by Frank Yerby
Jean smiled again.
“You flatter me, my lord,” he said.
For the life of him, when he left that chamber, the Comte de Gravereau could not be sure whether Jean Paul had seen the light, or whether he himself had been subjected to the subtlest of mockery. He dismissed the thought, as he did all thoughts that troubled him. It was a habit of his class. A habit that would one day prove fatal to them all.
The Comte was closeted with the King’s Lieutenant for half an hour before Jean’s trial. Whatever he said to that Royal Magistrate must have been quite effective, for Jean Paul escaped the preparatory questioning, which included mutilation by iron or by fire, the perforation of the tongue or the lips, whipping until blood flowed, and a few other such niceties still included in the penal law of France in 1784 and regularly employed in cases such as his.
Trained to the law as he was, Jean Paul realised just how great his debt to the Comte de Gravereau was. He tried to tell himself that he would rather have suffered all these things than to be indebted to Gervais la Moyte at the expense of both Thérèse and Nicole. But his brief experience with torture at the hands of experts had shown him the limits of his strength, and he was quite honestly glad to escape any more suffering.
Half an hour later he had been sentenced to five years in the galleys. Had he not been a lawyer, Jean Paul would have despaired utterly; for few men survived even one year at the oars of the galleys under the lash of the slave-drivers. But Jean knew that though the law remained on the statute book, the galleys themselves no longer existed; the worst he could expect was a bagne, a convict camp, which, though it was as close an approximation of hell as the penal authorities could make it, was still a thousand times better than the galleys which it had superseded. Men often served out their sentences in the bagnes and emerged alive; but from the galleys—never.
He was led under guard to a rude stockade a few leagues from the village and thrust inside. M. Gerade, the Intendant, looked up with a groan.
“My God,” he groaned, “not another one!”
“I’m afraid so, M. l’Intendant,” Jean Paul said mockingly.
M’sieur Gerade stared at him.
“And this one speaks French,” he said, “not peasant gabble! Your name?”
“Jean Paul Marin,” Jean said, “late Advocate at Law from Saint Jule and Bas Alpines, Supervisor of Stocks and Supplies for Marin et Fils, and now—common criminal.”
M. Gerade studied him for a long moment. Then he threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“Damn my eyes, boy!” he laughed, “I like you! What the devil happened to your face?”
“Compliments of the retainers of His Lordship, Gervais la Moyte, Comte de Gravereau,” Jean told him.
“That bastard!” The Intendant spat, then turning to Jean’s guards: “What are the charges against this man?”
“Breaking and entering, malicious mischief,” they chorused.
M. Gerade wrote on the record book before him.
“All right,” he growled, “be off with you. He’s under my jurisdiction now.”
He looked around until his gaze fell upon a filthy wretch.
“You!” he bellowed, “bring up a log!”
The wretch came up with a log and placed it before the Intendant.
“Have a seat, M’sieur l’Avocat,” M. Gerade said.
Jean sat down, staring at this strange official with frank curiosity. M. Renoir Gerade was a tall, thin man with a lean, kindly face. He was, Jean realised, the last man on earth one would expect to find in such a position.
“Now, my boy,” he said pleasantly, “tell me what really happened. Your name’s Marin. You mentioned being of Marin et Fils—which means you are one of the sons. As a Marin, you could buy that bastard Gravereau ten times over and demand change. Obviously you didn’t enter Château Gravereau to steal something. What the devil were you doing there?”
I have already been sentenced, Jean reflected. And damn my soul if this isn’t a human being!
“I went there,” he laughed, “to put a foot of cold steel or an ounce of lead through M. le Comte’s guts.”
“Too bad you didn’t succeed,” Gerade said calmly. “But this becomes astonishing! You went there to murder la Moyte, and you’re remanded to me with these childish charges; name of heaven, Marin, why?”
“Gervais la Moyte is all but bankrupt,” Jean said. “To recoup, he engages himself to my sister. Obviously he couldn’t have me put to death, or there would have been no wedding.”
“I see,” Gerade sighed. “Poor girl! Motive enough for killing him, I’d say. . . . Had you any other?”
Jean’s face was bleak, suddenly.
“He—he debauched the girl I was to have married,” he whispered.
“And my only daughter,” the Intendant said bitterly. “She—killed herself, my poor Marie. . . .”
My sympathies, M’sieur l’Intendant,” Jean Paul said.
“And mine to you,” M. Gerade replied, and put out his hand. Jean gripped it hard. And both of them knew that a life-long friendship had begun.
Jean looked around the stockade. It was filled with men, women, and children, all of them filthy, in rags, and half starved. An astonishing number of the women were great with child.
“All of them will be,” the Intendant said, seeing his look, “by the time we reach Toulon. It’s the system of herding them all together indiscriminately. . . . If a man is not a criminal when we get our hands on him, he always is, by the time we let him go.”
“But,” Jean said, “why are they here? Surely all these women and children are not . . .”
“Criminals? Most assuredly not. You know the law of 1764?”
“Three years in the galleys for begging,” Jean said slowly, “if you’re able-bodied. Nine for a second offence. A third—life. . . . Dear God, but we live in a barbaric country!”
“And they have to beg,” the Intendant said sadly. “It’s that or starve. The land’s allowed to lie fallow for years, because it can’t produce enough to pay the taxes to keep creatures like la Moyte in sensual idleness at Versailles. Let a peasant look the least bit fat or prosperous, and they double the impost—and then they clap a man in the bagne for begging a crust of bread to feed his starving babies with.”
“I know,” Jean Paul whispered.
“I do what I can,” the Intendant said, “but they don’t allow me enough to feed one-third of the prisoners they send me. And the really vicious thing is that a man need not really be a beggar. All he has to do is be accused by an enemy or someone who stands to profit by his imprisonment.”
“But who the devil could profit by jailing these poor devils?” Jean demanded.
M. Gerade pointed.
“See those women? Most of them were pregnant when they came here. Their seducers—nobles, mostly, as these women are of the servant class—accused them of vagabondage and thus removed a possible embarrassment from their path. The children? Accused by stepmothers, second wives, to clear the way for their own progeny. The man, by their brothers, by their children, by their wives, to gain some trifling inheritance.
And I have to try to feed them on five sous a day apiece— Name of God, it’s enough to drive a man mad!”
“Couldn’t you free them?” Jean said. “As I remember the law, you have that power.”
“You’re the lawyer,” Gerade growled. “Think again. Remember that long list of conditions under which they can be freed?”
“A solvent person,” Jean thought aloud, frowning in his effort to reduce the fog of legal terminology into plain words, “must guarantee the mendicant—give him a job, or promise to support him—that is it, isn’t it, M. Gerade?”
“That’s it, all right,” Renoir Gerade said angrily. “You know how many they arrested the first year this law was put into effect? Fifty thousand. Damn my eyes, Marin—you find fifty thousand solvent persons in France! Just find them. Then try to persuade them to guarantee a like number of beggar
s!”
He looked at Jean Paul quizzically.
“Now,” he said, “I’ll have to find you some straw to sleep on, and a few rags to cover you so that you won’t freeze. But it’ll only be for one night. Tomorrow we start the march to Toulon.”
Jean got up from the log, but he stood there, waiting. Something in Renoir Gerade’s tone told him to wait.
“We move from one stockade to another,” the Intendant went on. “At each one we pick up additional prisoners. But with their confounded economising on everything but folly, they don’t increase my guards . . .”
Jean Paul’s eyes searched his face. But M. Gerade talked in the same bland Mariner.
“If we followed the coast, it wouldn’t be so bad. But we have to go up to Avignon, and come back by way of Aries and Aix, picking up prisoners at each stop. By the time we leave Aix I always have more prisoners than I could handle with twice the guards I have . . . and in those mountains . . .”
Jean made him a magnificent bow.
“May I say, M’sieur l’Intendant,” he laughed, “that you are a prince?”
“And you,” Renoir Gerade smiled dryly, “are a damned fine lawyer. Shame to keep a brain like yours locked up. . . . Off with you now, or you’ll miss your supper.”
Jean Paul missed his supper anyway. It consisted of water, ancient, mouldy bread, and two ounces of salted grease. But when, in the morning, he learned that all their meals were always the same, he resolved to eat if it killed him, for he was going to need all his strength.
They by-passed Marseilles, and went up the mountain passes towards Avignon, the prisoners being herded along like so many sheep. On the first day’s march one of the women died of a miscarriage. Out of pity, M. Gerade slowed the pace until they were barely crawling, but the women and children suffered horribly all the same. When they made camp the first night, and were shivering around the camp-fires, Jean Paul came up to the Intendant with a request.
“Would it,” he smiled, “be stretching matters too far if I wrote a letter? I don’t know what the precise regulations are on that point. . . .”
“As far as I know, there aren’t any,” Gerade said. “The men who drafted the law didn’t believe, I think, that they’d ever have a criminal who could read or write. So write away, my learned footpad. You’ll find paper, pens, and ink in that portfolio of mine over by the tree.”
Jean Paul sat down near the camp-fire and began to write. As he did so, a little knot of filthy beggars gathered silently around him and stared in open-mouthed awe at his flying pen. Jean wrote on, serenely, for he was certain that none of them could read his words.
“I’ll post it for you by diligence in the first large town we pass through,” M. Gerade told him. Then, looking at the address, the Intendant stared at him.
“Mademoiselle Nicole la Moyte, Comtesse de Gravereau, Château Gravereau,” he whispered; “mon Dieu, boy—are you mad!”
“Yes,” Jean laughed, “quite. But I hope you’ll post it for me all the same.”
Thereafter Jean Paul Marin became the most sought-after man among the prisoners. They came to him one by one, those of them who had loved ones from whom they had been snatched away, and begged him to write letters for them. The kindly Intendant permitted him to do so, and even lent him his own folding table for the work. Jean wrote letters for his guards, who, being themselves of the people, were no better trained.
But, if before he had thought that he knew much of the misery of the peasantry of France, he now plumbed it to its bitter depths. The letters that he penned nightly were enough to wring tears from a marble statue. Before, Jean Paul had had some misgivings about his belief that the richest country in all Europe was being misgoverned into poverty; but after one week as unofficial scribe for the prisoners, he had none; more—his belief had deepened into certainty.
Nicole la Moyte was having her long blonde hair brushed by her maid when a footman brought her Jean Paul’s letter. She took it listlessly and laid it unopened on the glass top of her dressing-table. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, and the last thing in the world that she felt like doing was reading letters.
I wonder where he is now? she thought. He’s probably hungry and cold—and his poor face. . . But at the thought of Jean Paul’s broken face she couldn’t keep back her tears. She jerked forward away from Marie’s brush strokes, and leaned her face against her arms.
“There, there, child,” Marie said, “you mustn’t take on. He’s better out of your life. . . . After all, he isn’t your kind, and—”
“Oh, shut up!” Nicole screamed at her. “If Jeannot isn’t my kind, why, then I haven’t any kind! I don’t care what his mother and father were! He was so good and gentle, and so beautiful, too—until they ruined his face! Oh, Marie, can’t you understand?”
“I do understand,” Marie said, “only . . .”
Nicole silenced her with an abrupt motion. She had picked up the letter, mainly to wipe away the blots her own tears had made upon it. But once she had it in her hand, something about it caught her attention. After a moment she saw what it was. The handwriting was utterly strange to her. She received many letters, but always from young people of her own set, and from relatives, so that she could always tell at a glance whom the letter was from. But she had never seen this hand before in her life.
Her fingers trembled as she opened it, for some obscure instinct told her, long before she began to read, what it was.
Marie stood behind her, and read the letter over her shoulder. Marie was very proud of the fact that her young mistress had taught her to read, and seldom missed an opportunity to practise, since her knowledge, almost unheard-of in a servant, made her a power much sought-after by the whole domestic staff.
She had almost finished it by the time Nicole pressed it to her bosom, hiding the words. Marie stood there, watching the reflection of her young mistress’s eyes in the mirror. They were blue stars, widening with joy. They were twin sapphires, brighter than any diamond.
Then Nicole was out of the chair and skipping about the room. She caught Marie to her in a fierce hug.
“Oh, Marie!” she cried, “he’s alive and all right! Besides, I’m going to—I can’t tell you that. Run down and tell Augustin to saddle my mare. And Beau Prince also, put my brother’s best saddle on him! Then come back and help me into my riding-dress! I’m going away—for a whole week, maybe longer. . . .”
“Where?” Marie demanded sternly.
“That, Marie, is none of your affair! Go now—hurry.”
“But when my lord, your brother . . .”
“Comes back from his honeymoon? Don’t trouble yourself, Marie. By then I shall either be safely back here, or so far away he’ll never find me. Now stop your chatter, and do as I say!”
When, half an hour later, Nicole la Moyte came down the stairs and mounted Vite Belle, her mare, taking the reins of her brother’s stallion from the hands of Augustin and leading that proud beast after her, she made one of the classic mistakes that real aristocrats in all times and places fall into so readily. With the exception of her maidservants, with whom she was in close daily contact, it was quite impossible for her to think of the horde of servants about the Château Gravereau as people.
Therefore it never entered her mind what great folly it was to command the head coachman, who hated Jean Paul Marin with all his heart, and who was, additionally, Marie’s husband, to make the early arrangements for her flight. She was scarcely beyond the first bend of the road before Augustin stormed into her bedchamber.
“What is she up to?” he roared at his wife. “Taking Beau Prince—sending Jules and Reneau to prepare the hunting lodge up at Carpentras . . . a rendezvous? Don’t lie to me, wench! And with him, no doubt . . . God’s eyes! Has he escaped, then?”
“I—I don’t know,” Marie whispered.
“You don’t know! Perhaps a touch of this crop would improve your memory. Ah! you don’t like that, do you? Perhaps still another would ease the pa
in of the first . . .”
“Stop it!” Marie screeched; “for God’s love, Augustin, please!”
“But I like beating you,” Augustin smiled, flexing the riding crop between his two hands. “I think perhaps you would like to be as reckless as your mistress, riding off alone to the scandal of all the world. But this stops you, doesn’t it? And this, and this and this!”
“Augustin!”
“Only if you’ll tell me what she’s doing, and where he is! Tell me, Marie! Or, rather, don’t tell me. I am beginning to really enjoy this!”
“I’ll tell you,” Marie wept. “He—he plans to escape in the mountains . . . the guards are too few and the commandant is sympathetic. He’s going to go north over the trail through Gap and Briançon into Italy. She is to meet him and supply him with money and clothes—”
“And her own fair person, no doubt!” Augustin mocked. “My lord will reward me hugely for this.”
“And you, of course, my hero,” Marie sneered, “will overtake him with a horde of lackeys, and bring him back in chains!”
“So,” Augustin snapped, “what’s to prevent me?”
“The police. The mountain gendarmerie. ‘Twill be your words against hers, and since when in France have the words of a base-born coachman stood against a gentle lady’s?”
She was right. Augustin saw that at once. He stood there, scowling at her.
“Oh, Augustin,” Marie went on, pressing her advantage, “stay out of this! The less we have to do with the affairs of the noblesse, the better.”
“But when my lord comes back and finds I saddled the horses,” Augustin groaned.
“You knew not where she was going. She explained the second mount as being for a friend—‘My lord,’ you’ll say, ‘ ‘twas not my place to disobey my lady. . . .’ ”
Augustin’s face brightened suddenly, and Marie knew the sinking feeling that she had talked too long.
“My lord’s cousin, the Duc de Gramont!” Augustin exulted. “He has a lodge not far from Carpentras—and in this snowy weather he’ll surely be hunting there! Thank you, wench, for that caution. I’ll ride alone, bearing this news to the Duc. He’ll lead his lackeys. Then let the mountain gendarmes gainsay him!”