Explain yourself.”
“He is not a priest, not a Spaniard, he is ——”
“An escaped convict?” said the judge eagerly.
“Yes,” replied Lucien, “when he told me the fatal secret, I was already under obligations to him; I had fancied I was befriended by a respectable priest.”
“Jacques Collin ——” said Monsieur Camusot, beginning a sentence.
“Yes,” said Lucien, “his name is Jacques Collin.”
“Very good.
Jacques Collin has just now been identified by another person, and though he denies it, he does so, I believe, in your interest.
But I asked whether you knew who the man is in order to prove another of Jacques Collin’s impostures.”
Lucien felt as though he had hot iron in his inside as he heard this alarming statement.
“Do you not know,” Camusot went on, “that in order to give color to the extraordinary affection he has for you, he declares that he is your father?”
“He! My father?
— Oh, monsieur, did he tell you that?”
“Have you any suspicion of where the money came from that he used to give you?
For, if I am to believe the evidence of the letter you have in your hand, that poor girl, Mademoiselle Esther, must have done you lately the same services as Coralie formerly rendered you. Still, for some years, as you have just admitted, you lived very handsomely without receiving anything from her.”
“It is I who should ask you, monsieur, whence convicts get their money!
Jacques Collin my father!
— Oh, my poor mother!” and Lucien burst into tears.
“Coquart, read out to the prisoner that part of Carlos Herrera’s examination in which he said that Lucien de Rubempre was his son.”
The poet listened in silence, and with a look that was terrible to behold.
“I am done for!” he cried.
“A man is not done for who is faithful to the path of honor and truth,” said the judge.
“But you will commit Jacques Collin for trial?” said Lucien.
“Undoubtedly,” said Camusot, who aimed at making Lucien talk. “Speak out.”
But in spite of all his persuasion and remonstrances, Lucien would say no more.
Reflection had come too late, as it does to all men who are the slaves of impulse.
There lies the difference between the poet and the man of action; one gives way to feeling to reproduce it in living images, his judgement comes in after; the other feels and judges both at once.
Lucien remained pale and gloomy; he saw himself at the bottom of the precipice, down which the examining judge had rolled him by the apparent candor which had entrapped his poet’s soul.
He had betrayed, not his benefactor, but an accomplice who had defended their position with the courage of a lion, and a skill that showed no flaw.
Where Jacques Collin had saved everything by his daring, Lucien, the man of brains, had lost all by his lack of intelligence and reflection.
This infamous lie against which he revolted had screened a yet more infamous truth.
Utterly confounded by the judge’s skill, overpowered by his cruel dexterity, by the swiftness of the blows he had dealt him while making use of the errors of a life laid bare as probes to search his conscience, Lucien sat like an animal which the butcher’s pole-axe had failed to kill.
Free and innocent when he came before the judge, in a moment his own avowal had made him feel criminal.
To crown all, as a final grave irony, Camusot, cold and calm, pointed out to Lucien that his self-betrayal was the result of a misapprehension. Camusot was thinking of Jacques Collin’s announcing himself as Lucien’s father; while Lucien, wholly absorbed by his fear of seeing his confederacy with an escaped convict made public, had imitated the famous inadvertency of the murderers of Ibycus.
One of Royer–Collard’s most famous achievements was proclaiming the constant triumph of natural feeling over engrafted sentiments, and defending the cause of anterior oaths by asserting that the law of hospitality, for instance, ought to be regarded as binding to the point of negativing the obligation of a judicial oath.
He promulgated this theory, in the face of the world, from the French tribune; he boldly upheld conspirators, showing that it was human to be true to friendship rather than to the tyrannical laws brought out of the social arsenal to be adjusted to circumstances.
And, indeed, natural rights have laws which have never been codified, but which are more effectual and better known than those laid down by society.
Lucien had misapprehended, to his cost, the law of cohesion, which required him to be silent and leave Jacques Collin to protect himself; nay, more, he had accused him.
In his own interests the man ought always to be, to him, Carlos Herrera.
Monsieur Camusot was rejoicing in his triumph; he had secured two criminals. He had crushed with the hand of justice one of the favorites of fashion, and he had found the undiscoverable Jacques Collin.
He would be regarded as one of the cleverest of examining judges.
So he left his prisoner in peace; but he was studying this speechless consternation, and he saw drops of sweat collect on the miserable face, swell and fall, mingled with two streams of tears.
“Why should you weep, Monsieur de Rubempre?
You are, as I have told you, Mademoiselle Esther’s legatee, she having no heirs nor near relations, and her property amounts to nearly eight millions of francs if the lost seven hundred and fifty thousand francs are recovered.”
This was the last blow to the poor wretch.
“If you do not lose your head for ten minutes,” Jacques Collin had said in his note, and Lucien by keeping cool would have gained all his desire.
He might have paid his debt to Jacques Collin and have cut him adrift, have been rich, and have married Mademoiselle de Grandlieu.
Nothing could more eloquently demonstrate the power with which the examining judge is armed, as a consequence of the isolation or separation of persons under suspicion, or the value of such a communication as Asie had conveyed to Jacques Collin.
“Ah, monsieur!” replied Lucien, with the satirical bitterness of a man who makes a pedestal of his utter overthrow, “how appropriate is the phrase in legal slang ‘to UNDERGO examination.’
For my part, if I had to choose between the physical torture of past ages and the moral torture of our day, I would not hesitate to prefer the sufferings inflicted of old by the executioner.