“Between a man of your calibre and me — me of whom you tried to make a greater man than I am capable of being — no foolish sentiment can come at the moment of final parting.
You hoped to make me powerful and famous, and you have thrown me into the gulf of suicide, that is all.
I have long heard the broad pinions of that vertigo beating over my head.
“As you have sometimes said, there is the posterity of Cain and the posterity of Abel.
In the great human drama Cain is in opposition.
You are descended from Adam through that line, in which the devil still fans the fire of which the first spark was flung on Eve.
Among the demons of that pedigree, from time to time we see one of stupendous power, summing up every form of human energy, and resembling the fevered beasts of the desert, whose vitality demands the vast spaces they find there.
Such men are as dangerous as lions would be in the heart of Normandy; they must have their prey, and they devour common men and crop the money of fools. Their sport is so dangerous that at last they kill the humble dog whom they have taken for a companion and made an idol of.
“When it is God’s will, these mysterious beings may be a Moses, an Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet, or Napoleon; but when He leaves a generation of these stupendous tools to rust at the bottom of the ocean, they are no more than a Pugatschef, a Fouche, a Louvel, or the Abbe Carlos Herrera.
Gifted with immense power over tenderer souls, they entrap them and mangle them.
It is grand, it is fine — in its way.
It is the poisonous plant with gorgeous coloring that fascinates children in the woods.
It is the poetry of evil.
Men like you ought to dwell in caves and never come out of them.
You have made me live that vast life, and I have had all my share of existence; so I may very well take my head out of the Gordian knot of your policy and slip it into the running knot of my cravat.
“To repair the mischief I have done, I am forwarding to the public prosecutor a retraction of my deposition.
You will know how to take advantage of this document.
“In virtue of a will formally drawn up, restitution will be made, Monsieur l’Abbe, of the moneys belonging to your Order which you so imprudently devoted to my use, as a result of your paternal affection for me.
“And so, farewell. Farewell, colossal image of Evil and Corruption; farewell — to you who, if started on the right road, might have been greater than Ximenes, greater than Richelieu!
You have kept your promises. I find myself once more just as I was on the banks of the Charente, after enjoying, by your help, the enchantments of a dream.
But, unfortunately, it is not now in the waters of my native place that I shall drown the errors of a boy; but in the Seine, and my hole is a cell in the Conciergerie.
“Do not regret me: my contempt for you is as great as my admiration.
“LUCIEN.”
A little before one in the morning, when the men came to fetch away the body, they found Jacques Collin kneeling by the bed, the letter on the floor, dropped, no doubt, as a suicide drops the pistol that has shot him; but the unhappy man still held Lucien’s hand between his own, and was praying to God.
On seeing this man, the porters paused for a moment, for he looked like one of those stone images, kneeling to all eternity on a mediaeval tomb, the work of some stone-carver’s genius.
The sham priest, with eyes as bright as a tiger’s, but stiffened into supernatural rigidity, so impressed the men that they gently bid him rise.
“Why?” he asked mildly.
The audacious Trompe-la-Mort was as meek as a child.
The governor pointed him out to Monsieur de Chargeboeuf; and he, respecting such grief, and believing that Jacques Collin was indeed the priest he called himself, explained the orders given by Monsieur de Granville with regard to the funeral service and arrangements, showing that it was absolutely necessary that the body should be transferred to Lucien’s lodgings, Quai Malaquais, where the priests were waiting to watch by it for the rest of the night.
“It is worthy of that gentleman’s well-known magnanimity,” said Jacques Collin sadly. “Tell him, monsieur, that he may rely on my gratitude. Yes, I am in a position to do him great service. Do not forget these words; they are of the utmost importance to him.
“Oh, monsieur! strange changes come over a man’s spirit when for seven hours he has wept over such a son as he —— And I shall see him no more!”
After gazing once more at Lucien with an expression of a mother bereft of her child’s remains, Jacques Collin sank in a heap.
As he saw Lucien’s body carried away, he uttered a groan that made the men hurry off.
The public prosecutor’s private secretary and the governor of the prison had already made their escape from the scene.
What had become of that iron spirit; of the decision which was a match in swiftness for the eye; of the nature in which thought and action flashed forth together like one flame; of the sinews hardened by three spells of labor on the hulks, and by three escapes, the muscles which had acquired the metallic temper of a savage’s limbs?
Iron will yield to a certain amount of hammering or persistent pressure; its impenetrable molecules, purified and made homogeneous by man, may become disintegrated, and without being in a state of fusion the metal had lost its power of resistance.
Blacksmiths, locksmiths, tool-makers sometimes express this state by saying the iron is retting, appropriating a word applied exclusively to hemp, which is reduced to pulp and fibre by maceration.
Well, the human soul, or, if you will, the threefold powers of body, heart, and intellect, under certain repeated shocks, get into such a condition as fibrous iron. They too are disintegrated.
Science and law and the public seek a thousand causes for the terrible catastrophes on railways caused by the rupture of an iron rail, that of Bellevue being a famous instance; but no one has asked the evidence of real experts in such matters, the blacksmiths, who all say the same thing,
“The iron was stringy!”
The danger cannot be foreseen.
Metal that has gone soft, and metal that has preserved its tenacity, both look exactly alike.
Priests and examining judges often find great criminals in this state.
The awful experiences of the Assize Court and the “last toilet” commonly produce this dissolution of the nervous system, even in the strongest natures.
Then confessions are blurted by the most firmly set lips; then the toughest hearts break; and, strange to say, always at the moment when these confessions are useless, when this weakness as of death snatches from the man the mask of innocence which made Justice uneasy — for it always is uneasy when the criminal dies without confessing his crime.
Napoleon went through this collapse of every human power on the field of Waterloo.
At eight in the morning, when the warder of the better cells entered the room where Jacques Collin was confined, he found him pale and calm, like a man who has collected all his strength by sheer determination.
“It is the hour for airing in the prison-yard,” said the turnkey; “you have not been out for three days; if you choose to take air and exercise, you may.”
Jacques Collin, lost in his absorbing thoughts, and taking no interest in himself, regarding himself as a garment with no body in it, a perfect rag, never suspected the trap laid for him by Bibi–Lupin, nor the importance attaching to his walk in the prison-yard.
The unhappy man went out mechanically, along the corridor, by the cells built into the magnificent cloisters of the Palace of the Kings, over which is the corridor Saint–Louis, as it is called, leading to the various purlieus of the Court of Appeals.