Vautrin's Last Avatar - Part 1

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_ "What is it, Madeleine?" asked Madame Camusot, seeing her maid come into the room with the particular air that servants assume in critical moments.

"Madame," said Madeleine, "monsieur has just come in from Court; but he looks so upset, and is in such a state, that I think perhaps it would be well for you to go to his room."

"Did he say anything?" asked Madame Camusot.

"No, madame; but we never have seen monsieur look like that; he looks as if he were going to be ill, his face is yellow--he seems all to pieces----"

Madame Camusot waited for no more; she rushed out of her room and flew to her husband's study. She found the lawyer sitting in an armchair, pale and dazed, his legs stretched out, his head against the back of it, his hands hanging limp, exactly as if he were sinking into idiotcy.

"What is the matter, my dear?" said the young woman in alarm.

"Oh! my poor Amelie, the most dreadful thing has happened--I am still trembling. Imagine, the public prosecutor--no, Madame de Serizy--that is--I do not know where to begin."

"Begin at the end," said Madame Camusot.

"Well, just as Monsieur Popinot, in the council room of the first Court, had put the last signature to the ruling of 'insufficient cause' for the apprehension of Lucien de Rubempre on the ground of my report, setting him at liberty--in fact, the whole thing was done, the clerk was going off with the minute book, and I was quit of the whole business--the President of the Court came in and took up the papers. 'You are releasing a dead man,' said he, with chilly irony; 'the young man is gone, as Monsieur de Bonald says, to appear before his natural Judge. He died of apoplexy----'

"I breathed again, thinking it was sudden illness.

"'As I understand you, Monsieur le President,' said Monsieur Popinot, 'it is a case of apoplexy like Pichegru's.'

"'Gentlemen,' said the President then, very gravely, 'you must please to understand that for the outside world Lucien de Rubempre died of an aneurism.'

"We all looked at each other. 'Very great people are concerned in this deplorable business,' said the President. 'God grant for your sake, Monsieur Camusot, though you did no less than your duty, that Madame de Serizy may not go mad from the shock she has had. She was carried away almost dead. I have just met our public prosecutor in a painful state of despair.'--'You have made a mess of it, my dear Camusot,' he added in my ear.--I assure you, my dear, as I came away I could hardly stand. My legs shook so that I dared not venture into the street. I went back to my room to rest. Then Coquart, who was putting away the papers of this wretched case, told me that a very handsome woman had taken the Conciergerie by storm, wanting to save Lucien, whom she was quite crazy about, and that she fainted away on seeing him hanging by his necktie to the window-bar of his room. The idea that the way in which I questioned that unhappy young fellow--who, between ourselves, was guilty in many ways--can have led to his committing suicide has haunted me ever since I left the Palais, and I feel constantly on the point of fainting----"

"What next? Are you going to think yourself a murderer because a suspected criminal hangs himself in prison just as you were about to release him?" cried Madame Camusot. "Why, an examining judge in such a case is like a general whose horse is killed under him!--That is all."

"Such a comparison, my dear, is at best but a jest, and jesting is out of place now. In this case the dead man clutches the living. All our hopes are buried in Lucien's coffin."

"Indeed?" said Madame Camusot, with deep irony.

"Yes, my career is closed. I shall be no more than an examining judge all my life. Before this fatal termination Monsieur de Granville was annoyed at the turn the preliminaries had taken; his speech to our President makes me quite certain that so long as Monsieur de Granville is public prosecutor I shall get no promotion."

Promotion! The terrible thought, which in these days makes a judge a mere functionary.

Formerly a magistrate was made at once what he was to remain. The three or four presidents' caps satisfied the ambitions of lawyers in each Parlement. An appointment as councillor was enough for a de Brosses or a Mole, at Dijon as much as in Paris. This office, in itself a fortune, required a fortune brought to it to keep it up.

In Paris, outside the Parlement, men of the long robe could hope only for three supreme appointments: those of Controller-General, Keeper of the Seals, or Chancellor. Below the Parlement, in the lower grades, the president of a lower Court thought himself quite of sufficient importance to be content to fill his chair to the end of his days.

Compare the position of a councillor in the High Court of Justice in Paris, in 1829, who has nothing but his salary, with that of a councillor to the Parlement in 1729. How great is the difference! In these days, when money is the universal social guarantee, magistrates are not required to have--as they used to have--fine private fortunes: hence we see deputies and peers of France heaping office on office, at once magistrates and legislators, borrowing dignity from other positions than those which ought to give them all their importance.

In short, a magistrate tries to distinguish himself for promotion as men do in the army, or in a Government office.

This prevailing thought, even if it does not affect his independence, is so well known and so natural, and its effects are so evident, that the law inevitably loses some of its majesty in the eyes of the public. And, in fact, the salaries paid by the State makes priests and magistrates mere _employes_. Steps to be gained foster ambition, ambition engenders subservience to power, and modern equality places the judge and the person to be judged in the same category at the bar of society. And so the two pillars of social order, Religion and Justice, are lowered in this nineteenth century, which asserts itself as progressive in all things.

"And why should you never be promoted?" said Amelie Camusot.

She looked half-jestingly at her husband, feeling the necessity of reviving the energies of the man who embodied her ambitions, and on whom she could play as on an instrument.

"Why despair?" she went on, with a shrug that sufficiently expressed her indifference as to the prisoner's end. "This suicide will delight Lucien's two enemies, Madame d'Espard and her cousin, the Comtesse du Chatelet. Madame d'Espard is on the best terms with the Keeper of the Seals; through her you can get an audience of His Excellency and tell him all the secrets of this business. Then, if the head of the law is on your side, what have you to fear from the president of your Court or the public prosecutor?"

"But, Monsieur and Madame de Serizy?" cried the poor man. "Madame de Serizy is gone mad, I tell you, and her madness is my doing, they say."

"Well, if she is out of her mind, O judge devoid of judgment," said Madame Camusot, laughing, "she can do you no harm.--Come, tell me all the incidents of the day."

"Bless me!" said Camusot, "just as I had cross-questioned the unhappy youth, and he had deposed that the self-styled Spanish priest is really Jacques Collin, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and Madame de Serizy sent me a note by a servant begging me not to examine him. It was all over!----"

"But you must have lost your head!" said Amelie. "What was to prevent you, being so sure as you are of your clerk's fidelity, from calling Lucien back, reassuring him cleverly, and revising the examination?"

"Why, you are as bad as Madame de Serizy; you laugh justice to scorn," said Camusot, who was incapable of flouting his profession. "Madame de Serizy seized the minutes and threw them into the fire."

"That is the right sort of woman! Bravo!" cried Madame Camusot.

"Madame de Serizy declared she would sooner see the Palais blown up than leave a young man who had enjoyed the favors of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and her own to stand at the bar of a Criminal court by the side of a convict!"

"But, Camusot," said Amelie, unable to suppress a superior smile, "your position is splendid----"

"Ah! yes, splendid!"

"You did your duty."

"But all wrong; and in spite of the jesuitical advice of Monsieur de Granville, who met me on the Quai Malaquais."

"This morning!"

"This morning."

"At what hour?"

"At nine o'clock."

"Oh, Camusot!" cried Amelie, clasping and wringing her hands, "and I am always imploring you to be constantly on the alert.--Good heavens! it is not a man, but a barrow-load of stones that I have to drag on! --Why, Camusot, your public prosecutor was waiting for you.--He must have given you some warning."

"Yes, indeed----"

"And you failed to understand him! If you are so deaf, you will indeed be an examining judge all your life without any knowledge whatever of the question.--At any rate, have sense enough to listen to me," she went on, silencing her husband, who was about to speak. "You think the matter is done for?" she asked.

Camusot looked at his wife as a country bumpkin looks at a conjurer.

"If the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and Madame de Serizy are compromised, you will find them both ready to patronize you," said Amelie. "Madame de Serizy will get you admission to the Keeper of the Seals, and you will tell him the secret history of the affair; then he will amuse the King with the story, for sovereigns always wish to see the wrong side of the tapestry and to know the real meaning of the events the public stare at open-mouthed. Henceforth there will be no cause to fear either the public prosecutor or Monsieur de Serizy."

"What a treasure such a wife is!" cried the lawyer, plucking up courage. "After all, I have unearthed Jacques Collin; I shall send him to his account at the Assize Court and unmask his crimes. Such a trial is a triumph in the career of an examining judge!"

"Camusot," Amelie began, pleased to see her husband rally from the moral and physical prostration into which he had been thrown by Lucien's suicide, "the President told you that you had blundered to the wrong side. Now you are blundering as much to the other--you are losing your way again, my dear."

The magistrate stood up, looking at his wife with a stupid stare.

"The King and the Keeper of the Seals will be glad, no doubt, to know the truth of this business, and at the same time much annoyed at seeing the lawyers on the Liberal side dragging important persons to the bar of opinion and of the Assize Court by their special pleading --such people as the Maufrigneuses, the Serizys, and the Grandlieus, in short, all who are directly or indirectly mixed up with this case."

"They are all in it; I have them all!" cried Camusot.

And Camusot walked up and down the room like Sganarelle on the stage when he is trying to get out of a scrape.

"Listen, Amelie," said he, standing in front of his wife. "An incident recurs to my mind, a trifle in itself, but, in my position, of vital importance.

"Realize, my dear, that this Jacques Collin is a giant of cunning, of dissimulation, of deceit.--He is--what shall I say?--the Cromwell of the hulks!--I never met such a scoundrel; he almost took me in.--But in examining a criminal, a little end of thread leads you to find a ball, is a clue to the investigation of the darkest consciences and obscurest facts.--When Jacques Collin saw me turning over the letters seized in Lucien de Rubempre's lodgings, the villain glanced at them with the evident intention of seeing whether some particular packet were among them, and he allowed himself to give a visible expression of satisfaction. This look, as of a thief valuing his booty, this movement, as of a man in danger saying to himself, 'My weapons are safe,' betrayed a world of things.

"Only you women, besides us and our examinees, can in a single flash epitomize a whole scene, revealing trickery as complicated as safety-locks. Volumes of suspicion may thus be communicated in a second. It is terrifying--life or death lies in a wink.

"Said I to myself, 'The rascal has more letters in his hands than these!'--Then the other details of the case filled my mind; I overlooked the incident, for I thought I should have my men face to face, and clear up this point afterwards. But it may be considered as quite certain that Jacques Collin, after the fashion of such wretches, has hidden in some safe place the most compromising of the young fellow's letters, adored as he was by----"

"And yet you are afraid, Camusot? Why, you will be President of the Supreme Court much sooner than I expected!" cried Madame Camusot, her face beaming. "Now, then, you must proceed so as to give satisfaction to everybody, for the matter is looking so serious that it might quite possibly be snatched from us.--Did they not take the proceedings out of Popinot's hands to place them in yours when Madame d'Espard tried to get a Commission in Lunacy to incapacitate her husband?" she added, in reply to her husband's gesture of astonishment. "Well, then, might not the public prosecutor, who takes such keen interest in the honor of Monsieur and Madame de Serizy, carry the case to the Upper Court and get a councillor in his interest to open a fresh inquiry?"

"Bless me, my dear, where did you study criminal law?" cried Camusot. "You know everything; you can give me points."

"Why, do you believe that, by to-morrow morning, Monsieur de Granville will not have taken fright at the possible line of defence that might be adopted by some liberal advocate whom Jacques Collin would manage to secure; for lawyers will be ready to pay him to place the case in their hands!--And those ladies know their danger quite as well as you do--not to say better; they will put themselves under the protection of the public prosecutor, who already sees their families unpleasantly close to the prisoner's bench, as a consequence of the coalition between this convict and Lucien de Rubempre, betrothed to Mademoiselle de Grandlieu--Lucien, Esther's lover, Madame de Maufrigneuse's former lover, Madame de Serizy's darling. So you must conduct the affair in such a way as to conciliate the favor of your public prosecutor, the gratitude of Monsieur de Serizy, and that of the Marquise d'Espard and the Comtesse du Chatelet, to reinforce Madame de Maufrigneuse's influence by that of the Grandlieus, and to gain the complimentary approval of your President.

"I will undertake to deal with the ladies--d'Espard, de Maufrigneuse, and de Grandlieu.

"You must go to-morrow morning to see the public prosecutor. Monsieur de Granville is a man who does not live with his wife; for ten years he had for his mistress a Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille, who bore him illegitimate children--didn't she? Well, such a magistrate is no saint; he is a man like any other; he can be won over; he must give a hold somewhere; you must discover the weak spot and flatter him; ask his advice, point out the dangers of attending the case; in short, try to get him into the same boat, and you will be----"

"I ought to kiss your footprints!" exclaimed Camusot, interrupting his wife, putting his arm round her, and pressing her to his heart. "Amelie, you have saved me!"

"I brought you in tow from Alencon to Mantes, and from Mantes to the Metropolitan Court," replied Amelie. "Well, well, be quite easy!--I intend to be called Madame la Presidente within five years' time. But, my dear, pray always think over everything a long time before you come to any determination. A judge's business is not that of a fireman; your papers are never in a blaze, you have plenty of time to think; so in your place blunders are inexcusable."

"The whole strength of my position lies in identifying the sham Spanish priest with Jacques Collin," the judge said, after a long pause. "When once that identity is established, even if the Bench should take the credit of the whole affair, that will still be an ascertained fact which no magistrate, judge, or councillor can get rid of. I shall do like the boys who tie a tin kettle to a cat's tail; the inquiry, whoever carries it on, will make Jacques Collin's tin kettle clank."

"Bravo!" said Amelie.

"And the public prosecutor would rather come to an understanding with me than with any one else, since I am the only man who can remove the Damocles' sword that hangs over the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

"Only you have no idea how hard it will be to achieve that magnificent result. Just now, when I was with Monsieur de Granville in his private office, we agreed, he and I, to take Jacques Collin at his own valuation--a canon of the Chapter of Toledo, Carlos Herrera. We consented to recognize his position as a diplomatic envoy, and allow him to be claimed by the Spanish Embassy. It was in consequence of this plan that I made out the papers by which Lucien de Rubempre was released, and revised the minutes of the examinations, washing the prisoners as white as snow.

"To-morrow, Rastignac, Bianchon, and some others are to be confronted with the self-styled Canon of Toledo; they will not recognize him as Jacques Collin who was arrested in their presence ten years ago in a cheap boarding-house, where they knew him under the name of Vautrin."

There was a short silence, while Madame Camusot sat thinking.

"Are you sure your man is Jacques Collin?" she asked.

"Positive," said the lawyer, "and so is the public prosecutor."

"Well, then, try to make some exposure at the Palais de Justice without showing your claws too much under your furred cat's paws. If your man is still in the secret cells, go straight to the Governor of the Conciergerie and contrive to have the convict publicly identified. Instead of behaving like a child, act like the ministers of police under despotic governments, who invent conspiracies against the monarch to have the credit of discovering them and making themselves indispensable. Put three families in danger to have the glory of rescuing them."

"That luckily reminds me!" cried Camusot. "My brain is so bewildered that I had quite forgotten an important point. The instructions to place Jacques Collin in a private room were taken by Coquart to Monsieur Gault, the Governor of the prison. Now, Bibi-Lupin, Jacques Collin's great enemy, has taken steps to have three criminals, who know the man, transferred from La Force to the Conciergerie; if he appears in the prison-yard to-morrow, a terrific scene is expected----"

"Why?"

"Jacques Collin, my dear, was treasurer of the money owned by the prisoners in the hulks, amounting to considerable sums; now, he is supposed to have spent it all to maintain the deceased Lucien in luxury, and he will be called to account. There will be such a battle, Bibi-Lupin tells me, as will require the intervention of the warders, and the secret will be out. Jacques Collin's life is in danger.

"Now, if I get to the Palais early enough I may record the evidence of identity."

"Oh, if only his creditors should take him off your hands! You would be thought such a clever fellow!--Do not go to Monsieur de Granville's room; wait for him in his Court with that formidable great gun. It is a loaded cannon turned on the three most important families of the Court and Peerage. 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."

"Perhaps he wants to kill himself too," said Monsieur Gault. "Let us both go down to the cells together, for I ought to go there if only to transfer him to an upper room. Monsieur Camusot has given orders to mitigate this anonymous gentleman's confinement."

Jacques Collin, known as _Trompe-la-Mort_ in the world of the hulks, who must henceforth be called only by his real name, had gone through terrible distress of mind since, after hearing Camusot's order, he had been taken back to the underground cell--an anguish such as he had never before known in the course of a life diversified by many crimes, by three escapes, and two sentences at the Assizes. And is there not something monstrously fine in the dog-like attachment shown to the man he had made his friend by this wretch in whom were concentrated all the life, the powers, the spirit, and the passions of the hulks, who was, so to speak, their highest expression?

Wicked, infamous, and in so many ways horrible, this absolute worship of his idol makes him so truly interesting that this Study, long as it is already, would seem incomplete and cut short if the close of this criminal career did not come as a sequel to Lucien de Rubempre's end. The little spaniel being dead, we want to know whether his terrible playfellow the lion will live on.

In real life, in society, every event is so inevitably linked to other events, that one cannot occur without the rest. The water of the great river forms a sort of fluid floor; not a wave, however rebellious, however high it may toss itself, but its powerful crest must sink to the level of the mass of waters, stronger by the momentum of its course than the revolt of the surges it bears with it.

And just as you watch the current flow, seeing in it a confused sheet of images, so perhaps you would like to measure the pressure exerted by social energy on the vortex called Vautrin; to see how far away the rebellious eddy will be carried ere it is lost, and what the end will be of this really diabolical man, human still by the power of loving --so hardly can that heavenly grace perish, even in the most cankered heart.

This wretched convict, embodying the poem that has smiled on many a poet's fancy--on Moore, on Lord Byron, on Mathurin, on Canalis--the demon who has drawn an angel down to hell to refresh him with dews stolen from heaven,--this Jacques Collin will be seen, by the reader who has understood that iron soul, to have sacrificed his own life for seven years past. His vast powers, absorbed in Lucien, acted solely for Lucien; he lived for his progress, his loves, his ambitions. To him, Lucien was his own soul made visible.

It was _Trompe-la-Mort_ who dined with the Grandlieus, stole into ladies' boudoirs, and loved Esther by proxy. In fact, in Lucien he saw Jacques Collin, young, handsome, noble, and rising to the dignity of an ambassador.

_Trompe-la-Mort_ had realized the German superstition of a doppelganger by means of a spiritual paternity, a phenomenon which will be quite intelligible to those women who have ever truly loved, who have felt their soul merge in that of the man they adore, who have lived his life, whether noble or infamous, happy or unhappy, obscure or brilliant; who, in defiance of distance, have felt a pain in their leg if he were wounded in his; who if he fought a duel would have been aware of it; and who, to put the matter in a nutshell, did not need to be told he was unfaithful to know it.

As he went back to his cell Jacques Collin said to himself, "The boy is being examined."

And he shivered--he who thought no more of killing a man than a laborer does of drinking.

"Has he been able to see his mistresses?" he wondered. "Has my aunt succeeded in catching those damned females? Have the Duchesses and Countesses bestirred themselves and prevented his being examined? Has Lucien had my instructions? And if ill-luck will have it that he is cross-questioned, how will he carry it off? Poor boy, and I have brought him to this! It is that rascal Paccard and that sneak Europe who have caused all this rumpus by collaring the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs for the certificate Nucingen gave Esther. That precious pair tripped us up at the last step; but I will make them pay dear for their pranks.

"One day more and Lucien would have been a rich man; he might have married his Clotilde de Grandlieu.--Then the boy would have been all my own!--And to think that our fate depends on a look, on a blush of Lucien's under Camusot's eye, who sees everything, and has all a judge's wits about him! For when he showed me the letters we tipped each other a wink in which we took each other's measure, and he guessed that I can make Lucien's lady-loves fork out."

This soliloquy lasted for three hours. His torments were so great that they were too much for that frame of iron and vitriol; Jacques Collin, whose brain felt on fire with insanity, suffered such fearful thirst that he unconsciously drank up all the water contained in one of the pails with which the cell was supplied, forming, with the bed, all its furniture.

"If he loses his head, what will become of him?--for the poor child has not Theodore's tenacity," said he to himself, as he lay down on the camp-bed--like a bed in a guard-room.

A word must here be said about this Theodore, remembered by Jacques Collin at such a critical moment. Theodore Calvi, a young Corsican, imprisoned for life at the age of eighteen for eleven murders, thanks to the influential interference paid for with vast sums, had been made the fellow convict of Jacques Collin, to whom he was chained, in 1819 and 1820. Jacques Collin's last escape, one of his finest inventions --for he had got out disguised as a gendarme leading Theodore Calvi as he was, a convict called before the commissary of police--had been effected in the seaport of Rochefort, where the convicts die by dozens, and where, it was hoped, these two dangerous rascals would have ended their days. Though they escaped together, the difficulties of their flight had forced them to separate. Theodore was caught and restored to the hulks.

Indeed, a life with Lucien, a youth innocent of all crime, who had only minor sins on his conscience, dawned on him as bright and glorious as a summer sun; while with Theodore, Jacques Collin could look forward to no end but the scaffold after a career of indispensable crimes.

The thought of disaster as a result of Lucien's weakness--for his experience of an underground cell would certainly have turned his brain--took vast proportions in Jacques Collin's mind; and, contemplating the probabilities of such a misfortune, the unhappy man felt his eyes fill with tears, a phenomenon that had been utterly unknown to him since his earliest childhood.

"I must be in a furious fever," said he to himself; "and perhaps if I send for the doctor and offer him a handsome sum, he will put me in communication with Lucien."

At this moment the turnkey brought in his dinner.

"It is quite useless my boy; I cannot eat. Tell the governor of this prison to send the doctor to see me. I am very bad, and I believe my last hour has come."

Hearing the guttural rattle that accompanied these words, the warder bowed and went. Jacques Collin clung wildly to this hope; but when he saw the doctor and the governor come in together, he perceived that the attempt was abortive, and coolly awaited the upshot of the visit, holding out his wrist for the doctor to feel his pulse.

"The Abbe is feverish," said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, "but it is the type of fever we always find in inculpated prisoners--and to me," he added, in the governor's ear, "it is always a sign of some degree of guilt."

Just then the governor, to whom the public prosecutor had intrusted Lucien's letter to be given to Jacques Collin, left the doctor and the prisoner together under the guard of the warder, and went to fetch the letter.

"Monsieur," said Jacques Collin, seeing the warder outside the door, and not understanding why the governor had left them, "I should think nothing of thirty thousand francs if I might send five lines to Lucien de Rubempre."

"I will not rob you of your money," said Doctor Lebrun; "no one in this world can ever communicate with him again----"

"No one?" said the prisoner in amazement. "Why?"

"He has hanged himself----"

No tigress robbed of her whelps ever startled an Indian jungle with a yell so fearful as that of Jacques Collin, who rose to his feet as a tiger rears to spring, and fired a glance at the doctor as scorching as the flash of a falling thunderbolt. Then he fell back on the bed, exclaiming:

"Oh, my son!"

"Poor man!" said the doctor, moved by this terrific convulsion of nature.

In fact, the first explosion gave way to such utter collapse, that the words, "Oh, my son," were but a murmur.

"Is this one going to die in our hands too?" said the turnkey.

"No; it is impossible!" Jacques Collin went on, raising himself and looking at the two witnesses of the scene with a dead, cold eye. "You are mistaken; it is not Lucien; you did not see. A man cannot hang himself in one of these cells. Look--how could I hang myself here? All Paris shall answer to me for that boy's life! God owes it to me."

The warder and the doctor were amazed in their turn--they, whom nothing had astonished for many a long day.

On seeing the governor, Jacques Collin, crushed by the very violence of this outburst of grief, seemed somewhat calmer.

"Here is a letter which the public prosecutor placed in my hands for you, with permission to give it to you sealed," said Monsieur Gault.

"From Lucien?" said Jacques Collin.

"Yes, monsieur."

"Is not that young man----"

"He is dead," said the governor. "Even if the doctor had been on the spot, he would, unfortunately, have been too late. The young man died --there--in one of the rooms----"

"May I see him with my own eyes?" asked Jacques Collin timidly. "Will you allow a father to weep over the body of his son?"

"You can, if you like, take his room, for I have orders to remove you from these cells; you are no longer in such close confinement, monsieur."

The prisoner's eyes, from which all light and warmth had fled, turned slowly from the governor to the doctor; Jacques Collin was examining them, fearing some trap, and he was afraid to go out of the cell.

"If you wish to see the body," said Lebrun, "you have no time to lose; it is to be carried away to-night."

"If you have children, gentlemen," said Jacques Collin, "you will understand my state of mind; I hardly know what I am doing. This blow is worse to me than death; but you cannot know what I am saying. Even if you are fathers, it is only after a fashion--I am a mother too--I --I am going mad--I feel it!"

By going through certain passages which open only to the governor, it is possible to get very quickly from the cells to the private rooms. The two sets of rooms are divided by an underground corridor formed of two massive walls supporting the vault over which Galerie Marchande, as it is called, is built. So Jacques Collin, escorted by the warder, who took his arm, preceded by the governor, and followed by the doctor, in a few minutes reached the cell where Lucien was lying stretched on the bed.

On seeing the body, he threw himself upon it, seizing it in a desperate embrace with a passion and impulse that made these spectators shudder.

"There," said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, "that is an instance of what I was telling you. You see that man clutching the body, and you do not know what a corpse is; it is stone----"

"Leave me alone!" said Jacques Collin in a smothered voice; "I have not long to look at him. They will take him away to----"

He paused at the word "bury him."

"You will allow me to have some relic of my dear boy! Will you be so kind as to cut off a lock of his hair for me, monsieur," he said to the doctor, "for I cannot----"

"He was certainly his son," said Lebrun.

"Do you think so?" replied the governor in a meaning tone, which made the doctor thoughtful for a few minutes.

The governor gave orders that the prisoner should be left in this cell, and that some locks of hair should be cut for the self-styled father before the body should be removed. _

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