down to the river. Along that stretch of embankment, most of the houses had their ground floor raised up by the height of a few steps. When the water lapped against the foot of the houses, carriages drove along the frightful rue de la Mortillerie, now wholly demolished to make room for extensions to the City Hall. It was therefore easy for the pretended coster to push her little cart rapidly to the far end of the quay, and to hide it there until the real costerwoman, who at that moment was drinking away the whole proceeds of the transaction at one of the low bars in the rue de la Mortillerie, claimed it at the spot where the borrower had promised to leave it. At the time, the Quai Pelletier was being enlarged, an old soldier guarded the entrance to the site, and the barrow entrusted to his care was in no danger.
Asia at once took a cab in the City Hall square, and said to the driver: ‘To the Temple! and fast, there’s money in it.’
A woman dressed as Asia was could, without arousing the least curiosity, lose herself in the huge covered market where all the old rags of Paris are piled up, where a thousand pedlars jostle and two hundred shopwomen cry their wares. The two prévenus were barely committed, before she was getting herself rigged out in a low, damp little room over one of those dreadful shops which sell all the remnants stolen by dressmakers or tailors, kept by an old spinster called Romette, from her Christian name Jéromette. Romette was to wardrobe dealers what those ladies themselves are to distressed gentlewomen, a moneylender at one hundred per cent.
‘Come on, old girl! ’ said Asia, ‘I need dolling up. I must be at least a baroness in the Faubourg Saint Germain. And let’s get it sorted out sharp, eh?’ she went on, ‘I’m standing with my feet in boiling oil! You know what kind of thing suits me. Bring out the rouge pot, find me some bits of posh lace! and let’s have some glittering trinkets… Send your girl out to get me a cab, and let it draw up at the back door.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ replied the old spinster with the submissiveness and the nervous haste of a servant in
the presence of her mistress.
If there had been any witness to this scene, he would quickly have understood that the woman concealed beneath the name of Asia was on her own premises here.
‘I’ve been offered some diamonds!…’ said Romette as she did Asia’s head-dress.
‘Are they stolen?…’
‘I think so.’
‘Well, whatever the price, my child, you must do without them. We could be having dicks around for a while.’
We may now understand how Asia came to be in the waiting hall at the Law Courts, a writ of summons in her hand, being conducted along corridors and up those staircases which lead to the examining magistrates’ offices, asking for Monsieur Camusot, a quarter of an hour or so before his arrival.
A view of the big waiting room
ASIA was no longer herself. Having, like an actress, cleaned off her old woman’s face, put on red and white, she had covered her head with an admirable fair wig. Got up exactly to resemble a lady from the Faubourg Saint Germain in search of her lost dog, she looked about forty, for she had concealed her face behind a magnificent veil of black lace. A tight corset held in her cook’s waist. Carefully gloved, armed with a rather prominent bustle, she smelled of face-powder like a marshal’s wife. Toying with a gold-mounted handbag, she divided her attention between the walls of the Law Courts which she was evidently seeing for the first time and a leash to which might have been attached some pretty spaniel. So remarkable a dowager did not escape the notice of the black-robed population of the waiting hall.
Apart from the barristers without brief who sweep the hall floor with their gowns and who address more eminent counsel by their Christian names, as great lords do each other, to make it appear that they belong to the aristocracy of the Order, one often sees patient young men, kept standing about by solicitors against the possibility that some case at the bottom of the list may be fitted into a gap caused by the late arrival of those awaited in connection with a matter of higher priority. It would be interesting to portray all the varieties of black gowns which walk up and down this enormous room three by three, sometimes four by four, the noise of their chatter booming about the hall, so aptly named, since lawyers are worn out as much by waiting as by their prodigalities of speech; but this is not the place for such a study of the Parisian bar. Asia had counted on these accredited idlers, she laughed quietly at one or two of the jokes she heard and finally attracted the attention of Massol, a young probationer more occupied with the Gazette des Tribunaux than with any clients of his own, who laughingly placed his services at the disposition of a woman so well scented and so richly dressed.
A Harlot High and Low Page 37