The Beast Within - Emile Zola [215]
At first Roubaud simply answered yes or no in the sleepy, lethargic drawl which had by now become his customary manner of speech. He didn’t appear surprised that he had been arrested; as his personality slowly disintegrated, he had become indifferent to everything. In order to get him to talk, a warder was assigned permanently to his cell. Roubaud played cards with him all day long and was perfectly happy. He remained convinced that Cabuche was guilty; only he could have committed the murder. When asked about Jacques, he shrugged his shoulders and laughed, as much as to say that he knew all about the relationship between his wife and the engine driver. When, however, after his initial questions, Monsieur Denizet began to expound his theory of the murder and started to press him and accuse him directly of being an accomplice, in an attempt to extract a confession from him at the shock of having been found out, Roubaud had become more cautious. What tale was this, he thought? They were saying that it wasn’t him but Cabuche who had killed Grandmorin, just as he had killed Séverine, yet on both occasions he was the truly guilty party because Cabuche had been acting in his interest and on his behalf. He was amazed at this involved rigmarole and became very wary; they must be setting him a trap, lying to him in order to get him to admit that one of these murders — the first murder — had been committed by him. The minute he was arrested, Roubaud had assumed it was because the earlier case had been reopened. When confronted with Cabuche, he swore that he did not know him. But, when he then insisted he had discovered him covered in blood and about to rape his victim, Cabuche flew into a rage, and there followed a violent and confused scene which complicated matters even further. Three days went by, during which the magistrate questioned them both repeatedly, convinced that the two accomplices had agreed to put on this display of hostility towards each other in order to confuse him. Roubaud, utterly exhausted, had decided he would answer no more questions, when suddenly, in a moment of exasperation, and wanting to have the whole thing settled — a vague compulsion that had been troubling him for months — he blurted out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
That day Monsieur Denizet had conducted his inquiries with consummate skill, sitting at his desk, lowering his heavy eyelids and pursing his expressive lips in a display of great sagacity. For a whole hour he had tried every learned ploy he knew against Roubaud. Roubaud was overweight and looked flabby, sallow and unhealthy, but Denizet suspected that, beneath his unprepossessing exterior, he was really quite clever. He thought he had managed to track him down step by step, to hem him in and finally ensnare him, when Roubaud, like a man at the end of his tether, threw his hands in the air and exclaimed that he had had enough and that he would rather confess than go on being tormented like this. If they were determined to prove him guilty, he would rather be proved guilty of things that he had actually done. But as he told his story — his wife abused by Grandmorin when she was a young girl, his jealous rage when the sordid affair became known to him, how he had killed Grandmorin and why he had taken the ten thousand francs — the magistrate raised his eyelids sceptically,