Chapter XII: The Mouse-Trap

Was I so very small? I had the honour of a tumbril all to myself on my journey to the Conciergerie, and I swear that I could have thought I filled it. But Mademoiselle de Lâge was the pretty white heifer that had caused me to puff out my sides in emulation of her large nobility--me, yes, of whom she would have said, as the bull of the frog, “_Il n’était pas gros en tout comme un œuf_.” Now I was travelling probably to my grave; yet the exaltation of that interview still dwelt with me, and I thought often of some words that had once been uttered by a certain Casimir Bertrand: “To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back! What could kings wish for better?”

We came down upon the sullen prison by way of the Pont au Change and the Quay d’Horloge, and drew up at a door on the river-side. I saw a couple of turrets, with nightcap roofs, stretch themselves, as if yawning, above me. I saw in a wide angle of the gloomy block of buildings, where the bridge discharged itself upon the quay, a vast heap of newly thrown-up soil where some excavations were being conducted; and from the mound a sort of crane or scaffold, sinisterly suggestive of a guillotine surmounting a trench dug for its dead, stood out against a falling crimson sky. The river hummed in its course; above a green spot on the embankment wall a cloud of dancing midges seemed to boil upwards like steam from a caldron. Everything suggested to me the _mise en scène_ of a rehearsing tragedy, and then promptly I was haled, like an inanimate “property,” into the under-stage of that dark “theatre of varieties.”

Messieurs the jailers, it appeared, were at their supper, and would not for the moment be bothered with me. A gush of light and a violent voice issued from a door to one side of a stony vestibule: “Run the rascal into La Souricière, and be damned to him!”

Thereat I was hurried, by the “blue” that was responsible for my transfer, and an understrapper with the keys, by way of a gloomy course--up and down--through doorways clinched with monstrous bolts--under vaulted stone roofs where spiders, blinded by the lamp glare, shrank back into crevices, and where all the mildew of desolation sprouted in a poisonous fungus--along passages deeply quarried, it seemed, into the very foundations of despair; and at last they stopped, thrust me forward, and a door clapped to behind me with a slam of thunder.

I stood a moment where I was and caught at my bewildered faculties. It took me, indeed, but a moment to possess myself of them. In those days one had acquired a habit of wearing one’s wits unsheathed in one’s belt. Then I fell to admiring the quite unwonted brilliancy of the illumination that pervaded the cell. It was a particularly small chamber--perhaps ten feet by eight or so--and consequently the single lighted candle, held in a cleft stick the butt of which was thrust into a chink in the stones, irradiated it to its uttermost corner. The furniture was artless in its simplicity--a tub, a broken pitcher of water, and two heaps of foul straw. But so abominable a stench filled the place that no doubt there was room for little else.

Now, from one of the straw beds, the figure of a man--my sole comrade to be, it would appear--rose up as I stirred, and stood with its back and the palms of its hands pressed against the wall. Remaining thus motionless, the shadows blue in its gaunt cheeks, and little husks of wheat caught in its dusty hair, it fixed me with eyes like staring pebbles.

“_Défense d’entrer!_” it snapped out suddenly, and shut its mouth like a gin.

“Oh, monsieur!” said I, “no going out, rather, for the mouse in the trap.”

He lifted one of his arms at right angles to his body, and let it drop again to his side.

“Behold!” he cried, “the peril! Hadst thou been closer thy head had fallen!”

“But thine,” said I. “Hast thou not already lost it?”

“Oh, early in the struggle, monsieur! Oh, very early! And then my soul passed into the inanimate instrument of death and made it animate.”

“What! thou art the guillotine itself?”

“Look at me, then! Is it not obvious that I am that infernal engine, nor less that I am informed with the _ego_ that once was my victim and is now my familiar--being myself, in effect?”

“_Pardieu!_ this is worse than the game of ‘Proverbs.’ It rests with thy _ego_, then, to put a period to this orgy of blood.”

He gave forth a loud wailing cry.

“I am a demon, prejudged and predestined, and the saint of the Place du Trône is possessed with me.”

“A saint, possessed!”

He wrung his hands insanely.

“Oh!” he cried--“but is it not a fate to which damnation were Paradise! For me, the gentle Aubriot, who in my material form had shrunk from killing a fly--for me to thus deluge an unhappy land with the blood of martyrs! But I have threshed my conscience with a knotted discipline, and I know--yes, monsieur, I know--what gained me my punishment. A cripple once begged of me a poor two sous. I hesitated, in that I had but the one coin on me, and my nostrils yearned for snuff. I hesitated, and the devil tripped up my feet. I gave the man the piece and asked him a sou in change. For so petty a trifle did I barter my salvation. But heaven was not to be deceived, and its vengeance followed me like a snake through the grass. Ah!” (he jumped erect) “but the blade fell within an ace of thy shoulder!”

This was disquieting enough, in all truth. Yet I took comfort from the thought that the madman could avail himself of no more murderous weapon than his hands.

“Now, M. Guillotin,” said I, “observe that it is characteristic of you to lie quiescent when you are put away for the night.”

“_Nenni, nenni, nenni!_” he answered. “That may have been before the hideous apotheosis of the instrument. Now, possessed as I am, I slash and cut at whoever comes in my way.”

_Mon Dieu!_ but this was a wearisome lunatic! and I longed very ardently to be left peacefully to my own reflections. I came forward with a show of extreme fortitude.

“This demon of yourself,” I said--“you wish it to be exorcised, that the soil of France may grow green again?”

A fine self-sacrificial rapture illumined his wild face.

“Let me be hurled into the bottomless pit,” he cried, “that so the Millennium may rise in the east like an August sun!”

“Now,” said I, “I will commune with my soul during the night, that perchance it may be revealed to me how the guillotine may guillotine itself.”

To my surprise the ridiculous bait took, and the poor wretch sunk down upon his straw and uttered no further word. Crossing the cell to come to my own heap, my foot struck against an iron ring that projected from a flag. For an instant a mad hope flamed up in me, only to as immediately die down. Was it probable that the “Mouse-trap”--into which, I knew, it was the custom to put newly arrived prisoners before their overhauling by the turnkeys and “scenting” by the dogs of the guard--would be furnished with a door of exit as of entrance? Nevertheless, I stooped and tugged at the ring to see what should be revealed in the lifting of the stone. It, the latter, seemed a ponderous slab. I raised one end of it a foot or so with difficulty, and, propping it with the pitcher, looked to see what was underneath. A shallow trough or excavation--that was all; probably a mere pit into which to sweep the scourings of the cell. Leaving it open, I flung myself down upon the mat of straw, and gave myself up to a melancholy ecstasy of reflection.

The maniac crouched in his corner. So long as the light lasted I was conscious of his eyes fixed in a steady bright stare upon the lifted stone. There seemed something in its position that fascinated him. Then, with a dropping splutter, the candle sank upon itself and was extinguished suddenly; and straightway we were embedded in a block of gloom.

Very soon I was asleep. Ease and sensation, drink and food--how strangely in those days one’s soul had learned to withdraw itself from its instinctive attachments; to hover apart, as it were, from that clumsy expression of its desires that is the body with its appetites; and to accept at last, as radically irreclaimable, that same body so grievously misinformed with animism. Now I could surrender to forgetfulness, and that with little effort, all the load of emotion and anxiety with which a savage destiny sought to overwhelm me. Nor did this argue a brutish insensibility on my part; but only a lifting of idealism to spheres that offered a more tranquil and serener field for meditation.

Once during the night a single drawn sound, like the pipe of wind in a keyhole, roused me to a half-recovery of my faculties. I had been dreaming of Carinne and of the little pig that fell into the pit, and, associating the phantom cry with the voluble ghosts of my brain, I smiled and fled again to the heights.

The noise of heavily grating bolts woke me at length to the iron realities of a day that might be my last on earth. I felt on my face the wind of the dungeon door as it was driven back.

“Follow me, Aubriot!” grunted an indifferent voice in the opening.

Lacking a response of any sort, the speaker, who had not even put himself to the trouble of entering the cell, cried out gutturally and ironically--

“_Holà hé, holà hé_, Citizen Aubriot Guillotin! thou art called to operate on thyself! _Mordi, mordi, mordi!_ dost thou hear? thou art invited to commit suicide that France may regenerate itself of thee!”

I raised my head. A burly form, topped by a great hairy face, blocked the doorway. I made it out by the little light that filtered through a high-up grating above me.

“_Mille démons!_” shouted the turnkey suddenly, “what is this?”

He came pounding into the cell, paused, and lifted his hands like a benedictory priest. “_Mille démons!_” he whispered again, with his jaw dropped.

I had jumped to my feet.

“_Pardieu!_ Mr Jailer!” said I; “the guillotine, it appears, has anticipated upon itself that law of which it is the final expression. The rest of us you will of necessity acquit.”

I looked down, half-dazed; but I recalled the odd sound that had awakened me in the night. Here, then, was the explanation of it--in this swollen and collapsed form, whose head, it seemed, was plunged beneath the floor, as if it had dived for Tartarus and had stuck at the shoulders.

“He has guillotined himself with a vengeance!” I exclaimed.

“But how?” said the turnkey, stupidly.

“But thus, it is obvious: by propping the slab-end on the pitcher; by lying down with his neck over the brink of the trough; by upsetting the vessel with a sweep of his arm as he lay. _Mon Dieu!_ see how he sprouts from the chink like a horrible dead polypus! This is no mouse-trap, but a gin to catch human vermin!”

“It was not to be foreseen,” muttered the man, a little scared. “Who would have fancied a madman to be in earnest!”

“And that remark,” said I, “comes oddly from the lips of a patriot.”

He questioned me with his eyes in a surly manner.

“Bah!” I cried; “are not Robespierre, Couthon, St Just in earnest? are not you in earnest? and do you not all put your heads into traps? But I beg you to take me out of La Souricière.”

He had recovered his composure while I spoke.

“Come, then,” he said; “thou art wanted down below. And as to that rascal--_Mordi_!” he chuckled, “he has run into a _cul-de-sac_ on his way to hell; but at any rate he has saved the axe an extra notch to its edge.”

On the threshold of the room he stopped me and looked into my face.

“How much for a _billet_?” said he.

“You have one for me?”

“That depends.”

“But doubtless you have been paid to deliver it?”

“And doubtless thou wilt pay to receive it.”

“Oh, _mon Dieu_!” said I; “but these vails! And patriots, I see, are not so far removed from the lackeys they despise.”

“_Pardi!_” said the bulky man. “Listen to the fox preaching to the hens! But I will lay odds that in another twelve hours thou wilt be stripped of something besides thy purse. What matter, then! thou wilt have thy crown of glory to carry to the Lombard-house.”

I gave him what was left to me.

“Now,” said I; and he put a scrap of paper into my hand.

I unfolded it in the dim light and read these words, hurriedly scrawled thereon in a hand unknown to me: “_Play, if nothing else avails, the hidden treasures of Pierrettes_.”

“Follow me, Thibaut,” said the jailer.

* * * * * * *

As might feel a martyr, who, with a toy knife in his hand, is driven to face the lions, so felt I on my way to the Tribunal with that fragment of paper thrust into my breast. At one moment I could have cried out on the travesty of kindness that could thus seek to prolong my agony by providing me with an inadequate weapon; at another I was reminded how one might balance oneself in a difficult place with a prop no stronger than one’s own little finger. Yet this thin shaft of light cutting into desperate gloom had disquieted me strangely. Foreseeing, and prepared stoically to meet, the inevitable, I had even--before the _billet_ was placed in my hands--felt a certain curiosity to witness--though as an accused--the methods of procedure of a Court that was as yet only known to me through the infamy of its reputation. Now, however, caught back to earth with a rope of straw, I trembled over the very thought of the ordeal to which I was invited.

Coming, at the end of melancholy vaulted passages, to a flight of stone steps leading up to a door, I was suddenly conscious of a droning murmur like that of hived bees. The jailer, in the act of running the key into the lock, beckoned me to mount to him, and, thus possessed of me, caught me under the arm-pit.

“Play thy card, then, like a gambler!” said he.

“What!” I exclaimed in astonishment.

“Ah bah!” he growled; “didst thou think delicacy kept me from reading the message? But, fear not. Thou art too little a gudgeon for my playing”--and he swung open the door. Immediately the hiss and patter of voices swept upon me like rain. That, and the broad glare of daylight after so much darkness, confused me for a moment. The next I woke to the consciousness that at last my foot was on the precipice path--the gangway for the passage of the pre-damned into the Salle de la Liberté--the _arête_ of the “Montagne,” it might be called, seeing how it served that extreme faction for a ridge most perilous to its enemies to walk on.

This gangway skirted a wooden barricade that cut the hall at about a third of its length. To my left, as I advanced, I caught glimpse over the partition of the dismal black plumes on the hats of the judges, as they bobbed in juxtaposition of evil under a canopy of green cloth. To my right, loosely filling the body of the hall, was the public; and here my extreme insignificance as a prisoner was negatively impressed upon me by the indifference of those whom I almost brushed in passing, for scarce a _poissarde_ of them all deigned to notice the little gudgeon as he wriggled on the national hook. Then in a moment my conductor twisted me through an opening cut in the barricade, and I was delivered over to the Tribunal.

A certain drumming in my ears, a certain mist before my eyes, resolved themselves into a very set manner of attention. The stark, whitewashed walls seemed spotted with a plague of yellow faces--to my left a throng of mean blotches, the obsequious counsel for the defence; to my front the President and judges, in number three, like skulls decked with hearse-plumes; to my right the jury, a very Pandora-box of goblins, the lid left off, the evil countenances swarming over the edge. All seemed to my excited imagination to be faces and nothing else--drab, dirty, and malignant--ugly motes set against the staring white of the walls, dancing fantastically in the white day-beams that poured down from the high windows. Yet that I sought for most I could not at first distinguish,--not until the owner of it stood erect by a little table--placed to one side and a little forward of the judicial dais--over which he had been leaning. Then I recognised him instantly--Tinville, the Devil’s Advocate, the blood-boltered vampire--and from that moment he was the court to me, judge, jury, and counsel, and his dark face swam only in my vision like a gout of bile.

Now, I tell you, that so dramatic was this Assembly by reason of the deadliness of purpose that characterised it, that one, though a prisoner, almost resented the flippant coxcombry of the three sightless busts standing on brackets above the bench. For these--Brutus, Marat, St Fargeau (his gods quit the indignant Roman of responsibility for entertaining such company)--being jauntily decorated with a red bonnet apiece and a grimy cockade of the tricolour, jarred hopelessly in the context, and made of the bloodiest tragedy a mere clownish extravaganza. And, behold! of this extravaganza Fouquier-Tinville, when he gave reins to his humour, discovered himself to be the very Sannio--the rude powerful buffoon, with a wit only for indecency.

Yet he did not at a first glance figure altogether unprepossessing. Livid-skinned though he was, with a low forehead, which his hair, brushed back and stiffly hooked at its ends, seemed to claw about the middle like a black talon, there was yet little in his countenance that bespoke an active malignancy. His large eyes had that look of good-humoured weariness in them that, superficially, one is apt to associate with unvindictive long-sufferingness. His brows, black also and thick, were set in the habitual lift of suspense and inquiry. His whole expression was that of an anxious dwelling upon the prisoner’s words, lest the prisoner should incriminate himself; and it was only when one marked the tigerish steadiness of his gaze and the _sooty_ projection of his under-lip over a strongly cleft chin that one realised how the humour of the man lay all upon the evil side. For the rest--as each detail of his personality was hammered into me by my pulses--his black clothes had accommodated themselves to his every ungainly habit of movement, his limp shirt was caught up about his neck with a cravat like a rag of dowlas, and over his shoulders hung a broad national ribbon ending in a silver medallion, with the one word _Loi_ imprinted on it like a Judas kiss.

Thus the man, as he stood scrutinising me after an abstracted fashion, his left arm bent, the hand of it knuckled upon the table, the Lachesis thumb of it--flattened from long kneading of the yarn of life--striding over a form of indictment.

The atmosphere of the court was frowzy as that of a wine-shop in the early hours of morning. It repelled the freshness of the latter and communicated its influence to public and tribunal alike. Over all hung a slackness and a peevish unconcern as to business. Bench and bar yawned, and exchanged spiritless commonplaces of speech. True enough, a gudgeon was an indifferent fish with which to start the traffic of the day.

At length the Public Accuser slightly turned and nodded his head.

“_Maître Greffier_,” said he, in quite a noiseless little voice, “acquaint us of the charge, I desire thee, against this _patte-pelu_.”

_Nom de Dieu!_ here was a fine _coup d’archet_ to the overture. My heart drummed very effectively in response.

A little black-martin of a fellow, with long coat-tails and glasses to his eyes, stood up by the notaries’ table and handled a slip of paper. Everywhere the murmur of Tinville’s voice had brought the court to attention. I listened to the _greffier_ with all my ears.

“Act of Accusation,” he read out brassily, “against Jean-Louis Sebastien de Crancé, _ci-devant_ Comte de la Muette, and since calling himself the Citizen Jean-Louis Thibaut.”

Very well, and very well--I was discovered, then; through whose agency, if not through Jacques Crépin’s, I had no care to learn. The wonder to me was that, known and served as I had been, I should have enjoyed so long an immunity from proscription as an aristocrat. But I accused Crépin--and wrongfully, I believe--in my heart.

“Hath rendered himself answerable to the law of the 17th Brumaire,” went on the _greffier_, mechanically, “in that he, an _émigré_, hath ventured himself in the streets of Paris in disguise, and----”

The Public Accuser waved him impatiently to a stop. There fell a dumb silence.

“One pellet out of a charge is enough to kill a rat,” said he, quietly: then in an instant his voice changed to harsh and terrible, and he bellowed at me--

“What answer to that, Monsieur _r-r-r-rat_, Monsieur _ratatouille_?”

The change of manner was so astounding that I jumped as at the shock of a battery. Then a hot flush came to my face, and with it a dreadful impulse to strike this insolent on the mouth. I folded my arms, and gave him back glare for glare.

“Simply, monsieur,” I said, “that it is not within reason to accuse me of returning to what I have never quitted.”

“Paris?”

“The soil of France.”

“That shall not avail thee!” he thundered. “What right hast thou to the soil that thou and thine have manured with the sacred blood of the people?”

“Oh, monsieur!” I began--“but if you will convert my very refutation----”

He over-roared me as I spoke. He was breathing himself, at my expense, for the more serious business of the day. Positively I was being used as a mere punching-bag on which this “bruiser” (_comme on dit à l’Anglaise_) might exercise his muscles.

“Silence!” he shouted; “I know of what I speak! thou walk’st on a bog, where to extricate the right foot is to engulf the left. Emigrant art thou--titular at least by force of thy accursed rank; and, if that is not enough, thou hast plotted in prison with others that are known.”

I smiled, awaiting details of the absurd accusation. I had formed, it was evident, no proper conception of this court of summary jurisdiction. The President leaned over his desk at the moment and spoke with Tinville, proffering the latter his snuff-box. They exchanged some words, a pantomime of gesticulation to me. As they nodded apart, however, I caught a single wafted sentence: “We will whip her like the Méricourt if she is obstinate.”

To what vile and secret little history was this the key! To me it only signified that, while I had fancied them discussing a point of my case, the two were passing confidences on a totally alien matter. At last I felt very small; and that would have pleased Carinne.

“But, at any rate,” I thought, “the charge against me must now assume some definite form.”

He, that dark _bouche de fer_ of the Terror, stared at me gloomily, as if he had expected to find me already removed. Then suddenly he flung down upon the table the paper he had in his hand, and cried automatically, as if in a certain absence of mind, “I demand this man of the law to which he is forfeit.”

God in heaven! And so my trial was ended. They had not even allotted me one from the litter of mongrel counsel that, sitting there like begging curs, dared never, when retained, score a point in favour of a client lest the hags and the brats should hale them off to the lamp-irons. This certainly was Justice paralysed down one whole side.

I heard a single little cry lift itself from the hall behind me and the clucking of the _tricoteuses_. I felt it was all hopeless, but I clutched at the last desperate chance as the President turned to address (in three words) the jury.

“_M. l’Accusateur Public_,” I said, hurriedly, “I am constrained to tell you that I have in my possession that which may induce you to consider the advisability of a remand.”

The fellow stared dumfoundered at me, as if I had thrown my cap in his face. The President hung on his charge.

“Oh!” said the former, with an ironical nicety of tone--“and what is the nature of this magnificent evidence?”

I had out my scrap of paper, folded like a _billet-doux_.

“If the citizen will condescend to cast his eye on this?” I said.

He considered a minute. Curiosity ever fights in the bully with arrogance. At length he made a sign to a _gendarme_ to bring him that on which, it seemed, my life depended.

Every moment while he dwelt on the words was like the oozing of a drop of blood to me. I had in a flash judged it best to make him sole confidant with me in the contents of the paper, that so his private cupidity might be excited, and he not be driven by necessity to play the _rôle_ of the incorruptible. The instant he looked up my whole heart expanded.

“The prisoner,” he said, “acquits his conscience of a matter affecting the State. I must call upon you, _M. le Président_, to grant for the present a remand.”

Oh, _mon Dieu_! but the shamelessness of this avarice! I believe the scoundrel would have blushed to be discovered in nothing but an act of mercy.

“The prisoner is remanded to close confinement in the Convent of St Pélagie,” were the words that dismissed me from the court; and I swear Fouquier-Tinville’s large eyes followed me quite lovingly as I was marched away.