Honore de Balzac (22 page)

"They must have killed the senator and plastered the body up in some
wall," said Pigoult.

"I begin to fear it," answered Lechesneau. "Where did you carry that
plaster?" he said to Gothard.

The boy began to cry.

"The law frightens him," said Michu, whose eyes were darting flames like
those of a lion in the toils.

The servants, who had been detained at the village by order of the
mayor, now arrived and filled the antechamber where Catherine and
Gothard were weeping. To all the questions of the director of the jury
and the justice of peace Gothard replied by sobs; and by dint of weeping
he brought on a species of convulsion which alarmed them so much that
they let him alone. The little scamp, perceiving that he was no longer
watched, looked at Michu with a grin, and Michu signified his approval
by a glance. Lechesneau left the justice of peace and returned to the
stables.

"Monsieur," said Madame d'Hauteserre, at last, addressing Pigoult; "can
you explain these arrests?"

"The gentlemen are accused of abducting the senator by armed force and
keeping him a prisoner; for we do not think they have murdered him—in
spite of appearances," replied Pigoult.

"What penalties are attached to the crime?" asked Monsieur d'Hauteserre.

"Well, as the old law continues in force, and they are not amenable
under the Code, the penalty is death," replied the justice.

"Death!" cried Madame d'Hauteserre, fainting away.

The abbe now came in with his sister, who stopped to speak to Catherine
and Madame Durieu.

"We haven't even seen your cursed senator!" said Michu.

"Madame Marion, Madame Grevin, Monsieur Grevin, the senator's valet, and
Violette all tell another tale," replied Pigoult, with the sour smile of
magisterial conviction.

"I don't understand a thing about it," said Michu, dumbfounded by his
reply, and beginning now to believe that his masters and himself were
entangled in some plot which had been laid against them.

Just then the party from the stables returned. Laurence went up to
Madame d'Hauteserre, who recovered her senses enough to say: "The
penalty is death!"

"Death!" repeated Laurence, looking at the four gentlemen.

The word excited a general terror, of which Giguet, formerly instructed
by Corentin, took immediate advantage.

"Everything can be arranged," he said, drawing the Marquis de Simeuse
into a corner of the dining-room. "Perhaps after all it is nothing but a
joke; you've been a soldier and soldiers understand each other. Tell me,
what have you really done with the senator? If you have killed him—why,
that's the end of it! But if you have only locked him up, release him,
for you see for yourself your game is balked. Do this and I am certain
the director of the jury and the senator himself will drop the matter."

"We know absolutely nothing about it," said the marquis.

"If you take that tone the matter is likely to go far," replied the
lieutenant.

"Dear cousin," said the Marquis de Simeuse, "we are forced to go to
prison; but do not be uneasy; we shall return in a few hours, for there
is some misunderstanding in all this which can be explained."

"I hope so, for your sakes, gentlemen," said the magistrate, signing to
the gendarmes to remove the four gentlemen, Michu, and Gothard. "Don't
take them to Troyes; keep them in your guardhouse at Arcis," he said to
the lieutenant; "they must be present to-morrow, at daybreak, when we
compare the shoes of their horses with the hoof-prints in the park."

Lechesneau and Pigoult did not follow until they had closely questioned
Catherine, Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, and Laurence. The Durieus,
Catherine, and Marthe declared they had only seen their masters at
breakfast-time; Monsieur d'Hauteserre said he had seen them at three
o'clock.

When, at midnight, Laurence found herself alone with Monsieur and Madame
d'Hauteserre, the abbe and his sister, and without the four young men
who for the last eighteen months had been the life of the chateau and
the love and joy of her own life, she fell into a gloomy silence which
no one present dared to break. No affliction was ever deeper or more
complete than hers. At last a deep sigh broke the stillness, and all
eyes turned towards the sound.

Marthe, forgotten in a corner, rose, exclaiming, "Death! They will kill
them in spite of their innocence!"

"Mademoiselle, what is the matter with you?" said the abbe.

Laurence left the room without replying. She needed solitude to recover
strength in presence of this terrible unforeseen disaster.

At a distance of thirty-four years, during which three great revolutions
have taken place, none but elderly persons can recall the immense
excitement produced in Europe by the abduction of a senator of the
French Empire. No trial, if we except that of Trumeaux, the grocer of
the Place Saint-Michel, and that of the widow Morin, under the Empire;
those of Fualdes and de Castaing, under the Restoration; those of Madame
Lafarge and Fieschi, under the present government, ever roused so much
curiosity or so deep an interest as that of the four young men accused
of abducting Malin. Such an attack against a member of his Senate
excited the wrath of the Emperor, who was told of the arrest of the
delinquents almost at the moment when he first heard of the crime and
the negative results of the inquiries. The forest, searched throughout,
the department of the Aube, ransacked from end to end, gave not the
slightest indication of the passage of the Comte de Gondreville nor
of his imprisonment. Napoleon sent for the chief justice, who, after
obtaining certain information from the ministry of police, explained to
his Majesty the position of Malin in regard to the Simeuse brothers
and the Gondreville estate. The Emperor, at that time pre-occupied
with serious matters, considered the affair explained by these anterior
facts.

"Those young men are fools," he said. "A lawyer like Malin will escape
any deed they may force him to sign under violence. Watch those nobles,
and discover the means they take to set the Comte de Gondreville at
liberty."

He ordered the affair to be conducted with the utmost celerity,
regarding it as an attack on his own institutions, a fatal example of
resistance to the results of the Revolution, an effort to open the great
question of the sales of "national property," and a hindrance to that
fusion of parties which was the constant object of his home policy.
Besides all this, he thought himself tricked by these young nobles, who
had given him their promise to live peaceably.

"Fouche's prediction has come true," he cried, remembering the words
uttered two years earlier by his present minister of police, who said
them under the impressions conveyed to him by Corentin's report as to
the character and designs of Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne.

It is impossible for persons living under a constitutional government,
where no one really cares for that cold and thankless, blind, deaf Thing
called public interest, to imagine the zeal which a mere word of the
Emperor was able to inspire in his political or administrative machine.
That powerful will seemed to impress itself as much upon things as upon
men. His decision once uttered, the Emperor, overtaken by the coalition
of 1806, forgot the whole matter. He thought only of new battles to
fight, and his mind was occupied in massing his regiments to strike the
great blow at the heart of the Prussian monarchy. His desire for prompt
justice in the present case found powerful assistance in the great
uncertainty which affected the position of all magistrates of the
Empire. Just at this time Cambaceres, as arch-chancellor, and Regnier,
chief justice, were preparing to organize
tribunaux de premiere
instance
(lower civil courts), imperial courts, and a court of appeal
or supreme court. They were agitating the question of a legal garb or
costume; to which Napoleon attached, and very justly, so much importance
in all official stations; and they were also inquiring into the
character of the persons composing the magistracy. Naturally, therefore,
the officials of the department of the Aube considered they could have
no better recommendation than to give proofs of their zeal in the matter
of the abduction of the Comte de Gondreville. Napoleon's suppositions
became certainties to these courtiers and also to the populace.

Peace still reigned on the continent; admiration for the Emperor was
unanimous in France; he cajoled all interests, persons, vanities, and
things, in short, everything, even memories. This attack, therefore,
directed against his senator, seemed in the eyes of all an assault upon
the public welfare. The luckless and innocent gentlemen were the objects
of general opprobrium. A few nobles living quietly on their estates
deplored the affair among themselves but dared not open their lips;
in fact, how was it possible for them to oppose the current of public
opinion. Throughout the department the deaths of the eleven persons
killed by the Simeuse brothers in 1792 from the windows of the hotel
Cinq-Cygne were brought up against them. It was feared that other
returned and now emboldened
emigres
might follow this example of
violence against those who had bought their estates from the "national
domain," as a method of protesting against what they might call an
unjust spoliation.

The unfortunate young nobles were therefore considered as robbers,
brigands, murderers; and their connection with Michu was particularly
fatal to them. Michu, who was declared, either he or his father-in-law,
to have cut off all the heads that fell under the Terror in that
department, was made the subject of ridiculous tales. The exasperation
of the public mind was all the more intense because nearly all the
functionaries of the department owed their offices to Malin. No generous
voice uplifted itself against the verdict of the public. Besides all
this, the accused had no legal means with which to combat prejudice; for
the Code of Brumaire, year IV., giving as it did both the prosecution of
a charge and the verdict upon it into the hands of a jury, deprived the
accused of the vast protection of an appeal against legal suspicion.

The day after the arrest all the inhabitants of the chateau of
Cinq-Cygne, both masters and servants, were summoned to appear before
the prosecuting jury. Cinq-Cygne was left in charge of a farmer,
under the supervision of the abbe and his sister who moved into it.
Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne, with Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, went
to Troyes and occupied a small house belonging to Durieu in one of the
long and wide faubourgs which lead from the little town. Laurence's
heart was wrung when she at last comprehended the temper of the
populace, the malignity of the bourgeoisie, and the hostility of the
administration, from the many little events which happened to them as
relatives of prisoners accused of criminal wrong-doing and about to
be judged in a provincial town. Instead of hearing encouraging or
compassionate words they heard only speeches which called for vengeance;
proofs of hatred surrounded them in place of the strict politeness or
the reserve required by mere decency; but above all they were conscious
of an isolation which every mind must feel, but more particularly those
which are made distrustful by misfortune.

Laurence, who had recovered her vigor of mind, relied upon the innocence
of the accused, and despised the community too much to be frightened by
the stern and silent disapproval they met with everywhere. She sustained
the courage of Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, all the while thinking
of the judicial struggle which was now being hurried on. She was,
however, to receive a blow she little expected, which, undoubtedly,
diminished her courage.

In the midst of this great disaster, at the moment when this afflicted
family were made to feel themselves, as it were, in a desert, a man
suddenly became exalted in Laurence's eyes and showed the full beauty of
his character. The day after the indictment was found by the jury,
and the prisoners were finally committed for trial, the Marquis de
Chargeboeuf courageously appeared, still in the same old caleche, to
support and protect his young cousin. Foreseeing the haste with which
the law would be administered, this chief of a great family had already
gone to Paris and secured the services of the most able as well as the
most honest lawyer of the old school, named Bordin, who was for ten
years counsel of the nobility in Paris, and was ultimately succeeded by
the celebrated Derville. This excellent lawyer chose for his assistant
the grandson of a former president of the parliament of Normandy, whose
studies had been made under his tuition. This young lawyer, who was
destined to be appointed deputy-attorney-general in Paris after the
conclusion of the present trial, became eventually one of the most
celebrated of French magistrates. Monsieur de Grandville, for that was
his name, accepted the defence of the four young men, being glad of
an opportunity to make his first appearance as an advocate with
distinction.

The old marquis, alarmed at the ravages which troubles had wrought in
Laurence's appearance, was charmingly kind and considerate. He made no
allusion to his neglected advice; he presented Bordin as an oracle whose
counsel must be followed to the letter, and young de Grandville as a
defender in whom the utmost confidence might be placed.

Laurence held out her hand to the kind old man, and pressed his with an
eagerness which delighted him.

"You were right," she said.

"Will you now take my advice?" he asked.

The young countess bowed her head in assent, as did Monsieur and Madame
d'Hauteserre.

"Well, then, come to my house; it is in the middle of town, close to
the courthouse. You and your lawyers will be better off there than here,
where you are crowded and too far from the field of battle. Here, you
would have to cross the town twice a day."