“Recantation.
“I, the undersigned, hereby declare that I retract, without reservation, all that I deposed at my examination to-day before Monsieur Camusot.
“The Abbe Carlos Herrera always called himself my spiritual father, and I was misled by the word father used in another sense by the judge, no doubt under a misapprehension.
“I am aware that, for political ends, and to quash certain secrets concerning the Cabinets of Spain and of the Tuileries, some obscure diplomatic agents tried to show that the Abbe Carlos Herrera was a forger named Jacques Collin; but the Abbe Carlos Herrera never told me anything about the matter excepting that he was doing his best to obtain evidence of the death or of the continued existence of Jacques Collin.
“LUCIEN DE RUBEMPRE. “AT THE CONCIERGERIE, May 15th, 1830.”
The fever for suicide had given Lucien immense clearness of mind, and the swiftness of hand familiar to authors in the fever of composition.
The impetus was so strong within him that these four documents were all written within half an hour; he folded them in a wrapper, fastened with wafers, on which he impressed with the strength of delirium the coat-of-arms engraved on a seal-ring he wore, and he then laid the packet very conspicuously in the middle of the floor.
Certainly it would have been impossible to conduct himself with greater dignity, in the false position to which all this infamy had led him; he was rescuing his memory from opprobrium, and repairing the injury done to his accomplice, so far as the wit of a man of the world could nullify the result of the poet’s trustfulness.
If Lucien had been taken back to one of the lower cells, he would have been wrecked on the impossibility of carrying out his intentions, for those boxes of masonry have no furniture but a sort of camp-bed and a pail for necessary uses.
There is not a nail, not a chair, not even a stool.
The camp-bed is so firmly fixed that it is impossible to move it without an amount of labor that the warder would not fail to detect, for the iron-barred peephole is always open.
Indeed, if a prisoner under suspicion gives reason for uneasiness, he is watched by a gendarme or a constable.
In the private rooms for which prisoners pay, and in that whither Lucien had been conveyed by the judge’s courtesy to a young man belonging to the upper ranks of society, the movable bed, table, and chair might serve to carry out his purpose of suicide, though they hardly made it easy.
Lucien wore a long blue silk necktie, and on his way back from examination he was already meditating on the means by which Pichegru, more or less voluntarily, ended his days.
Still, to hang himself, a man must find a purchase, and have a sufficient space between it and the ground for his feet to find no support.
Now the window of his room, looking out on the prison-yard, had no handle to the fastening; and the bars, being fixed outside, were divided from his reach by the thickness of the wall, and could not be used for a support.
This, then, was the plan hit upon by Lucien to put himself out of the world.
The boarding of the lower part of the opening, which prevented his seeing out into the yard, also hindered the warders outside from seeing what was done in the room; but while the lower portion of the window was replaced by two thick planks, the upper part of both halves still was filled with small panes, held in place by the cross pieces in which they were set.
By standing on his table Lucien could reach the glazed part of the window, and take or break out two panes, so as to have a firm point of attachment in the angle of the lower bar.
Round this he would tie his cravat, turn round once to tighten it round his neck after securing it firmly, and kick the table from under his feet.
He drew the table up under the window without making any noise, took off his coat and waistcoat, and got on the table unhesitatingly to break a pane above and one below the iron cross-bar.
Standing on the table, he could look out across the yard on a magical view, which he then beheld for the first time.
The Governor of the prison, in deference to Monsieur Camusot’s request that he should deal as leniently as possible with Lucien, had led him, as we have seen, through the dark passages of the Conciergerie, entered from the dark vault opposite the Tour d’Argent, thus avoiding the exhibition of a young man of fashion to the crowd of prisoners airing themselves in the yard.
It will be for the reader to judge whether the aspect of the promenade was not such as to appeal deeply to a poet’s soul.
The yard of the Conciergerie ends at the quai between the Tour d’Argent and the Tour Bonbec; thus the distance between them exactly shows from the outside the width of the plot of ground.
The corridor called the Galerie de Saint–Louis, which extends from the Galerie Marchande to the Courts of Appeals and the Tour Bonbec — in which, it is said, Saint–Louis’ room still exists — may enable the curious to estimate the depths of the yard, as it is of the same length.
Thus the dark cells and the private rooms are under the Galerie Marchande.
And Queen Marie Antoinette, whose dungeon was under the present cells, was conducted to the presence of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which held its sittings in the place where the Court of Appeals now performs its solemn functions, up a horrible flight of steps, now never used, in the very thickness of the wall on which the Galerie Marchande is built.
One side of the prison-yard — that on which the Hall of Saint–Louis forms the first floor — displays a long row of Gothic columns, between which the architects of I know not what period have built up two floors of cells to accommodate as many prisoners as possible, by choking the capitals, the arches, and the vaults of this magnificent cloister with plaster, barred loopholes, and partitions.
Under the room known as the Cabinet de Saint–Louis, in the Tour Bonbec, there is a spiral stair leading to these dens.
This degradation of one of the immemorial buildings of France is hideous to behold.
From the height at which Lucien was standing he saw this cloister, and the details of the building that joins the two towers, in sharp perspective; before him were the pointed caps of the towers.
He stood amazed; his suicide was postponed to his admiration.
The phenomena of hallucination are in these days so fully recognized by the medical faculty that this mirage of the senses, this strange illusion of the mind is beyond dispute.
A man under the stress of a feeling which by its intensity has become a monomania, often finds himself in the frame of mind to which opium, hasheesh, or the protoxyde of azote might have brought him.
Spectres appear, phantoms and dreams take shape, things of the past live again as they once were.
What was but an image of the brain becomes a moving or a living object.
Science is now beginning to believe that under the action of a paroxysm of passion the blood rushes to the brain, and that such congestion has the terrible effects of a dream in a waking state, so averse are we to regard thought as a physical and generative force. (See Louis Lambert.) Lucien saw the building in all its pristine beauty; the columns were new, slender and bright; Saint–Louis’ Palace rose before him as it had once appeared; he admired its Babylonian proportions and Oriental fancy.
He took this exquisite vision as a poetic farewell from civilized creation.
While making his arrangements to die, he wondered how this marvel of architecture could exist in Paris so utterly unknown.
He was two Luciens — one Lucien the poet, wandering through the Middle Ages under the vaults and the turrets of Saint–Louis, the other Lucien ready for suicide.
Just as Monsieur de Granville had ended giving his instructions to the young secretary, the Governor of the Conciergerie came in, and the expression of his face was such as to give the public prosecutor a presentiment of disaster.
“Have you met Monsieur Camusot?” he asked.
“No, monsieur,” said the Governor; “his clerk Coquart instructed me to give the Abbe Carlos a private room and to liberate Monsieur de Rubempre — but it is too late.”
“Good God! what has happened?”
“Here, monsieur, is a letter for you which will explain the catastrophe.
The warder on duty in the prison-yard heard a noise of breaking glass in the upper room, and Monsieur Lucien’s next neighbor shrieking wildly, for he heard the young man’s dying struggles.
The warder came to me pale from the sight that met his eyes. He found the prisoner hanged from the window bar by his necktie.”
Though the Governor spoke in a low voice, a fearful scream from Madame de Serizy showed that under stress of feeling our faculties are incalculably keen.
The Countess heard, or guessed. Before Monsieur de Granville could turn round, or Monsieur de Bauvan or her husband could stop her, she fled like a flash out of the door, and reached the Galerie Marchande, where she ran on to the stairs leading out to the Rue de la Barillerie.