Part 16

He continued: “Never mind! Here’s _my_ history. I am son of a famous thief; it is a pity that they gave him one day a hempen cravat; it was during the ‘reign of the Gallows by the grace of Heaven.’ At six years of age I had neither father nor mother; in summer I turned summersets in the dust on the high-road, that carriage-travellers might throw me money; in winter I walked with naked feet in the mud, in ragged clothes, and blowing on my purple hands to excite pity. At nine years old I began to use my fingers; at times I emptied a pocket or a reticule; at ten years old I was a pilferer: then I made acquaintances, and at seventeen I became a thief. I broke into a shop, I robbed the till; I was taken and sent to the Galleys. What a hard life that was! Sleeping on bare boards, drinking plain water, eating black bread, dragging a stupid fetter which was of no use; sun-strokes and whip-strokes: and then all the heads are kept shaved, and I had such fine chesnut hair! Never mind! I served my time; fifteen years. That wears one famously!

“I was two-and-thirty years old; one fine morning they gave me a map of the road, a passport, and sixty-six francs, which I had amassed in my fifteen years at the Galleys, working sixteen hours a-day, thirty days a-month, twelve months a-year. Never mind! I wished to be an honest man with my sixty-six francs; and I had finer sentiments under my rags than you might find beneath the cassock of a priest. But deuce take the passport! It was yellow, and they had written upon it ‘_Freed convict_.’ I was obliged to show this at every village, and to present it every week to the mayors of the towns through which I was ordered to pass. A fine recommendation! a galley-convict! I frightened all the folk, and little children ran away, and people locked their doors. No one would give me work; I expended the last of my sixty-six francs,--and then--one must live. I showed my arms, fit for labour; the people shut their doors. I offered my day’s work for fifteen sous, for ten sous, for five sous! and no one would have me. What could be done? One day, being hungry, I knocked my elbow through a baker’s window; I seized on a loaf, and the baker seized on me. I did not eat the loaf, yet I was condemned to the Galleys for life, with three letters branded on my shoulder; I’ll show them to you if you like. They call that sort of justice _the relapse_. So here I was, a returned horse. I was brought back to Toulon,--this time among the Green-caps (galley-slaves for life); so now I decided to escape. I had _only_ three walls to pierce, two chains to break, and I had one nail! I escaped. They fired the signal gun; for we convicts are, like the Cardinals of Rome, dressed in red, and they fire cannons when we depart! Their powder went to the sparrows! This time, no yellow passport, but then no money either. I met some comrades in the neighbourhood who had also served their time or broken their chains. Their captain proposed to me to join the band. They killed on the highways. I acceded, and I began to kill to live. Sometimes we attacked a Diligence, sometimes it was a post-chaise, sometimes a grazier on horseback. We took the money, we let the horses go, and buried the bodies under a tree, taking care that their feet did not appear; and then we danced on the graves, so that the ground might not seem fresh broken.

“I grew old this way, hiding in the bushes, sleeping in the air, hunted from wood to wood, but at least free and my own master. Everything has an end, and this like the rest: the gendarmes one night caught us at our tricks; my comrades escaped; but I, the oldest, remained under the claw of these cats in cocked hats. They brought me here. I had already mounted all the steps of the justice-ladder, except one. Whether I had now taken a handkerchief or a life was all the same for me. There was but one ‘relapse’ to give me,--the executioner. My business has been short: faith, I began to grow old and good for nothing. My father _married the widow_ (was hanged); I am going to retire to the Abbey of Mont-à-Regret (the Guillotine); that’s all, comrade!”

I remained stupefied during the recital. He laughed louder than at the beginning, and tried to take my hand. I drew back in horror.

“Friend,” cried he, “you don’t seem game. Don’t be foolish on the scaffold: d’ye see? There is one bad moment to pass on the board, but that’s so soon done. I should like to be there to show you the step! Faith, I’ve a great mind not to plead, if they will finish me with you to-day. The same Priest will serve us both. You see I’m a good fellow, eh? I say, shall we be friends?”

Again he advanced a step nearer to me.

“Sir,” I answered, repulsing him, “I decline it.”

Fresh bursts of laughter at my answer.

“Ha, ha, ha! Sir, you must be a Marquis.”

I interrupted him, “My friend, I require reflection: leave me in peace.”

The gravity of my tone rendered him instantly thoughtful. He shook his grey and nearly bald head, while he murmured between his teeth, “I understand now,--the Priest!”

After a few minutes’ silence, he said to me, almost timidly,--

“Sir, you are a Marquis; that is all very well; but you have on such a nice great-coat, which will not be of much use to you. The Executioner will take it. Give it to me, and I will sell it for tobacco.”

I took off my great-coat, and gave it to him. He began to clap his hands with childish joy; then looking at my shirt-sleeves, and seeing that I shivered, he added, “You are cold, Sir; put on this; it rains, and you will be wet through; besides, you ought to go decently on the wagon!”

While saying this, he took off his coarse, grey woollen jacket, and put my arms into it, which I allowed him to do unconsciously. I then leaned against the wall, and I cannot describe the effect this man had on me. He was examining the coat which I had given him, and uttered each moment an exclamation of delight. “The pockets are quite new! The collar is not in the least worn! It will bring me at least fifteen francs. What luck! I shall have tobacco during all my six weeks.”

The door opened again. They were come to conduct me to the room where the condemned finally await their execution; and the guard was also come to take the other prisoner to the Bicêtre. He placed himself, laughingly, amongst them, and said to the gendarmes,--

“I say, don’t make a mistake! We have changed skins, the gentleman and I; but don’t take me in his place. That won’t suit me at all, now that I can have tobacco for six weeks!”

TWENTY-THIRD PAPER.

That old scoundrel! he took my great-coat from me, for I did not give it to him; and then he left me this rag, his odious jacket. For whom shall I be taken?

It was not from indifference, or from charity, that I let him take it. No; but because he was stronger than I! If I had refused, he would have beaten me with those great coarse hands. Charity, indeed! I was full of bad feeling; I should like to have strangled him with my own hands, the old thief!--to have trampled him under my feet.

I feel my heart full of rage and bitterness, and my nature turned to gall: the approach of violent death renders one wicked.

TWENTY-FOURTH PAPER.

They brought me into an empty cell. I asked for a table, a chair, and writing materials. When all these were brought, I asked for a bed. The turnkey eyed me with astonishment, and seemed mentally to say, “What will be the use of it?” However they made up a chaff bed in the corner. But at the same time a gendarme came to install himself in what was called my chamber. Are they afraid that I would strangle myself with the mattress?

TWENTY-FIFTH PAPER.

It is ten o’clock.

Oh, my poor little girl! In six hours more thy Father will be dead,--something to be dragged about the tables of lecturing rooms; a head to be cast by one party, a trunk to be dissected by another; then all to be thrown together into a bier, and despatched to the felons’ burial-ground. This is what they are going to do with thy Father; yet none of them hate me, all pity me, and all could save me! They are going to kill me, Mary, to kill me in cold blood,--a ceremonial for the general good. Poor little girl! thy Father, who loved thee so well, thy Father who kissed thy little white neck, who passed his hands so fondly through the ringlets of thy silken hair, who danced thee on his knee, and every evening joined thy two little hands to pray to God!

Who will do all this for thee in future? Who now will love thee? My darling child, what wilt thou do for my presents, pretty play things, and kisses? Ah, unfortunate Orphan! What wilt thou do for food and raiment?

If the Jury had seen thee, my pretty little Mary, they would have understood it was wrong to kill the Father of a child three years old.

And when she grows up, what will become of her? Her Father will be one of the disgraces of Paris. She will blush for me and at hearing my name; she will be despised, rejected, reviled, on account of him who loved her with all the tenderness of his heart. Oh, my little Mary, whom I so idolized! can it be true that thou wilt encounter shame and horror through me?

Oh! can it be true that I shall die before the close of day? Those distant shouts which I hear, that mass of animated spectators who are already hastening to the Quays, those gendarmes preparing in their barracks,--is it all for me? Yes, I--myself am going to die?--this actual self which is here, which lives, moves, breathes,--this self which I touch and can feel!

TWENTY-SIXTH PAPER.

If I even knew how _it_ is built, and in what way one dies upon it; but it is horrible, I do not know this.

The very name of it is frightful, and I cannot understand how I have hitherto been able to write and utter it. The idea I attach to this hateful name is vague, undefined, and therefore more sinister. I construct and demolish in my mind continually its hideous scaffolding.

I dare not ask a question about it; yet it is dreadful not to know what it is, and how to act. I fancy there is a sort of hollow, and that you are laid on your face, and--

Ah, my hair will be white before my head falls!

TWENTY-SEVENTH PAPER.

I had a glimpse of _it_ once. I was passing by the Grêve in a carriage, about eleven o’clock, one morning, when a crowd impeded our progress. I looked out of the window; a dense throng of men, women, and children filled the place and the neighbouring streets. Above the crowd I saw a kind of frame of red wood, which three men were building. I turned away my head with disgust. Close to the carriage there was a woman who said to a child, “Now, look! the axe slides badly; they are going to grease the slide with a candle-end.”

They are probably doing the same now. Eleven o’clock has just struck. No doubt they are greasing the slide.

Oh, unhappy creature! this time I shall not turn away my head.

TWENTY-EIGHTH PAPER.

Oh for a pardon! My reprieve! Perhaps I shall be pardoned. The King has no dislike to me. I wish to see my lawyer! He was right, and I should prefer the galleys. Five years of the galleys,--nay, twenty years, or even the galleys for life. Yes, and to be branded with letters! But it would let me have a reprieve of my life! A galley-slave can move, come and go, and see the sunshine.

Oh! I must see my lawyer; he shall discover some new plea to urge in mitigation of my sentence.

How can I thus write when every point of his eloquence has already failed, and been unanswerably refuted!

TWENTY-NINTH PAPER.

The Priest returned. He has white hair, a very gentle look, a good and respectable countenance, and is a charitable man. This morning I saw him empty his purse into the hands of the prisoners. Whence is it then that his voice causes no emotion, and he does not ever seem affected by his own theme? Whence is it that he has as yet said nothing which has won on my intellect or my heart?

This morning I was bewildered; I scarcely heard what he said; his words seemed to me useless, and I remained indifferent; they glided away like those drops of rain off the window-panes of my cell.

Nevertheless, when he came just now to my room, his appearance did me good. Amongst all mankind he is the only one who is still a brother for me, I reflected; and I felt an ardent thirst for good and consoling words.

When he was seated on the chair, and I on the bed, he said to me,--

“My son,--”

This word opened my heart. He continued:

“My son, do you believe in God?”

“Oh, yes, Father!” I answered him.

“Do you believe in the holy Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church?”

“Willingly,” said I.

“My son,” returned he, “you have an air of doubt.”

Then he began to speak. He spoke a long time; he uttered a quantity of words. Then, when he had finished, he rose, and looked at me for the first time since the beginning of his discourse, and said “Well?”

I protest I had listened to him with avidity at first, then with attention, then with consideration.

I also rose and said, “Sir, leave me for a time, I beg of you.”

He asked, “When shall I return.”

“I will let you know, Sir.”

Then he withdrew in silence, but shaking his head as though inwardly exclaiming, “An Unbeliever.”

No! low as I have fallen, I am _not_ an unbeliever. God is my witness that I believe in Him. But how did that old man address me? Nothing to be felt, nothing to affect me, nothing to draw forth tears, nothing which sprung from his heart to enter into mine,--nothing which was addressed from himself to myself.

On the contrary, there was something vague, inaccentuated, applicable to any case and to none in particular: emphatic where it should have been profound, flat where it ought to have been simple; a species of sentimental sermon and theological elegy. Now and then a quotation in Latin; here and there the names of Saint Augustine and Saint Gregory, and others of the Calendar. And throughout he had the air of reciting a lesson which he had already twenty times repeated; seeming to go over a theme almost obliterated in his memory from being so long known; but not one look in his eyes, not one accent in his voice, to indicate that _he_ was interested!

And how could it be otherwise? This Priest is the head Chaplain of the Prison; his calling is to console and exhort,--that is, he lives by it. Condemned felons are the spring of his eloquence; he receives their confession, and prays with them, because he keeps his place by it. He has advanced in years in conducting men to death from his youth, he has grown accustomed to that which makes others shudder. The dungeon and scaffold are every-day matters with him.

He receives notice the preceding evening that he will have to attend some one the following day, at a certain hour. He asks, “Is it for the Galleys or an execution?” and he asks no more respecting them, but comes next day as a matter of course.

_Oh that they would bring me, instead of this man, some young curate, some aged Priest, taken by chance from the nearest parish! Let them find him at his devotional studies, and, without warning, say to him, “There is a man who is going to die, and it is reserved for you to console him. You must be there when they bind his hands; you must take a place in the fatal cart, with your crucifix, and conceal the executioner from him. You must pass with him through that horrible crowd which is thirsting for his execution; you must embrace him at the foot of the scaffold, and you must remain there until his soul has flown!”_

_When they have said this, let them bring him hither, agitated, palpitating, all shuddering from head to foot. Let me throw myself into his arms; then kneel at his feet, and he will weep, and we will weep together; and he will be eloquent, and I shall be consoled, and my heart will unburthen itself into his heart,--and I shall receive the blessed hope of Redemption, and he will take my Soul!_

THIRTIETH PAPER.

But that old man, what is he to me? What am I to him? Another individual of an unhappy class, a shadow of which he has seen so many; another unit to add to his list of executions.

I have been wrong, perhaps, not to attend to him more; it is he who is good, while I am the reverse. Alas! it was not my fault. The thought of my violent death has spoiled and hardened all within me.

They have just brought me food, as if I could possibly wish for it! I even tried to eat, but the first mouthful fell untasted from my lips.

THIRTY-FIRST PAPER.

Since then a strange circumstance happened. They came to relieve my good old gendarme, with whom, ungrateful egotist that I am, I did not even shake hands. Another took his place; a man with a low forehead, heavy features, and stupid countenance. Beyond this I paid no attention, but seated myself at the table, my forehead resting on my hands, and my mind troubled by thought. A light touch on my shoulder made me look round. It was the new gendarme, with whom I was alone, and who addressed me pretty nearly in these terms:--

“Criminal, have you a kind heart?”

“No!” answered I, impatiently. The abruptness of my answer seemed to disconcert him. Nevertheless, he began again, hesitatingly,--

“People are not wicked for the pleasure of being so?”

“Why not?” answered I. “If you have nothing but that to say to me, leave me in peace. What is your aim?”

“I beg your pardon, Criminal,” he returned; “I will only say two words, which are these: If you could cause the happiness of a poor man, and that it cost you nothing, would you not do so?”

I answered gravely, “Surely, you cannot allude to me as having power to confer happiness?”

He lowered his voice and assumed a mysterious air, which ill-suited with his idiotic countenance.

“Yes, Criminal, yes,--happiness! fortune!” whispered he; “all this can come to me through you. Listen here, I am a poor gendarme; the service is heavy, the pay is light; my horse is my own, and ruins me. So I put into the lottery as a counterbalance. Hitherto I have only missed by not having the right numbers. I am always very near them. If I buy seventy-six, number seventy-seven comes up a prize. Have a little patience, if you please; I have almost done. Well, here is a lucky opportunity for me. It appears, Criminal, begging your pardon, that you are to be executed to-day. It is a certain fact that the dead who are destroyed that way see the lottery before it is drawn on earth. Promise that your spirit shall appear to me to-morrow evening, to give me three numbers,--three good ones, eh? What trouble will it be to you? and I am not afraid of ghosts. Be easy on that point. Here’s my address: Popincourt Barracks, staircase A, No. 26, at the end of the corridor. You will know me again, won’t you? Come even to-night, if it suits you better.”

I would have disdained to reply to such an imbecile, if a mad hope had not crossed my mind. In my desperate position there are moments when one fancies that a chain may be broken by a hair.

“Listen,” said I to him, acting my part as well as a dying wretch could. “I can indeed render thee richer than the King. I can make thee gain millions, on one condition.”

He opened his stupid eyes.

“What, what? I will do anything to please you, Criminal.”

“Then instead of three numbers I promise to tell you four. Change coats with me.”

“Oh, is that all?” cried he, undoing the first hooks of his uniform cheerfully.

I rose from my chair; I watched all his movements with a beating heart. I already fancied the doors opening before the uniform of a gendarme; and then the prison--the street--the town--left far behind me! But suddenly he turned round with indecision, and asked,--

“I say,--it is not to go out of this?”

I saw that all was lost; nevertheless, I tried one last effort, useless as it was foolish.

“Yes, it is,” said I to him; “but as thy fortune will be made--”

He interrupted me.

“Oh, law, no! on account of my numbers! To make them good, you must be dead, you know!”

I sat down again, silent, and more desponding, from all the hope that I had conceived.

THIRTY-SECOND PAPER.

I shut my eyes, covered them with my hands, and sought to forget the present in the past. In a rapid reverie, the recollections of childhood and youth came back one by one, soft, calm, smiling, like islands of flowers on the black gulf of confused thoughts which whirled through my brain.

I was again a child,--a laughing, healthy schoolboy, playing, running, shouting with my brothers, in the broad green walks of the old garden where my first years were passed.

And then, four years later, behold me there again, still a child, but a passionate dreamer. And there is a young girl in the garden,--a little Spaniard, with large eyes and long hair, her dark polished skin, her rosy lips and cheeks, the Andalusian of fourteen, named _Pepa_. Our mothers had told us to “go and run together;” we had come forth to walk. They had told us to play; but we had talked instead. Only the year before, we used to play and quarrel and dispute together. I tyrannized over Pepita for the best apple in the orchard; I beat her for a bird’s nest. She cried; I scolded her, and we went to complain of each other to our mothers. But now--she was leaning on my arm, and I felt proud and softened. We walked slowly, and we spoke low. I gathered for her some flowers, and our hands trembled on meeting. She spoke to me of the birds, of the sky above us, of the crimson sun-set behind the trees; or else of her schoolfellows, her gown and ribbons. We talked in innocence, but we both blushed. The child had grown into a young girl. After we had walked for some time, I made her sit down on a bank; she was smiling. I was serious.

“Sit down there,” said she, “there is still daylight; let us read something. Have you a book?”

I happened to have a favourite volume with me. I drew near her, and opened it by chance. She leaned her shoulder against mine, and we began to read the same page. Before turning the leaf, she was always obliged to wait for me. My mind was less quick than hers. “Have you finished?” she would ask, when I had only just commenced. Then our heads leaned together, our hair mixed, our breath gradually mingled, and at last our lips met.

When we again thought of continuing our reading it was starlight. I shall remember that evening all my life!

Oh, heavens! All _my_ life!

THIRTY-THIRD PAPER.

The clock had just struck some hour,--I do not know which. I do not hear the strokes plainly. I seem to have the peal of an organ in my ears. It is the confusion of my last thoughts. At this final day, when I look back over the events of life, I recall my crime with horror; but I wish to have still longer to repent of it. I felt more remorse after my condemnation; since then it seems as if there were no space but for thoughts of death. But now, oh, how I wish to repent me thoroughly! When I had lingered for a minute on what had passed in my life, and then came back to the thought of its approaching termination, I shuddered as at something new. My happy childhood, my fair youth,--a golden web with its end stained. If any read my history, after so many years of innocence and happiness, they will not believe in this execrable year, which began by a crime, and will close with an execution. It would appear impossible.

And nevertheless, oh,--imperfection of human laws and human nature!--I was not ill-disposed.

THIRTY-FOURTH PAPER.

Oh! to die in a few hours, and to think that a year ago, on the same day, I was innocent and at liberty, enjoying autumnal walks, wandering beneath the trees! To think that in this same moment there are, in the houses around me, men coming and going, laughing and talking, reading newspapers, thinking of business; shopkeepers selling their wares, young girls preparing their ball-dresses for the evening; mothers playing with their children!

THIRTY-FIFTH PAPER.