“She seemed to be a lady.”
“Did you see her face?”
“She wore a black veil.”
“What did they say to each other?”
“Well — a pious person, with a prayer-book in her hand — what could she say?
She asked the Abbe’s blessing and went on her knees.”
“Did they talk together a long time?”
“Not five minutes; but we none of us understood what they said; they spoke Spanish no doubt.”
“Tell us everything, monsieur,” the public prosecutor insisted. “I repeat, the very smallest detail is to us of the first importance.
Let this be a caution to you.”
“She was crying, monsieur.”
“Really weeping?”
“That we could not see, she hid her face in her handkerchief.
She left three hundred francs in gold for the prisoners.”
“That was not she!” said Camusot.
“Bibi–Lupin at once said, ‘She is a thief!’” said Monsieur Gault.
“He knows the tribe,” said Monsieur de Granville. —“Get out your warrant,” he added, turning to Camusot, “and have seals placed on everything in her house — at once!
But how can she have got hold of Monsieur de Serizy’s recommendation?
— Bring me the order — and go, Monsieur Gault; send me that Abbe immediately.
So long as we have him safe, the danger cannot be greater.
And in the course of two hours’ talk you get a long way into a man’s mind.”
“Especially such a public prosecutor as you are,” said Camusot insidiously.
“There will be two of us,” replied Monsieur de Granville politely.
And he became discursive once more.
“There ought to be created for every prison parlor, a post of superintendent, to be given with a good salary to the cleverest and most energetic police officers,” said he, after a long pause.
“Bibi–Lupin ought to end his days in such a place.
Then we should have an eye and ear on the watch in a department that needs closer supervision than it gets.
— Monsieur Gault could tell us nothing positive.”
“He has so much to do,” said Camusot. “Still, between these secret cells and us there lies a gap which ought not to exist.
On the way from the Conciergerie to the judges’ rooms there are passages, courtyards, and stairs.
The attention of the agents cannot be unflagging, whereas the prisoner is always alive to his own affairs.
“I was told that a lady had already placed herself in the way of Jacques Collin when he was brought up from the cells to be examined.
That woman got into the guardroom at the top of the narrow stairs from the mousetrap; the ushers told me, and I blamed the gendarmes.”
“Oh! the Palais needs entire reconstruction,” said Monsieur de Granville. “But it is an outlay of twenty to thirty million francs!
Just try asking the Chambers for thirty millions for the more decent accommodation of Justice.”
The sound of many footsteps and a clatter of arms fell on their ear.
It would be Jacques Collin.
The public prosecutor assumed a mask of gravity that hid the man. Camusot imitated his chief.
The office-boy opened the door, and Jacques Collin came in, quite calm and unmoved.
“You wished to speak to me,” said Monsieur de Granville. “I am ready to listen.”
“Monsieur le Comte, I am Jacques Collin. I surrender!”
Camusot started; the public prosecutor was immovable.
“As you may suppose, I have my reasons for doing this,” said Jacques Collin, with an ironical glance at the two magistrates. “I must inconvenience you greatly; for if I had remained a Spanish priest, you would simply have packed me off with an escort of gendarmes as far as the frontier by Bayonne, and there Spanish bayonets would have relieved you of me.”
The lawyers sat silent and imperturbable.
“Monsieur le Comte,” the convict went on, “the reasons which have led me to this step are yet more pressing than this, but devilish personal to myself. I can tell them to no one but you. — If you are afraid ——”
“Afraid of whom?
Of what?” said the Comte de Granville.
In attitude and expression, in the turn of his head, his demeanor and his look, this distinguished judge was at this moment a living embodiment of the law which ought to supply us with the noblest examples of civic courage.
In this brief instant he was on a level with the magistrates of the old French Parlement in the time of the civil wars, when the presidents found themselves face to face with death, and stood, made of marble, like the statues that commemorate them.
“Afraid to be alone with an escaped convict!”