Chapter V: Part 5

“Monsieur,” he said, “you are sworn bookseller, and I must take you for a well-conducted man. Nevertheless, in your display of goods a volume of the works of Ronsard is open at the frontispiece, which represents a naked woman. And it is a thing not fit to be looked at.”

“Pardon me, Monsieur,” replied Monsieur Blaizot, gently, “it is a frontispiece of Léonard Gautier’s who, in his day, was considered a very able draughtsman.”

“It matters little to me,” replied the elder, “that the draughtsman was clever. All that I take into consideration is that he represented nudities. This figure has nothing on but its hair, and I am grievously surprised, Monsieur, that a man of age and prudence, such as you appear, should expose it to the gaze of the young men who frequent the Rue St. Jacques. You would do well to burn it, following the example of Father Garasse, who expended his means in acquiring, in order to burn them, a number of books opposed to public decency and to the Society of Jesus. At least, it would be more decent in you to hide it in the most secret recess of your shop, which conceals, I fear, many a book calculated to excite minds to vice, not only by their text, but by their plates.”

Monsieur Blaizot replied, reddening, that such a suspicion was unjust, and it grieved him coming from a worthy man.

“I must tell you who I am,” said the elder. “You see before you Monsieur Nicodème, the President of the Purity League. The end that I pursue is to outdo in niceness in the matter of modesty the regulations of the _Lieutenant de Police_. I busy myself, with the help of a dozen Parliamentary councillors, and two hundred churchwardens from the principal parishes, in clearing away nudities exposed in public places, such as squares, boulevards, streets, alleys, quays, courts, and gardens. And, not content with establishing modesty in the public way, I exert myself to spread its dominion even into the salon, the study, and the bedroom, whence it is but too often banished. Know, Monsieur, that the Society that I have founded has trousseaux made for young married people, containing long and ample night-garments which permit these young spouses chastely to go about the execution of God’s commandment relative to increase and multiplication. And, to mingle charm, if I may say so, with austerity, these garments are trimmed with pleasing embroidery. I plume myself on having thus invented garments of an intimate nature so well designed to make another Sarah and Tobias of all our young couples, and to cleanse the sacrament of marriage from the impurities which unfortunately have clung to it.”

My good master, who, his nose in Cassiodorus, had been listening to their discourse, replied with the utmost gravity from the top of his ladder, that he thought the invention admirable, and praiseworthy, but that he had a still more excellent one of the kind.

“I would that our young spouses,” said he, “were rubbed from head to foot with blacking before they met, making their skin like boot-leather, which would greatly damp the criminal ardours of the flesh, and be a grievous obstacle to the caresses, kisses, and endearments that lovers practise too generally between the sheets.”

Monsieur Nicodème, lifting his head at these words, saw my good master on the ladder, and saw also from his demeanour that he was laughing at him.

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” said he, with sadness and indignation, “I would forgive you did you merely laugh at me. But you ridicule at the same time, decency and public morals, and there you are much to blame. In spite of wicked jokes, the Society that I have founded has already done good and useful work. Crack your jokes, sir! We have fixed six hundred vine or fig-leaves on the statues in the king’s gardens.”

“Admirable indeed, sir,” responded my good master, adjusting his spectacles, “and at that rate every statue will soon have its leaf. But (seeing that objects have no meaning for us save by association of ideas) in placing vine-leaves and fig-leaves on statues, you transfer the quality of indecency to the leaves; so that one can no longer see vine or fig-tree on the countryside without conceiving them as sheltering some indecency; and it is no small sin, my good sir, to fix immodesty on these innocent plants. Allow me to tell you further that it is a dangerous thing to make a study, as you do, of everything that may cause disquietude and uneasiness to the flesh, without reflecting that if a given shape be such as to scandalise souls, each of us who bears the original of that shape will scandalise himself, except he be less than a man—a thing one does not like to contemplate.”

“Monsieur,” responded the aged Nicodème, rather heatedly, “I gather from the language you hold that you are a libertine and a debauchee.”

“Monsieur,” said my good master, “I am a Christian, and as for living in debauchery, I could not think of such a thing, having enough to do to gain my daily bread, wine, and tobacco. Such as you see me, Monsieur, I know no orgy but the silent orgies of meditation, and the only feast I sit down to is the feast of the Muses. But I, as a wise man, consider that it is a bad thing to outbid in shamefacedness the teachings of the Catholic religion, which on this subject allows a good deal of liberty, and adjusts itself easily to people’s customs and prejudices. I take you to be tainted with Calvinism and to be leaning to the heresy of iconoclasm. For, in truth, one does not know whether your zeal will not go so far as to burn images of God and the saints, from hatred of the humanity evident in them. Such words as modesty, decency, and shame, which come so readily from your mouth, have as a matter of fact no precise and constant meaning. Custom and nice feeling can alone define them with truth and moderation. I only acknowledge poets, artists, and pretty women, as judges in these delicate matters. What an extraordinary notion, to set up a row of attorneys in judgment on Grace and Pleasure!”

“But, Monsieur,” replied the aged Nicodème, “we have nothing to do with Smiles or Graces, still less with images of God and the saints, and you are maliciously fastening a quarrel on us. We are decent people, who wish to turn aside the eyes of our sons from improper sights, and one knows well enough what is decent and what is not. Do you wish, Monsieur l’Abbé, that our young people should be open to every temptation of the streets?”

“Ah! Monsieur,” replied my good master. “We must all be tempted. It is the lot of men and Christians on this earth. And the most formidable temptation comes from within—not from without. You would not take so much trouble to remove from the shop windows any sketch of nude women if, as I have done, you had studied the lives of the Fathers of the desert. There you would have seen how, in a frightful wilderness, far from any carved or painted shape, torn with hair-shirts, macerated with penance, faint from fasting, tossing on a bed of thorns, the anchorites were penetrated to the very marrow with the prickings of carnal desire. In their wretched cells they saw visions a thousand times more voluptuous than this allegory which offends you in Monsieur Blaizot’s window.

“The devil, or, as free-thinkers would say, nature, is a better painter of lascivious scenes than Giulio Romano himself. He surpasses all the Italian and Flemish masters in grouping, movement, and colour. Alas! one is powerless against his glowing pictures. Those that shock you are of small account in comparison, and you would do wisely to leave to the care of the _Lieutenant de Police_, as your fellow citizens are willing it should be left, the guardianship of public decency. Truly your ingenuousness astonishes me; you have little notion what a man is, and what society is, and of the fever and insurgence of a great city. Oh! the silly greybeards, who in the midst of all the uncleanness of a Babylon where every lifted curtain shows the eye or the arm of a courtesan, where busy humanity touch and quicken one another in the public squares, fall a-groaning and complaining of a few naughty pictures hung up on book-sellers’ stalls; and carry their lamentations even to the very Parliament of the kingdom when a woman has shown her legs to some fellows in a dancing-saloon—just the most ordinary sight in the world for them.”

Thus spoke my good master from the top of his ladder. But Monsieur Nicodème stopped his ears in order not to hear him, and cried out on his cynicism.

“Heavens!” he sighed, “what can be more disgusting than a naked woman, and how shameful to compromise, as does this Abbé, with an immorality which is the ruin of a country, for people can only exist by purity of morals.”

“It is true, Monsieur,” said my good master, “that peoples are strong only so long as they preserve their morals; but by that is understood a community of rules, opinions, and interests, and a generous-minded obedience to law; not trifles such as occupy you. Beware, moreover, lest shamefacedness, failing as a charm, become but a piece of stupidity, and less the artless dullness of your fears present a ridiculous spectacle and one not a little indecent.”

But Monsieur Nicodème had already left the place.

XVIII

JUSTICE

Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, who should rather have been nourished at the Prytaneum by a grateful republic, gained his bread by writing letters for servant-girls in a stall near the cemetery of the Innocents. There he happened to serve in the office of secretary to a Portuguese lady who was crossing France, with her nigger-boy. She gave him a _liard_ for a letter written to her husband, and an _écu_ of six _livres_ for another to her lover. It was the first _écu_ my good master had handled since the feast of St. John; and since he was open-handed, even to magnificence, he straightway took me to the _Pomme d’Or_, on the Quai de Grève, close to the Town-hall, where the wine is not doctored, and the sausages are of the best. And the big dealers, who buy apples on the Mall, go there ordinarily towards midday to try to best one another. It was spring-time, and sweet to be alive on such a day. My good master had our table spread on the embankment, and we hearkened, as we dined, to the lapping of the water under the oars of the boatmen. A light caressing breeze laved us with gentle breath, and we were glad to be alive and in the sunlight. While we were eating our fried gudgeons a noise of men and horses at our elbow made us turn round.

Guessing what made us curious a dingy little old man, at the next table, said, with an obliging smile:

“It is nothing, gentlemen—a servant-girl whom they are taking to be hanged for stealing some bits of lace from her mistress.”

And indeed, as he spoke, we saw, seated at the tail of a cart between two mounted police-sergeants, a girl, quite pretty, her appearance bewildered, her bosom forced into relief by the drag of her arms, which were bound behind her back. She passed in a moment, and yet I shall always see before my eyes that vision of a white face, and that look that already stared out upon nothing.

“Yes, gentlemen,” said the dingy little old man, “she is the servant of Madame Josse, the councillor’s wife, and to make herself smart when going with her lover to Ramponneau’s stole from her mistress a lace head-dress in _point a’ Alençon_, and then, having committed the theft, ran away. She was taken in a house by the Pont-au-Change, and at once confessed her crime. Accordingly she was not put to the torture for more than an hour or two. What I tell you, gentlemen, I know to be true, as I am beadle at the court where she was tried.”

The dingy little old man attacked his sausage, for it was getting cold, and continued:

“She should be at the scaffold by now, and in five minutes, perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less, the pretty rogue will have given up the ghost. Some of the hanged give no trouble to the executioner. No sooner is the cord round their neck than they quietly expire. But there are others who positively live at the rope’s end, and make a furious to-do about it. The most demoniacal of all was a priest, who was sentenced last year for forging the Royal signature on lottery tickets. For more than twenty minutes he fought like a carp on the end of a line.

“He! He!” chuckled the little old man, “the Abbé was modest and did not want the honour of a step up in the world. I saw him when they took him out of the cart. He cried and struggled so that the hangman said to him: ‘Do not be a child, Monsieur l’Abbé!’ But the oddest thing was, that, there being another thief along with him, he was, at first, taken for the chaplain, and that by the executioner, whom the police-officer had the greatest difficulty in undeceiving. Wasn’t that amusing?”

“No, Monsieur,” replied my good master, letting the fish, he had held to his lips for some moments, fall on his plate. “No, it is not amusing, and the thought that that nice-looking girl is at this moment yielding up her soul spoils the taste of my gudgeons for me, and the joy of seeing the sky above, which smiled on me but a moment back.”

“Ah, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said the little official, “if you are so sensitive as all that, you could never have witnessed without fainting what my father saw with his own eyes, when yet a child, at Dijon, his native town. Have you ever heard speak of Hélène Gillet?”

“Never,” said my master.

“In that case I will tell you her story, as my father, many a time, told it to me.”

He drank off his wine, wiped his lips with a corner of the cloth, and recounted the history I here repeat.

XIX

THE BEADLE’S STORY

In the year 1624, in the month of October, Hélène Gillet, aged twenty-two, daughter of the governor-royal of Bourg-en-Bresse, who was still under the paternal roof, along with her brothers yet of tender years, showed such visible signs of being with child that it was the talk of the town, and the young girls of Bourg ceased to associate with her. It was noticed next that her figure went down, and such comments were made that the _Lieutenant-Criminel_ ordered her to be examined by a jury of matrons. These latter reported that she had been with child and that her confinement had taken place at least fifteen days before. On their report, Hélène Gillet was put in prison and was questioned by the Court of First Instance. She there made a confession:

“‘Some months ago,’ she told them, ‘a young man from the neighbourhood, who was staying at my uncle’s house, came to my father’s to teach the boys to read and write. He possessed me but once. It was through a servant who locked me up in a room with him. There he ravished me.’ And when they asked her why she had not cried for help, she replied that surprise had taken away her voice. Pressed by the judges, she added, that in consequence of this violation she became with child and was delivered prematurely. Far from having helped on the birth, she would not have known what it was, had not a servant revealed to her the true nature of the occurrence.

“The magistrates, dissatified with her replies, did not know, all the same, how to contradict them, when an unexpected witness came forward to furnish certain proofs of the accusation. A soldier, who happened to pass when out walking by the garden of Monsieur Pierre Gillet, the governor-royal, father of the accused, saw in a ditch, at the foot of the wall, a raven trying to pull away a cloth with its beak. He went up to it to see what it was and found the body of a little child. He immediately informed the authorities. The child was wrapped in a chemise marked with the letters H. G. on the neck. It was proved to have been a full-term child, and Hélène Gillet, convicted of infanticide, was condemned to death according to custom. On account of the honourable post held by her father she was permitted to enjoy the privilege accorded those of noble birth, and the sentence ran that her head should be cut off.

“An appeal having been made to the Parliament of Dijon, she was conducted under the guard of two archers to the capital of Burgundy, and shut in the conciergerie of the Palace. Her mother, who had gone with her, withdrew to the house of the Bernardine nuns. The case was heard by the members of Parliament on Monday the 12th of May, the last sitting before Whitsuntide. On the report of Counsellor Jacob the judges confirmed the sentence of the Bourg Court of First Instance, ordering that the condemned should be led to execution with the cord round her neck. It was generally remarked that this circumstance of infamy was added in a strange and unusual fashion to the punishment of a noble, and such severity, which was against all rules, was greatly blamed. But the decree admitted of no appeal, and had to be carried out immediately.

“And indeed, on the same day, at half-past three in the afternoon, Hélène Gillet was led to the scaffold, the bells tolling the while, in a procession, heralded by trumpets, which sounded such a peal that all the good folk of the town heard it in their houses, and falling on their knees prayed for the soul of her who was about to die. The deputy King’s-attorney advanced on horseback followed by his attendants. Then came the condemned woman in a cart, the cord round her neck according to the decree of Parliament.

“She was attended by two Jesuit fathers and two Capuchin brothers, who held up before her Jesus dying on the Cross. Near by stood the headsman with his sword and the headswoman with a pair of shears. A company of archers surrounded the cart. Behind pressed a crowd of curious people where might have been discerned many small tradesmen, bakers, butchers, masons, from whom a great tumult arose.

“The procession stopped on the place called Place Morimont not, as might be thought, because it was the place of public execution, but in remembrance of the mitred and croziered abbots of Morimont, who formerly had their house there. The wooden scaffold was set up on some stone steps adjoining a humble chapel where the monks were wont to pray for the souls of the victims.

“Hélène Gillet ascended the steps with the four religious, the headsman, and his wife the headswoman. The latter, having withdrawn the cord which encircled the victim’s neck, cut her hair with shears half a foot long and bandaged her eyes; the religious prayed aloud. The headsman, however, began to tremble and turn pale. He was one, Simon Grandjean, a feeble-looking man, and as gentle and timorous of appearance as his wife, the headswoman, was savage. He had taken communion that morning in prison, and yet he felt upset and without courage to put this child to death. He leant over towards the crowd:

“‘Your pardon, all of you,’ he said, ‘if I do what I have to do badly. I have a fever on me I have been unable to shake off for three months.’

“Then tottering, wringing his hands, lifting his eyes to heaven, he fell on his knees before Hélène Gillet, and twice asked her pardon. He asked a blessing from the priests, and when the headswoman had arranged the victim on the block he lifted his sword.

“The Jesuits and the Capuchins cried out ‘Jesus! Mary!’ and a groan went up from the crowd. The blow, which should have severed the neck, made a large gash on the left shoulder, and the poor creature fell over on her right side.

“Simon Grandjean, turning to the crowd, exclaimed:

“‘Let me die!’

“Hooting arose, and some stones were thrown on the scaffold where the headswoman was replacing the victim on the block.

“Her husband again took his sword. Striking a second time, he deeply gashed the neck of the poor girl, who fell on the sword, which slipped from the hands of the executioner.

“This time the uproar from the crowd was terrible, and such a hail of stones showered on the scaffold that Simon Grandjean and the Jesuits and the Capuchins jumped down. They managed to gain the low-roofed chapel and shut themselves in. The headswoman, left alone with the victim, looked for the sword. Not seeing it, she took the cord with which Hélène Gillet had been led there, knotted it round the neck, and setting her foot on her chest tried to strangle her.

“Hélène, seizing the cord with both hands, defended herself, all bleeding as she was; whereupon the woman Grandjean dragged her by the cord, head downwards, to the edge of the platform, and, having got her to the stone steps, she cut her throat with the shears.

“She was at it when the butchers and the masons, upsetting the archers and the police, rushed the approaches of the scaffold and chapel: a dozen strong arms lifted Hélène Gillet and carried her, insensible, to the shop of Maître Jacquin, the barber-surgeon.

“The crowd of people which flung itself on the chapel-door would soon have forced it. But the two Capuchin brothers and the two Jesuit fathers opened it, being terrified. And holding up their crosses with outstretched arm, they made a way with great difficulty through the riot.

“The headsman and his wife were stoned, and struck down with hammers, and their bodies dragged through the streets. Hélène Gillet, however, recovering consciousness at the surgeon’s, asked to drink. Then, while Maître Jacquin was dressing her wound, she said:

“‘Shall I not have anything more to suffer?’

“It was found that she had suffered two blows with the sword, six cuts from the shears, which had slashed her lips and throat, and that her loins had been deeply cut by the sword, over which the headswoman dragged her while trying to strangle her; and finally that her whole body was bruised by the stones the crowd had thrown on the scaffold.

“Nevertheless she was healed of all her wounds. Left in the hands of Jacquin the surgeon, under guard of a sheriff’s officer, she asked continually:

“‘Is it not over? Will they kill me?’

“The surgeon, and some charitable people who stood by her, were urgent in reassuring her. But only the king could grant her her life. Févret, the advocate, drew up a petition which was signed by many notables of Dijon, and carried to his Majesty. Festivities were being held at the court at that moment on account of the marriage of Henrietta-Maria of France with the King of England. On the score of this marriage, Louis the Just granted the favour asked.

“He gave a full pardon to the poor girl, deeming, as the letters of remission said, that she had suffered tortures which equalled, nay even surpassed, the penalty of her sentence.

“Hélène Gillet, restored to life, withdrew into a convent at Brest where she practised up to the time of her death, the strictest piety. Such,” said the little official, “is the true history of Hélène Gillet, as every one in Dijon knows. Do you not find it entertaining, Monsieur l’Abbé?”

XX

JUSTICE (_continued_)

“Alas!” said my good master, “I cannot stomach my food. My heart is as sick at this horrible scene, which you have described so cold-bloodedly, sir, as at the sight of this servant of Madame Josse’s whom they are taking to be hanged, when something better might be made of her.”

“But, Monsieur,” retorted the beadle, “have I not told you that this girl has stolen from her mistress; and do you not wish thieves to be hanged?”

“Certainly,” said my good master, “it is customary; and as the force of custom is irresistible, I pay no attention to it in my ordinary course of life. In the same way Seneca, the philosopher, who nevertheless inclined to mildness, put together treatises of consummate elegance, even while near to him, at Rome, slaves were crucified for the smallest fault, as we see in the case of the slave Mithridates, who died, his hands nailed to the cross; merely guilty of having blasphemed the divinity of his master, the infamous Trimalchio. We are so made that nothing usual or customary either troubles or wounds us. And habit wears away, if I may say so, our indignation as well as our astonishment. I wake up every morning without thinking, I own, of the unhappy beings who are to be hanged or broken upon the wheel during the day. But when the thought of torture becomes more perceptible to me my heart is troubled, and the sight of this handsome girl led to her death contracts my throat to the point of refusing passage to this little fish.”

“What is a handsome girl?” said the beadle. “There is not a street in Paris where they don’t make them by the dozen every night. Why did this one steal from her mistress, Madame Josse?”

“I know nothing of that, Monsieur,” gravely answered my good master, “you know nothing, and the judges who condemned her knew no more, for the reasons of our actions are obscure, and their springs remain deeply hidden. I hold man free as regards his deeds, as my religion teaches me to believe, but beyond the doctrine of the Church, which is sure, there is so little ground for believing in the freedom of mankind, that I tremble when I think of decrees of justice punishing actions whose mainspring, sequence, and causes, all equally escape us, where the will plays often but a small part, and which are sometimes accomplished without consciousness. If, finally, we are responsible for our acts, since the system of our holy religion is founded on the mysterious accord between human free-will and divine grace, it is an error to deduce from this obscure and delicate liberty all the troubles, all the tortures, and all the suffering of which our laws are prodigal.”

“I perceive with sorrow, Monsieur,” said the dingy little man, “that you are on the side of the rogues.”

“Alas! Monsieur,” said my good master, “they are part of suffering humanity, and members like ourselves of Jesus Christ who died between two thieves. I seem to perceive cruelties in our laws which will appear more distinctly in the future, and over which our posterity will wax indignant.”

“I do not agree with you, Monsieur,” said the other, drinking a little gulp of wine. “All the gothic barbarity has been pared away from our laws and customs, and justice is to-day restrained and humane to excess. Punishment is exactly proportioned to crime, and you see thieves hanged, murderers broken on the wheel, traitors torn by four horses, atheists, sorcerers, and sodomites burnt, coiners boiled alive; in all which criminal law exhibits extreme moderation and all possible mildness.”

“Monsieur, in all times judges have believed themselves to be benevolent, equitable, and gentle. In the gothic ages of St. Louis, and even of Charlemagne, they admired their own benignity, which appears to us to-day as savage. I divine that, in their turn, our sons will judge us as savage, and that they will find still something more to pare away from the tortures and punishments which we inflict.”

“Monsieur, you are not speaking as a magistrate. Torture is necessary to extract confessions unobtainable by gentle means. As to punishments, they are reduced to what is necessary to assure safety of their life and goods to citizens.”

“You acknowledge then, Monsieur, that justice has for its object not what is just, but what is useful, and that it is inspired only by the interests and prejudices of peoples. Nothing is more true, and faults are punished not in proportion to the malice attached to them, but in view of the harm they cause, or which it is believed they cause, to society in general. Thus, coiners are put into a copper of boiling water, although, in reality, there is little malice in striking false coins. But the public, and financiers in particular, suffer a marked damage therefrom. It is this loss for which they avenge themselves with pitiless cruelty. Thieves are hanged, less for the perversity that lies in taking bread, and clothes, which is, by the way, excessively small, than for the reason of the natural attachment men have for their possessions. It is expedient to restore human justice to its true reason—which is the material interest of men, and to disengage it from all high philosophy—with which it pompously and hypocritically veils itself.”

“Monsieur,” replied the little official, “I do not understand you. It appears to me that justice is the more equitable the more useful it is, and this usefulness itself, which makes you disdain it, ought to render it august and sacred to you.”

“You do not understand me,” said my good master.

“Monsieur,” said the little official, “I notice that you are drinking nothing. Your wine is good if I may judge by the colour of it. May I not taste it?”

It is true that for the first time in his life my good master had left some wine at the bottom of the bottle. He poured it into the little official’s glass.

“Your health, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said the beadle. “Your wine is good, but your arguments are worthless. Justice, I repeat, is the more equitable the more useful it is, and this usefulness itself, which, you say, is in its origin and foundation, should make it appear to you as august and sacred. But you must acknowledge that the essence of justice is to be _just_, as the word implies?”

“Monsieur,” said my good master, “when we have called beauty beautiful, truth true, and justice just, we shall have said nothing at all. Your Ulpian, who spoke with precision, asserted that justice is the firm and perpetual desire to attribute to each what belongs to him, and that laws are just when they sanction this desire. The misfortune is, that men have nothing of their own, and thus the equity of law does but guarantee to them the fruit of their inherited, or recent, rapine. They resemble those childish agreements wherein after having won some marbles, the winners say to those who wish to win them back again, ‘That is not fair play.’ The sagacity of judges limits itself to differentiating between usurpations which are not fair play and those which were agreed upon in starting, and this distinction is equally childish and thin. Above all, it is arbitrary. The strapping young woman who at this very moment is hanging at the end of a hempen rope, had stolen, you say, a lace head-dress from Councillor Josse’s wife. But on what do you found your belief that this head-dress belonged to Councillor Josse’s wife? You will tell me that she bought it with her own money, or found it in her wedding-chest, or received it from some lover—all good ways of acquiring lace. But however she may have acquired it I merely see that she had the enjoyment of it, as one of those gifts of fortune one finds, or loses perchance, and over which one has no natural right. Nevertheless, I own that the lappets belonged to her conformably to the rules of this game of possession, which human society can play as children play at hop-scotch. She valued her lappets, and in fact she had no less right to them than any other. Well and good. It was justice to return them to her, but without putting such a high price on them that for two wretched lappets of _point d’Alençon_ a human creature should be destroyed.”

“Monsieur,” said the little official, “you keep in view but one side of the justice of the matter. It was not enough to do right by Councillor Josse’s wife by giving her back her lappets. It was necessary also to do right by the servant in hanging her by the neck. For justice is to render to each what is due to him. In which lies its majesty.”

“In that case,” said my good master, “justice is wickeder even than I thought. This belief that she owes punishment to the guilty is ferocious in the extreme. It is gothic barbarity.”

“Monsieur,” said the little official, “you misunderstand justice. Justice strikes without anger, and it has no hatred for this girl it sends to the gallows.”

“A good thing, too,” said my good master. “But I should prefer that judges confess that they punish the guilty from pure necessity, and only to make impressive examples. In that case they would merely hold by what was actually necessary. But if they think, in punishing, to give the guilty his due, one sees to what this delicate discrimination will lead them, and their probity itself will make them inexorable; for one knows not how to refuse people what is due to them. This maxim horrifies me, Monsieur. It was laid down with the greatest severity by an able philosopher of the name of Menardus, who pretends that to fail to punish an ill-doer is to do him wrong, and wickedly to deprive him of the right to expiate his fault. He held that the Athenian magistrates had done excellently well by Socrates the sage, and that they worked for the purification of his soul when they made him drink the hemlock. But those are odious thoughts. I ask that criminal justice should tend less to the sublime. The notion of pure revenge attached more commonly to the punishment of malefactors, although base and bad in itself, is less terrible in its consequences than the overweening virtue of ingenuous philosophers. I knew in former days, in Séez, a jovial and good sort of fellow, who took his children on his knee every evening and told them tales. He led an exemplary life, went to the sacraments, and prided himself on his scrupulous honesty in the corn business he had carried on for more than sixty years. Now he happened to be robbed by his servant of some doubloons, ducats, rose-nobles, and some fine gold coins, which he, curious of such things, kept in a case at the back of a drawer. As soon as he discovered this loss he carried complaint to the police, whereupon the maidservant was questioned, tried, condemned, and executed. The good man, who knew his rights, exacted that the skin of the thief should be given to him, of which he made a pair of pantaloons; and he would often smack his thigh and cry, ‘The hussy! the hussy!’ The girl had taken his gold pieces, he had taken her skin; anyway he had his unphilosophical revenge in all the simplicity of his rustic savagery. He had no notion of fulfilling a lofty duty when he slapped his hand light-heartedly on his garment of human skin. Better is it to acknowledge that if one hangs a thief it is for prudence’ sake, and with the object of frightening the others by his example, and not at all on the philosophical plea for the sake of giving each man his due. For in true philosophy nothing belongs to anyone if we except life itself. To pretend that we owe expiation to criminals is to fall into mysticism of a ferocious description, worse than naked violence and open anger. As to the punishment of thieves, it is a right which has its origin in force, not in philosophy. Philosophy teaches us, on the contrary, that all we possess is acquired by violence or by cunning. And you see also that judges approve of our being deprived of our possessions if the ravisher be powerful enough. Thus it is permitted to the king to take our silver-plate to make war, as was seen under Louis the Great, when the requisition was so exacting that they even took away the fringe of the bed-hangings, to use the gold woven with the silk. This prince put his hand on the goods of individuals and on the treasures of the Church, and twenty years ago, performing my devotions in Notre-Dame-de-Liesse in Picardy, I heard the complaints of an old verger, who deplored that the late king had taken away and melted down all the treasures of the church, and ravished even the jewelled breast of gold, placed there some time before in great pomp by the Princess Palatine, after she had been miraculously cured of cancer. Justice seconded the prince in his requisition, and punished severely those who hid away any article from the king’s commissaries. Evidently she did not think that these things belonged so peculiarly to their possessors that nothing could separate them.”

“Monsieur,” said the little official, “the commissaries acted in the name of the king, who, possessing everything in the kingdom, can dispose of it to his liking, either for war, or for naval armaments, or in any other way.”

“That is true,” said my good master, “and that is one of the rules of the game. The judges go about it as in the game of ‘goose,’ following one another and looking at what is written in the rules. The sovereign’s rights, upheld by the Swiss Guard, and by all sorts of soldiers, are written there. And this poor girl, who has been hanged, had no Swiss Guard to inscribe in the rules of the game that she had the right to wear Madame Josse’s lace. That is just how it is.”

“Monsieur,” said the little official, “I hope you do not liken Louis the Great, who took his subjects’ plate to pay his soldiers, to this creature who stole a head-dress to deck herself.”

“Monsieur,” said my good master, “it is less innocent to make war than to go to Ramponneau’s in a lace head-dress. But justice gives to every one what is his, according to the rules of this game played by man, which is the wickedest, the most absurd, and the least amusing of all games. And ’tis our misfortune that every man is obliged to take a hand in it.”

“It is necessary,” said the little official.

“Laws are also of use,” said my good master. “But they are not just and can never be so, for the judge assures to his fellow men the enjoyment of the goods that belong to them, without distinction between the beneficial and the hurtful: this distinction is not found in the rules of the game, but in the book of Divine justice only, wherein no one may read. Do you know the story of the angel and the anchorite? An angel came down to earth with the face of a man and the dress of a pilgrim; making his way through Egypt. He knocked, at eventide, at the door of a good anchorite, who, taking him for a traveller, gave him supper, and wine from a golden cup. Then he made him lie down on his bed whilst he laid himself on the ground on some handfuls of maize-straw. While he slept his celestial guest rose up, took the cup out of which he had drunk, and, hiding it under his cloak, fled away. He acted thus, not meaning any ill-will towards the good hermit, but, on the contrary, in the interest of the host who had given him such a charitable welcome. For he knew that this cup would have been the undoing of the holy man, who had put his heart into its keeping, whereas God desires us to love none but Him and does not brook that a man, devoted to religion, should attach himself to the things of this world. The angel who had his share of Divine wisdom, distinguished between goods that are good and goods that are not. Judges do not make this distinction. Who knows but what Madame Josse may not lose her soul along with the lappets of lace her servant took, and which the judges have given back?”

“In the meanwhile,” said the little official, rubbing his hands, “there is now a hussy the less in this world.”

He shook the crumbs from his coat, bowed to those present, and went off jauntily.

XXI

JUSTICE (_continued_)

My good master, turning to me, continued in this manner:

“I only related the story of the angel and the hermit to show the abyss which separates the temporal from the spiritual. Now it is only in things temporal that human justice is exercised, and it is on a low plane where high principles are not in favour. The cruellest offence that could be possibly be done our Lord Jesus Christ is to place His image in the courts of law, where judges pardon Pharisees who crucified Him, and condemn the Magdalene whom He raised up with His Divine hands. What does He—the Just One—among these men, who are unable to show themselves just, even should they wish to, because their melancholy duty is to consider the actions of their fellows, not for what they are in their essence, but merely from the point of view of the social interest; that is to say, on account of this mass of egoism, avarice, error, and abuse which go to the making of cities, and of which they are the purblind guardians. In weighing a fault they add to it the weight of fear or anger it inspired in the cowardly public. And all this is written in their book in such wise that the ancient reading and dead letter stand in the stead of intelligence, heart, and a living soul. And all these regulations, some of which go back to the infamous time of Byzantium and Theodora, agree on this one point only, that all must be perpetuated—virtues and vices alike, in a society which has no desire for change. A fault, in itself, is of so little account in the eyes of the law, and the surrounding circumstances are so considerable, that the selfsame act allowable in one case becomes unpardonable in another, as is shown in the instance of a slap in the face, which, given by one man to another appears simply, in the case of a bourgeois, the effect of an irascible temper, but, for a soldier, becomes a crime punishable by death. This barbarity, which still exists, will be our shame in centuries to come. We reck little of it, but one day they will ask each other what sort of savages we can have been to send a man to his death for a generous warmth of blood springing from his heart when he is bound by law to suffer the perils of war and the miseries of barrack-life. And it is clear that, if there were such a thing as justice, we should not have two codes, one military, the other civil. This military justice, whose results one sees daily, is atrociously cruel; and men, if they ever establish law and order, will never believe that formerly, in times of peace, courts-martial avenged the majesty of corporals and sergeants by the death of a man. They will not believe that unfortunate beings were ordered to be shot for the crime of desertion before the enemy, in an expedition where the government of France itself did not recognise a state of war. What is to be wondered at is that such atrocities are committed by Christian people who do honour to St. Sebastian, a mutinous soldier; and to those martyrs of the Theban legion, whose sole glory is having, in a former age, incurred the severity of courts-martial in refusing to fight against the Bagaudes. But enough of this, let us talk no more of the justice of these gentlemen of the sword, who will perish one day according to the prophecy of the Son of God; let us return to our civil magistrates.

“Judges search not the reins, neither do they read the heart of man, and their justest justice is rude and superficial. All the more then must they cling to this coarse skin of the law on which the codes are inscribed. They are men—that is to say weak and corruptible, gentle to the strong, and pitiless to the weak. They sanction, by their judgments, the cruellest social iniquities, and it is difficult to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their personal baseness from what is imposed on them by their duty to their profession; which duty is, in reality, to uphold the State in what is evil as well as in what is good; to see that public morality remains unaltered, whether excellent or detestable; and to assure the rights of citizens along with the tyrannical desires of the prince, to say nothing of the ridiculous and cruel superstitions which find an inviolable shelter under the lilies of France.

“The most austere magistrate may be brought, by his integrity itself, to decrees as revolting, and perhaps even more inhuman, than those of one who fails in his duty, and I do not know myself, which of the two I should dread the most, the judge who has made a soul for himself out of the text of the law, or he who makes use of a remnant of sentiment to twist the text. The one would sacrifice me to his interests or his passions, the other would immolate me coldly for the written word.

“Again, we must notice that the magistrate is the defender, through his office, not of new prejudices to which we are all more or less submissive, but of old prejudices which are preserved in our laws while they are fading from our minds and our manners. And there is no one of a thinking and liberal turn of mind who does not feel how much of the barbarous there is in law, whereas the judge has not the right to feel this.

“But I am speaking as if laws, clumsy and barbarous as they are, were at least clear and precise. But much is necessary for them to become so. The ‘gramarye’ of a wizard would be easy to understand compared with many of the articles in our codes and case-law. This difficulty of interpretation has greatly contributed to the establishing of divers degrees of jurisdiction, and we admit that what the manorial court has not understood the Parliamentary gentlemen will make clear. It is expecting a great deal from five men in red robes and square caps, who even after having recited the _Veni Creator_ are still subject to error; and it is better to acknowledge that the highest court judges without further appeal, for the sole reason, that the others were exhausted before recourse was had to this. The prince is himself of this opinion, for he has a judgment-seat[16] above the Parliament.”

FOOTNOTES:

[16] The institution styled _lit de justice_, bed of justice.

XXII

JUSTICE (_concluded_)

My good master looked sorrowfully at the flowing water, an image of this life, where all things pass and nothing changes. He pondered for some time and then continued in a low voice:

“That point is of itself, my son, an insurmountable perplexity to me, that it is needful that justice should come from judges. It is clear that they are interested in finding guilty the man whom they at first suspected. _Esprit de corps_, so strong among them, pushes them to it, and so you may see throughout their procedure how they brush aside the defence as importunate, and only allow it a hearing when the prosecution has donned its arms and composed its countenance, and has, in fact, contrived to assume the air of the Goddess of Wisdom. By professional feeling they are inclined to see guilt in every accused person, and their zeal appears so alarming to certain European nations that, in important cases, they give them the help of twelve men, drawn by lot. Whereby, it appears, blind chance is a better guarantee of the life and liberty of the accused than can be the enlightened conscience of a judge. It is true, however, that these bourgeois magistrates, drawn by lot, are kept out of the affair, of which they see but the outside pomp and show. And it is also true that, ignorant of the law, they are not called upon to apply it, but to decide merely, in one word, whether it is a case for applying it. It is said that this kind of assize results sometimes in absurdities, but that the nations who have instituted it are attached to it as a kind of very precious safeguard. I willingly believe that. And I understand their accepting decrees given in such fashion, which may be inept or cruel, but at least whose absurdity and barbarity cannot be imputed to one person, so to speak. Iniquity seems bearable when it is incoherent enough to appear involuntary.

“The little official of a moment ago, who had such a feeling for justice, suspected me of taking the side of thieves and assassins. On the contrary, I disapprove so strongly of theft and murder that I cannot endure even the authorised copy of them by the law, and it is painful to me to observe that judges have found no better way to punish rogues and homicides than by imitating them; for in truth, Tournebroche my son, what is fine or execution, save theft and murder, perpetrated with majestic punctiliousness? And do you not see that, notwithstanding all its splendour, our justice only attains to the shameful revenge of evil for evil, misery for misery; and to the doubling of crimes and sins for the sake of equilibrium and symmetry? It is possible, in the carrying out of this duty, to exercise a certain probity and disinterestedness. One may show oneself a l’Hospital as well as a Jeffreys, and for my part I know a magistrate who is an honest fellow enough. But to return to the principle of the thing, I have wanted to show the true character of an institution which the pride of the judges and the terror of the people, vying with each other, have clothed in borrowed majesty. I have wanted to show the humble origin of these codes they wish to make august, and which are in reality but an odd heap of expedients.

“Alas! laws emanate from man; a poor and miserable origin. They are mostly born of occasion. Ignorance, superstition, the pride of princes, the interests of the legislator, caprice, fantasy—these are the sources of the great body of the law, which becomes worthy of veneration when it is no longer intelligible. This obscurity that envelops it, thickened by the commentators, gives it the majesty of the oracles of old. I hear on all sides, and I read in every paper, that nowadays we make laws fitting for the circumstance and the occasion. That is the view of the short-sighted, who fail to see that it is but following an immemorial custom, and that in all times laws have resulted from some chance thing. We complain also of the obscurity and contradiction into which legislators continually fall. And we fail to note that their predecessors were equally dense and confused.

“In actual fact, Tournebroche my son, laws are good or bad less by their nature than in the way we use them, and such and such a provision, extremely wicked though it be, does no harm if the judge does not put it into force. Custom is stronger than law. Refinement of manners, gentleness of mind, are the only remedies one can reasonably bring for legal barbarity. For to correct laws by laws is to take a lengthy and uncertain road. Centuries alone undo the work of centuries. There is little hope that a French Numa will meet one day in the forest of Compiègne, or among the rocks of Fontainebleau, with another nymph Egeria, who shall dictate wise laws to him.”

He gazed for long on the hills which showed blue on the horizon. His air was grave and sad. Then, laying his hand gently on my shoulder, he spoke to me in accents so profound that I was touched to the depths of my soul. He said: