Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Part 55

"Lucien de Rubempre is in custody, your husband is conducting the inquiry; I will answer for the poor boy's innocence; see that he is released within twenty-four hours.--This is not all. Some one will ask to-morrow to see Lucien in private in his cell; your husband may be present if he chooses, so long as he is not discovered. The King looks for high courage in his magistrates in the difficult position in which he will presently find himself; I will bring your husband forward, and recommend him as a man devoted to the King even at the risk of his head. Our friend Camusot will be made first a councillor, and then the President of Court somewhere or other.--Good-bye.--I am under orders, you will excuse me, I know?

"You will not only oblige the public prosecutor, who cannot give an opinion in this affair; you will save the life of a dying woman, Madame de Serizy. So you will not lack support.

"In short, you see, I put my trust in you, I need not say--you know----"

She laid a finger to her lips and disappeared.

"And I had not a chance of telling her that Madame d'Espard wants to see Lucien on the scaffold!" thought the judge's wife as she returned to her hackney cab.

She got home in such a state of anxiety that her husband, on seeing her, asked:

"What is the matter, Amelie?"

"We stand between two fires."

She told her husband of her interview with the d.u.c.h.ess, speaking in his ear for fear the maid should be listening at the door.

"Now, which of them has the most power?" she said in conclusion. "The Marquise was very near getting you into trouble in the silly business of the commission on her husband, and we owe everything to the d.u.c.h.ess.

"One made vague promises, while the other tells you you shall first be Councillor and then President.--Heaven forbid I should advise you; I will never meddle in matters of business; still, I am bound to repeat exactly what is said at Court and what goes on----"

"But, Amelie, you do not know what the Prefet of police sent me this morning, and by whom? By one of the most important agents of the superior police, the Bibi-Lupin of politics, who told me that the Government had a secret interest in this trial.--Now let us dine and go to the Varietes. We will talk all this over to-night in my private room, for I shall need your intelligence; that of a judge may not perhaps be enough----"

Nine magistrates out of ten would deny the influence of the wife over her husband in such cases; but though this may be a remarkable exception in society, it may be insisted on as true, even if improbable. The magistrate is like the priest, especially in Paris, where the best of the profession are to be found; he rarely speaks of his business in the Courts, excepting of settled cases. Not only do magistrates'

wives affect to know nothing; they have enough sense of propriety to understand that it would damage their husbands if, when they are told some secret, they allowed their knowledge to be suspected.

Nevertheless, on some great occasions, when promotion depends on the decision taken, many a wife, like Amelie, has helped the lawyer in his study of a case. And, after all, these exceptions, which, of course, are easily denied, since they remain unknown, depend entirely on the way in which the struggle between two natures has worked out in home-life. Now, Madame Camusot controlled her husband completely.

When all in the house were asleep, the lawyer and his wife sat down to the desk, where the magistrate had already laid out the doc.u.ments in the case.

"Here are the notes, forwarded to me, at my request, by the Prefet of police," said Camusot.

"_The Abbe Carlos Herrera_.

"This individual is undoubtedly the man named Jacques Collin, known as _Trompe-la-Mort_, who was last arrested in 1819, in the dwelling-house of a certain Madame Vauquer, who kept a common boarding-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, where he lived in concealment under the alias of Vautrin."

A marginal note in the Prefet's handwriting ran thus:

"Orders have been sent by telegraph to Bibi-Lupin, chief of the Safety department, to return forthwith, to be confronted with the prisoner, as he is personally acquainted with Jacques Collin, whom he, in fact, arrested in 1819 with the connivance of a Mademoiselle Michonneau.

"The boarders who then lived in the Maison Vauquer are still living, and may be called to establish his ident.i.ty.

"The self-styled Carlos Herrera is Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre's intimate friend and adviser, and for three years past has furnished him with considerable sums, evidently obtained by dishonest means.

"This partners.h.i.+p, if the ident.i.ty of the Spaniard with Jacques Collin can be proved, must involve the condemnation of Lucien de Rubempre.

"The sudden death of Peyrade, the police agent, is attributable to poison administered at the instigation of Jacques Collin, Rubempre, or their accomplices. The reason for this murder is the fact that justice had for a long time been on the traces of these clever criminals."

And again, on the margin, the magistrate pointed to this note written by the Prefet himself:

"This is the fact to my personal knowledge; and I also know that the Sieur Lucien de Rubempre has disgracefully tricked the Comte de Serizy and the Public Prosecutor."

"What do you say to this, Amelie?"

"It is frightful!" repled his wife. "Go on."

"The transformation of the convict Jacques Collin into a Spanish priest is the result of some crime more clever than that by which Coignard made himself Comte de Sainte-Helene."

"_Lucien de Rubempre_.

"Lucien Chardon, son of an apothecary at Angouleme--his mother a Demoiselle de Rubempre--bears the name of Rubempre in virtue of a royal patent. This was granted by the request of Madame la d.u.c.h.esse de Maufrigneuse and Monsieur le Comte de Serizy.

"This young man came to Paris in 182... without any means of subsistence, following Madame la Comtesse Sixte du Chatelet, then Madame de Bargeton, a cousin of Madame d'Espard's.

"He was ungrateful to Madame de Bargeton, and cohabited with a girl named Coralie, an actress at the Gymnase, now dead, who left Monsieur Camusot, a silk mercer in the Rue des Bourdonnais, to live with Rubempre.

"Ere long, having sunk into poverty through the insufficiency of the money allowed him by this actress, he seriously compromised his brother-in-law, a highly respected printer of Angouleme, by giving forged bills, for which David Sechard was arrested, during a short visit paid to Angouleme by Lucien. In consequence of this affair Rubempre fled, but suddenly reappeared in Paris with the Abbe Carlos Herrera.

"Though having no visible means of subsistence, the said Lucien de Rubempre spent on an average three hundred thousand francs during the three years of his second residence in Paris, and can only have obtained the money from the self-styled Abbe Carlos Herrera --but how did he come by it?

"He has recently laid out above a million francs in repurchasing the Rubempre estates to fulfil the conditions on which he was to be allowed to marry Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu. This marriage has been broken off in consequence of inquiries made by the Grandlieu family, the said Lucien having told them that he had obtained the money from his brother-in-law and his sister; but the information obtained, more especially by Monsieur Derville, attorney-at-law, proves that not only were that worthy couple ignorant of his having made this purchase, but that they believed the said Lucien to be deeply in debt.

"Moreover, the property inherited by the Sechards consists of houses; and the ready money, by their affidavit, amounted to about two hundred thousand francs.

"Lucien was secretly cohabiting with Esther Gobseck; hence there can be no doubt that all the lavish gifts of the Baron de Nucingen, the girl's protector, were handed over to the said Lucien.

"Lucien and his companion, the convict, have succeeded in keeping their footing in the face of the world longer than Coignard did, deriving their income from the prost.i.tution of the said Esther, formerly on the register of the town."

Though these notes are to a great extent a repet.i.tion of the story already told, it was necessary to reproduce them to show the part played by the police in Paris. As has already been seen from the note on Peyrade, the police has summaries, almost invariably correct, concerning every family or individual whose life is under suspicion, or whose actions are of a doubtful character. It knows every circ.u.mstance of their delinquencies. This universal register and account of consciences is as accurately kept as the register of the Bank of France and its accounts of fortunes. Just as the Bank notes the slightest delay in payment, gauges every credit, takes stock of every capitalist, and watches their proceedings, so does the police weigh and measure the honesty of each citizen. With it, as in a Court of Law, innocence has nothing to fear; it has no hold on anything but crime.

However high the rank of a family, it cannot evade this social providence.

And its discretion is equal to the extent of its power. This vast ma.s.s of written evidence compiled by the police--reports, notes, and summaries--an ocean of information, sleeps undisturbed, as deep and calm as the sea. Some accident occurs, some crime or misdemeanor becomes aggressive,--then the law refers to the police, and immediately, if any doc.u.ments bear on the suspected criminal, the judge is informed. These records, an a.n.a.lysis of his antecedents, are merely side-lights, and unknown beyond the walls of the Palais de Justice. No legal use can be made of them; Justice is informed by them, and takes advantage of them; but that is all. These doc.u.ments form, as it were, the inner lining of the tissue of crimes, their first cause, which is hardly ever made public. No jury would accept it; and the whole country would rise up in wrath if excerpts from those doc.u.ments came out in the trial at the a.s.sizes. In fact, it is the truth which is doomed to remain in the well, as it is everywhere and at all times. There is not a magistrate who, after twelve years' experience in Paris, is not fully aware that the a.s.size Court and the police authorities keep the secret of half these squalid atrocities, or who does not admit that half the crimes that are committed are never punished by the law.

If the public could know how reserved the _employes_ of the police are--who do not forget--they would reverence these honest men as much as they do Cheverus. The police is supposed to be astute, Machiavellian; it is, in fact most benign. But it hears every pa.s.sion in its paroxysms, it listens to every kind of treachery, and keeps notes of all. The police is terrible on one side only. What it does for justice it does no less for political interests; but in these it is as ruthless and as one-sided as the fires of the Inquisition.

"Put this aside," said the lawyer, replacing the notes in their cover; "this is a secret between the police and the law. The judge will estimate its value, but Monsieur and Madame Camusot must know nothing of it."

"As if I needed telling that!" said his wife.

"Lucien is guilty," he went on; "but of what?"