Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Madeleine de Mortsauf took Clotilde by the arm and allowed Lucien to talk. They thus walked on as far as the village of Grez. It was now eight o’clock, and there Clotilde dismissed Lucien.

“Well, my friend,” said she, closing this long interview with much dignity, “I never shall marry any one but you. I would rather believe in you than in other men, in my father and mother – no woman ever gave greater proof of attachment surely? – Now, try to counteract the fatal prejudices which militate against you.”

Just then the tramp of galloping horses was heard, and, to the great amazement of the ladies, a force of gendarmes surrounded the little party.

“What do you want?” said Lucien, with the arrogance of a dandy.

“Are you Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre?” asked the public prosecutor of Fontainebleau.

“Yes, monsieur.”

“You will spend to-night in La Force,” said he. “I have a warrant for the detention of your person.”

“Who are these ladies?” asked the sergeant.

“To be sure. – Excuse me, ladies – your passports? For Monsieur Lucien, as I am instructed, had acquaintances among the fair sex, who for him would – ”

“Do you take the Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu for a prostitute?” said Madeleine, with a magnificent flash at the public prosecutor.

“You are handsome enough to excuse the error,” the magistrate very cleverly retorted.

“Baptiste, produce the passports,” said the young Duchess with a smile.

“And with what crime is Monsieur de Rubempre charged?” asked Clotilde, whom the Duchess wished to see safe in the carriage.

“Of being accessory to a robbery and murder,” replied the sergeant of gendarmes.

Baptiste lifted Mademoiselle de Grandlieu into the chaise in a dead faint.

By midnight Lucien was entering La Force, a prison situated between the Rue Payenne and the Rue des Ballets, where he was placed in solitary confinement.

The Abbe Carlos Herrera was also there, having been arrested that evening.

THE END OF EVIL WAYS

At six o’clock next morning two vehicles with postilions, prison vans, called in the vigorous language of the populace, paniers a salade, came out of La Force to drive to the Conciergerie by the Palais de Justice.

Few loafers in Paris can have failed to meet this prison cell on wheels; still, though most stories are written for Parisian readers, strangers will no doubt be satisfied to have a description of this formidable machine. Who knows? A police of Russia, Germany, or Austria, the legal body of countries to whom the “Salad-basket” is an unknown machine, may profit by it; and in several foreign countries there can be no doubt that an imitation of this vehicle would be a boon to prisoners.

This ignominious conveyance, yellow-bodied, on high wheels, and lined with sheet-iron, is divided into two compartments. In front is a box-seat, with leather cushions and an apron. This is the free seat of the van, and accommodates a sheriff’s officer and a gendarme. A strong iron trellis, reaching to the top, separates this sort of cab-front from the back division, in which there are two wooden seats placed sideways, as in an omnibus, on which the prisoners sit. They get in by a step behind and a door, with no window. The nickname of Salad-basket arose from the fact that the vehicle was originally made entirely of lattice, and the prisoners were shaken in it just as a salad is shaken to dry it.

For further security, in case of accident, a mounted gendarme follows the machine, especially when it conveys criminals condemned to death to the place of execution. Thus escape is impossible. The vehicle, lined with sheet-iron, is impervious to any tool. The prisoners, carefully searched when they are arrested or locked up, can have nothing but watch-springs, perhaps, to file through bars, and useless on a smooth surface.

So the panier a salade, improved by the genius of the Paris police, became the model for the prison omnibus (known in London as “Black Maria”) in which convicts are transported to the hulks, instead of the horrible tumbril which formerly disgraced civilization, though Manon Lescaut had made it famous.

The accused are, in the first instance, despatched in the prison van from the various prisons in Paris to the Palais de Justice, to be questioned by the examining judge. This, in prison slang, is called “going up for examination.” Then the accused are again conveyed from prison to the Court to be sentenced when their case is only a misdemeanor; or if, in legal parlance, the case is one for the Upper Court, they are transferred from the house of detention to the Conciergerie, the “Newgate” of the Department of the Seine.

Finally, the prison van carries the criminal condemned to death from Bicetre to the Barriere Saint-Jacques, where executions are carried out, and have been ever since the Revolution of July. Thanks to philanthropic interference, the poor wretches no longer have to face the horrors of the drive from the Conciergerie to the Place de Greve in a cart exactly like that used by wood merchants. This cart is no longer used but to bring the body back from the scaffold.

Without this explanation the words of a famous convict to his accomplice, “It is now the horse’s business!” as he got into the van, would be unintelligible. It is impossible to be carried to execution more comfortably than in Paris nowadays.

At this moment the two vans, setting out at such an early hour, were employed on the unwonted service of conveying two accused prisoners from the jail of La Force to the Conciergerie, and each man had a “Salad-basket” to himself.

Nine-tenths of my readers, ay, and nine-tenths of the remaining tenth, are certainly ignorant of the vast difference of meaning in the words incriminated, suspected, accused, and committed for trial – jail, house of detention, and penitentiary; and they may be surprised to learn here that it involves all our criminal procedure, of which a clear and brief outline will presently be sketched, as much for their information as for the elucidation of this history. However, when it is said that the first van contained Jacques Collin and the second Lucien, who in a few hours had fallen from the summit of social splendor to the depths of a prison cell, curiosity will for the moment be satisfied.

The conduct of the two accomplices was characteristic; Lucien de Rubempre shrank back to avoid the gaze of the passers-by, who looked at the grated window of the gloomy and fateful vehicle on its road along the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Rue du Martroi to reach the quay and the Arch of Saint-Jean, the way, at that time, across the Place de l’Hotel de Ville. This archway now forms the entrance gate to the residence of the Prefet de la Seine in the huge municipal palace. The daring convict, on the contrary, stuck his face against the barred grating, between the officer and the gendarme, who, sure of their van, were chatting together.

The great days of July 1830, and the tremendous storm that then burst, have so completely wiped out the memory of all previous events, and politics so entirely absorbed the French during the last six months of that year, that no one remembers – or a few scarcely remember – the various private, judicial, and financial catastrophes, strange as they were, which, forming the annual flood of Parisian curiosity, were not lacking during the first six months of the year. It is, therefore, needful to mention how Paris was, for the moment, excited by the news of the arrest of a Spanish priest, discovered in a courtesan’s house, and that of the elegant Lucien de Rubempre, who had been engaged to Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu, taken on the highroad to Italy, close to the little village of Grez. Both were charged as being concerned in a murder, of which the profits were stated at seven millions of francs; and for some days the scandal of this trial preponderated over the absorbing importance of the last elections held under Charles X.

In the first place, the charge had been based on an application by the Baron de Nucingen; then, Lucien’s apprehension, just as he was about to be appointed private secretary to the Prime Minister, made a stir in the very highest circles of society. In every drawing-room in Paris more than one young man could recollect having envied Lucien when he was honored by the notice of the beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse; and every woman knew that he was the favored attache of Madame de Serizy, the wife of one of the Government bigwigs. And finally, his handsome person gave him a singular notoriety in the various worlds that make up Paris – the world of fashion, the financial world, the world of courtesans, the young men’s world, the literary world. So for two days past all Paris had been talking of these two arrests. The examining judge in whose hands the case was put regarded it as a chance for promotion; and, to proceed with the utmost rapidity, he had given orders that both the accused should be transferred from La Force to the Conciergerie as soon as Lucien de Rubempre could be brought from Fontainebleau.

As the Abbe Carlos had spent but twelve hours in La Force, and Lucien only half a night, it is useless to describe that prison, which has since been entirely remodeled; and as to the details of their consignment, it would be only a repetition of the same story at the Conciergerie.

But before setting forth the terrible drama of a criminal inquiry, it is indispensable, as I have said, that an account should be given of the ordinary proceedings in a case of this kind. To begin with, its various phases will be better understood at home and abroad, and, besides, those who are ignorant of the action of the criminal law, as conceived of by the lawgivers under Napoleon, will appreciate it better. This is all the more important as, at this moment, this great and noble institution is in danger of destruction by the system known as penitentiary.

A crime is committed; if it is flagrant, the persons incriminated (inculpes) are taken to the nearest lock-up and placed in the cell known to the vulgar as the Violon – perhaps because they make a noise there, shrieking or crying. From thence the suspected persons (inculpes) are taken before the police commissioner or magistrate, who holds a preliminary inquiry, and can dismiss the case if there is any mistake; finally, they are conveyed to the Depot of the Prefecture, where the police detains them pending the convenience of the public prosecutor and the examining judge. They, being served with due notice, more or less quickly, according to the gravity of the case, come and examine the prisoners who are still provisionally detained. Having due regard to the presumptive evidence, the examining judge then issues a warrant for their imprisonment, and sends the suspected persons to be confined in a jail. There are three such jails (Maisons d’Arret) in Paris – Sainte-Pelagie, La Force, and les Madelonettes.

Observe the word inculpe, incriminated, or suspected of crime. The French Code has created three essential degrees of criminality – inculpe, first degree of suspicion; prevenu, under examination; accuse, fully committed for trial. So long as the warrant for committal remains unsigned, the supposed criminal is regarded as merely under suspicion, inculpe of the crime or felony; when the warrant has been issued, he becomes “the accused” (prevenu), and is regarded as such so long as the inquiry is proceeding; when the inquiry is closed, and as soon as the Court has decided that the accused is to be committed for trial, he becomes “the prisoner at the bar” (accuse) as soon as the superior court, at the instance of the public prosecutor, has pronounced that the charge is so far proved as to be carried to the Assizes.

Thus, persons suspected of crime go through three different stages, three siftings, before coming up for trial before the judges of the upper Court – the High Justice of the realm.

At the first stage, innocent persons have abundant means of exculpating themselves – the public, the town watch, the police. At the second state they appear before a magistrate face to face with the witnesses, and are judged by a tribunal in Paris, or by the Collective Court of the departments. At the third stage they are brought before a bench of twelve councillors, and in case of any error or informality the prisoner committed for trial at the Assizes may appeal for protection to the Supreme court. The jury do not know what a slap in the face they give to popular authority, to administrative and judicial functionaries, when they acquit a prisoner. And so, in my opinion, it is hardly possible that an innocent man should ever find himself at the bar of an Assize Court in Paris – I say nothing of other seats of justice.

The detenu is the convict. French criminal law recognizes imprisonment of three degrees, corresponding in legal distinction to these three degrees of suspicion, inquiry, and conviction. Mere imprisonment is a light penalty for misdemeanor, but detention is imprisonment with hard labor, a severe and sometimes degrading punishment. Hence, those persons who nowadays are in favor of the penitentiary system would upset an admirable scheme of criminal law in which the penalties are judiciously graduated, and they will end by punishing the lightest peccadilloes as severely as the greatest crimes.

The reader may compare in the Scenes of Political Life (for instance, in Une Tenebreuse affaire) the curious differences subsisting between the criminal law of Brumaire in the year IV., and that of the Code Napoleon which has taken its place.

In most trials, as in this one, the suspected persons are at once examined (and from inculpes become prevenus); justice immediately issues a warrant for their arrest and imprisonment. In point of fact, in most of such cases the criminals have either fled, or have been instantly apprehended. Indeed, as we have seen the police, which is but an instrument, and the officers of justice had descended on Esther’s house with the swiftness of a thunderbolt. Even if there had not been the reasons for revenge suggested to the superior police by Corentin, there was a robbery to be investigated of seven hundred and fifty thousand francs from the Baron de Nucingen.

Just as the first prison van, conveying Jacques Collin, reached the archway of Saint-Jean – a narrow, dark passage, some block ahead compelled the postilion to stop under the vault. The prisoner’s eyes shone like carbuncles through the grating, in spite of his aspect as of a dying man, which, the day before, had led the governor of La Force to believe that the doctor must be called in. These flaming eyes, free to rove at this moment, for neither the officer nor the gendarme looked round at their “customer,” spoke so plain a language that a clever examining judge, M. Popinot, for instance, would have identified the man convicted for sacrilege.

In fact, ever since the “salad-basket” had turned out of the gate of La Force, Jacques Collin had studied everything on his way. Notwithstanding the pace they had made, he took in the houses with an eager and comprehensive glance from the ground floor to the attics. He saw and noted every passer-by. God Himself is not more clear-seeing as to the means and ends of His creatures than this man in observing the slightest differences in the medley of things and people. Armed with hope, as the last of the Horatii was armed with his sword, he expected help. To anybody but this Machiavelli of the hulks, this hope would have seemed so absolutely impossible to realize that he would have gone on mechanically, as all guilty men do. Not one of them ever dreams of resistance when he finds himself in the position to which justice and the Paris police bring suspected persons, especially those who, like Collin and Lucien, are in solitary confinement.

It is impossible to conceive of the sudden isolation in which a suspected criminal is placed. The gendarmes who apprehend him, the commissioner who questions him, those who take him to prison, the warders who lead him to his cell – which is actually called a cachot, a dungeon or hiding-place, those again who take him by the arms to put him into a prison-van – every being that comes near him from the moment of his arrest is either speechless, or takes note of all he says, to be repeated to the police or to the judge. This total severance, so simply effected between the prisoner and the world, gives rise to a complete overthrow of his faculties and a terrible prostration of mind, especially when the man has not been familiarized by his antecedents with the processes of justice. The duel between the judge and the criminal is all the more appalling because justice has on its side the dumbness of blank walls and the incorruptible coldness of its agents.

But Jacques Collin, or Carlos Herrera – it will be necessary to speak of him by one or the other of these names according to the circumstances of the case – had long been familiar with the methods of the police, of the jail, and of justice. This colossus of cunning and corruption had employed all his powers of mind, and all the resources of mimicry, to affect the surprise and anility of an innocent man, while giving the lawyers the spectacle of his sufferings. As has been told, Asie, that skilled Locusta, had given him a dose of poison so qualified as to produce the effects of a dreadful illness.

Thus Monsieur Camusot, the police commissioner, and the public prosecutor had been baffled in their proceedings and inquiries by the effects apparently of an apoplectic attack.

“He has taken poison!” cried Monsieur Camusot, horrified by the sufferings of the self-styled priest when he had been carried down from the attic writhing in convulsions.

Four constables had with great difficulty brought the Abbe Carlos downstairs to Esther’s room, where the lawyers and the gendarmes were assembled.

“That was the best thing he could do if he should be guilty,” replied the public prosecutor.

“Do you believe that he is ill?” the police commissioner asked.

The police is always incredulous.

The three lawyers had spoken, as may be imagined, in a whisper; but Jacques Collin had guessed from their faces the subject under discussion, and had taken advantage of it to make the first brief examination which is gone through on arrest absolutely impossible and useless; he had stammered out sentences in which Spanish and French were so mingled as to make nonsense.

At La Force this farce had been all the more successful in the first instance because the head of the “safety” force – an abbreviation of the title “Head of the brigade of the guardians of public safety” – Bibi-Lupin, who had long since taken Jacques Collin into custody at Madame Vauquer’s boarding-house, had been sent on special business into the country, and his deputy was a man who hoped to succeed him, but to whom the convict was unknown.

Bibi-Lupin, himself formerly a convict, and a comrade of Jacques Collin’s on the hulks, was his personal enemy. This hostility had its rise in quarrels in which Jacques Collin had always got the upper hand, and in the supremacy over his fellow-prisoners which Trompe-la-Mort had always assumed. And then, for ten years now, Jacques Collin had been the ruling providence of released convicts in Paris, their head, their adviser, and their banker, and consequently Bibi-Lupin’s antagonist.

Thus, though placed in solitary confinement, he trusted to the intelligent and unreserved devotion of Asie, his right hand, and perhaps, too, to Paccard, his left hand, who, as he flattered himself, might return to his allegiance when once that thrifty subaltern had safely bestowed the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs that he had stolen. This was the reason why his attention had been so superhumanly alert all along the road. And, strange to say! his hopes were about to be amply fulfilled.

The two solid side-walls of the archway were covered, to a height of six feet, with a permanent dado of mud formed of the splashes from the gutter; for, in those days, the foot passenger had no protection from the constant traffic of vehicles and from what was called the kicking of the carts, but curbstones placed upright at intervals, and much ground away by the naves of the wheels. More than once a heavy truck had crushed a heedless foot-passenger under that arch-way. Such indeed Paris remained in many districts and till long after. This circumstance may give some idea of the narrowness of the Saint-Jean gate and the ease with which it could be blocked. If a cab should be coming through from the Place de Greve while a costermonger-woman was pushing her little truck of apples in from the Rue du Martroi, a third vehicle of any kind produced difficulties. The foot-passengers fled in alarm, seeking a corner-stone to protect them from the old-fashioned axles, which had attained such prominence that a law was passed at last to reduce their length.

When the prison van came in, this passage was blocked by a market woman with a costermonger’s vegetable cart – one of a type which is all the more strange because specimens still exist in Paris in spite of the increasing number of green-grocers’ shops. She was so thoroughly a street hawker that a Sergeant de Ville, if that particular class of police had been then in existence, would have allowed her to ply her trade without inspecting her permit, in spite of a sinister countenance that reeked of crime. Her head, wrapped in a cheap and ragged checked cotton kerchief, was horrid with rebellious locks of hair, like the bristles of a wild boar. Her red and wrinkled neck was disgusting, and her little shawl failed entirely to conceal a chest tanned brown by the sun, dust, and mud. Her gown was patchwork; her shoes gaped as though they were grinning at a face as full of holes as the gown. And what an apron! a plaster would have been less filthy. This moving and fetid rag must have stunk in the nostrils of dainty folks ten yards away. Those hands had gleaned a hundred harvest fields. Either the woman had returned from a German witches’ Sabbath, or she had come out of a mendicity asylum. But what eyes! what audacious intelligence, what repressed vitality when the magnetic flash of her look and of Jacques Collin’s met to exchange a thought!

“Get out of the way, you old vermin-trap!” cried the postilion in harsh tones.

“Mind you don’t crush me, you hangman’s apprentice!” she retorted. “Your cartful is not worth as much as mine.”

And by trying to squeeze in between two corner-stones to make way, the hawker managed to block the passage long enough to achieve her purpose.

“Oh! Asie!” said Jacques Collin to himself, at once recognizing his accomplice. “Then all is well.”

The post-boy was still exchanging amenities with Asie, and vehicles were collecting in the Rue du Martroi.

“Look out, there – Pecaire fermati. Souni la – Vedrem,” shrieked old Asie, with the Red-Indian intonations peculiar to these female costermongers, who disfigure their words in such a way that they are transformed into a sort onomatopoeia incomprehensible to any but Parisians.

In the confusion in the alley, and among the outcries of all the waiting drivers, no one paid any heed to this wild yell, which might have been the woman’s usual cry. But this gibberish, intelligible to Jacques Collin, sent to his ear in a mongrel language of their own – a mixture of bad Italian and Provencal – this important news:

“Your poor boy is nabbed. I am here to keep an eye on you. We shall meet again.”

In the midst of his joy at having thus triumphed over the police, for he hoped to be able to keep up communications, Jacques Collin had a blow which might have killed any other man.

“Lucien in custody!” said he to himself.

He almost fainted. This news was to him more terrible than the rejection of his appeal could have been if he had been condemned to death.

Now that both the prison vans are rolling along the Quai, the interest of this story requires that I should add a few words about the Conciergerie, while they are making their way thither. The Conciergerie, a historical name – a terrible name, – a still more terrible thing, is inseparable from the Revolutions of France, and especially those of Paris. It has known most of our great criminals. But if it is the most interesting of the buildings of Paris, it is also the least known – least known to persons of the upper classes; still, in spite of the interest of this historical digression, it should be as short as the journey of the prison vans.

What Parisian, what foreigner, or what provincial can have failed to observe the gloomy and mysterious features of the Quai des Lunettes – a structure of black walls flanked by three round towers with conical roofs, two of them almost touching each other? This quay, beginning at the Pont du Change, ends at the Pont Neuf. A square tower – the Clock Tower, or Tour de l’Horloge, whence the signal was given for the massacre of Saint-Bartholomew – a tower almost as tall as that of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, shows where the Palais de Justice stands, and forms the corner of the quay.

These four towers and these walls are shrouded in the black winding sheet which, in Paris, falls on every facade to the north. About half-way along the quay at a gloomy archway we see the beginning of the private houses which were built in consequence of the construction of the Pont Neuf in the reign of Henry IV. The Place Royale was a replica of the Place Dauphine. The style of architecture is the same, of brick with binding courses of hewn stone. This archway and the Rue de Harlay are the limit line of the Palais de Justice on the west. Formerly the Prefecture de Police, once the residence of the Presidents of Parlement, was a dependency of the Palace. The Court of Exchequer and Court of Subsidies completed the Supreme Court of Justice, the Sovereign’s Court. It will be seen that before the Revolution the Palace enjoyed that isolation which now again is aimed at.

This block, this island of residences and official buildings, in their midst the Sainte-Chapelle – that priceless jewel of Saint-Louis’ chaplet – is the sanctuary of Paris, its holy place, its sacred ark.

For one thing, this island was at first the whole of the city, for the plot now forming the Place Dauphine was a meadow attached to the Royal demesne, where stood a stamping mill for coining money. Hence the name of Rue de la Monnaie – the street leading to the Pont Neuf. Hence, too, the name of one of the round towers – the middle one – called the Tour d’Argent, which would seem to show that money was originally coined there. The famous mill, to be seen marked in old maps of Paris, may very likely be more recent than the time when money was coined in the Palace itself, and was erected, no doubt, for the practice of improved methods in the art of coining.

The first tower, hardly detached from the Tour d’Argent, is the Tour de Montgomery; the third, and smallest, but the best preserved of the three, for it still has its battlements, is the Tour Bonbec.

The Sainte-Chapelle and its four towers – counting the clock tower as one – clearly define the precincts; or, as a surveyor would say, the perimeter of the Palace, as it was from the time of the Merovingians till the accession of the first race of Valois; but to us, as a result of certain alterations, this Palace is more especially representative of the period of Saint-Louis.

Charles V. was the first to give the Palace up to the Parlement, then a new institution, and went to reside in the famous Hotel Saint-Pol, under the protection of the Bastille. The Palais des Tournelles was subsequently erected backing on to the Hotel Saint-Pol. Thus, under the later Valois, the kings came back from the Bastille to the Louvre, which had been their first stronghold.

The original residence of the French kings, the Palace of Saint-Louis, which has preserved the designation of Le Palais, to indicate the Palace of palaces, is entirely buried under the Palais de Justice; it forms the cellars, for it was built, like the Cathedral, in the Seine, and with such care that the highest floods in the river scarcely cover the lowest steps. The Quai de l’Horloge covers, twenty feet below the surface, its foundations of a thousand years old. Carriages run on the level of the capitals of the solid columns under these towers, and formerly their appearance must have harmonized with the elegance of the Palace, and have had a picturesque effect over the water, since to this day those towers vie in height with the loftiest buildings in Paris.

As we look down on this vast capital from the lantern of the Pantheon, the Palace with the Sainte-Chapelle is still the most monumental of many monumental buildings. The home of our kings, over which you tread as you pace the immense hall known as the Salle des Pas-Perdus, was a miracle of architecture; and it is so still to the intelligent eye of the poet who happens to study it when inspecting the Conciergerie. Alas! for the Conciergerie has invaded the home of kings. One’s heart bleeds to see the way in which cells, cupboards, corridors, warders’ rooms, and halls devoid of light or air, have been hewn out of that beautiful structure in which Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque – the three phases of ancient art – were harmonized in one building by the architecture of the twelfth century.

This palace is a monumental history of France in the earliest times, just as Blois is that of a later period. As at Blois you may admire in a single courtyard the chateau of the Counts of Blois, that of Louis XII., that of Francis I., that of Gaston; so at the Conciergerie you will find within the same precincts the stamp of the early races, and, in the Sainte-Chapelle, the architecture of Saint-Louis.

Municipal Council (to you I speak), if you bestow millions, get a poet or two to assist your architects if you wish to save the cradle of Paris, the cradle of kings, while endeavoring to endow Paris and the Supreme Court with a palace worthy of France. It is a matter for study for some years before beginning the work. Another new prison or two like that of La Roquette, and the palace of Saint-Louis will be safe.