Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (82 page)

The prison at Angoulême dates from the Middle Ages and has not gone through any more changes than the Cathedral. Still called the House of Justice, it is backed by the magistrates’ court. It has the standard type of entrance: a door studded with nails, solid-looking, well-worn, low, and so much the more cyclopean in its construction for having one eye in the middle – the spy-hole through which the gaoler takes stock of the inmates before opening the door. A corridor runs along the front on the ground-floor, and on to this corridor a number of cells open, having high canopied windows which draw their light from the prison yard. The gaoler occupies a lodging separated from the cells by a vault which divides the ground-floor into two halves; and at the
end of it one can see, once one is through the wicket, a grill shutting off the prison-yard. The gaoler led David into a cell close to the vault whose door stood opposite his lodging. He wanted to be near a man who, in view of his special situation, might be company to him.

‘It’s the best cell,’ he said when he saw that David was stupefied at the sight of this den.

Its walls were of stone and somewhat damp. There were iron bars at the very lofty windows. An icy chill struck up from the flag-stones. David could hear the rhythmic steps of the warder on sentry-go as he paced up and down the corridor. This sound, as monotonous as the boom of the tide, dins into one every minute the thought: ‘There’s a guard outside! I’m no longer free!’ All such details have a prodigious cumulative effect on the morale of honest people. David saw that the bed was execrable; but incarcerated people feel so violently upset during their first night that they do not notice how hard their couch is until the following night. The gaoler was gracious and in a natural tone proposed that David should walk about the prison-yard until night-time. His torture was only to begin when he went to bed. Prisoners were allowed no light, and a permit from the Public Attorney was needed to exempt a prisoner for debt from this regulation, which evidently only applied to those in the hands of criminal justice. The gaoler was kind enough to admit David to his fire-side, but he had to be shut up at last, at bed-time.

Then the poor man realized the horrors of prison and was revolted at the brutality of its routine. But, thanks to a reaction common enough among thinking men, he cut himself off from this solitude, escaping into one of those dreams in which poetic minds have the power to indulge during their waking hours. In the end the unhappy man came round to reflecting about his affairs. Prison gives a tremendous impetus to examination of conscience. David asked himself if he had fulfilled his duties as head of a family, wondered what state of desolation his wife must be in and why, as Marion had suggested, he might not earn enough money to be able to carry out his researches at leisure.

‘How,’ he asked himself, ‘can I stay in Angoulême after such a disgrace? If I get out of prison, what will become of us? Where shall we go?’ He felt misgivings about his paper-making process, the sort of poignant misgivings which only other inventors would have been able to understand. From one doubt to another David came to a clear view of his predicament, and he told himself what the Cointets had told Papa Séchard, what Petit-Claud had just told Eve: ‘Supposing all goes well, what will happen when the invention is tried out? I need a patent, and that means money! I need a factory for experiments on a large scale, and that means divulging my secret! Oh! How right Petit-Claud was!’

From the darkest prisons such shafts of light proceed.

‘Anyway,’ said David as he fell asleep on the wretched camp-bed with its horrible mattress of extremely coarse brown cloth, ‘no doubt I shall see Petit-Claud in the morning.’

Thus David had worked himself into the mood for listening to the proposals of his enemies by the time his wife came to report them to him. After embracing her husband and sitting down at the foot of the bed, for there was only one chair of the most squalid sort, her regard fell on the hideous bucket standing in a corner and on the walls bespattered with the names and apophthegms which David’s predecessors had scrawled on them. Then, at the sight of her husband sharing the plight of criminals, the tears began to flow from her reddened eyes – she still had some tears left in spite of all those she had shed.

‘It’s to this then that a desire for glory can bring one!’ she cried. ‘Oh my angel, give up this career… Let’s follow the beaten track without trying to get rich quick… It needs so little to make me happy after so many sufferings!… And if you knew everything!… The disgrace of this arrest is not our worst misfortune!… Read this.’

She handed over Lucien’s letter which David ran through quickly. In order to quiet his fears, she quoted the scathing remark Petit-Claud had made about Lucien.

‘If Lucien has committed suicide, all is over by now,’ said David. ‘And if all is not over, he won’t kill himself. As he
says himself, his courage wouldn’t last longer than a single morning.’

‘But how can we stand this anxiety?’ Lucien’s sister cried, ready to forgive almost everything at the thought of her brother’s death.

Then she repeated to her husband the proposals Petit-Claud had made a pretence of obtaining from the Cointets. David accepted them immediately with obvious pleasure.

‘We shall have enough to live on in a village close to L’Houmeau, and all I ask for is a peaceful life,’ the inventor exclaimed. ‘If Lucien has chosen to punish himself by dying, we shall have enough money to live on until my father dies. If Lucien is still alive, the poor boy will manage to conform to our modest circumstances… The Cointets will certainly reap the profit from my discovery; but after all what do I matter in comparison with my country?… I’m only one man. If everybody benefits from my invention, well, I am content. Look, my dear Eve, we’re neither of us cut out for business. We have neither the greed for gain nor the reluctance to let any money slip through our fingers, even when we have every right to it. These two kinds of avarice may be virtues in a tradesman: they are called prudence and business acumen!’

Delighted at this unanimity, one of the most fragrant flowers which bloom from mutual love – for it is impossible that two beings who love each other should not see eye to eye in their interests and points of view – Eve asked the gaoler to send a note to Petit-Claud telling him to set David free and informing him of their mutual consent to the basic points of the projected arrangement. Ten minutes later Petit-Claud came to David’s horrible cell and told Eve: ‘Go home, Madame, we will follow you.’

‘So then, my dear friend,’ said Petit-Claud, ‘you let them catch you! How did it come about that you were so foolish as to leave your sanctuary?’

‘How could I not leave it? This is what Lucien wrote to me.’

He handed Cérizet’s forgery to Petit-Claud, who took it, read it, gazed at it, felt the paper and went on talking business
while he folded the letter and slipped it into his pocket as if through absent-mindedness. Then the solicitor took David by the arm and left the prison with him, the bailiff’s warrant for release having been brought to the gaoler during the conversation. When he was back home David felt as if he were in Heaven: he wept like a child as he hugged his little Lucien and found himself back in his own bedroom after three weeks of duress, the last hours of which, according to provincial standards, had brought disgrace upon him. Kolb and Marion had returned. Marion had learnt in L’Houmeau that Lucien had been seen walking along the road to Paris beyond Marsac. His dandyish clothes had been noticed by country people who were bringing produce to market. Kolb had ridden on horseback along the high-road and in the end had learned that Lucien, whom the Abbé Marron had recognized, was travelling post in a barouche.

‘What did I say?’ exclaimed Petit-Claud. ‘He’s not a poet, that young man: he’s a serial novel!’

‘Travelling post,’ Eve was saying. ‘But where’s he going to this time?’

‘Now,’ said Petit-Claud to David, ‘come to the Cointets. They’re waiting for you.’ ‘Oh, Monsieur!’ cried the beautiful Madame Séchard. ‘I implore you to defend our interests as best you can. Our whole future is in your hands.’

‘Madame,’ said Petit-Claud, ‘would you like the discussion to take place here? I’ll leave David with you. The Cointet brothers will come here this evening, and you’ll see if I know how to defend your interests.’

‘Oh, Monsieur!’ said Eve. ‘You would be doing me a real service.’

‘Very good. Then we’ll be here this evening about seven.’

‘I am very grateful,’ Eve replied with a look and tone of voice which showed Petit-Claud how far he had gone in gaining his client’s confidence. ‘Have no fear,’ he added. ‘You can see I was right. Your brother is a long way from suicide. Well now, perhaps by this evening you’ll have a small fortune. A serious purchaser has come forward for your printing works.’

‘In that case,’ said Eve, ‘why not wait before binding ourselves to the Cointets?’

‘You’re forgetting, Madame,’ Petit-Claud replied, seeing that he had made a dangerous avowal, ‘that you won’t be free to sell your printing-works before paying Monsieur Métivier, for all your plant is still under distraint.’

Petit-Claud went home and sent for Cérizet. Once the compositor was in his office, he took him aside into a window-recess.

‘Tomorrow,’ he whispered to him, ‘you’ll be owner of the Séchard press, with enough influence behind you to obtain the transfer of the licence… But you don’t want to finish up in a convict-prison, do you?’

‘Here! What do you mean?
convict-prison?’
Cérizet stammered.

‘Your letter to David was a forgery, and I hold it… If Henriette were questioned, what would she say?… But I don’t want to bring you to ruin,’ Petit-Claud quickly added on seeing Cérizet turn pale.

‘There’s still something you want me to do?’ the Parisian exclaimed.

‘Yes indeed. This is what I expect of you. Listen carefully. In two months you’ll be a master-printer in Angoulême… but you’ll owe the money for your press, and it will take you more than ten years to pay it back!… You’ll be working a long time for those who found you the capital! And what’s more you’ll have to act as figure-head for the Liberal party… I myself will draw up your deed of partnership with Gannerac, and I’ll do it in such a way that one day you’ll have the printing-works to yourself… But if they found a newspaper, if you become managing-editor, if I become deputy Public Attorney here, you’ll arrange with tall Cointet to insert in your newspaper some articles of such a nature as to get it confiscated and suppressed. The Cointets will pay you generously to do them that service. It’s true you’ll be sentenced and get a taste of prison, but you’ll pass for an important and persecuted man. You’ll become a somebody in the Liberal party, a Sergeant Mercier, a Paul-Louis Courier, a small-scale Manuel.
I won’t ever let your licence be cancelled. Finally, the day when the journal is suppressed, I’ll burn this letter in front of you… It won’t have cost you a lot to make your fortune…’

The popular classes have very erroneous ideas about the legal ins and outs of forgery, and Cérizet, who had imagined himself already in the dock, breathed again.

‘In three years from now I shall be Public Attorney in Angoulême,’ Petit-Claud continued. ‘You might well have need of me. Think it over.’

‘It’s agreed,’ said Cérizet. ‘But how little you know me! Burn this letter in front of me, and trust to my gratitude.’

Petit-Claud scrutinized Cérizet. There ensued one of those eye-to-eye duels in which the regard of the scrutinizer is like a lancet probing deep into the soul and in which the eyes of the man trying to show how trustworthy he is provide an interesting spectacle.

Petit-Claud made no reply. He lit a candle and burnt the letter, saying to himself: ‘He has his fortune to make!’

‘I’ll serve you hand and foot,’ said the compositor.