A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘At Brest, sonny,’ Hair’s Breadth went on, ‘you can be sure of finding a bean or two in the third spoonful, if you dig into the tub; at Toulon, it takes five scoops; and at Rochefort, you never catch any, unless you’re an old hand.’

  Having spoken, our philosopher rejoined La Pouraille and Biffon, who, much intrigued by the wild boar, began to cross the yard, while Jacques Collin, bowed down with grief, walked towards their end. Dodgedeath, given up to dreadful thoughts, thoughts appropriate to a fallen emperor, had not realized that everybody was looking at him, that he was the centre of attention, and he walked slowly, gazing at the fatal casement from which Lucien de Rubempré had hanged himself. None of the prisoners knew of this episode, for Lucien’s neighbour, the young forger, from motives which we shall presently discover, had said nothing about it. The three mobsmen so arranged themselves as to bar the priest’s way.

  ‘He isn’t a boar,’ said La Pouraille to Hair’s Breadth, ‘he’s an old horse. Look how he drags his right foot!’

  Here it should be explained, for not all our readers have taken it into their heads to visit a penal settlement, that each convict is attached to another (always a young one and an old one together) by a chain. The weight of this chain, clinched to a ring above the ankle, is such that, after a year, it has permanently affected the convict’s gait. Compelled to put more force into one leg than into the other to drag this manacle, for the old French word manicle is still used by convicts for that piece of hardware, the condemned man invincibly contracts a habit from the effort. Later, when he is no longer fettered, it is the same with the iron as with an amputated limb, from which an old soldier suffers to the end of his days; the convict always feels his manacle,he can never get rid of the effect it has had on his gait. In police terms, he always drags his right foot.This diagnosis, known among ex-convicts, as it is to the police, if it doesn’t serve to establish the identity of a comrade, at least confirms it.

  In the case of Dodgedeath, whose last escape had taken place eight years before, the movement had become almost imperceptible; but, in consequence of his absorbed meditation, he moved with a step so slow and so heavy, that, weak as the deformity of gait had grown, it might catch a practised eye like that of La Pouraille. It will be readily understood, moreover, that convicts, forever in each other's presence in the hulks, and having no other persons than themselves to observe, have so studied each other’s physiognomies, that they recognize certain habits which escape their systematic enemies : the informers, the constabulary, police superintendent. Thus, for example, it was to a certain tugging motion of the maxillary muscles of the left cheek recognized by a convict, who was sent to observe a parade of thé Seine legion, that the lieutenant-colonel of that body, the famous Coignard, owed his arrest; for, despite Bibi-Lupin’s conviction, the Police dared not believe in the identity of Count Pontis de Sainte Hélène with Coignard.

  His majesty the Dab

  ‘IT’s the boss, it’s the Dab,’ said Hair’s Breadth on receiving from Jacques Collin that distracted look which a man sunk in despair casts on all around him.

  ‘Faith, yes, it’s Dodgedeath,’ said Biffon rubbing his hands together. ‘Oh, it’s his build, that square frame; but what’s he done to himself? it doesn’t look like him.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said Hair’s Breadth, ‘I know what the plan is! he wants to see his queen who’s due to be executed.’

  For the benefit of those readers who don’t know what a queen is, we may recall the words of the governor of one of the central prisons to the late Lord Durham, who visited all the prisons during his stay in Paris. This nobleman, anxious to learn all the secrets of the French penal system, even got the late Sanson, the public executioner, to set up his machinery, and asked to see a live calf executed so that he could estimate the action of that engine which the French Revolution made so famous.

  The governor, having shown him round the whole prison, the yards, the workshops, the dungeons, etc., pointed to one building with an expression of disgust.

  ‘I shan’t take Your Lordship there,’ he said, ‘for that’s the queens’ quarters…’

  ‘Really!’ said Lord Durham, ‘and what are they?’

  ‘That’s the third sex, my lord.’

  ‘They’re going to shorten Théodore!’ said La Pouraille, ‘a nice lad! what dash! what cheek! what a loss to society!’

  ‘Yes, Théodore Calvi’s taking the edge off his last appetite,’ said Biffon. ‘Ah, the largues are going to blubber their ogles, for they loved that little scamp!’

  ‘So there you are, my friend?’ said La Pouraille to Jacques Collin.

  And, together with his two acolytes, with whom he had linked arms, he barred the way to the newcomer.

  ‘Oh, Dab, so you’ve turned wild boar, then?’ added La Pouraille.

  ‘They say you’ve heaved our chink,’ Biffon put in with a threatening air.

  ‘There’ll be some rhino coming from you, no doubt?’ asked Hair’s Breadth.

  ‘Don’t make fun of a poor priest brought here by mistake,’ Jacques Collin, who immediately recognized his three comrades, answered mechanically.

  ‘It’s the tinkle of his bell all right, if it isn’t the right mug,’ said La Pouraille putting his hand on the shoulder of Jacques Collin.

  This gesture, the looks of his three comrades, violently pulled the Dab out of his state of prostration, and restored him to contact with real life; for, during that fatal night, he had ranged through spiritual realms of unbounded feeling in search of a new way.

  ‘Don’t stew it up for your Dab!’ said Jacques Collin in a low voice, hollow and threatening as the growl of a lion. ‘The cops are there, let them cut the pack at the bridge. I’m playing this lark for a chum at his last throw.’

  His manner as he spoke displayed all the unction of a priest attempting to convert the unfortunate, and a glance starting heavenward nevertheless took in the prison yard, the warders under the arches, and spoke contempt for them.

  ‘Skin your glaziers,’ he said, ‘and look at the narks. Don’t let on you know me, use your bean and make out you think I’m a wild boar, or I’ll scuttle you, you, your largues and the bawbees.’

  ‘Who do you think we are?’ said Hair’s Breadth. ‘You’ve come here to ransom your queen.’

  ‘Madeleine is dressed for a bill on the Strand,’ said La Pouraille.

  ‘Théodore!’ said Jacques Collin suppressing a start and a cry.

  It was the last turn of the screw for this crumbling colossus.

  ‘They’re going to top him,’ La Pouraille repeated, ‘he’s been two months stacked for the way out.’

  Jacques Collin, near fainting, his knees giving way, was held up by his three companions, and he had the presence of mind to put his hands together and adopt an air of compunction. La Pouraille and Biffon respectfully sustained the sacrilegious Dodgedeath, while Hair’s Breadth ran to the warder on duty at the wicket-ate which led to the parlour.

  ‘The venerable priest wants to sit down, give me a chair for him.’

  And so the trial shot mounted by Bibi-Lupin failed. Dodgedeath, like Napoleon recognized by his soldiers, obtained submission and respect from the three convicts. Two words had sufficed. They were ‘your largues’ and ‘the bawbees’, summing up all the objects of man’s real affection. This threat was for the three convicts the index of supreme power, the Dab still held their fortunes in his hands. Still all-powerful outside, their Dab had not betrayed them, as false friends had said. The colossal renown for skill and deliberation of their chief aroused, moreover, the curiosity of the three convicts; for, in prison, curiosity becomes the only goad to these outcast souls. The boldness of Jacques Collin’s disguise, maintained against the very keys of the Conciergerie, further dazed the three criminals.

  ‘I’ve been in solitary four days, I didn’t know Théodore was so near the Mount,…’ said Jacques Collin. ‘I came to save a poor lad who hanged himself there, yesterday, at four o’clock, and he
re another misfortune faces me. I have no more trump-cards to play!…’

  ‘Poor Dab!’ said Hair’s Breadth.

  ‘Ah, the Baker has abandoned me!’ cried Jacques Collin, using a cant name for the Devil, tearing himself away from the arms of his two comrades and holding himself formidably erect. ‘There comes a moment when the world is too strong for men like us! The Stork’ - the Palais de Justice – ‘swallows us in the end.’

  The governor of the Conciergerie, informed of the Spanish priest’s fainting fit, came to the yard himself to spy on him, he seated himself on a chair, in the sun, watching everything with the fearful perspicacity which the exercise of functions like his augments daily, and which an air of indifference conceals.

  ‘Ah, dear God!’ said Jacques Collin, ‘to be confused with people like these, the refuse of society, criminals, murderers!… But God will not abandon his servant. Dear Mr Governor, I shall mark my passage through this place with acts of charity whose memory will remain! I shall convert these unfortunates, they will discover that they have souls, that life eternal awaits them, and that, if they lost the battle here below, there is still a heaven for them to conquer, the heaven which is theirs at the cost of a true, a sincere repentance.’

  Twenty or thirty prisoners, who had come up and grouped themselves behind the three terrible convicts, whose ferocious looks had kept the inquisitive at a distance of at least a few feet, listened to this allocution pronounced with evangelical suavity.

  ‘That one, Monsieur Gault,’ said the formidable La Pouraille, ‘well, we should listen to him…’

  ‘They tell me,’ continued Jacques Collin, addressing Monsieur Gault who was nearby, ‘that there is a man condemned to death in this prison.’

  ‘At this very moment,’ said Monsieur Gault, ‘the rejection of his appeal is being read out to him.’

  ‘I do not know what that means,’ Jacques Collin asked innocently looking about him.

  ‘Gawd, is he a simp!’ said the young fellow who had been consulting Hair’s Breadth about the blooming of horse-beans in the meadows.

  ‘Ho, well, today or tomorrow they’ll shorten him,’ said a prisoner.

  ‘Shorten?’ asked Jacques Collin, whose air of simplicity and ignorance filled the three swell mobsmen with admiration.

  ‘In their language,’ replied the governor, ‘it means that the sentence of death will be duly executed. As the clerk is now reading out the result of an appeal, no doubt the executioner will presently receive his instructions. The unfortunate man has steadfastly refused the consolations of religion…’

  ‘Ah, Mr Governor, it is a soul to be saved!…’ cried Jacques Collin.

  The sacrilegious impostor wrung his hands with a despairing lover’s expression which to the attentive governor seemed like the effect of divine fervour.

  ‘Ah, Monsieur,’ went on Dodgedeath, ‘let me prove what I am and all I can do by allowing me to cause the flower of repentance to unfold in that hardened heart! God endowed me with the gift of speaking certain words which effect a great change. I shatter the heart, and it opens… What do you fear? let me be accompanied by constables, by warders, by anybody you like.’

  ‘I’ll see if the house chaplain is willing to let you replace him,’ said Monsieur Gault.

  And the governor retired, struck by the perfectly indifferent, though inquisitive, manner with which the convicts and other prisoners regarded this priest, whose evangelical voice lent charm to his half-French, half-Spanish babbling.

  Conflicting wiles

  ‘How do you come to be here, Father?’ Hair’s Breadth’s young interlocutor asked Jacques Collin.

  ‘Oh, it was an error,’ replied Jacques Collin taking stock of the white-headed boy. ‘I was found at the house of a courtesan who had just been robbed after her death. It was discovered that she had killed herself; but the authors of the theft, who were probably her servants have not yet been arrested.’

  ‘And was it because of that theft that the young man hanged himself?…’

  ‘Ah, there is no doubt that the poor child could not bear the thought of being stigmatized by unjust imprisonment,’ replied Dodgedeath raising his eyes to heaven.

  ‘Yes,’ said the youth, ‘they were just going to set him at liberty when he did it. That was bad luck!’

  ‘Only those who are innocent so catch the imagination,’ said Jacques Collin. ‘Observe that the theft was committed to his detriment.’

  ‘How much was it?’ asked the subtle and profound Hair’s Breadth.

  ‘Seven hundred and fifty thousand francs,’ Jacques Collin answered gently.

  The three convicts looked at each other, and they separated themselves from the group which all the other prisoners had formed round the supposed ecclesiastic.

  ‘It’s him rinsed that tart’s cellar!’ said Hair’s Breadth in Biffon’s ear. ‘They wanted to put the wind up us about that lot we filed.’

  ‘He’ll always be the Dab of the Grand Fanandels,’ replied La Pouraille. ‘Our gelt hasn’t hooked it.’

  La Pouraille, who looked for a man he could trust, wanted to believe in Jacques Collin’s good faith. In prison more than anywhere, people like to believe what they hope for!

  ‘I’ll bet you fifty pigs he fobs the dab at the Stork,’ said Hair’s Breadth, meaning that his Dab would outwit the Attorney General, ‘and he’ll get his queen off.’

  ‘If that happens,’ said Biffon, ‘I shan’t think he’s Meg altogether,’ Meg being God, ‘but I shall believe he’s smoked a pipe or two with the Baker.’

  ‘Did you hear him,’ Hair’s Breadth pointed out, ‘say the Baker had abandoned him?’

  ‘Ah!’ cried La Pouraille, ‘if he’d a mind to save my seat of learning, what a life I should have with my lick of the gelt, all the yellow billets I’ve got stowed away!’

  ‘Do what he tells you!’ said Hair’s Breadth.

  ‘Is that a giggle?’ La Pouraille added looking at his mate.

  ‘Are you a simpkin? You’re already stacked rigid for Mount Unwilling. The only way you can rub, so you can stay on your stumps, hone your grinders, unsalt yourself and go on heaving, is to lend him your lugs.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it,’ La Pouraille admitted, ‘and not one of us’d cackle on the Dab, or I’ll take him along o’ me where I’m off to…’

  ‘He’d do it just like that!’ cried Hair’s Breadth.

  Even those who are least susceptible to any feeling of sympathy with this strange world may yet imagine Jacques Collin’s state of mind, between the corpse of the idol he had worshipped five hours that night and the impending death of his old chain-mate, the future corpse of the young Corsican Théodore. If it were only to see this unfortunate, he had to use his wits in no usual degree; to save him, that would be a miracle! And he was already considering how.

  To understand what Jacques Collin was now to attempt, it must be remarked here that murderers, thieves and the prison population in general are less redoubtable than is commonly supposed. With very few exceptions, the criminal classes are cowardly, no doubt because of the perpetual fear with which their hearts are contracted. Their faculties being incessantly alert to the opportunities for theft, and carrying out a theft requiring the employment of all their vital forces, an agility of mind equal to the bodily aptitude, an attentiveness which is a strain on their temperament, they become stupid, outside those violent exertions of the will, for the same reason as a singer or a dancer will sink back exhausted after an exacting solo or one of those formidable duets which modern composers inflict on the public. Malefactors are, indeed, so denuded of reason, or so oppressed by fear, that they become utterly childish. Credulous to a degree, the simplest ruse snares them. After the success of a venture, they are in such a state of prostration that, giving themselves up at once to the excesses they seem to find necessary, they get drunk on wine or spirits, and fling themselves wildly into the arms of their women, hoping to calm themselves by expending their last strength, to lose
with their reason all memory of what has just taken place. In this situation, they are at the mercy of the Police. Once arrested they are blind, they lose their heads, and their need of hope is so great that they will believe anything, while there is no absurdity they cannot be led to admit. One example may serve to show just how far an arrested criminal’s stupidity will go. Bibi-Lupin had recently obtained a confession from a murderer aged nineteen, by persuading him that minors were never executed. When this boy was transferred to the Conciergerie to undergo sentence, after the rejection of his appeal, that terrible agent came to see him.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not yet twenty?…’ he asked the lad.

  ‘Yes, I’m only nineteen and a half,’ said the murderer with perfect calm.

  ‘Ah, well,’ replied Bibi-Lupin, ‘don’t worry, you will never be twenty…’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh in three days’ time they’ll have topped you,’ said the head of criminal investigation.

  The murderer, who still believed, even after judgment, that minors weren’t executed collapsed like a batter pudding.

  These men, made cruel by the need to suppress witnesses, for they commit murder only to destroy proof (it is one of the arguments put forward for abolishing capital punishment); these giants of skill and cunning, with whom the action of the hand, the speed of the glance, the senses are exercised as among savages, become heroes of evil-doing only upon the theatre of their exploits. Not only, the crime once committed, do their troubles begin, for they are as bewildered by the need to hide their booty as they were formerly oppressed by poverty; but also they are weakened like a woman recovering from childbirth. Frightening in their energy at the time of action, they are like children from the moment of triumph. Their nature, in a word, is that of wild animals, easy to kill when they’ve fed. In prison, these singular men are human only in their dissimulation and by that discretion which gives way only at the last moment, when they are broken, worn-out by the length of their detention.