“You old communard!” repeated M. Worms-Clavelin.
“Hold your tongue, Worms! Your soul is ignoble and your mind obtuse. You have no meaning in yourself, but, in the phrase of to-day, you are a representative type. Just Heavens! how many victims were butchered during a whole century of civil war just that M. Worms-Clavelin might become a republican préfet! Worms, you are lower in the scale than the préfets of the Empire.”
“The Empire!” exclaimed M. Worms-Clavelin “Blast the Empire! First of all it swept us all into the abyss, and then it made me an official. But, all the same, wine is made, corn is grown, just as in the time of the Empire; they bet on the Bourse, as under the Empire; one eats, drinks, and makes love, as under the Empire. At bottom, life is just the same. How could government and administration be different? There are certain shades of difference, I grant you. We have more liberty; we even have too much of it. We have more security. We enjoy a government which suits the ideals of the people. As far as such a thing is possible, we are the masters of our fate. All the social forces are now held in just balance, or nearly so. Now just you show me what there is that could be changed. The colour of our postage stamps perhaps... and after that!... As old Montessuy used to say, ‘No, no, friend, short of changing the French, there is nothing in France to change.’ Of course, I am all for progress. One must talk about moving, were it only in order to dispense with movement. ‘Forward! forward!’ The Marseillaise must have been useful in not carrying one to the frontier!..
The look which Georges Frémont turned on the préfet was full of deep, affectionate, kindly, thoughtful scorn:
“Everything is as perfect as it can be, then, Worms?”
“Don’t make out that I speak like an utter dolt. Nothing is perfect, but all things cling together, prop one another up, dovetail with one another. It is just like père Mulot’s wall which you can see from here behind the orangery. It is all warped and cracked and leans forward. For the last thirty years that fool of a Quatrebarbe, the diocesan architect, has been stopping dead in front of Mulot’s house. Then, with his nose in air, his hands behind his back and his legs apart, he says: ‘I really don’t see how that holds together!’ The little imps coming out from school stand behind him and shout in mockery of his gruff tones: ‘I really don’t see how that holds together!’ He turns round and, seeing nobody, looks at the pavement as though the echo of his voice had risen from the earth. Then he goes away repeating, ‘I really don’t see how that holds together!’ It holds together because nobody touches it; because père Mulot summons neither masons nor architects; above all, because he takes good care not to ask M. Quatrebarbe for his advice. It holds together because up till now it has held together. It holds together, you old dreamer, because they neither revise the taxes nor reform the Constitution.”
“That is to say, it holds together through fraud and iniquity,” said Georges Frémont. “We have fallen into a cauldron of shame. Our finance ministers are under the thumb of the cosmopolitan banking-houses. And, sadder still, it is France — France, of old the deliverer of the nations — that has no care in European politics save to avenge the rights of titled sovereigns. Without even daring to shudder, we permitted the massacre of three hundred thousand Christians in the East, although, by our traditions, we had been constituted their revered and august protectors. We have betrayed not only the interests of humanity, but our own; and now you may see the Republic floating in Cretan waters among the Powers of Europe, like a guinea-fowl amid a flock of gulls. It was to this point, then, that our friendship with our ally was to lead us.”
The préfet protested:
“Don’t attack the Russian entente, Frémont. It’s the very best of all the electioneering baits.”
“The Russian alliance,” replied Frémont, waving his fork, “I hailed the birth of it with joyful expectation. But, alas, did it not, at the very first test, fling us into the arms of that assassin the Sultan and lead us to Crete, there to hurl melinite shell at Christians whose only fault was the long oppression they had suffered? But it was not Russia that we took such pains to humour, it was the great bankers interested in Ottoman bonds. And you saw how the glorious victory of Canea was hailed by the Jewish financiers with a burst of generous enthusiasm.”
“There you go,” cried the préfet, “that’s just sentimental politics! You ought to know, at any rate, where that sort of thing leads. And why the deuce you should be excited about the Greeks, I don’t see. They’re not at all interesting.”
“You are right, Worms,” said the inspector of fine arts. “You are perfectly right. The Greeks are not interesting, for they are poor. They have nothing but their blue sea, their violet hills and the fragments of their statues. The honey of Hymettus is never quoted on the Bourse. The Turks, on the contrary, are well worthy of the attention of European financiers. They have internal dissensions; above all they have resources. They pay badly and they pay much. One can do business with them. Stocks rise. All is well then. Such are the ideals of our foreign policy!”
M. Worms-Clavelin interrupted him hurriedly, and casting on him a reproachful look, said:
“Ah, now! Georges, don’t be disingenuous. You know well enough that we neither have, nor can have, any foreign policy.”
XI
IT seems that it is fixed for tomorrow,” said M. de Terremondre as he entered Paillot’s shop.
Everyone understood the allusion: he was referring to the execution of Lecœur, the butcher’s assistant, who had been sentenced to death on the 27th of November, for the murder of Madame Houssieu. This young criminal supplied the entire township with an interest in life. Judge Roquincourt, who had a reputation in society as a ladies’ man, had courteously admitted Madame Dellion and Madame de Gromance to the prison and allowed them a glimpse of the prisoner through the barred grating of the cell where he was playing cards with a gaoler. In his turn, the governor of the prison, M. Ossian Colot, an officer of the Academy, gladly did the honours of his condemned prisoner to journalists as well as to prominent townsmen. M. Ossian Colot had written with the knowledge of an expert on various questions of the penal code. He was proud of his establishment, which was run on the most up-to-date lines, and he by no means despised popularity. The visitors cast curious glances at Lecœur, while they speculated; on the relationship between this youth of twenty and the nonagenarian widow who had become his victim. They stood stupefied by astonishment before this monstrous brute. Yet Abbé Tabarit, the prison chaplain, told with tears in his eyes how the poor lad had expressed the most edifying sentiments of repentance and piety. Meanwhile, from morning to night throughout three whole months, Lecœur played cards with his gaolers and disputed the points in their own slang, for they were of the same class. His darkened soul never revealed its sufferings in words, but the rosy, chubby lad who, only ten months before, was to be met whistling in the street with his basket on his head, and his white apron knotted round his muscular loins, now shivered in his strait waistcoat with pale, cadaverous face and looked like a sick man of forty. His herculean neck was wasted and now protruded from his drooping shoulders, thin and disproportionately long. By this time it was agreed on all sides that he had exhausted the abhorrence, the pity and the curiosity of his fellow-citizens, and that it was high time to put an end to him.
“For six o’clock to-morrow. I heard it from Surcouf himself,” added M. de Terremondre. “They’ve got the guillotine at the station.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Dr. Fornerol. “For three nights the crowd has been congregating at the cross-roads of les Evées and there have been several accidents. Julien’s son fell from a tree on his head and cracked his skull. I’m afraid it’s impossible to save him.
“As for the condemned,” continued the doctor, “nobody, not even the President of the Republic, could prolong his life. For this young lad who was vigorous and sound up to the time of his arrest is now in the last stage of consumption.”
“Have you seen him in his cell, then?” ask
ed Paillot.
“Several times,” answered Dr. Fornerol, “and I have even attended him professionally at Ossian Colot’s request, for he is always deeply interested in the moral and physical well-being of his boarders.”
“He’s a real philanthropist,” answered M. de Terremondre. “And the fact ought to be recognised that, in its way, our municipal prison is an admirable institution, with its clean, white cells, all radiating from a central watch-tower, and so skilfully arranged that all the’’occupants are constantly under observation without being aware of the fact. Nothing can be said against it, it is complete and modern and all on the newest lines. Last year, when I was on a walking tour in Morocco, I saw at Tangier, in a courtyard shaded by a mulberry tree, a wretched building of mud and plaster, with a huge negro dressed in rags lying asleep in front of it. Being a soldier, he was armed with a cudgel. Swarthy hands clasping wicker baskets were projecting from the narrow windows of the building. These belonged to the prisoners, who were offering the passers-by the products of their lazy efforts, in exchange for a copper or two. Their guttural voices whined out prayers and complaints, which were harshly punctuated at intervals by curses and furious shouts. For they were all shut up together in a vast hall and spent the time in quarrelling with one another about the apertures, through which they all wanted to pass their baskets. Whenever a dispute was too noisy, the black soldier would wake up and force both baskets and suppliant hands back within the walls by a vigorous onslaught of his cudgel. In a few seconds, however, more hands would appear, all sunburnt and tattooed in blue like the first ones. I had the curiosity to peep into the prison hall through the chinks in an old wooden door. I could see in the dim-lit, shadowy place a horde of tatterdemalions scattered over the damp ground, bronzed bodies sleeping on piles of red rags, solemn faces with long venerable beards beneath their turbans, nimble blackamoors weaving baskets with shouts of laughter. On swollen limbs here and there could be seen soiled linen bandages barely hiding sores and ulcers, and one could see and hear the vermin wave and rustle in all directions. Sometimes a laugh passed round the room. And a black hen was pecking at the filthy ground with her beak. The soldier allowed me to watch the prisoners as long as I liked, waiting for me to go, before he begged of me. Then I thought of the governor of our splendid municipal prison, and I said to myself: ‘If only M. Ossian Colot were to come to Tangier he would soon discover and sweep away this crowding, this horrible promiscuity.’”
“You paint a picture of barbarism which I recognise,” answered M. Bergeret. “It is far less cruel than civilisation. For these Mussulman prisoners have no sufferings to undergo, save such as arise from the indifference or the occasional savagery of their gaolers. At least the philanthropists leave them alone and their life is endurable, for they escape the torture of the cell system, and in comparison with the cell invented by the penal code of science, every other sort of prison is quite pleasant.
“There is,” continued M. Bergeret, “a peculiar savagery in civilised peoples, which surpasses in cruelty all that the imagination of barbarism can conceive. A criminal expert is a much fiercer being than a savage, and a philanthropist will invent tortures unknown in China or Persia. A Persian executioner kills his prisoners by starving them, but it required a philanthropist to conceive the idea of killing them with solitude. It is on the principle of solitude that the punishment of the cell system depends, and no other penalty can be compared with it for duration and cruelty. The sufferer, if he is lucky, becomes mad through it, and madness mercifully destroys in him all sense of his sufferings. People imagine they are justifying this abominable system when they allege that the prisoner must be withdrawn from the bad influence, of his fellows and put in a position where he cannot give way to immoral or criminal instincts. People who reason in this way are really such great fools that one can scarcely call them hypocrites.”
“You are right,” said M. Mazure. “But let us be just to our own age. The Revolution not only accomplished a reform in judicial procedure, but also much improved the lot of the prisoner. The dungeons of the olden times were generally dark, pestilential dens.”
“It is true,” replied M. Bergeret, “that men have been cruel and malicious in every age and have always delighted in tormenting the wretched. But before philanthropists arose, at any rate, men were only tortured through a simple feeling of hatred and desire for revenge, and not for the good of their morals.”
“You forget,” answered M. Mazure, “that the Middle Ages gave birth to the most accursed form of philanthropy ever known — the spiritual. For it is just this name that suits the spirit of the holy Inquisition. It was through pure charity alone that this tribunal handed heretics over to the stake, and if it destroyed the body, it was, so they said, only in order to save the soul.”
“They never said that,” answered M. Bergeret, “and they never thought it. Victor Hugo did, indeed, believe that Torquemada ordered men to be burnt for their good, in order that their eternal happiness might be secured at the price of a short pain. On this theory he constructed a drama that sparkles with the play of antithesis. But there is no foundation whatever for this idea of his, and I should never have imagined that a scholar like you, fattening, as you have done, on old parchments, would have been led astray by a poet’s lies. The truth is that the tribunal of the Inquisition, in handing the heretic over to the secular arm, was simply cutting away a diseased limb from the Church, for fear lest the whole body should be contaminated. As for the limb thus cut off, its fate was in the hands of God. Such was the spirit of the Inquisition, frightful enough, but by no means romantic. But where the Holy Office showed what you rightly call spiritual philanthropy was in the treatment it meted out to those converted from the error of their ways. It charitably condemned them to perpetual imprisonment, and immured them for the good of their souls. But I was merely referring to the State prisons, just now, such as they were in the Middle Ages and in modern times up to the reign of Louis XIV.”
“It is true,” said M. de Terremondre, “that the system of solitary confinement has not produced all the happy results that were expected from it in the reformation of prisoners.”
“This system,” said Dr. Fornerol, “often produces rather serious mental disorders. Yet it is only fair to add that criminals are naturally predisposed to troubles of this kind. We recognise to-day that the criminal is a degenerate. Thus, for instance, thanks to M. Ossian Colot’s courtesy, I have been allowed to make an examination of our murderer, this fellow Lecœur. I found many physiological defects in him.... His teeth, for instance, are: quite abnormal. I argue from that fact that he is only partially responsible for his acts.”
“Yet,” said M. Bergeret, “one of the sisters of Mithridates had a double row of teeth in each jaw, and in her brother’s estimation at any rate, she was a woman of noble courage. So dearly did he love her that when he was a fugitive pursued by Lucullus, he gave orders that she should be strangled by a mute to prevent her falling alive into the hands of the Romans. Nor did she then fail to live up to her brother’s lofty estimation of her character, but suffering death by the bowstring with joyous calmness, said: ‘I thank the king, my brother, for having had a care to my honour, even in the midst of his own besetting troubles.’ You see from this example that heroism is not impossible even with a row of abnormal teeth.”
“Lecœur’s case,” replied the doctor, “presents many other peculiarities which cannot fail to be significant in the eyes of a scientist. Like so many born criminals his senses are blunted. Thus I found, when I examined him, that he was tattooed in every part of his body. You would be surprised at the lewd fancy shown in the choice of scenes and symbols painted on his skin.”
“Really?” said M. de Terremondre.
“The skin of this patient,” said Dr. Fornerol, “really ought to be properly prepared and preserved in our museum. But it is not the character of the tattooing that I want to insist upon, but rather the number of the pictures and their arrangement on the bo
dy. Certain parts of the operation must have caused the patient an amount of pain which could scarcely have been bearable to a person of ordinary sensibility.”
“There you are making a mistake!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre. “It is evident that you don’t know my friend Jilly. Yet he is a very well-known man. Jilly was quite young when, in 1885 or’86, he made the tour of the world with his friend Lord Turnbridge on the yacht Old Friend. Jilly swears that throughout the whole voyage, through storms and calm, neither Lord Turnbridge nor himself ever put foot on deck for a single moment. The whole time they remained in the cabin drinking champagne with an old top-’ man of the marines who had been taught tattooing by a Tasmanian chief. In the course of the voyage this old top-man covered the two friends from head to foot with tattoo marks, and Jilly returned to France adorned with a fox-hunt that comprises as many as three hundred and twenty-four figures of men, women, horses and dogs. He is always delighted to show it when he sups with boon companions at an inn. Now I really cannot say whether Jilly is abnormally insensitive to pain, but what I can tell you is that he is a fine fellow, and a man of honour and that he is incapable of..
“But,” asked M. Bergeret, “do you think it right that this butcher’s boy should be guillotined?
For you confess that there are such things as born criminals, and in your own phrase it seems that Lecoeur was only partially responsible for his acts, through a congenital predisposition to crime.”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
“Then what would you do with him?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact,” replied M. Bergeret, “I am but little interested in the fate of this particular man. But I am, nevertheless, opposed to the death penalty.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 137