Scenes from a Courtesan's Life [153]
greatest monuments of his short reign. This new view of criminal law put an end to a perfect abyss of misery. Indeed, it may be said that, apart from the terrible moral torture which men of the better classes must suffer when they find themselves in the power of the law, the action of that power is simple and mild to a degree that would hardly be expected. Suspected or accused criminals are certainly not lodged as if they were at home; but every necessary is supplied to them in the prisons of Paris. Besides, the burden of feelings that weighs on them deprives the details of daily life of their customary value. It is never the body that suffers. The mind is in such a phase of violence that every form of discomfort or of brutal treatment, if such there were, would be easily endured in such a frame of mind. And it must be admitted that an innocent man is quickly released, especially in Paris.
So Lucien, on entering his cell, saw an exact reproduction of the first room he had occupied in Paris at the Hotel Cluny. A bed to compare with those in the worst furnished apartments of the Quartier Latin, straw chairs with the bottoms out, a table and a few utensils, compose the furniture of such a room, in which two accused prisoners are not unfrequently placed together when they are quiet in their ways, and their misdeeds are not crimes of violence, but such as forgery or bankruptcy.
This resemblance between his starting-point, in the days of his innocency, and his goal, the lowest depths of degradation and sham, was so direct an appeal to his last chord of poetic feeling, that the unhappy fellow melted into tears. For four hours he wept, as rigid in appearance as a figure of stone, but enduring the subversion of all his hopes, the crushing of all his social vanity, and the utter overthrow of his pride, smarting in each separate _I_ that exists in an ambitious man--a lover, a success, a dandy, a Parisian, a poet, a libertine, and a favorite. Everything in him was broken by this fall as of Icarus.
Carlos Herrera, on the other hand, as soon as he was locked into his cell and found himself alone, began pacing it to and fro like the polar bear in his cage. He carefully examined the door and assured himself that, with the exception of the peephole, there was not a crack in it. He sounded all the walls, he looked up the funnel down which a dim light came, and he said to himself, "I am safe enough!"
He sat down in a corner where the eye of a prying warder at the grating of the peephole could not see him. Then he took off his wig, and hastily ungummed a piece of paper that did duty as lining. The side of the paper next his head was so greasy that it looked like the very texture of the wig. If it had occurred to Bibi-Lupin to snatch off the wig to establish the identity of the Spaniard with Jacques Collin, he would never have thought twice about the paper, it looked so exactly like part of the wigmaker's work. The other side was still fairly white, and clean enough to have a few lines written on it. The delicate and tiresome task of unsticking it had been begun in La Force; two hours would not have been long enough; it had taken him half of the day before. The prisoner began by tearing this precious scrap of paper so as to have a strip four or five lines wide, which he divided into several bits; he then replaced his store of paper in the same strange hiding-place, after damping the gummed side so as to make it stick again. He felt in a lock of his hair for one of those pencil leads as thin as a stout pin, then recently invented by Susse, and which he had put in with some gum; he broke off a scrap long enough to write with and small enough to hide in his ear. Having made these preparations with the rapidity and certainty of hand peculiar to old convicts, who are as light-fingered as monkeys, Jacques Collin sat down on the edge of his bed to meditate on his instructions to Asie, in perfect confidence that he should come across her, so entirely did he rely on the woman's genius.
"During the preliminary examination," he reflected,
So Lucien, on entering his cell, saw an exact reproduction of the first room he had occupied in Paris at the Hotel Cluny. A bed to compare with those in the worst furnished apartments of the Quartier Latin, straw chairs with the bottoms out, a table and a few utensils, compose the furniture of such a room, in which two accused prisoners are not unfrequently placed together when they are quiet in their ways, and their misdeeds are not crimes of violence, but such as forgery or bankruptcy.
This resemblance between his starting-point, in the days of his innocency, and his goal, the lowest depths of degradation and sham, was so direct an appeal to his last chord of poetic feeling, that the unhappy fellow melted into tears. For four hours he wept, as rigid in appearance as a figure of stone, but enduring the subversion of all his hopes, the crushing of all his social vanity, and the utter overthrow of his pride, smarting in each separate _I_ that exists in an ambitious man--a lover, a success, a dandy, a Parisian, a poet, a libertine, and a favorite. Everything in him was broken by this fall as of Icarus.
Carlos Herrera, on the other hand, as soon as he was locked into his cell and found himself alone, began pacing it to and fro like the polar bear in his cage. He carefully examined the door and assured himself that, with the exception of the peephole, there was not a crack in it. He sounded all the walls, he looked up the funnel down which a dim light came, and he said to himself, "I am safe enough!"
He sat down in a corner where the eye of a prying warder at the grating of the peephole could not see him. Then he took off his wig, and hastily ungummed a piece of paper that did duty as lining. The side of the paper next his head was so greasy that it looked like the very texture of the wig. If it had occurred to Bibi-Lupin to snatch off the wig to establish the identity of the Spaniard with Jacques Collin, he would never have thought twice about the paper, it looked so exactly like part of the wigmaker's work. The other side was still fairly white, and clean enough to have a few lines written on it. The delicate and tiresome task of unsticking it had been begun in La Force; two hours would not have been long enough; it had taken him half of the day before. The prisoner began by tearing this precious scrap of paper so as to have a strip four or five lines wide, which he divided into several bits; he then replaced his store of paper in the same strange hiding-place, after damping the gummed side so as to make it stick again. He felt in a lock of his hair for one of those pencil leads as thin as a stout pin, then recently invented by Susse, and which he had put in with some gum; he broke off a scrap long enough to write with and small enough to hide in his ear. Having made these preparations with the rapidity and certainty of hand peculiar to old convicts, who are as light-fingered as monkeys, Jacques Collin sat down on the edge of his bed to meditate on his instructions to Asie, in perfect confidence that he should come across her, so entirely did he rely on the woman's genius.
"During the preliminary examination," he reflected,