Honore de Balzac (13 page)

"If the Messieurs Simeuse are here," said the abbe, "I would give ten
pints of my blood and my right arm to save them; but if Mademoiselle de
Cinq-Cygne is in the secret she has not—and this I swear on my eternal
salvation—betrayed it in any way, neither has she done me the honor to
consult me. I am now very glad of her discretion, if discretion there
be. We played cards last night as usual, at boston, in almost complete
silence, until half-past ten o'clock, and we neither saw nor heard
anything. Not a child can pass through this solitary valley without the
whole community knowing it, and for the last two weeks no one has come
from other places. Now the d'Hauteserre and the Simeuse brothers would
make a party of four. Old d'Hauteserre and his wife have submitted to
the present government, and they have made all imaginable efforts
to persuade their sons to return to France; they wrote to them again
yesterday. I can only say, upon my soul and conscience, that your visit
has alone shaken my firm belief that these young men are living in
Germany. Between ourselves, there is no one here, except the young
countess, who does not do justice to the eminent qualities of the First
Consul."

"Fox!" thought Corentin. "Well, if those young men are shot," he said,
aloud; "it is because their friends have willed it—I wash my hands of
the affair."

He had led the abbe to a part of the garden which lay in the moonlight,
and as he said the last words he looked at him suddenly. The priest
was greatly distressed, but his manner was that of a man surprised and
wholly ignorant.

"Understand this, monsieur l'abbe," resumed Corentin; "the right of
these young men to the estate of Gondreville will render them doubly
criminal in the eyes of the middle class. I'd like to see them put faith
in God and not in his saints—"

"Is there really a plot?" asked the abbe, simply.

"Base, odious, cowardly, and so contrary to the generous spirit of
the nation," replied Corentin, "that it will meet with universal
opprobrium."

"Well! Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne is incapable of baseness," cried the
abbe.

"Monsieur l'abbe," replied Corentin, "let me tell you this; there is for
us (meaning you and me) proof positive of her guilt; but there is not
enough for the law. You see she took flight when we came; I sent the
mayor to warn her."

"Yes, but for one who is so anxious to save them, you followed rather
closely on his heels," said the abbe.

At those words the two men looked at each other, and all was said.
Each belonged to those profound anatomists of thought to whom a mere
inflexion of the voice, a look, a word suffices to reveal a soul, just
as the Indians track their enemies by signs invisible to European eyes.

"I expected to draw something out of him, and I have only betrayed
myself," thought Corentin.

"Ha! the sly rogue!" thought the priest.

Midnight rang from the old church clock just as Corentin and the abbe
re-entered the salon. The opening and shutting of doors and closets
could be heard from the bedrooms above. The gendarmes pulled open the
beds; Peyrade, with the quick perception of a spy, handled and sounded
everything. Such desecration excited both fear and indignation among
the faithful servants of the house, who still stood motionless about the
salon. Monsieur d'Hauteserre exchanged looks of commiseration with his
wife and Mademoiselle Goujet. A species of horrible curiosity kept every
one on the qui vive. Peyrade at length came down, holding in his hand a
sandal-wood box which had probably been brought from China by Admiral
de Simeuse. This pretty casket was flat and about the size of a quarto
volume.

Peyrade made a sign to Corentin and took him into the embrasure of a
window.

"I've an idea!" he said, "that Michu, who was ready to pay Marion eight
hundred thousand francs in gold for Gondreville, and who evidently
meant to shoot Malin yesterday, is the man who is helping the Simeuse
brothers. His motive in threatening Marion and aiming at Malin must
be the same. I thought when I saw him that he was capable of ideas;
evidently he has but one; he discovered what was going on and he must
have come here to warn them."

"Probably Malin talked about the conspiracy to his friend the notary,
and Michu from his ambush overheard what was said," remarked Corentin,
continuing the inductions of his colleague. "No doubt he has only
postponed his shot to prevent an evil he thinks worse than the loss of
Gondreville."

"He knew what we were the moment he laid eyes on us," said Peyrade. "I
thought then that he was amazingly intelligent for a peasant."

"That proves that he is always on his guard," replied Corentin. "But,
mind you, my old man, don't let us make a mistake. Treachery stinks in
the nostrils, and primitive folks do scent it from afar."

"But that's our strength," said the Provencal.

"Call the corporal of Arcis," cried Corentin to one of the gendarmes. "I
shall send him at once to Michu's house," he added to Peyrade.

"Our ear, Violette, is there," said Peyrade.

"We started without getting news from him. Two of us are not enough;
we ought to have had Sabatier with us—Corporal," he said, when the
gendarme appeared, taking him aside with Peyrade, "don't let them fool
you as they did the Troyes corporal just now. We think Michu is in this
business. Go to his house, put your eye on everything, and bring word of
the result."

"One of my men heard horses in the forest just as they arrested the
little groom; I've four fine fellows now on the track of whoever is
hiding there," replied the gendarme.

He left the room, and the gallop of his horse which echoed on the paved
courtyard died rapidly away.

"One thing is certain," said Corentin to himself, "either they have gone
to Paris or they are retreating to Germany."

He sat down, pulled a note-book from the pocket of his spencer, wrote
two orders in pencil, sealed them, and made a sign to one of the
gendarmes to come to him.

"Be off at full gallop to Troyes, wake up the prefect, and tell him to
start the telegraph as soon as there's light enough."

The gendarme departed. The meaning of this movement and Corentin's
intentions were so evident that the hearts of the household sank within
them; but this new anxiety was additional to another that was now
martyrizing them; their eyes were fixed on the sandal-wood box! All the
while the two agents were talking together they were each taking note of
those eager looks. A sort of cold anger stirred the unfeeling hearts of
these men who relished the power of inspiring terror. The police man has
the instincts and emotions of a hunter: but where the one employs his
powers of mind and body in killing a hare, a partridge, or a deer, the
other is thinking of saving the State, or a king, and of winning a large
reward. So the hunt for men is superior to the other class of hunting
by all the distance that there is between animals and human beings.
Moreover, a spy is forced to lift the part he plays to the level and
the importance of the interests to which he is bound. Without looking
further into this calling, it is easy to see that the man who follows
it puts as much passionate ardor into his chase as another man does into
the pursuit of game. Therefore the further these men advanced in their
investigations the more eager they became; but the expression of their
faces and their eyes continued calm and cold, just as their ideas,
their suspicions, and their plans remained impenetrable. To any one who
watched the effects of the moral scent, if we may so call it, of these
bloodhounds on the track of hidden facts, and who noted and understood
the movements of canine agility which led them to strike the truth in
their rapid examination of probabilities, there was in it all something
actually horrifying. How and why should men of genius fall so low when
it was in their power to be so high? What imperfection, what vice, what
passion debases them? Does a man become a police-agent as he becomes
a thinker, writer, statesmen, painter, general, on the condition of
knowing nothing but how to spy, as the others speak, write, govern,
paint, and fight? The inhabitants of the chateau had but one wish,—that
the thunderbolts of heaven might fall upon these miscreants; they were
athirst for vengeance; and had it not been for the presence, up to this
time, of the gendarmes there would undoubtedly have been an outbreak.

"No one, I suppose, has the key of this box?" said the cynical Peyrade,
questioning the family as much by the movement of his huge red nose as
by his words.

The Provencal noticed, not without fear, that the guards were no longer
present; he and Corentin were alone with the family. The younger man
drew a small dagger from his pocket, and began to force the lock of the
box. Just then the desperate galloping of a horse was heard upon the
road and then upon the pavement by the lawn; but most horrible of all
was the fall and sighing of the animal, which seemed to drop all at
once at the door of the middle tower. A convulsion like that which
a thunderbolt might produce shook the spectators when Laurence, the
trailing of whose riding-habit announced her coming, entered the room.
The servants hastily formed into two lines to let her pass.

In spite of her rapid ride, the girl had felt the full anguish the
discovery of the conspiracy must needs cause her. All her hopes were
overthrown! she had galloped through ruins as her thoughts turned to the
necessity of submission to the Consular government. Were it not for the
danger which threatened the four gentlemen, and which served as a tonic
to conquer her weariness and her despair, she would have dropped
asleep on the way. The mare was almost killed in her haste to reach the
chateau, and stand between her cousins and death. As all present looked
at the heroic girl, pale, her features drawn, her veil aside, her whip
in her hand, standing on the threshold of the door, whence her burning
glance grasped the whole scene and comprehended it, each knew from the
almost imperceptible motion which crossed the soured and bittered face
of Corentin, that the real adversaries had met. A terrible duel was
about to begin.

Noticing the box, now in the hands of Corentin, the countess raised her
whip and sprang rapidly towards him. Striking his hands with so violent
a blow that the casket fell to the ground, she seized it, flung it into
the middle of the fire, and stood with her back to the chimney in a
threatening attitude before either of the agents recovered from their
surprise. The scorn which flamed from her eyes, her pale brow, her
disdainful lips, were even more insulting than the haughty action which
treated Corentin as though he were a venomous reptile. Old d'Hauteserre
felt himself once more a cavalier; all his blood rushed to his face, and
he grieved that he had no sword. The servants trembled for an instant
with joy. The vengeance they had called down upon these men had come.
But their joy was driven back within their souls by a terrible fear; the
gendarmes were still heard coming and going in the garrets.

The
spy
—noun of strength, under which all shades of the police are
confounded, for the public has never chosen to specify in language the
varieties of those who compose this dispensary of social remedies so
essential to all governments—the spy has this curious and magnificent
quality: he never becomes angry; he possesses the Christian humility of
a priest; his eyes are stolid with an indifference which he holds as
a barrier against the world of fools who do not understand him; his
forehead is adamant under insult; he pursues his ends like a reptile
whose carapace is fractured only by a cannonball; but (like that
reptile) he is all the more furious when the blow does reach him,
because he believed his armor invulnerable. The lash of the whip upon
his fingers was to Corentin, pain apart, the cannonball that cracked
the shell. Coming from that magnificent and noble girl, this action,
emblematic of her disgust, humiliated him, not only in the eyes of the
people about him, but in his own.

Peyrade sprang to the hearth, caught Laurence's foot, raised it, and
compelled her, out of modesty, to throw herself on the sofa, where she
had lately lain asleep. The scene, like other contrasts in human things,
was burlesque in the midst of terror. Peyrade scorched his hand as he
dashed it into the fire to seize the box; but he got it, threw it on the
floor and sat down upon it. These little actions were done with great
rapidity and without a word being uttered. Corentin, recovering from the
pain of the blow, caught Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne by both hands, and
held her.

"Do not compel me to use force against you," he said, with withering
politeness.

Peyrade's action had extinguished the fire by the natural process of
suppressing the air.

"Gendarmes! here!" he cried, still occupying his ridiculous position.

"Will you promise to behave yourself?" said Corentin, insolently,
addressing Laurence, and picking up his dagger, but not committing the
great fault of threatening her with it.

"The secrets of that box do not concern the government," she answered,
with a tinge of melancholy in her tone and manner. "When you have read
the letters it contains you will, in spite of your infamy, feel ashamed
of having read them—that is, if you can still feel shame at anything,"
she added, after a pause.

The abbe looked at her as if to say, "For God's sake, be calm!"

Peyrade rose. The bottom of the box, which had been nearly burned
through, left a mark upon the floor; the lid was scorched and the sides
gave way. The grotesque Scaevola, who had offered to the god of the
Police and Terror the seat of his apricot breeches, opened the two sides
of the box as if it had been a book, and slid three letters and two
locks of hair upon the card-table. He was about to smile at Corentin
when he perceived that the locks were of two shades of gray. Corentin
released Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne's hands and went up to the table to
read the letter from which the hair had fallen.