Mere imprisonment is a light penalty for misdemeanor, but detention is imprisonment with hard labor, a severe and sometimes degrading punishment.
Hence, those persons who nowadays are in favor of the penitentiary system would upset an admirable scheme of criminal law in which the penalties are judiciously graduated, and they will end by punishing the lightest peccadilloes as severely as the greatest crimes.
The reader may compare in the Scenes of Political Life (for instance, in Une Tenebreuse affaire) the curious differences subsisting between the criminal law of Brumaire in the year IV., and that of the Code Napoleon which has taken its place.
In most trials, as in this one, the suspected persons are at once examined (and from inculpes become prevenus); justice immediately issues a warrant for their arrest and imprisonment.
In point of fact, in most of such cases the criminals have either fled, or have been instantly apprehended.
Indeed, as we have seen the police, which is but an instrument, and the officers of justice had descended on Esther’s house with the swiftness of a thunderbolt.
Even if there had not been the reasons for revenge suggested to the superior police by Corentin, there was a robbery to be investigated of seven hundred and fifty thousand francs from the Baron de Nucingen.
Just as the first prison van, conveying Jacques Collin, reached the archway of Saint–Jean — a narrow, dark passage, some block ahead compelled the postilion to stop under the vault.
The prisoner’s eyes shone like carbuncles through the grating, in spite of his aspect as of a dying man, which, the day before, had led the governor of La Force to believe that the doctor must be called in.
These flaming eyes, free to rove at this moment, for neither the officer nor the gendarme looked round at their “customer,” spoke so plain a language that a clever examining judge, M. Popinot, for instance, would have identified the man convicted for sacrilege.
In fact, ever since the “salad-basket” had turned out of the gate of La Force, Jacques Collin had studied everything on his way.
Notwithstanding the pace they had made, he took in the houses with an eager and comprehensive glance from the ground floor to the attics.
He saw and noted every passer-by.
God Himself is not more clear-seeing as to the means and ends of His creatures than this man in observing the slightest differences in the medley of things and people.
Armed with hope, as the last of the Horatii was armed with his sword, he expected help.
To anybody but this Machiavelli of the hulks, this hope would have seemed so absolutely impossible to realize that he would have gone on mechanically, as all guilty men do.
Not one of them ever dreams of resistance when he finds himself in the position to which justice and the Paris police bring suspected persons, especially those who, like Collin and Lucien, are in solitary confinement.
It is impossible to conceive of the sudden isolation in which a suspected criminal is placed. The gendarmes who apprehend him, the commissioner who questions him, those who take him to prison, the warders who lead him to his cell — which is actually called a cachot, a dungeon or hiding-place, those again who take him by the arms to put him into a prison-van — every being that comes near him from the moment of his arrest is either speechless, or takes note of all he says, to be repeated to the police or to the judge.
This total severance, so simply effected between the prisoner and the world, gives rise to a complete overthrow of his faculties and a terrible prostration of mind, especially when the man has not been familiarized by his antecedents with the processes of justice.
The duel between the judge and the criminal is all the more appalling because justice has on its side the dumbness of blank walls and the incorruptible coldness of its agents.
But Jacques Collin, or Carlos Herrera — it will be necessary to speak of him by one or the other of these names according to the circumstances of the case — had long been familiar with the methods of the police, of the jail, and of justice.
This colossus of cunning and corruption had employed all his powers of mind, and all the resources of mimicry, to affect the surprise and anility of an innocent man, while giving the lawyers the spectacle of his sufferings.
As has been told, Asie, that skilled Locusta, had given him a dose of poison so qualified as to produce the effects of a dreadful illness.
Thus Monsieur Camusot, the police commissioner, and the public prosecutor had been baffled in their proceedings and inquiries by the effects apparently of an apoplectic attack.
“He has taken poison!” cried Monsieur Camusot, horrified by the sufferings of the self-styled priest when he had been carried down from the attic writhing in convulsions.
Four constables had with great difficulty brought the Abbe Carlos downstairs to Esther’s room, where the lawyers and the gendarmes were assembled.
“That was the best thing he could do if he should be guilty,” replied the public prosecutor.
“Do you believe that he is ill?” the police commissioner asked.
The police is always incredulous.
The three lawyers had spoken, as may be imagined, in a whisper; but Jacques Collin had guessed from their faces the subject under discussion, and had taken advantage of it to make the first brief examination which is gone through on arrest absolutely impossible and useless; he had stammered out sentences in which Spanish and French were so mingled as to make nonsense.
At La Force this farce had been all the more successful in the first instance because the head of the “safety” force — an abbreviation of the title “Head of the brigade of the guardians of public safety”— Bibi–Lupin, who had long since taken Jacques Collin into custody at Madame Vauquer’s boarding-house, had been sent on special business into the country, and his deputy was a man who hoped to succeed him, but to whom the convict was unknown.
Bibi–Lupin, himself formerly a convict, and a comrade of Jacques Collin’s on the hulks, was his personal enemy.
This hostility had its rise in quarrels in which Jacques Collin had always got the upper hand, and in the supremacy over his fellow-prisoners which Trompe-la-Mort had always assumed.
And then, for ten years now, Jacques Collin had been the ruling providence of released convicts in Paris, their head, their adviser, and their banker, and consequently Bibi–Lupin’s antagonist.
Thus, though placed in solitary confinement, he trusted to the intelligent and unreserved devotion of Asie, his right hand, and perhaps, too, to Paccard, his left hand, who, as he flattered himself, might return to his allegiance when once that thrifty subaltern had safely bestowed the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs that he had stolen.
This was the reason why his attention had been so superhumanly alert all along the road.
And, strange to say! his hopes were about to be amply fulfilled.
The two solid side-walls of the archway were covered, to a height of six feet, with a permanent dado of mud formed of the splashes from the gutter; for, in those days, the foot passenger had no protection from the constant traffic of vehicles and from what was called the kicking of the carts, but curbstones placed upright at intervals, and much ground away by the naves of the wheels.
More than once a heavy truck had crushed a heedless foot-passenger under that arch-way.
Such indeed Paris remained in many districts and till long after.
This circumstance may give some idea of the narrowness of the Saint–Jean gate and the ease with which it could be blocked.
If a cab should be coming through from the Place de Greve while a costermonger-woman was pushing her little truck of apples in from the Rue du Martroi, a third vehicle of any kind produced difficulties.
The foot-passengers fled in alarm, seeking a corner-stone to protect them from the old-fashioned axles, which had attained such prominence that a law was passed at last to reduce their length.
When the prison van came in, this passage was blocked by a market woman with a costermonger’s vegetable cart — one of a type which is all the more strange because specimens still exist in Paris in spite of the increasing number of green-grocers’ shops.
She was so thoroughly a street hawker that a Sergeant de Ville, if that particular class of police had been then in existence, would have allowed her to ply her trade without inspecting her permit, in spite of a sinister countenance that reeked of crime.
Her head, wrapped in a cheap and ragged checked cotton kerchief, was horrid with rebellious locks of hair, like the bristles of a wild boar.
Her red and wrinkled neck was disgusting, and her little shawl failed entirely to conceal a chest tanned brown by the sun, dust, and mud.
Her gown was patchwork; her shoes gaped as though they were grinning at a face as full of holes as the gown.
And what an apron! a plaster would have been less filthy.
This moving and fetid rag must have stunk in the nostrils of dainty folks ten yards away.