The passage, leading to the cells for solitary confinement and to the women’s quarters, faces the stove where gendarmes and warders are always collected together.
The air-hole, the only outlet to the open air, is nine feet above the floor, and looks out on the first court, which is guarded by sentries at the outer gate.
No human power can make any impression on the walls.
Besides, a man sentenced to death is at once secured in a straitwaistcoat, a garment which precludes all use of the hands; he is chained by one foot to his camp bed, and he has a fellow prisoner to watch and attend on him.
The room is paved with thick flags, and the light is so dim that it is hard to see anything.
It is impossible not to feel chilled to the marrow on going in, even now, though for sixteen years the cell has never been used, in consequence of the changes effected in Paris in the treatment of criminals under sentence.
Imagine the guilty man there with his remorse for company, in silence and darkness, two elements of horror, and you will wonder how he ever failed to go mad.
What a nature must that be whose temper can resist such treatment, with the added misery of enforced idleness and inaction.
And yet Theodore Calvi, a Corsican, now twenty-seven years of age, muffled, as it were, in a shroud of absolute reserve, had for two months held out against the effects of this dungeon and the insidious chatter of the prisoner placed to entrap him.
These were the strange circumstances under which the Corsican had been condemned to death.
Though the case is a very curious one, our account of it must be brief.
It is impossible to introduce a long digression at the climax of a narrative already so much prolonged, since its only interest is in so far as it concerns Jacques Collin, the vertebral column, so to speak, which, by its sinister persistency, connects Le Pere Goriot with Illusions perdues, and Illusions perdues with this Study.
And, indeed, the reader’s imagination will be able to work out the obscure case which at this moment was causing great uneasiness to the jury of the sessions, before whom Theodore Calvi had been tried.
For a whole week, since the criminal’s appeal had been rejected by the Supreme Court, Monsieur de Granville had been worrying himself over the case, and postponing from day to day the order for carrying out the sentence, so anxious was he to reassure the jury by announcing that on the threshold of death the accused had confessed the crime.
A poor widow of Nanterre, whose dwelling stood apart from the township, which is situated in the midst of the infertile plain lying between Mount–Valerian, Saint–Germain, the hills of Sartrouville, and Argenteuil, had been murdered and robbed a few days after coming into her share of an unexpected inheritance.
This windfall amounted to three thousand francs, a dozen silver spoons and forks, a gold watch and chain and some linen.
Instead of depositing the three thousand francs in Paris, as she was advised by the notary of the wine-merchant who had left it her, the old woman insisted on keeping it by her.
In the first place, she had never seen so much money of her own, and then she distrusted everybody in every kind of affairs, as most common and country folk do.
After long discussion with a wine-merchant of Nanterre, a relation of her own and of the wine-merchant who had left her the money, the widow decided on buying an annuity, on selling her house at Nanterre, and living in the town of Saint–Germain.
The house she was living in, with a good-sized garden enclosed by a slight wooden fence, was the poor sort of dwelling usually built by small landowners in the neighborhood of Paris.
It had been hastily constructed, with no architectural design, of cement and rubble, the materials commonly used near Paris, where, as at Nanterre, they are extremely abundant, the ground being everywhere broken by quarries open to the sky.
This is the ordinary hut of the civilized savage.
The house consisted of a ground floor and one floor above, with garrets in the roof.
The quarryman, her deceased husband, and the builder of this dwelling, had put strong iron bars to all the windows; the front door was remarkably thick.
The man knew that he was alone there in the open country — and what a country!
His customers were the principal master-masons in Paris, so the more important materials for his house, which stood within five hundred yards of his quarry, had been brought out in his own carts returning empty.
He could choose such as suited him where houses were pulled down, and got them very cheap.
Thus the window frames, the iron-work, the doors, shutters, and wooden fittings were all derived from sanctioned pilfering, presents from his customers, and good ones, carefully chosen.
Of two window-frames, he could take the better.
The house, entered from a large stable-yard, was screened from the road by a wall; the gate was of strong iron-railing.
Watch-dogs were kept in the stables, and a little dog indoors at night.
There was a garden of more than two acres behind.
His widow, without children, lived here with only a woman servant.
The sale of the quarry had paid off the owner’s debts; he had been dead about two years.
This isolated house was the widow’s sole possession, and she kept fowls and cows, selling the eggs and milk at Nanterre.
Having no stableboy or carter or quarryman — her husband had made them do every kind of work — she no longer kept up the garden; she only gathered the few greens and roots that the stony ground allowed to grow self-sown.
The price of the house, with the money she had inherited, would amount to seven or eight thousand francs, and she could fancy herself living very happily at Saint–Germain on seven or eight hundred francs a year, which she thought she could buy with her eight thousand francs.
She had had many discussions over this with the notary at Saint–Germain, for she refused to hand her money over for an annuity to the wine-merchant at Nanterre, who was anxious to have it.
Under these circumstances, then, after a certain day the widow Pigeau and her servant were seen no more.
The front gate, the house door, the shutters, all were closed.
At the end of three days, the police, being informed, made inquisition.
Monsieur Popinot, the examining judge, and the public prosecutor arrived from Paris, and this was what they reported:—
Neither the outer gate nor the front door showed any marks of violence.
The key was in the lock of the door, inside.
Not a single bar had been wretched; the locks, shutters, and bolts were all untampered with.
The walls showed no traces that could betray the passage of the criminals.
The chimney-posts, of red clay, afforded no opportunity for ingress or escape, and the roofing was sound and unbroken, showing no damage by violence.
On entering the first-floor rooms, the magistrates, the gendarmes, and Bibi–Lupin found the widow Pigeau strangled in her bed and the woman strangled in hers, each by means of the bandana she wore as a nightcap.
The three thousand francs were gone, with the silver-plate and the trinkets.
The two bodies were decomposing, as were those of the little dog and of a large yard-dog.