Chapter 38

Le Biffon was a complete contrast to Fil-de-Soie. This famous robber, short, burly, and fat, but active, with a livid complexion, and deep-set black eyes, dressed like a cook, standing squarely on very bandy legs, was alarming to behold, for in his countenance all the features predominated that are most typical of the carnivorous beast.

Fil-de-Soie and le Biffon were always wheedling la Pouraille, who had lost all hope. The murderer knew that he would be tried, sentenced, and executed within four months. Indeed, Fil-de-Soie and le Biffon, la Pouraille’s chums, never called him anything but _le Chanoine de l’Abbaye de Monte-a-Regret_ (a grim paraphrase for a man condemned to the guillotine). It is easy to understand why Fil-de-Soie and le Biffon should fawn on la Pouraille. The man had somewhere hidden two hundred and fifty thousand francs in gold, his share of the spoil found in the house of the Crottats, the “victims,” in newspaper phrase. What a splendid fortune to leave to two pals, though the two old stagers would be sent back to the galleys within a few days! Le Biffon and Fil-de-Soie would be sentenced for a term of fifteen years for robbery with violence, without prejudice to the ten years’ penal servitude on a former sentence, which they had taken the liberty of cutting short. So, though one had twenty-two and the other twenty-six years of imprisonment to look forward to, they both hoped to escape, and come back to find la Pouraille’s mine of gold.

But the “Ten-thousand man” kept his secret; he did not see the use of telling it before he was sentenced. He belonged to the “upper ten” of the hulks, and had never betrayed his accomplices. His temper was well known; Monsieur Popinot, who had examined him, had not been able to get anything out of him.

This terrible trio were at the further end of the prison-yard, that is to say, near the better class of cells. Fil-de-Soie was giving a lecture to a young man who was IN for his first offence, and who, being certain of ten years’ penal servitude, was gaining information as to the various convict establishments.

“Well, my boy,” Fil-de-Soie was saying sententiously as Jacques Collin appeared on the scene, “the difference between Brest, Toulon, and Rochefort is----”

“Well, old cock?” said the lad, with the curiosity of a novice.

This prisoner, a man of good family, accused of forgery, had come down from the cell next to that where Lucien had been.

“My son,” Fil-de-Soie went on, “at Brest you are sure to get some beans at the third turn if you dip your spoon in the bowl; at Toulon you never get any till the fifth; and at Rochefort you get none at all, unless you are an old hand.”

Having spoken, the philosopher joined le Biffon and la Pouraille, and all three, greatly puzzled by the priest, walked down the yard, while Jacques Collin, lost in grief, came up it. _Trompe-la-Mort_, absorbed in terrible meditations, the meditations of a fallen emperor, did not think of himself as the centre of observation, the object of general attention, and he walked slowly, gazing at the fatal window where Lucien had hanged himself. None of the prisoners knew of this catastrophe, since, for reasons to be presently explained, the young forger had not mentioned the subject. The three pals agreed to cross the priest’s path.

“He is no priest,” said Fil-de-Soie; “he is an old stager. Look how he drags his right foot.”

It is needful to explain here--for not every reader has had a fancy to visit the galleys--that each convict is chained to another, an old one and a young one always as a couple; the weight of this chain riveted to a ring above the ankle is so great as to induce a limp, which the convict never loses. Being obliged to exert one leg much more than the other to drag this fetter (manicle is the slang name for such irons), the prisoner inevitably gets into the habit of making the effort. Afterwards, though he no longer wears the chain, it acts upon him still; as a man still feels an amputated leg, the convict is always conscious of the anklet, and can never get over that trick of walking. In police slang, he “drags his right.” And this sign, as well known to convicts among themselves as it is to the police, even if it does not help to identify a comrade, at any rate confirms recognition.

In _Trompe-la Mort_, who had escaped eight years since, this trick had to a great extent worn off; but just now, lost in reflections, he walked at such a slow and solemn pace that, slight as the limp was, it was strikingly evident to so practiced an eye as la Pouraille’s. And it is quite intelligible that convicts, always thrown together, as they must be, and never having any one else to study, will so thoroughly have watched each other’s faces and appearance, that certain tricks will have impressed them which may escape their systematic foes--spies, gendarmes, and police-inspectors.

Thus it was a peculiar twitch of the maxillary muscles of the left cheek, recognized by a convict who was sent to a review of the Legion of the Seine, which led to the arrest of the lieutenant-colonel of that corps, the famous Coignard; for, in spite of Bibi-Lupin’s confidence, the police could not dare believe that the Comte Pontis de Sainte-Helene and Coignard were one and the same man.

“He is our boss” (dab or master) said Fil-de-Soie, seeing in Jacques Collin’s eyes the vague glance a man sunk in despair casts on all his surroundings.

“By Jingo! Yes, it is _Trompe-la-Mort_,” said le Biffon, rubbing his hands. “Yes, it is his cut, his build; but what has he done to himself? He looks quite different.”

“I know what he is up to!” cried Fil-de-Soie; “he has some plan in his head. He wants to see the boy” (sa tante) “who is to be executed before long.”

The persons known in prison as tantes or aunts may be best described in the ingenious words of the governor of one of the great prisons to the late Lord Durham, who, during his stay in Paris, visited every prison. So curious was he to see every detail of French justice, that he even persuaded Sanson, at that time the executioner, to erect the scaffold and decapitate a living calf, that he might thoroughly understand the working of the machine made famous by the Revolution. The governor having shown him everything--the yards, the workshops, and the underground cells--pointed to a part of the building, and said, “I need not take your Lordship there; it is the quartier des tantes.”--“Oh,” said Lord Durham, “what are they!”--“The third sex, my Lord.”

“And they are going to scrag Theodore!” said la Pouraille, “such a pretty boy! And such a light hand! such cheek! What a loss to society!”

“Yes, Theodore Calvi is yamming his last meal,” said le Biffon. “His trips will pipe their eyes, for the little beggar was a great pet.”

“So you’re here, old chap?” said la Pouraille to Jacques Collin. And, arm-in-arm with his two acolytes, he barred the way to the new arrival. “Why, Boss, have you got yourself japanned?” he went on.

“I hear you have nobbled our pile” (stolen our money), le Biffon added, in a threatening tone.

“You have just got to stump up the tin!” said Fil-de-Soie.

The three questions were fired at him like three pistol-shots.

“Do not make game of an unhappy priest sent here by mistake,” Jacques Collin replied mechanically, recognizing his three comrades.

“That is the sound of his pipe, if it is not quite the cut of his mug,” said la Pouraille, laying his hand on Jacques Collin’s shoulder.

This action, and the sight of his three chums, startled the “Boss” out of his dejection, and brought him back to a consciousness of reality; for during that dreadful night he had lost himself in the infinite spiritual world of feeling, seeking some new road.

“Do not blow the gaff on your Boss!” said Jacques Collin in a hollow threatening tone, not unlike the low growl of a lion. “The reelers are here; let them make fools of themselves. I am faking to help a pal who is awfully down on his luck.”

He spoke with the unction of a priest trying to convert the wretched, and a look which flashed round the yard, took in the warders under the archways, and pointed them out with a wink to his three companions.

“Are there not narks about? Keep your peepers open and a sharp lookout. Don’t know me, Nanty parnarly, and soap me down for a priest, or I will do for you all, you and your molls and your blunt.”

“What, do you funk our blabbing?” said Fil-de-Soie. “Have you come to help your boy to guy?”

“Madeleine is getting ready to be turned off in the Square” (the Place de Greve), said la Pouraille.

“Theodore!” said Jacques Collin, repressing a start and a cry.

“They will have his nut off,” la Pouraille went on; “he was booked for the scaffold two months ago.”

Jacques Collin felt sick, his knees almost failed him; but his three comrades held him up, and he had the presence of mind to clasp his hands with an expression of contrition. La Pouraille and le Biffon respectfully supported the sacrilegious _Trompe-la-Mort_, while Fil-de-Soie ran to a warder on guard at the gate leading to the parlor.

“That venerable priest wants to sit down; send out a chair for him,” said he.

And so Bibi-Lupin’s plot had failed.

_Trompe-la-Mort_, like a Napoleon recognized by his soldiers, had won the submission and respect of the three felons. Two words had done it. Your molls and your blunt--your women and your money--epitomizing every true affection of man. This threat was to the three convicts an indication of supreme power. The Boss still had their fortune in his hands. Still omnipotent outside the prison, their Boss had not betrayed them, as the false pals said.

Their chief’s immense reputation for skill and inventiveness stimulated their curiosity; for, in prison, curiosity is the only goad of these blighted spirits. And Jacques Collin’s daring disguise, kept up even under the bolts and locks of the Conciergerie, dazzled the three felons.

“I have been in close confinement for four days and did not know that Theodore was so near the Abbaye,” said Jacques Collin. “I came in to save a poor little chap who scragged himself here yesterday at four o’clock, and now here is another misfortune. I have not an ace in my hand----”

“Poor old boy!” said Fil-de-Soie.

“Old Scratch has cut me!” cried Jacques Collin, tearing himself free from his supporters, and drawing himself up with a fierce look. “There comes a time when the world is too many for us! The beaks gobble us up at last.”

The governor of the Conciergerie, informed of the Spanish priest’s weak state, came himself to the prison-yard to observe him; he made him sit down on a chair in the sun, studying him with the keen acumen which increases day by day in the practise of such functions, though hidden under an appearance of indifference.

“Oh! Heaven!” cried Jacques Collin. “To be mixed up with such creatures, the dregs of society--felons and murders!--But God will not desert His servant! My dear sir, my stay here shall be marked by deeds of charity which shall live in men’s memories. I will convert these unhappy creatures, they shall learn they have souls, that life eternal awaits them, and that though they have lost all on earth, they still may win heaven--Heaven which they may purchase by true and genuine repentance.”

Twenty or thirty prisoners had gathered in a group behind the three terrible convicts, whose ferocious looks had kept a space of three feet between them and their inquisitive companions, and they heard this address, spoken with evangelical unction.

“Ay, Monsieur Gault,” said the formidable la Pouraille, “we will listen to what this one may say----”

“I have been told,” Jacques Collin went on, “that there is in this prison a man condemned to death.”

“The rejection of his appeal is at this moment being read to him,” said Monsieur Gault.

“I do not know what that means,” said Jacques Collin, artlessly looking about him.

“Golly, what a flat!” said the young fellow, who, a few minutes since, had asked Fil-de-Soie about the beans on the hulks.

“Why, it means that he is to be scragged to-day or to-morrow.”

“Scragged?” asked Jacques Collin, whose air of innocence and ignorance filled his three pals with admiration.

“In their slang,” said the governor, “that means that he will suffer the penalty of death. If the clerk is reading the appeal, the executioner will no doubt have orders for the execution. The unhappy man has persistently refused the offices of the chaplain.”

“Ah! Monsieur le Directeaur, this is a soul to save!” cried Jacques Collin, and the sacrilegious wretch clasped his hands with the expression of a despairing lover, which to the watchful governor seemed nothing less than divine fervor. “Ah, monsieur,” _Trompe-la-Mort_ went on, “let me prove to you what I am, and how much I can do, by allowing me to incite that hardened heart to repentance. God has given me a power of speech which produces great changes. I crush men’s hearts; I open them.--What are you afraid of? Send me with an escort of gendarmes, of turnkeys--whom you will.”

“I will inquire whether the prison chaplain will allow you to take his place,” said Monsieur Gault.

And the governor withdrew, struck by the expression, perfectly indifferent, though inquisitive, with which the convicts and the prisoners on remand stared at this priest, whose unctuous tones lent a charm to his half-French, half-Spanish lingo.

“How did you come in here, Monsieur l’Abbe?” asked the youth who had questioned Fil-de-Soie.

“Oh, by a mistake!” replied Jacques Collin, eyeing the young gentleman from head to foot. “I was found in the house of a courtesan who had died, and was immediately robbed. It was proved that she had killed herself, and the thieves--probably the servants--have not yet been caught.”

“And it was for that theft that your young man hanged himself?”

“The poor boy, no doubt, could not endure the thought of being blighted by his unjust imprisonment,” said _Trompe-la-Mort_, raising his eyes to heaven.

“Ay,” said the young man; “they were coming to set him free just when he had killed himself. What bad luck!”

“Only innocent souls can be thus worked on by their imagination,” said Jacques Collin. “For, observe, he was the loser by the theft.”

“How much money was it?” asked Fil-de-Soie, the deep and cunning.

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand francs,” said Jacques Collin blandly.

The three convicts looked at each other and withdrew from the group that had gathered round the sham priest.

“He screwed the moll’s place himself!” said Fil-de-Soie in a whisper to le Biffon, “and they want to put us in a blue funk for our cartwheels” (thunes de balles, five-franc pieces).

“He will always be the boss of the swells,” replied la Pouraille. “Our pieces are safe enough.”

La Pouraille, wishing to find some man he could trust, had an interest in considering Jacques Collin an honest man. And in prison, of all places, a man believes what he hopes.

“I lay you anything, he will come round the big Boss and save his chum!” said Fil-de-Soie.

“If he does that,” said le Biffon, “though I don’t believe he is really God, he must certainly have smoked a pipe with old Scratch, as they say.”

“Didn’t you hear him say, ‘Old Scratch has cut me’?” said Fil-de-Soie.

“Oh!” cried la Pouraille, “if only he would save my nut, what a time I would have with my whack of the shiners and the yellow boys I have stowed.”

“Do what he bids you!” said Fil-de Soie.

“You don’t say so?” retorted la Pouraille, looking at his pal.

“What a flat you are! You will be booked for the Abbaye!” said le Biffon. “You have no other door to budge, if you want to keep on your pins, to yam, wet your whistle, and fake to the end; you must take his orders.”

“That’s all right,” said la Pouraille. “There is not one of us that will blow the gaff, or if he does, I will take him where I am going----”

“And he’ll do it too,” cried Fil-de-Soie.

The least sympathetic reader, who has no pity for this strange race, may conceive of the state of mind of Jacques Collin, finding himself between the dead body of the idol whom he had been bewailing during five hours that night, and the imminent end of his former comrade--the dead body of Theodore, the young Corsican. Only to see the boy would demand extraordinary cleverness; to save him would need a miracle; but he was thinking of it.

For the better comprehension of what Jacques Collin proposed to attempt, it must be remarked that murderers and thieves, all the men who people the galleys, are not so formidable as is generally supposed. With a few rare exceptions these creatures are all cowards, in consequence no doubt, of the constant alarms which weigh on their spirit. The faculties being perpetually on the stretch in thieving, and the success of a stroke of business depending on the exertion of every vital force, with a readiness of wit to match their dexterity of hand, and an alertness which exhausts the nervous system; these violent exertions of will once over, they become stupid, just as a singer or a dancer drops quite exhausted after a fatiguing pas seul, or one of those tremendous duets which modern composers inflict on the public.

Malefactors are, in fact, so entirely bereft of common sense, or so much oppressed by fear, that they become absolutely childish. Credulous to the last degree, they are caught by the bird-lime of the simplest snare. When they have done a successful _job_, they are in such a state of prostration that they immediately rush into the debaucheries they crave for; they get drunk on wine and spirits, and throw themselves madly into the arms of their women to recover composure by dint of exhausting their strength, and to forget their crime by forgetting their reason.

Then they are at the mercy of the police. When once they are in custody they lose their head, and long for hope so blindly that they believe anything; indeed, there is nothing too absurd for them to accept it. An instance will suffice to show how far the simplicity of a criminal who has been _nabbed_ will carry him. Bibi-Lupin, not long before, had extracted a confession from a murderer of nineteen by making him believe that no one under age was ever executed. When this lad was transferred to the Conciergerie to be sentenced after the rejection of his appeal, this terrible man came to see him.

“Are you sure you are not yet twenty?” said he.

“Yes, I am only nineteen and a half.”

“Well, then,” replied Bibi-Lupin, “you may be quite sure of one thing--you will never see twenty.”

“Why?”

“Because you will be scragged within three days,” replied the police agent.

The murderer, who had believed, even after sentence was passed, that a minor would never be executed, collapsed like an omelette soufflee.

Such men, cruel only from the necessity for suppressive evidence, for they murder only to get rid of witnesses (and this is one of the arguments adduced by those who desire the abrogation of capital punishment),--these giants of dexterity and skill, whose sleight of hand, whose rapid sight, whose every sense is as alert as that of a savage, are heroes of evil only on the stage of their exploits. Not only do their difficulties begin as soon as the crime is committed, for they are as much bewildered by the need for concealing the stolen goods as they were depressed by necessity--but they are as weak as a woman in childbed. The vehemence of their schemes is terrific; in success they become like children. In a word, their nature is that of the wild beast--easy to kill when it is full fed. In prison these strange beings are men in dissimulation and in secretiveness, which never yields till the last moment, when they are crushed and broken by the tedium of imprisonment.

It may hence be understood how it was that the three convicts, instead of betraying their chief, were eager to serve him; and as they suspected he was now the owner of the stolen seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, they admired him for his calm resignation, under bolt and bar of the Conciergerie, believing him capable of protecting them all.

When Monsieur Gault left the sham priest, he returned through the parlor to his office, and went in search of Bibi-Lupin, who for twenty minutes, since Jacques Collin had gone downstairs, had been on the watch with his eye at a peephole in a window looking out on the prison-yard.

“Not one of them recognized him,” said Monsieur Gault, “and Napolitas, who is on duty, did not hear a word. The poor priest all through the night, in his deep distress, did not say a word which could imply that his gown covers Jacques Collin.”

“That shows that he is used to prison life,” said the police agent.

Napolitas, Bibi-Lupin’s secretary, being unknown to the criminals then in the Conciergerie, was playing the part of the young gentlemen imprisoned for forgery.

“Well, but he wishes to be allowed to hear the confession of the young fellow who is sentenced to death,” said the governor.

“To be sure! That is our last chance,” cried Bibi-Lupin. “I had forgotten that. Theodore Calvi, the young Corsican, was the man chained to Jacques Collin; they say that on the hulks Jacques Collin made him famous pads----”

The convicts on the galleys contrive a kind of pad to slip between their skin and the fetters to deaden the pressure of the iron ring on their ankles and instep; these pads, made of tow and rags, are known as patarasses.

“Who is warder over the man?” asked Bibi-Lupin.

“Coeur la Virole.”

“Very well, I will go and make up as a gendarme, and be on the watch; I shall hear what they say. I will be even with them.”

“But if it should be Jacques Collin are you not afraid of his recognizing you and throttling you?” said the governor to Bibi-Lupin.

“As a gendarme I shall have my sword,” replied the other; “and, besides, if he is Jacques Collin, he will never do anything that will risk his neck; and if he is a priest, I shall be safe.”

“Then you have no time to lose,” said Monsieur Gault; “it is half-past eight. Father Sauteloup has just read the reply to his appeal, and Monsieur Sanson is waiting in the order room.”

“Yes, it is to-day’s job, the ‘widow’s huzzars’” (les hussards de la veuve, another horrible name for the functionaries of the guillotine) “are ordered out,” replied Bibi-Lupin. “Still, I cannot wonder that the prosecutor-general should hesitate; the boy has always declared that he is innocent, and there is, in my opinion, no conclusive evidence against him.”

“He is a thorough Corsican,” said Monsieur Gault; “he has not said a word, and has held firm all through.”

The last words of the governor of the prison summed up the dismal tale of a man condemned to die. A man cut off from among the living by law belongs to the Bench. The Bench is paramount; it is answerable to nobody, it obeys its own conscience. The prison belongs to the Bench, which controls it absolutely. Poetry has taken possession of this social theme, “the man condemned to death”--a subject truly apt to strike the imagination! And poetry has been sublime on it. Prose has no resource but fact; still, the fact is appalling enough to hold its own against verse. The existence of a condemned man who has not confessed his crime, or betrayed his accomplices, is one of fearful torment. This is no case of iron boots, of water poured into the stomach, or of limbs racked by hideous machinery; it is hidden and, so to speak, negative torture. The condemned wretch is given over to himself with a companion whom he cannot but trust.

The amiability of modern philanthropy fancies it has understood the dreadful torment of isolation, but this is a mistake. Since the abolition of torture, the Bench, in a natural anxiety to reassure the too sensitive consciences of the jury, had guessed what a terrible auxiliary isolation would prove to justice in seconding remorse.