Be bold: propose to Monsieur de Granville that he should relieve you of Jacques Collin by transferring him to La Force, where the convicts know how to deal with those who betray them.
“I will go to the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, who will take me to the Grandlieus.
Possibly I may see Monsieur de Serizy. Trust me to sound the alarm everywhere.
Above all, send me a word we will agree upon to let me know if the Spanish priest is officially recognized as Jacques Collin.
Get your business at the Palais over by two o’clock, and I will have arranged for you to have an interview with the Keeper of the Seals; perhaps I may find him with the Marquise d’Espard.”
Camusot stood squarely with a look of admiration that made his knowing wife smile.
“Now, come to dinner and be cheerful,” said she in conclusion. “Why, you see!
We have been only two years in Paris, and here you are on the highroad to be made Councillor before the end of the year.
From that to the Presidency of a court, my dear, there is no gulf but what some political service may bridge.”
This conjugal sitting shows how greatly the deeds and the lightest words of Jacques Collin, the lowest personage in this drama, involved the honor of the families among whom he had planted his now dead protege.
At the Conciergerie Lucien’s death and Madame de Serizy’s incursion had produced such a block in the wheels of the machinery that the Governor had forgotten to remove the sham priest from his dungeon-cell.
Though more than one instance is on record of the death of a prisoner during his preliminary examination, it was a sufficiently rare event to disturb the warders, the clerk, and the Governor, and hinder their working with their usual serenity.
At the same time, to them the important fact was not the handsome young fellow so suddenly become a corpse, but the breakage of the wrought-iron bar of the outer prison gate by the frail hands of a fine lady.
And indeed, as soon as the public prosecutor and Comte Octave de Bauvan had gone off with Monsieur de Serizy and his unconscious wife, the Governor, clerk, and turnkeys gathered round the gate, after letting out Monsieur Lebrun, the prison doctor, who had been called in to certify to Lucien’s death, in concert with the “death doctor” of the district in which the unfortunate youth had been lodging.
In Paris, the “death doctor” is the medical officer whose duty it is in each district to register deaths and certify to their causes.
With the rapid insight for which he was known, Monsieur de Granville had judged it necessary, for the honor of the families concerned, to have the certificate of Lucien’s death deposited at the Mairie of the district in which the Quai Malaquais lies, as the deceased had resided there, and to have the body carried from his lodgings to the Church of Saint–Germain des Pres, where the service was to be held.
Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, Monsieur de Granville’s private secretary, had orders to this effect.
The body was to be transferred from the prison during the night.
The secretary was desired to go at once and settle matters at the Mairie with the parish authorities and with the official undertakers.
Thus, to the world in general, Lucien would have died at liberty in his own lodgings, the funeral would start from thence, and his friends would be invited there for the ceremony.
So, when Camusot, his mind at ease, was sitting down to dinner with his ambitious better-half, the Governor of the Conciergerie and Monsieur Lebrun, the prison doctor, were standing outside the gate bewailing the fragility of iron bars and the strength of ladies in love.
“No one knows,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “what an amount of nervous force there is in a man wound up to the highest pitch of passion.
Dynamics and mathematics have no formulas or symbols to express that power.
Why, only yesterday, I witnessed an experiment which gave me a shudder, and which accounts for the terrible strength put forth just now by that little woman.”
“Tell me about it,” said Monsieur Gault, “for I am so foolish as to take an interest in magnetism; I do not believe in it, but it mystifies me.”
“A physician who magnetizes — for there are men among us who believe in magnetism,” Lebrun went on, “offered to experiment on me in proof of a phenomenon that he described and I doubted.
Curious to see with my own eyes one of the strange states of nervous tension by which the existence of magnetism is demonstrated, I consented.
“These are the facts. — I should very much like to know what our College of Medicine would say if each of its members in turn were subjected to this influence, which leaves no loophole for incredulity.
“My old friend — this doctor,” said Doctor Lebrun parenthetically, “is an old man persecuted for his opinions since Mesmer’s time by all the faculty; he is seventy or seventy-two years of age, and his name is Bouvard.
At the present day he is the patriarchal representative of the theory of animal magnetism.
This good man regards me as a son; I owe my training to him.
— Well, this worthy old Bouvard it was who proposed to prove to me that nerve-force put in motion by the magnetizer was, not indeed infinite, for man is under immutable laws, but a power acting like other powers of nature whose elemental essence escapes our observation.
“‘For instance,’ said he, ‘if you place your hand in that of a somnambulist who, when awake, can press it only up to a certain average of tightness, you will see that in the somnambulistic state — as it is stupidly termed — his fingers can clutch like a vise screwed up by a blacksmith.’— Well, monsieur, I placed my hand in that of a woman, not asleep, for Bouvard rejects the word, but isolated, and when the old man bid her squeeze my wrist as long and as tightly as she could, I begged him to stop when the blood was almost bursting from my finger tips.
Look, you can see the marks of her clutch, which I shall not lose for these three months.”
“The deuce!” exclaimed Monsieur Gault, as he saw a band of bruised flesh, looking like the scar of a burn.
“My dear Gault,” the doctor went on, “if my wrist had been gripped in an iron manacle screwed tight by a locksmith, I should not have felt the bracelet of metal so hard as that woman’s fingers; her hand was of unyielding steel, and I am convinced that she could have crushed my bones and broken my hand from the wrist.
The pressure, beginning almost insensibly, increased without relaxing, fresh force being constantly added to the former grip; a tourniquet could not have been more effectual than that hand used as an instrument of torture.
— To me, therefore, it seems proven that under the influence of passion, which is the will concentrated on one point and raised to an incalculable power of animal force, as the different varieties of electric force are also, man may direct his whole vitality, whether for attack or resistance, to one of his organs. — Now, this little lady, under the stress of her despair, had concentrated her vital force in her hands.”
“She must have a good deal too, to break a wrought-iron bar,” said the chief warder, with a shake of the head.
“There was a flaw in it,” Monsieur Gault observed.
“For my part,” said the doctor, “I dare assign no limits to nervous force.
And indeed it is by this that mothers, to save their children, can magnetize lions, climb, in a fire, along a parapet where a cat would not venture, and endure the torments that sometimes attend childbirth.
In this lies the secret of the attempts made by convicts and prisoners to regain their liberty.
The extent of our vital energies is as yet unknown; they are part of the energy of nature itself, and we draw them from unknown reservoirs.”
“Monsieur,” said the warder in an undertone to the Governor, coming close to him as he was escorting Doctor Lebrun as far as the outer gates of the Conciergerie, “Number 2 in the secret cells says he is ill, and needs the doctor; he declares he is dying,” added the turnkey.
“Indeed,” said the Governor.
“His breath rattles in his throat,” replied the man.
“It is five o’clock,” said the doctor; “I have had no dinner. But, after all, I am at hand. Come, let us see.”
“Number 2, as it happens, is the Spanish priest suspected of being Jacques Collin,” said Monsieur Gault to the doctor, “and one of the persons suspected of the crime in which that poor young man was implicated.”
“I saw him this morning,” replied the doctor. “Monsieur Camusot sent for me to give evidence as to the state of the rascal’s health, and I may assure you that he is perfectly well, and could make a fortune by playing the part of Hercules in a troupe of athletes.”