So Lucien, on entering his cell, saw an exact reproduction of the first room he had occupied in Paris at the Hotel Cluny.
A bed to compare with those in the worst furnished apartments of the Quartier Latin, straw chairs with the bottoms out, a table and a few utensils, compose the furniture of such a room, in which two accused prisoners are not unfrequently placed together when they are quiet in their ways, and their misdeeds are not crimes of violence, but such as forgery or bankruptcy.
This resemblance between his starting-point, in the days of his innocency, and his goal, the lowest depths of degradation and sham, was so direct an appeal to his last chord of poetic feeling, that the unhappy fellow melted into tears.
For four hours he wept, as rigid in appearance as a figure of stone, but enduring the subversion of all his hopes, the crushing of all his social vanity, and the utter overthrow of his pride, smarting in each separate I that exists in an ambitious man — a lover, a success, a dandy, a Parisian, a poet, a libertine, and a favorite.
Everything in him was broken by this fall as of Icarus.
Carlos Herrera, on the other hand, as soon as he was locked into his cell and found himself alone, began pacing it to and fro like the polar bear in his cage.
He carefully examined the door and assured himself that, with the exception of the peephole, there was not a crack in it.
He sounded all the walls, he looked up the funnel down which a dim light came, and he said to himself,
“I am safe enough!”
He sat down in a corner where the eye of a prying warder at the grating of the peephole could not see him.
Then he took off his wig, and hastily ungummed a piece of paper that did duty as lining.
The side of the paper next his head was so greasy that it looked like the very texture of the wig.
If it had occurred to Bibi–Lupin to snatch off the wig to establish the identity of the Spaniard with Jacques Collin, he would never have thought twice about the paper, it looked so exactly like part of the wigmaker’s work.
The other side was still fairly white, and clean enough to have a few lines written on it.
The delicate and tiresome task of unsticking it had been begun in La Force; two hours would not have been long enough; it had taken him half of the day before.
The prisoner began by tearing this precious scrap of paper so as to have a strip four or five lines wide, which he divided into several bits; he then replaced his store of paper in the same strange hiding-place, after damping the gummed side so as to make it stick again.
He felt in a lock of his hair for one of those pencil leads as thin as a stout pin, then recently invented by Susse, and which he had put in with some gum; he broke off a scrap long enough to write with and small enough to hide in his ear.
Having made these preparations with the rapidity and certainty of hand peculiar to old convicts, who are as light-fingered as monkeys, Jacques Collin sat down on the edge of his bed to meditate on his instructions to Asie, in perfect confidence that he should come across her, so entirely did he rely on the woman’s genius.
“During the preliminary examination,” he reflected, “I pretended to be a Spaniard and spoke broken French, appealed to my Ambassador, and alleged diplomatic privilege, not understanding anything I was asked, the whole performance varied by fainting, pauses, sighs — in short, all the vagaries of a dying man.
I must stick to that.
My papers are all regular.
Asie and I can eat up Monsieur Camusot; he is no great shakes!
“Now I must think of Lucien; he must be made to pull himself together. I must get at the boy at whatever cost, and show him some plan of conduct, otherwise he will give himself up, give me up, lose all!
He must be taught his lesson before he is examined.
And besides, I must find some witnesses to swear to my being a priest!”
Such was the position, moral and physical, of these two prisoners, whose fate at the moment depended on Monsieur Camusot, examining judge to the Inferior Court of the Seine, and sovereign master, during the time granted to him by the Code, of the smallest details of their existence, since he alone could grant leave for them to be visited by the chaplains, the doctor, or any one else in the world.
No human authority — neither the King, nor the Keeper of the Seals, nor the Prime Minister, can encroach on the power of an examining judge; nothing can stop him, no one can control him.
He is a monarch, subject only to his conscience and the Law.
At the present time, when philosophers, philanthropists, and politicians are constantly endeavoring to reduce every social power, the rights conferred on the examining judges have become the object of attacks that are all the more serious because they are almost justified by those rights, which, it must be owned, are enormous.
And yet, as every man of sense will own, that power ought to remain unimpaired; in certain cases, its exercise can be mitigated by a strong infusion of caution; but society is already threatened by the ineptitude and weakness of the jury — which is, in fact, the really supreme bench, and which ought to be composed only of choice and elected men — and it would be in danger of ruin if this pillar were broken which now upholds our criminal procedure.
Arrest on suspicion is one of the terrible but necessary powers of which the risk to society is counterbalanced by its immense importance.
And besides, distrust of the magistracy in general is a beginning of social dissolution.
Destroy that institution, and reconstruct it on another basis; insist — as was the case before the Revolution — that judges should show a large guarantee of fortune; but, at any cost, believe in it!
Do not make it an image of society to be insulted!
In these days a judge, paid as a functionary, and generally a poor man, has in the place of his dignity of old a haughtiness of demeanor that seems odious to the men raised to be his equals; for haughtiness is dignity without a solid basis.
That is the vicious element in the present system.
If France were divided into ten circuits, the magistracy might be reinstated by conferring its dignities on men of fortune; but with six-and-twenty circuits this is impossible.
The only real improvement to be insisted on in the exercise of the power intrusted to the examining judge, is an alteration in the conditions of preliminary imprisonment.
The mere fact of suspicion ought to make no difference in the habits of life of the suspected parties.
Houses of detention for them ought to be constructed in Paris, furnished and arranged in such a way as greatly to modify the feeling of the public with regard to suspected persons.
The law is good, and is necessary; its application is in fault, and public feeling judges the laws from the way in which they are carried out.
And public opinion in France condemns persons under suspicion, while, by an inexplicable reaction, it justifies those committed for trial.
This, perhaps, is a result of the essentially refractory nature of the French.
This illogical temper of the Parisian people was one of the factors which contributed to the climax of this drama; nay, as may be seen, it was one of the most important.
To enter into the secret of the terrible scenes which are acted out in the examining judge’s chambers; to understand the respective positions of the two belligerent powers, the Law and the examinee, the object of whose contest is a certain secret kept by the prisoner from the inquisition of the magistrate — well named in prison slang, “the curious man”— it must always be remembered that persons imprisoned under suspicion know nothing of what is being said by the seven or eight publics that compose the Public, nothing of how much the police know, or the authorities, or the little that newspapers can publish as to the circumstances of the crime.
Thus, to give a man in custody such information as Jacques Collin had just received from Asie as to Lucien’s arrest, is throwing a rope to a drowning man. As will be seen, in consequence of this ignorance, a stratagem which, without this warning, must certainly have been equally fatal to the convict, was doomed to failure.
Monsieur Camusot, the son-in-law of one of the clerks of the cabinet, too well known for any account of his position and connection to be necessary here, was at this moment almost as much perplexed as Carlos Herrera in view of the examination he was to conduct.
He had formerly been President of a Court of the Paris circuit; he had been raised from that position and called to be a judge in Paris — one of the most coveted posts in the magistracy — by the influence of the celebrated Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whose husband, attached to the Dauphin’s person, and Colonel of a cavalry regiment of the Guards, was as much in favor with the King as she was with MADAME.
In return for a very small service which he had done the Duchess — an important matter to her — on occasion of a charge of forgery brought against the young Comte d’Esgrignon by a banker of Alencon (see La Cabinet des Antiques; Scenes de la vie de Province), he was promoted from being a provincial judge to be president of his Court, and from being president to being an examining judge in Paris.
For eighteen months now he had sat on the most important Bench in the kingdom; and had once, at the desire of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, had an opportunity of forwarding the ends of a lady not less influential than the Duchess, namely, the Marquise d’Espard, but he had failed. (See the Commission in Lunacy.)