The uses to which these premises are put
IN general, remanded persons, whether they are going, in the jargon of the palace, to school, or to appear before a court of summary jurisdiction, are deposited by their salad baskets straight into the Mousetrap. The Mousetrap, which lies opposite the wicket, is composed of a certain number of cells effected in the kitchens of Saint Louis, where prévenus brought from the various prisons wait either for the court to sit or for their examining magistrate to be ready for them. The Mousetrap is bounded on the north by the embankment, on the east by the guard post of the municipal guard, on the west by the Conciergerie yard and on the south by a huge vaulted room (doubtless the old banqueting hall), not at present in use. Over the Mousetrap extends a large interior guardroom, with a window looking out over the Conciergerie yard, it is occupied by the departmental constabulary and the staircase ends there. When it is time for the courts to sit, ushers appear to call out the names of those who are to appear, constables go down in number equal to that of the prisoners, each constable takes an accused person by the arm; and, thus paired, they climb the staircase, pass through the guardroom and along corridors which bring them to a room adjacent to the famous Court Six (of summary jurisdiction). This is also the route taken by persons on indictment on their way from the Conciergerie to the Court of Assize, or on return.
In the big waiting room, between the door to Court One (also of summary jurisdiction) and the staircase which leads up to Court Six, you immediately notice, on a first visit, an entrance without door, without any architectural decoration, an insignificant square hole. Through it come judges and lawyers on their way along the corridors, to the guardroom, down to the. Mousetrap and the wicket of the Conciergerie. All the offices of examining magistrates are situated on different floors in that part of the building. These offices are reached by dreadful flights of stairs, a maze in which people who don’t know the Law Courts always lose themselves. Some of the office windows give on to the embankment, others on to the Conciergerie yard. In 1830, some examining magistrates’ offices also looked out over the rue de la Barillerie.
Thus when a salad basket turns left into the Conciergerie yard, it will be bringing remanded persons to the Mousetrap; when it turns right, it is bringing those committed for trial to the Conciergerie. It was to the right that the salad basket containing Jacques Collin turned to deposit him at the wicket. Nothing could be more forbidding. Criminals or visitors perceive two wrought-iron gratings, separated by a space of about six feet, which are always opened one after the other, and through which everything is so scrupulously examined that people accorded a visiting permit have effectively crossed this space before the key grates in the lock. Examining magistrates, even the Attorney General’s personal staff, do not enter without having been recognized. And so, is there any talk of the possibility of communicating or escaping?… the governor of the Conciergerie will have on his lips a smile to discourage the most temerarious novelist in his schemes against verisimilitude. The only escape known, in the annals of the Conciergerie, is that of Lavalette; but the certainty of august connivance, now proved, diminished, if not the devotion of the spouse, at least the risk of failure. If they estimate the nature of all the obstacles on the spot, the most fervent lovers of the marvellous must acknowledge that at all times those obstacles were what they are now, invincible. No words can describe the strength of these walls and vaults, they have to be seen. Although the paving of the yard is at a level below that of the embankment, once you are through the wicket, you must go down several steps to reach an enormous vaulted hall whose massive walls are ornamented with magnificent pillars and flanked by the Montgommery Tower, today part of the governor of the Conciergerie’s private quarters, and by the Tour d’Argent which contains the sleeping quarters of the warders, turnkeys or screws, whatever you choose to call them. These employees are less numerous than might be imagined (there are twenty of them); their accommodation does not differ from that of what is known as the pistole. This name doubtless comes from the fact that formerly prisoners paid a pistole a week for such accommodation, which recalls by its bareness those cold attics in which great men without resources start by living in Paris. To the left in this great entrance hall stands the registry of the Conciergerie, an office set round by glass partitions, occupied by the governor and his clerk and containing all committal records. There, those in various stages of inculpation are entered, described and searched. There it is decided where they shall be lodged, a question whose solution depends on the size of the patient’s purse. Facing the counter here, may be seen a glass door, that of the parlour where relations and lawyers communicate with prisoners through a double trellis of wood. Light reaches this parlour from the prison yard, the place of exercise in which prisoners take the air at fixed times.
Illuminated only by such daylight as reaches it by way of two gratings, for the only window giving on to the courtyard in which we arrived lies entirely within the record-office, the atmosphere and the lighting of this hall are perfectly in keeping with what the imagination might have conceived. It is all the more frightening in that parallel with the Argent and Montgommery Towers, you glimpse mysterious, vaulted, forbidding, unlighted crypts, winding beyond the parlour and leading to the dungeons of the queen, of Madame Elizabeth, and the cells for solitary confinement. This maze of freestone has become the basement of the Law Courts, having once seen royal festivals. From 1825 to 1832, it was in this great hall, between a big stove which heats it and the first of the two gratings, that the ceremonial toilet was performed on condemned men before execution. Walking across these flagstones, one cannot but shudder to think what confidences, what last looks and last footsteps they have received.
The formalities of committal
TO get out of his frightful conveyance the man at death’s door needed the assistance of two constables who took him each under one arm, held him up and carried him to the registry as if in a faint. Dragged thus, the dying man raised his eyes in a manner reminiscent of the Saviour’s descent from the cross. Certainly in no painting does Jesus display a more cadaverous, more collapsed face than was that of the sham Spaniard, he seemed at his last gasp. When he was seated in the record-office, he repeated in a feeble voice the words he had addressed to everyone since his arrest: ‘I wish to see His Excellency the Spanish ambassador…’
‘You can say that,’ replied the governor, ‘to the examining magistrate.’
‘Ah! Jesus!’ Jacques Collin continued with a sigh. ‘Can I not have a breviary?… Am I to be forever denied a doctor?… I have not two hours to live.’
As Carlos Herrera was to be consigned to solitary confinement, it was useless to ask him whether he claimed the advantages of the pistole, that is to say the right to occupy one of those rooms in which one enjoys the only comforts allowed by the Law. These rooms are situated to one end of the prison yard with which we shall be concerned later. The usher and the clerk between them phlegmatically carried out the formalities of committal.
‘Mr Governor,’ said Jacques Collin in his foreign-sounding French, ‘I am dying, as you see. Tell, if you can, at the very earliest moment, tell this examining magistrate that I solicit as a favour what a criminal would most fear, that I may appear before him as soon as he arrives; for my sufferings are truly unbearable, and as soon as I see him, this mistake will be put right…’
It is a general rule, criminals always speak of a mistake. Go to the penal settlements, question those under sentence, they are almost invariably the victims of a miscarriage of justice. This expression therefore brings a smile to the lips of all who have to do with prisoners at any stage in the course of legal proceedings.
‘I shall tell the examining magistrate of your request,’ replied the governor.
‘I shall bless you then, sir!…’ the Spaniard said raising his eyes heavenward.
Once committed in due form, Carlos Herrera, taken under the arms by two municipal guards accompanied by a warder, told by the governor
to which cell the prisoner should be taken, was conducted through the underground labyrinth of the Conciergerie to a room which was perfectly clean, whatever certain philanthropists and reformers may say, but without any possibility of communication.
When he was out of sight, the warders, the prison governor, his clerk, the usher himself, the constables looked at each other like people who seek each other’s opinions, and doubt was depicted on all their faces; but at the sight of the other prisoner, all the spectators returned to their habitual uncertainty, concealed by an air of indifference. Except in very unusual circumstances, those employed at the Conciergerie do not show much curiosity, criminals being to them what his clients are to a barber. Thus all the formalities which so disturb the imagination are conducted with greater simplicity than money matters at a bank, and often with more politeness. Lucien’s mask was that of a guilty man who has given up hope, for he simply did what was expected of him, he behaved mechanically. Ever since Fontainebleau, the poet had been contemplating his ruin, saying to himself that the hour of expiation had struck. Pale, limp, knowing nothing of what had taken place at Esther’s during his absence, he knew himself to be the intimate companion of an escaped convict; a situation in which he could only anticipate catastrophes worse than death. The sole intention his mind was now and then able to conceive was that of suicide. He wanted at any price to escape the ignominies he foresaw like the fantasies of a disordered dream.
Jacques Collin, as the more dangerous prisoner of the two, had been put in a dark cell of solid freestone, into which light only entered from one of those small inner yards, such as are found here and there in the precincts of the Law Courts, situated in the wing in which the Attorney General had his office. This little enclosed space serves as an exercise yard for the women’s quarters. Lucien was led in the same general direction to a cell next to the pistoles, the examining magistrate having instructed the governor to show him some little consideration.
How the two prisoners take their misfortune
IN general, those who are unlikely ever to find themselves up against the Law entertain the darkest notions about solitary confinement. The thought of criminal justice is inextricably bound up with ideas of torture, of the insalubrity of prisons, of cold stone walls sweating tears, of the coarseness of the gaolers and the food, obligatory stage-properties of drama; but it may be useful to point out here that such exaggerations belong entirely to the theatre, and are laughed at by magistrates, lawyers and those who, out of curiosity, visit prisons or come to observe them. For long, things were indeed terrible. It is not to be disputed that under the former high judicial court in the ages of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, those awaiting trial were flung pell-mell into a single large room above the old reception hall. Its use of the prisons was itself one of the crimes of the revolution of 1789, and to see the dungeons of the queen and of Madame Elizabeth is enough to give one the deepest horror of old judicial forms. Today, however, incalculable harm though philanthropy may have wrought in society generally, it has done some good to individuals. We owe to Napoleon our Code of criminal law, which, more obviously than that of civil law, which in certain respects urgently calls for reform, will remain one of the greatest monuments of that short reign. The new penality did away with a host of abuses and the needless suffering they caused. Though members of the superior classes of society must always feel dreadfully afflicted when they fall into the hands of the Law, we may truthfully assert that its power is exercised with a mildness and simplicity all the greater for being unexpected. Those first charged or subsequently remanded are not indeed made as comfortable as they would be at home; but the requisites of life are found in the prisons of Paris. The pressure of unaccustomed feelings, in any case, frees the accessories of life of their habitual meaning. It is not the body which suffers. The state of mind is so violent that any kind of discomfort, or even brutality, encountered in those surroundings, would be easily borne. In Paris at least, anyone who is innocent will be promptly set at liberty, that is certain.
Lucien, on entering his cell, thus saw a faithful replica of the first room he had occupied in Paris, at the Hôtel Cluny. A bed like those in the poorest furnished rooms in the Latin quarter, straw-bottomed chairs, a table and a few utensils constitute the furniture of one of these rooms, in which two prisoners are often put together when their manners are mild and their crimes of a sufficiently reassuring nature, forgery and bankruptcy for instance. This similarity between his point of departure, full of innocence, and the point to which he had come, the last degree of shame and degradation, was so evident to what remained of his poetic fibre, that the unfortunate young man burst into tears. He wept for four hours on end, in appearance as unfeeling as a figure of stone, but tormented by all his disappointed hopes, stricken to the heart of all his crushed social vanity, his broken pride, all those selves which belong to the ambitious man, the man in love, the fortunate man, the dandy, the Parisian, the poet, the voluptuary and the child of privilege. Every faculty in him had been shattered by this Icarian fall.
Carlos Herrera, for his part, once left alone in his cell, paced about it like the polar bear in its cage at the zoological gardens. He minutely inspected the door and established that, the spy-hole apart, no hole had been made in it. He sounded all round the walls, he looked up at the hood through whose aperture feeble light reached him and said to himself: ‘This is out of harm’s way all right!’ He went and sat down in a corner where the eye of a warder applied to the spy-hole would not have been able to see him. Then he removed his wig and promptly unstuck a piece of paper from the inside. The side of this paper in contact with his head was so filthy it seemed part of the tegument of the wig. If Bibi-Lupin had had the idea of removing this wig to establish the Spaniard’s identity with Jacques Collin, he would not have been suspicious of this paper, so much did it seem to belong to the wigmaker’s art. The other side of the paper was still white and clean enough to be written on. The difficult and minute business of unsticking had been begun at La Force, two hours would have been too little time, half the previous day had been spent on the operation. The prisoner began by trimming this precious paper in such a way as to give him a strip four or five lines broad, which he divided into several pieces; then he replaced his store of paper in its singular repository, having moistened the layer of gum arabic with which it was kept in place. He felt among the hair for one of those pencils, slender as a pin, which Susse had recently begun to make, and which also was gummed into place; he broke off a piece long enough to write with and short enough to keep in his ear. These preparations completed with the speed and dexterity common to old lags who are as clever as monkeys, Jacques Collin sat on the edge of his bed and considered his instructions to Asia, certain of finding her in his path, such was his trust in this woman’s ingenuity.
‘Questioned summarily, ‘ he said to himself, ‘I behaved like a Spaniard who speaks French badly, demanding his ambassador, claiming diplomatic privilege and not understanding what was put to him, all that punctuated with moments of weakness, deep groans, sighs, in short all the humbug appropriate to a man at death’s door. I must go on like that. My papers are in order. Asia and I together, we shall make a meal of Monsieur Camusot, he isn’t very bright. Now let’s think about Lucien, his spirits need raising, at all costs I must communicate with the child, outline his plan of conduct, otherwise he’ll give himself away, give me away and ruin everything!… It must be drummed into him before his interrogation. Then I must have witnesses to the fact of my priestly state!’
Such was the mental and physical condition of the two prisoners whose fate at that moment depended on Monsieur Camusot, examining magistrate of the Court of First Instance of the Seine, sovereign judge, during the time allowed him by the code of criminal procedure, of the smallest details of their existence; for he alone could allow the chaplain, the Conciergerie doctor or anyone else to communicate with them.
The functions of an examining magistrate
NO human power
, neither the King nor the Keeper of the Seals, nor yet the Prime Minister, can encroach on the authority of an examining magistrate, nothing can stand in his way, he cannot be given orders. He is subject only to his conscience and the law. At a time when philosophers, philanthropists and publicists are all the while engaged in cutting down the forms of social authority, the rights which the law confers on examining magistrates are being made the subject of attacks which are all the more formidable in that they are partly justified, those rights being excessive. Nevertheless, any man in his right mind will see that the authority must remain unimpaired; in a number of ways, its exercise may be made less harsh by broad discretionary means; but society, already shaken by the stupidity and weakness of juries (whose high and august magisterial function should be confided only to selected persons of note), would be threatened with ruin if this column which upholds the whole of our criminal law were broken. The power of arrest is fearsome but necessary, its social danger counterbalanced by its very importance. Distrust of the magistracy would be the start of social disintegration. Destroy the institution, rebuild it on other foundations; require, as was done before the Revolution, that all magistrates be rich men; but believe in it; don’t make it an image of society in order to insult it. Magistrates now, paid as public servants, for the most part poor men, have swopped their former dignity for a pride which seems intolerable to many set up as their equals; for haughtiness is a dignity which rests on a slender base. That is the weakness of the institution as we find it today. If France were divided into ten jurisdictions, the magistracy’s position could be raised by requiring all magistrates to be men of great fortune, which becomes impossible with twenty-six judicial areas. The only real improvement which may be demanded in the exercise of those powers confided to the examining magistrate, is the rehabilitation of those prisons we call maisons d’arrêt. There should be no marked change in the life of those who are merely prévenus or remanded in custody. Those prisons ought, in Paris, to be so built, furnished and disposed as to modify profoundly the public’s idea of what committal involves. The law itself is good, it is necessary, the way it is carried out is bad and laws are judged morally by the manner of their carrying out. Public opinion in France condemns the man taken into custody but, by a strange contradiction, views him with sympathy once he comes up for trial. Perhaps this is due to the Frenchman’s essentially critical attitude towards authority. A lack of consequentiality in the Parisian public was to contribute towards the catastrophe of our present drama; it was indeed, as we shall see, a major factor. To understand the terrible scenes played out in an examining magistrate’s office; to appreciate the respective situations of the two belligerent parties, the prisoners and the Law, when what is at stake is the secret kept by the former against the determined curiosity of the latter, we must never forget that those kept in solitary confinement know nothing of what is being said about them in the seven or eight publics which constitute the Public, nothing of what the police and the courts know, nothing even of what newspapers have published about the circumstances of a crime. Thus for such a man to have learnt what Asia had contrived to tell Jacques Collin about Lucien’s arrest, is for a line to be thrown to a drowning man. We shall see that, without this, the plan concocted against the convict would have succeeded. This being stated in large general terms, readers not easily moved may well experience the fear to which these three circumstances give rise: sequestration, silence and remorse.