“M. Pélisson,” added he, “cannot get on without him. It is Lespardat who organises the concerts at the prefecture.”
Then the minister and his secretary continued their walk towards the Rue de la Paix, along the arcades, stopping here and there before the windows of the photograph shops.
“There are too many nude figures exposed in these shop-fronts,” said the minister. “It would be better to take away their license from these shops. Strangers judge us by appearances, and such spectacles as these are calculated to injure the good name of the country and the government.”
Suddenly, at the corner of the Rue de l’Échelle, Labarthe told his chief to look at a veiled woman who was coming towards them with a rapid step. But Delarbre, glancing at her for a moment, considered her very ordinary, far too slender, and not at all elegant.
“She is clumsily shod,” said he; “she is from the provinces.”
When she had passed them:
“Your Excellency is quite right,” said Labarthe. “That is Madame Pélisson.”
At this name the minister, much interested, turned round eagerly. With a vague feeling of his own dignity, he dared not follow her. But he showed his curiosity in his look.
Labarthe spurred it on.
“I’ll wager, monsieur le ministre, that she won’t go very far.”
They both hastened their steps, and saw Madame Pélisson follow the arcades, skirt the Place du Palais-Royal, and then, throwing uneasy glances to left and right, disappear into the Hôtel du Louvre.
At that the minister began to laugh from the depths of his throat. His little leaden eyes lighted up. And he muttered between his teeth the words which his secretary guessed rather than heard:
“The magistracy is avenged.”
* * * * *
On the same day the Emperor, then in residence at Fontainebleau, was smoking cigarettes in the library of the palace. He was leaning motionless, with the air of a melancholy sea-bird, against the case in which is kept the Monaldeschi coat of mail. Viollet-le-Duc and Mérimée, both his intimate friends, stood by his side.
He asked:
“Why, Monsieur Mérimée, do you like the works of Brantôme?”
“Sire,” replied Mérimée, “in them I recognise the French nation, with her good and bad qualities. She is never worse than when she is without a leader to show her a noble aim.”
“Really,” said the Emperor, “does one find that in Brantôme?”
“One also finds in him,” answered Mérimée, “the influence of women in the affairs of state.”
At that moment Madame Ramel entered the gallery. Napoleon had given orders that she should be allowed to come to him whenever she presented herself. At the sight of his foster-sister he showed as much delight as his expressionless, sorrowful face was capable of displaying.
“My dear Madame Ramel,” asked he, “how is your nephew getting on at Nantes? Is he satisfied?”
“But, sire,” said Madame Ramel, “he was not sent there. Another was nominated in his place.”
“That’s strange,” murmured His Majesty thoughtfully.
Then, placing his hand on the academician’s shoulder:
“My dear Monsieur Mérimée, I am supposed to rule the fate of France, of Europe, and of the world. And I cannot get a nomination for a substitut of the sixth class, at a salary of two thousand four hundred francs.”
XV
HAVING finished his reading, M. Bergeret folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket. M. Mazure, M. Paillot, and M. de Terremondre nodded three times in silence.
Then the last-named placed a hand on Bergeret’s shoulder:
“What you have just read to us, my dear sir,” said he, “is truly...”
At this moment Léon flung himself into the shop and exclaimed with a mixture of excitement and importance:
“Madame Houssieu has just been found strangled in her bed.”
“How extraordinary!” said M. de Terremondre.
“From the state of the body,” added Léon, “it is believed that death took place three days ago.”
“Then,” remarked M. Mazure, the archivist, “that would make it Saturday that the crime was committed.”
Paillot, the bookseller, who had remained silent up till now, with his mouth wide open out of deference to death, now began to collect his thoughts.
“On Saturday, about five o’clock in the afternoon, I plainly heard stifled cries and the heavy thud produced by the fall of a body. I even said to these gentlemen” (he turned towards M. de Terremondre and M. Bergeret) “that something extraordinary was going on in Queen Marguerite’s house.”
No one supported the claim that the bookseller was making that he alone, by the keenness of his senses and the penetration of his mind, had suspected the deed at the moment when it was taking place.
After a respectful silence, Paillot began again: “During the night between Saturday and Sunday I said to Madame Paillot:— ‘There isn’t a sound from Queen Marguerite’s house.’”
M. Mazure asked the age of the victim. Paillot replied that Madame Houssieu was between seventy-nine and eighty years of age, that she had been a widow fifty years, that she owned landed property, stocks and shares, and a large sum of money, but that, being miserly and eccentric, she kept no servant, and cooked her victuals herself over the fireplace in her room, living alone amidst a wreckage of furniture and crockery, covered with the dust of a quarter of a century. It was actually more than twenty-five years since any one had wielded a broom in Queen Marguerite’s house. Madame Houssieu went out but seldom, bought a whole week’s supply of provisions for herself, and never let any one in to the house save the butcher-boy and two or three urchins who ran errands for her.
“And the crime is supposed to have been committed on Saturday afternoon?” asked M. de Terremondre.
“So it is believed, from the state of the body,” replied Léon. “It appears that it is a ghastly sight.”
“On Saturday, in the afternoon,” replied M. de Terremondre, “we were here, merely separated by a wall from the horrible scene, and we were chatting about passing trifles.”
There was again a long silence. Then some one asked if the assassin had been arrested, or if they even knew who it was. But, in spite of his zeal, Léon could not answer these questions.
A shadow, which grew ever deeper and deeper and seemed funereal, began to fall across the bookseller’s shop. It was caused by the dark crowd of sightseers swarming in the square in front of the house of crime.
“Doubtless they are waiting for the inspector of police and the public prosecutor,” said Mazure, the archivist.
Paillot, who was gifted with an exquisite caution, fearing lest the eager people would break the window-panes, ordered Léon to close the shutters.
“Don’t leave anything open,” said he, “save the window which looks on the Rue des Tintelleries.”
This precautionary measure seemed to bear the stamp of a certain moral delicacy. The gentlemen of the old-book corner approved of it. But since the Rue des Tintelleries was narrow, and since on that side the panes were covered with notices and drawing-copies, the shop became plunged in darkness.
The murmur of the crowd, till then unnoticed, spread with the shadow and became continuous, hollow, solemn, almost terrible, evidencing the unanimity of the moral condemnation.
Much moved, M. de Terremondre gave fresh expression to the thought which had struck him:
“It is strange,” said he, “that while the crime was being committed so near us, we were talking quietly of unimportant affairs.”
At this M. Bergeret bent his head towards his left shoulder, gave a far-away glance, and spoke thus:
“My dear sir, allow me to tell you that there is nothing strange in that. It is not customary, when a criminal action is going on, that conversations should stop of their own accord around the victim, either within a radius of so many leagues or even of so many feet. A commotion inspired by the most villainous tho
ught only produces natural effects.”
M. de Terremondre made no reply to this speech, and the rest of his hearers turned away from M. Bergeret with a vague sense of disquietude and disapproval.
Still the professor of literature persisted:
“And why should an act so natural and so common as murder produce strange and uncommon results? To kill is common to animals, and especially to man. Murder was for long ages regarded in human civilisation as a courageous action, and there still remain in our morals and institutions certain traces of this ancient point of view.”
“What traces?” demanded M. de Terremondre.
“They are to be found in the honours,” replied M. Bergeret, “which are paid to soldiers.”
“That is not the same thing,” said M. de Terremondre.
“Certainly it is,” said M. Bergeret. “For the motive force of all human actions is hunger or love. Hunger taught savages murder, impelled them to wars, to invasions. Civilised nations are like hunting-dogs. A perverted instinct drives them to destroy without profit or reason. The unreasonableness of modern wars disguises itself under dynastic interest, nationality, balance of power, honour. This last pretext is perhaps the most extravagant of all, for there is not a nation in the world that is not sullied with every crime and loaded with every shame. There is not one of them which has not endured all the humiliations that fortune could inflict on a miserable band of men. If there yet remains any honour among the nations, it is a strange means of upholding it to make war — that is to say, to commit all the crimes by which an individual dishonours himself: arson, robbery, rape, murder. And as for the actions whose motive power is love, they are for the most part as violent, as frenzied, as cruel as the actions inspired by hunger; so much so that one must come to the conclusion that man is a mischievous beast. But it still remains to inquire why I know this, and whence it comes that the fact arouses grief and indignation in me. If nothing but evil existed, it would not be visible, as the night would have no name if the sun never rose.”
M. de Terremondre, however, had extended enough deference to the religion of tenderness and human dignity by reproaching himself with having conversed in a gay and careless fashion at the moment of the crime and so near the victim. He began to regard the tragic end of Madame Houssieu as a familiar incident which one might look at straightforwardly and of which one might deduce the consequences. He reflected that now there was nothing to prevent his buying Queen Marguerite’s house as a storehouse for his collections of furniture, china, and tapestry, and thus starting a sort of municipal museum. As a reward for his zeal and munificence, he counted on receiving, along with the applause of his fellow-countrymen, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and perhaps the title of correspondent of the Institute.
He had in the Academy of Inscriptions two or three comrades, old bachelors like himself, with whom he sometimes lunched in Paris in some wineshop, and to whom he recounted many anecdotes about women. And there was no correspondent for the district.
Hence he had already reached the point of depreciating the coveted house.
“It won’t stand upright much longer,” said he, “that house of Queen Marguerite. The beams of the floors used to fall in flakes of touchwood on the poor old octogenarian. It will be necessary to spend an immense sum in putting it in repair.”
“The best thing,” said Mazure, the archivist, “would be to pull it down and remove the frontage to the courtyard of the museum. It would really be a pity to abandon Philippe Tricouillard’s shield to the wreckers.”
They heard a great commotion among the crowd in the square. It was the noise of the people whom the police were driving back to clear a passage for the magistrates into the house of crime.
Paillot pushed his nose out of the half-open door.
“Here,” said he, “comes the examining judge, M. Roquincourt, with M. Surcouf, his clerk. They have gone into the house.”
One after the other the academicians of the old-book corner had slipped out behind the bookseller on to the pavement of the Rue des Tintelleries, from which they watched the surging movements of the people who crowded the Place Saint-Exupère.
Among the mob Paillot recognised M. Cassignol, the president in chief. The old man was taking his daily constitutional. The excited crowd, in which he had got entangled during his walk, impeded his short steps and feeble sight. He went on, still upright and sturdy, carrying his withered, white head erect.
When Paillot saw him, he ran up to him, doffed his velvet cap, and, offering him his arm, invited him to come and sit down in the shop.
“How imprudent of you, Monsieur Cassignol, to venture into such a crowd! It’s almost like a riot.”
At the word riot, the old man had a vision, as it were, of the century of revolution, three parts of which he had seen. He was now in his eighty-seventh year, and had already been on the retired list for twenty-five years.
Leaning on the bookseller, Paillot, he crossed the doorstep of the shop and sat down on a rush-bottomed chair, in the midst of the respectful academicians. His malacca cane, with its silver top, trembled under his hand between his hollow thighs. His spine was stiffer than the back of his chair. He drew off his tortoiseshell spectacles to wipe them, and it took him a long time to put them on again. He had lost his memory for faces, and although he was hard of hearing, it was by the voice that he recognised people.
He asked concisely for the cause of the crowds which had gathered in the square, but he hardly listened to the answer given him by M. de Terremondre. His brain, sound but ossified, steeped as it were in myrrh, received no new impressions, although old ideas and passions remained deeply embedded in it.
MM. de Terremondre, Mazure, and Bergeret stood up in a circle round him. They were ignorant of his story, lost now in the immemorial past. They only knew that he had been the disciple, the friend, and the companion of Lacordaire and Montalembert, that he had opposed, as far as the precise limits of his rights and his office permitted, the establishment of the Empire, that in former days he had been subjected to the insults of Louis Veuillot, (Louis Veuillot, author and journalist, born 1813, and much given to duels, both with words and swords.) and that he went every Sunday to mass, with a great book under his arm. Like all the town, they recognised that he retained his old-world honesty and the glory of having maintained the cause of liberty throughout his whole life. But not one of them could have told of what type was his liberalism, for none of them had read this sentence in a pamphlet, published by M. Cassignol in 1852, on the affairs of Rome:— “There is no liberty save that of the man who believes in Jesus Christ, and in the moral dignity of man.” It was said that, still remaining active in mind at his age, he was classifying his correspondence and working at a book on the relations between Church and State. He still spoke fluently and brightly.
During the conversation which he followed with difficulty, on hearing a mention of the name of M. Garrand, the public prosecutor of the Republic, he remarked, looking down at the knob of his stick as though it were the solitary witness of those bygone days that still survived:
‘“In 1838 I knew at Lyons a public prosecutor for the Crown who had a high idea of his duties. He used to maintain that one of the attributes of public administration was infallibility, and that the king’s prosecutor could no more be in the wrong than the king himself. His name was M. de Clavel, and he left some valuable works on criminal cross-examination.”
Then the old man was silent, alone with his memories in the midst of men.
Paillot, on the doorstep, was watching what was going on outside.
“Here is M. Roquincourt coming out of the house.”
M. Cassignol, thinking only of past events, said:
“I started at the bar. I was under the orders of M. de Clavel, who used again and again to repeat to me: ‘Grasp this maxim thoroughly: — The interests of the prisoner are sacred, the interests of society are doubly sacred, the interests of justice are thrice sacred.’ Metaphysical principles ha
d in those days more influence on men’s minds than they have nowadays.”
“That’s very true,” said M. de Terremondre.
“They are carrying away a bedside-table, some linen, and a little truck,” said Paillot. “These are doubtless articles to be used in evidence.”
M. de Terremondre, no longer able to restrain himself, went forward to watch the loading of the truck. Suddenly, knitting his brows, he exclaimed:
“Sacrebleu!”
Then, seeing Paillot’s inquiring look, he added:
“It’s nothing! nothing!”
Cunning collector that he was, he had just caught sight of a water-jug in porcelaine a la Reine among the articles attached, and he was making up his mind to inquire about it after the trial from Surcouf, the registrar, who was an obliging man. In getting together his collections he used artifice. “One must rise to the occasion,” he used to say to himself. “Times are bad.”
“I was nominated deputy at twenty-two years of age,” resumed M. Cassignol. “At that time my long, curly hair, my beardless, ruddy cheeks, gave me a look of youth that rendered me desperate. In order to inspire respect I had to affect an air of solemnity and to wear an aspect of severity. I carried out my duties with a diligence that brought its reward. At thirty-three years of age I became attorney-general at Puy.”
“It is a picturesque town,” said M. Mazure.
“In the performance of my new duties I had to inquire into an affair of little interest, if one only took account of the nature of the crime and the character of the accused, but which had indeed its own importance, since it was a matter that involved the death sentence. A fairly prosperous farmer had been found murdered in his bed. I pass over the circumstances of the crime, which yet remain fixed in my memory, although they were as commonplace as possible. I need only say that, from the opening of the inquiry, suspicions fell on a ploughman, a servant of the victim. This was a man of thirty. His name was Poudrailles, Hyacinthe Poudrailles. On the day following the crime he had suddenly disappeared, and was found in a wineshop, where he was spending pretty freely. Strong circumstantial evidence pointed to him as the author of this murder. A sum of sixty francs was found on him, for the possession of which he could not account; his clothes bore traces of blood. Two witnesses had seen him prowling round the farm on the night of the crime. It is true that another witness swore to an alibi, but that witness was a well-known bad character.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 125