‘This death gave rise to gossip very quickly,’ said Collin.
‘Look, I haven’t seen Europe and Paccard again, I’m afraid they may have filched the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs,’ said Asia.
‘Ah! the blackguards!…’ said Dodgedeath. ‘That bit of larceny is going to be our downfall!…’
The start of Corentin’s revenge
HUMAN justice, in the form in which it flourishes in Paris, that is to say in its cleverest, most mistrustful, wittiest, most educated form, too witty in some ways, for it interprets the law differently on different occasions, had at last put its hand on the originators of this horrible intrigue. Baron Nucingen, recognizing the effects of poison, and failing to find his seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, thought that one of those odious characters who so greatly displeased him, Paccard or Europe, was guilty of the crime. In his first moment of fury, he made haste to the Prefecture of Police. It was a stroke on the bell which alerted all Corentin’s numbered men. The Prefecture, the Attorney General’s office, the local police superintendent, the justice of the peace, the examining magistrate, everything was set in motion. At nine o’ clock in the evening, three doctors who had been summoned were conducting an autopsy on poor Esther, and a thorough search was being made! Dodgedeath, warned by Asia, exclaimed: ‘I’m not known here, I can dissimulate myself!’ He pulled himself up by the frame of the hinged skylight in his attic room, and, with unparallelled agility, stood on the roof, from which point of vantage he studied his surroundings with the calmness of a slater. ‘Good,’ he said to himself seeing, five houses away, in the rue de Provence, a garden, ‘that will do for me!…’
‘Better come quietly, Dodgedeath!’ was the reply made by Contenson who stepped out from behind a chimneystack. ‘You can explain to Monsieur Camusot what sort of religious service you’re conducting on the roof-tops, Monsieur l’Abbé, and especially why you were running away…’
‘I’ve got enemies in Spain,’ said Carlos Herrera.
‘Let’s go there by way of your attic, to Spain,’ said Contenson.
The sham Spaniard appeared to yield, but, bracing himself against the frame of the skylight, he took hold of Contenson and threw him with such violence that the spy landed up in the gutter in the rue Saint Georges. Contenson lay dead on the battlefield. Jacques Collin returned calmly to his attic, and went to bed.
‘Give me something to make me really ill, without killing me,’ he said to Asia, 'for I must be at death’s door so that I can’t reply to anything I’m asked by the inquisitor. Don’t worry, I’m a priest, and a priest I shall remain. I’ve just got rid, in a way that will seem quite natural, of one of those who could have unmasked me.’
At seven o’ clock the previous evening, Lucien had set out in his gig with a passport made out that morning for Fontainebleau, had changed horses once and spent the night at the last inn on the Nemours side. At six o’ clock next morning, he went alone, on foot, into the forest through which he walked as far as Bouron.
‘That,’ he said to himself, sitting down on a rock from which the fair landscape of Bouron may be seen, ‘is the fatal place at which Napoleon hoped to make a gigantic stand, the last evening but one before his abdication.’
At daybreak, he heard the rumbling of a post-chaise and saw an open carriage go by with the servants of the young Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu and Clotilde de Grandlieu’s maid.
‘There they are,’ Lucien said to himself, ‘come on, let’s play this little scene nicely, and I’m saved, I shall be the duke’s son-in-law in spite of the duke.’
An hour later, he heard the unmistakable sound of an elegant travelling carriage, the berline in which the two women rode. They had arranged for the carriage to brake hard on the hill outside Bouron, and the manservant who was riding behind stopped the berline. At that moment, Lucien came forward.
‘Clotilde!’ he cried knocking on the glass.
‘No,’ said the young duchess to her friend, ‘he is not to enter the carriage, and we shall not be alone with him. Talk with him for the last time, I don’t mind that: but it must be in the roadway where we shall go on foot, followed by Baptiste… It is a fine day, we are well-wrapped-up, we’re not afraid of the cold. The carriage will follow us…’
And the two women got down.
‘Baptiste,’ said the young duchess, ‘the post-boy can go very gently, we’re going to walk for a little way, and you can come with us.’
Madeleine de Mortsauf took Clotilde by the arm, and allowed Lucien to speak. They walked together thus as far as the little village of Grez. It was then eight o’clock, and there Clotilde dismissed Lucien.
‘Well, my dear,’ she said bringing the long interview to a dignified end, ‘I shall never marry anyone but you. I’d rather believe in you than in other men, or my father and mother… Nobody can offer better proof of attachment, can they?… Now you must try to dissipate the prejudices you’re faced with…’
At that moment several horses were heard at a gallop, and, to the astonishment of the two ladies, a detachment of gendarmerie surrounded the little group.
‘What do you want?… said Lucien with a dandy’s arrogance.
‘Are you Monsieur Lucien Chardon de Rubempré?’ said the procurator of Fontainebleau.
‘That’s my name, yes.’
‘You’ll be sleeping tonight at La Force,’ replied the attorney, ‘I have a warrant of arrest made out for you.’
‘Who are these ladies?…’ exclaimed the leader of the detachment.
‘Ah, yes, I beg your pardon, ladies, your passports? for, according to my information, Monsieur Lucien is acquainted with women who are capable of…’
‘Do you take the duchess of Lenoncourt-Chaulieu for a tart?’ said Madeleine giving the district attorney a duchess look.
‘You are handsome enough,’ the magistrate said blandly.
‘Baptiste, show our passports,’ replied the young duchess with a faint smile.
‘And of what crime is Monsieur accused?’ said Clotilde whom the duchess wished to help back into the carriage.
‘Of complicity in theft and murder,’ replied the leader of the constabulary.
Baptiste lifted Mademoiselle de Grandlieu into the berline in a dead faint.
At midnight, Lucien was entered at La Force, a prison situated at the junction of the rue Pavée and the rue des Ballets, and placed in solitary confinement; arrested earlier, Father Carlos Herrera was already there.
PART THREE
WHERE EVIL WAYS LEAD
The salad basket
NEXT day, at six o’ clock, two carriages with post-boys, of the kind known in the vigorous language of the people as salad baskets, emerged from the yard of La Force and proceeded towards the Conciergerie and the adjoining Law Courts.
Few of those who stroll in our streets have failed at one time or another to meet this type of ambulant prison; but though most books are written exclusively for Parisians, other people may be pleased to find here some description of this powerful instrument of our criminal justice. Who knows? the police forces of Russia, Germany or Austria, the magistracies of countries without salad baskets may find such a description profitable; while, in a number of foreign countries, imitation of this mode of transport would certainly prove beneficial to the prisoners themselves.
This ignoble carriage with its yellow body, raised on two wheels and lined with sheet-iron, is divided into two compartments. The front part contains a leather-covered bench, protected by a splashboard. This is the free part of the basket, intended for an usher and a constable. A strong grating of iron trellis, over the full height and breadth of the carriage, separates this cab from the second compartment in which are two wooden benches placed, like those in omnibuses, at either side of the body, and on these the prisoners sit; they are introduced by way of folding steps through an unlighted door at the tail of the vehicle. The nickname ‘salad basket’ comes from the fact that, originally, the body being of open work all over,
the prisoners were shaken about just like salads. For greater security, in case something unexpected happens, the vehicle is followed by an armed constable on horseback, especially when it is taking those condemned to death to their last ordeal. Escape is thus impossible. Lined as the vehicle is with sheet metal, no sort of tool can bite a way out. The prisoners, carefully searched at the time of their arrest or committal, may at best have concealed about their person short lengths of watch-spring useful for sawing through bars, but powerless with plane surfaces. Thus the salad basket, perfected by the genius of the Paris police, ends by serving as a model for the cellular van which transports convicts to the penal settlement, replacing the frightful tumbril, the shame of earlier civilizations, though Manon Lescaut made it famous.
Accused persons are in the first place taken by salad basket from the various prisons in the capital to the Palais de Justice there to be interrogated by the magistrate in charge of the judicial inquiry. In prison slang, this is called seeing the judge. The same persons may thereafter be taken to the Palais from the same prisons to receive their sentences, when it is only a matter of summary jurisdiction; then, when in the eyes of the law we are concerned with serious crime, they are decanted from houses of detention into the Conciergerie, which is the headquarters of justice in the Seine department. Finally, those condemned to death are taken in a salad basket from Bicêtre to the Saint James’s barrier, which is the place of execution since the July revolution. Thanks to the work of philanthropists, these unfortunates no longer undergo the torture of transportation from the Conciergerie to the Place de Grève or Strand in a cart exactly like those used by wood-sellers. Such a cart is now employed only to transport the scaffold itself. Without this explanation, we shall fail to understand the joke made by a celebrated murderer to his accomplice as they were pushed into the salad basket: ‘Now it’s all up to the horses!’ It would hardly be possible to face the extreme penalty in greater comfort than that in which it is currently faced in Paris.
The two patients
A T present, the two salad baskets leaving so early in the morning were being used somewhat irregularly to transfer two accused persons from La Force to the Conciergerie, and the two prisoners each had a salad basket to himself.
Nine tenths of the readers and nine tenths of this last tenth are certainly ignorant of the considerable differences which separate the words: inculpé, prévenu, accusé, détenu, or maison d’arrêt, maison de justice and maison de détention; everyone, indeed, may be surprised to learn that these distinctions are crucial to any understanding of French criminal law, of which a clear and succinct account will presently be offered them as much for their general instruction as in order that the conclusion of this story may also be clear. The reader’s curiosity may, however, be sufficiently aroused, to begin with, when he knows that the first salad basket contained Jacques Collin and the second Lucien, who within a few hours had descended from the very summit of social grandeur to the depths of a prison cell. The attitude of the two accomplices was characteristic. Lucien de Rubempré concealed himself to avoid being seen by passers-by who peered through the grating of the sinister and fatal conveyance as it made its way along the rue Saint Antoine to come out by the river down the rue du Martroi, then through the Arcade Saint Jean under which it had to pass to cross the Place de I’Hôtel de Ville. This arcade now forms the entrance to the prefectoral residence within the vast City Hall. The intrepid convict kept his face against the grill which divided the carriage, peering between the heads of the usher and the gendarme who, confident in the security of their salad basket, talked happily.
The tempestuous July days of 1830 caused so great an upheaval that what took place shortly before them has been forgotten. People were so concerned with politics during the last six months of the year, that scarcely anyone still recalls, however strange they may have been, what personal, judicial and financial catastrophes, the annual diet of Parisian curiosity, duly occupied them during the first six months. It is therefore necessary to remind the reader to what extent Paris was then agitated by news of the arrest of a Spanish priest found at the house of a courtesan and by that of the elegant Lucien de Rubempré, future husband of Mademoiselle de Grandlieu, captured on the highway to Italy, at the little village of Grez, the two of them charged with a murder of which the proceeds amounted to seven millions; for the scandal provoked by this case overshadowed for some days the nevertheless prodigious interest of the last elections held under Charles X.
For one thing, this criminal trial resulted in part from an action brought by Baron Nucingen. For another, Lucien, on the eve of being made private secretary to the prime minister, was talked of at the highest level in Parisian society. In all the drawing-rooms of Paris, more than one young man remembered his envy of Lucien when the latter had been singled out by the fair Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and all the women knew to what extent Madame de Sérisy, wife of one of the most influential of current statesmen, interested herself in him. The victim’s extreme good looks were famous throughout the various worlds of which Paris is composed: the world of high society, the world of finance, the world of harlotry, the world of young men, the literary world. For two days past, Paris had talked of nothing else but these two arrests. The examining magistrate upon whom the conduct of the judicial inquiry had devolved, Monsieur Camusot, saw in it a way to his own advancement; and, in order to press on with the matter at the greatest possible speed, had ordered the two accused (or inculpated) to be transferred from La Force to the Conciergerie as soon as Lucien de Rubempré had been brought from Fontainebleau. The abbé Carlos and Lucien having spent, the former no more than twelve hours and the latter half a night at La Force, there is no point in describing that prison which has since been greatly modified; while, as to the committal proceedings, to present them in detail would be a mere repetition of what was to take place at the Conciergerie.
Criminal law for the man in the street
BUT before going into the awful drama of a criminal inquiry, it is indispensable, as we have just said, to explain the usual course of a trial of this kind; its various phases will then be better understood both in France and abroad; the previously uninformed will also be in a position to appreciate the simplicity of criminal proceedings at law, as these were conceived by our legislators under Napoleon. It is all the more important in that this great and finely constructed work is, at the moment, threatened with destruction by the so-called penitentiary system.
A crime is committed: if it is flagrant, the inculpés or persons detected are taken to the nearest guard post and put in the cell popularly called a violon, doubtless because of the music which is heard there: shouting or weeping. Thence, the prisoner is taken before the police superintendent, who conducts a preliminary investigation and who may discharge him at once, if there has been a mistake; otherwise inculpés are taken to the central police station, where the police hold them at the disposition of the district attorney and the examining magistrate, who, according to the seriousness of the case, alerted more or less promptly, arrive and question those in custody. According to the nature of his first findings, the examining magistrate issues a warrant of committal and consigns the inculpé to a remand centre or maison d’arrêt, of which there are three in Paris: Sainte Pélagie, La Force and Les Madelonnettes.
Note the expression: inculpé. The French Code has set up three essential distinctions in criminal law: inculpation, prévention, accusation. Until a warrant of arrest is signed, the presumed authors of a crime or misdemeanour are inculpés; placed under arrest in due form, they become prévenus, they remain purely and simply prévenus so long as the judicial inquiry proceeds. Thereafter, the tribunal being convinced that the case against them should be brought before the courts, their condition is that of accusés, once the Crown has been advised by the Attorney General that they may appear on indictment before a court of assize. Thus, persons suspected of a crime pass from one to another of three different conditions, are sifted three times before th
eir appearance at a public hearing. At the first stage, the innocent may vindicate themselves in the eyes of the public, the town guard, the police. At the second stage, they stand charged before a magistrate, are confronted with witnesses, and the bill of indictment against them is examined by a chamber of the tribunal in Paris, by a whole tribunal in the provinces. At the third stage, they appear before twelve counsellors, and the judgment of a court of assize may, in the event of misdirection or an error of form, be referred by the accused to the Central Court of Criminal Appeal or Cour de Cassation. The jury does not know what popular, administrative and judicial authorities it affronts when it acquits accusés. Thus, it appears to us that, in Paris (whatever may be the case under other jurisdictions), an innocent man is unlikely to find himself in the dock at the Court of Assize.
A détenu is a man who has been sentenced. Our criminal law has set up maisons d’arrét, maisons de justice and maisons de détention, juridical differences which correspond with those between the prévenu, the accusé and the condamné. Mere imprisonment carries with it only light punishment, it is the penalty for minor offences; but detention is afflictive and may, in certain cases, involve banishment or other loss of civil rights. Those who nowadays advocate a uniform penitentiary system would thus destroy an admirable penal code according to which penalties were carefully graduated, and the result would be to punish trifling misdemeanours almost as severely as serious crimes. The code instituted by Napoleon, it may be noted, differs greatly from that of revolutionary times which it superseded.
In important cases, like the one before us, the inculpés almost invariably become prévenus at the outset. The warrant for committal or arrest is issued immediately. In fact, more often than not, the inculpés have either taken flight, or they are surprised in the act. Thus, as we have seen, the Police, which is only the means of executing the law, and Justice had appeared with the speed of lightning at Esther’s domicile. Even had no motives of revenge been whispered into the ear of the Police Judiciaire (as the Brigade de Sûreté or crime squad is more properly called), information of a theft of seven hundred and fifty thousand francs had been laid by Baron Nucingen.