CVII. La Fosse-aux-Lions.

CVII

The Lions' Den.

One of the divisions of the Force prison, the one containing the most compromised and dangerous detainees, is called the Saint-Bernard courtyard.

The prisoners, in their energetic language, have nicknamed it the Lions' Den, probably because captives have teeth that often bite the bars and sometimes the guards.

It is a prison within the prison; the walls are twice as thick as the others. Every day a turnkey carefully sounds the massive grates, and one recognizes by the herculean stature, the cold and piercing glances of these guards, that they have been chosen to rule over their people through terror and the activity of the mind.

The exercise yard of this division is framed by enormous walls upon which the sun glides obliquely when it decides to penetrate this gulf of moral and physical ugliness. It is there, on the pavement, that since the hour of rising there wander, anxious, haggard, pale, like shadows, the men whom justice holds bowed beneath the cleaver that she is sharpening.

They are seen clinging, crouching, along the wall that absorbs and retains the most heat. They remain there, talking two by two, more often isolated, the eye constantly drawn toward the door that opens to call someone from the inhabitants of this lugubrious abode, or to vomit into the gulf a new scoria rejected from the crucible of society.

The Saint-Bernard courtyard has its own visiting room; it is a long square, divided into two parts by two grilles planted parallel to each other three feet apart, so that the visitor cannot shake the prisoner's hand or pass him anything. This visiting room is dark, damp, and in every way horrible, especially when one thinks of the frightful confidences that have slid over these grilles and rusted the iron of the bars.

Yet this place, awful as it is, is the paradise where come to refresh themselves in a hoped-for, savored society these men whose days are numbered: it is so rare that one leaves the Lions' Den to go anywhere but to the Saint-Jacques barrier, the hulks, or the cellular dungeon!

In this courtyard that we have just described, and which sweated with a cold dampness, there walked, his hands in the pockets of his coat, a young man regarded with much curiosity by the inhabitants of the Den.

He would have passed for an elegant man, thanks to the cut of his clothes, if those clothes had not been in rags; however they had not been worn out: the cloth, fine and silky in the intact places, easily regained its luster under the caressing hand of the prisoner who tried to make of it a new coat.

He applied the same care to fastening a cambric shirt considerably changed in color since his entrance into prison, and upon his varnished boots passed the corner of a handkerchief embroidered with initials surmounted by a heraldic crown.

Some pensioners of the Lions' Den considered with marked interest the toilette researches of the prisoner.

"Look, there's the prince making himself handsome," said one of the thieves.

"He is very handsome naturally," said another, "and if he only had a comb and pomade, he would eclipse all the gentlemen with white gloves."

"His coat must have been quite new and his boots shine prettily. It is flattering for us that there are colleagues so genteel; and those blackguard gendarmes are very vile. The envious ones! to have torn a toilette like that!"

"It seems he is a famous one," said another; "he has done everything... and in the grand style... He comes from over there so young! oh! it is superb!"

And the object of this hideous admiration seemed to savor the praises or the vapor of the praises, for he did not hear the words.

His toilette finished, he approached the canteen wicket against which a guard was leaning:

"Come now, sir," he said to him, "lend me twenty francs, you will have them soon; with me, no risks to run. Just think that I am connected to relatives who have more millions than you have pennies... Come now, twenty francs, and I beg you, so that I may take a half-pistole and buy a dressing gown. I suffer horribly from being always in coat and boots. What a coat! sir, for a prince Cavalcanti!"

The guard turned his back on him and shrugged his shoulders. He did not even laugh at these words which would have unbent all brows, for this man had heard many others, or rather he had always heard the same thing.

"Go on," said Andrea, "you are a man without bowels, and I will get you dismissed from your post."

This word made the guard turn around, who, this time, let escape a loud burst of laughter.

Then the prisoners approached and formed a circle.

"I tell you," continued Andrea, "that with this miserable sum I shall be able to procure myself a coat and a room, so as to receive in a decent fashion the illustrious visit that I expect from day to day."

"He is right! he is right!" said the prisoners... "By God! one sees well that he is a man of breeding."

"Well, lend him the twenty francs," said the guard leaning on his other colossal shoulder; "don't you owe that to a comrade?"

"I am not the comrade of these people," said the young man proudly; "do not insult me, you have not that right."

The thieves looked at each other with sullen murmurs, and a tempest raised by the provocation of the guard, even more than by the words of Andrea, began to rumble over the aristocratic prisoner.

The guard, sure to play the _quos ego_ when the waves should be too tumultuous, let them rise little by little to play a trick on the importunate solicitor, and give himself a recreation during the long watch of his day.

Already the thieves were drawing near to Andrea; some said to each other:

"The shoe! the shoe!"

A cruel operation which consists of beating, not with a shoe but with a hobnailed boot, a comrade fallen into the disgrace of these gentlemen.

Others proposed the eel; another kind of recreation consisting of filling with sand, pebbles, coppers, when they have them, a twisted handkerchief, which the tormentors discharge like a flail upon the shoulders and head of the patient.

"Let us whip the fine gentleman," said some, "the honest gentleman!"

But Andrea, turning toward them, winked, puffed out his cheek with his tongue, and made that smacking of the lips which is equivalent to a thousand signs of intelligence among bandits reduced to silence.

It was a masonic sign that Caderousse had indicated to him.

They recognized one of their own.

At once the handkerchiefs fell; the hobnailed shoe returned to the foot of the chief tormentor. One heard some voices proclaim that monsieur was right, that monsieur could be honest as he pleased, and that the prisoners wished to give the example of freedom of conscience.

The riot receded. The guard was so stupefied that he immediately took Andrea by the hands and began to search him, attributing to some manifestations more significant than fascination this sudden change in the inhabitants of the Lions' Den.

Andrea let him do it, not without protesting.

Suddenly a voice rang out at the wicket.

"Benedetto!" cried an inspector.

The guard released his prey.

"I am called?" said Andrea.

"To the visiting room!" said the voice.

"You see, I am being visited. Ah! my dear sir, you are going to see whether one can treat a Cavalcanti like an ordinary man!"

And Andrea, gliding through the courtyard like a black shadow, precipitated himself through the half-open wicket, leaving in admiration his comrades and the guard himself.

He was in fact called to the visiting room, and one should not wonder at it less than Andrea himself; for the cunning young man, since his entrance into the Force, instead of using, like common people, the benefit of writing to have himself claimed, had kept the most stoical silence.

"I am," he said, "evidently protected by someone powerful; everything proves it to me; this sudden fortune, this facility with which I have smoothed all obstacles, a family improvised, an illustrious name become my property, gold raining in my house, the most magnificent alliances promised to my ambition. An unhappy forgetfulness of my fortune, an absence of my protector has lost me, yes, but not absolutely, not forever! The hand has withdrawn for a moment, it must stretch toward me again and seize me anew at the moment when I shall believe myself ready to fall into the abyss.

"Why risk an imprudent step? I might perhaps alienate the protector! There are two means for him to get me out of trouble: mysterious evasion, bought at a price of gold, and forcing the hand of the judges to obtain an absolution. Let us wait to speak, to act, until it is proved to me that I have been totally abandoned, and then..."

Andrea had built a plan that may be thought clever; the wretch was intrepid in attack and rough in defense.

The misery of the common prison, the privations of every kind, he had supported them. However little by little nature, or rather habit, had regained the upper hand. Andrea suffered from being naked, from being dirty, from being starved; time hung heavy on him.

It is at this moment of boredom that the voice of the inspector called him to the visiting room.

Andrea felt his heart leap with joy. It was too early for it to be the visit of the examining magistrate, and too late for it to be a call from the prison director or the doctor; it was therefore the unexpected visit.

Behind the grate of the visiting room where Andrea was introduced, he perceived, with eyes dilated by avid curiosity, the dark and intelligent face of M. Bertuccio, who was also looking, with a painful astonishment, at the grilles, the bolted doors and the shadow that stirred behind the crossed bars.

"Ah!" said Andrea, touched to the heart.

"Good day, Benedetto," said Bertuccio in his hollow and sonorous voice.

"You! you!" said the young man looking around him with fright.

"You do not recognize me," said Bertuccio, "unhappy child!"

"Silence, but silence then!" said Andrea, who knew the fine hearing of these walls; "my God, my God, do not speak so loud!"

"You would like to talk with me, would you not," said Bertuccio, "alone?"

"Oh! yes," said Andrea.

"Very well."

And Bertuccio, searching in his pocket, made a sign to a guard who was visible behind the pane of the wicket.

"Read," he said.

"What is that?" said Andrea.

"The order to conduct you to a room, to install you there, and to leave me to communicate with you."

"Oh!" said Andrea, bounding with joy.

And at once, withdrawing into himself, he said:

"Again the unknown protector! I am not forgotten! They seek the secret, since they want to talk in an isolated room. I have them... Bertuccio has been sent by the protector!"

The guard conferred a moment with a superior, then opened the two grated doors and conducted to a room on the first floor overlooking the courtyard Andrea, who no longer felt his joy.

The room was whitewashed with lime, as is the custom in prisons. It had an aspect of gaiety that appeared radiant to the prisoner: a stove, a bed, a chair, a table formed its sumptuous furniture.

Bertuccio sat on the chair. Andrea threw himself on the bed. The guard withdrew.

"Come now," said the steward, "what have you to tell me?"

"And you?" said Andrea.

"But speak first..."

"Oh! no; it is you who have much to teach me, since you have come to find me."

"Well, be it so. You have continued the course of your villainies: you have stolen, you have assassinated."

"Good! if it is to tell me these things that you have me brought into a private room, it was as well not to trouble yourself. I know all these things. There are others that I do not know, on the contrary. Let us speak of those, if you please. Who sent you?"

"Oh! oh! you go fast, M. Benedetto."

"Is it not? and to the point. Above all let us spare useless words. Who sends you?"

"No one."

"How do you know that I am in prison?"

"I recognized you long ago in the insolent fashionable who was pushing a horse so gracefully in the Champs-Élysées."

"The Champs-Élysées!... Ah! ah! we are burning, as they say in the game of tweezers... The Champs-Élysées... Come, let us speak a little of my father, will you?"

"And what am I then?"

"You, my brave sir, you are my adoptive father... But it is not you, I imagine, who disposed in my favor of a hundred thousand francs or so that I devoured in four or five months; it is not you who forged me an Italian and gentleman father; it is not you who introduced me into the world and invited me to a certain dinner that I believe I am still eating, at Auteuil, with the best company of all Paris, with a certain king's attorney whose acquaintance I was very wrong not to cultivate, who would be so useful to me at this moment; it is not you, in short, who stood security for me for a million or two when there happened to me the fatal accident of the discovery of the trick... Come, speak, estimable Corsican, speak..."

"What do you wish me to tell you?"

"I will help you.

"You were speaking of the Champs-Élysées just now, my worthy foster father."

"Well?"

"Well, in the Champs-Élysées lives a gentleman very rich, very rich."

"At whose house you stole and assassinated, is it not?"

"I believe so."

"M. the Count of Monte-Cristo?"

"It is you who named him, as M. Racine says. Well, am I to throw myself into his arms, strangle him on my heart crying: 'My father! my father!' as M. Pixérécourt says?"

"Let us not jest," replied Bertuccio gravely, "and let such a name not be pronounced here as you dare pronounce it."

"Bah!" said Andrea a little dizzy from the solemnity of Bertuccio's bearing, "why not?"

"Because he who bears that name is too favored by heaven to be the father of a wretch such as you."

"Oh! big words..."

"And great effects if you do not take care!"

"Threats!... I do not fear them... I will say..."

"Do you believe you have to deal with pygmies of your sort?" said Bertuccio in a tone so calm and with a look so assured that Andrea was moved to the bottom of his entrails; "do you believe you have to deal with your routine scoundrels of the hulks, or your naive dupes of the world?... Benedetto, you are in a terrible hand, that hand is willing to open for you: profit by it. Do not play with the thunderbolt that it lays down for an instant, but that it can take up again if you try to disturb it in its free movement."

"My father... I wish to know who is my father!" said the obstinate one; "I shall perish in it if need be, but I shall know it. What is scandal to me? good... reputation... advertisements... as Beauchamp the journalist says. But you others, people of the great world, you always have something to lose in scandal, despite your millions and your coats of arms... Come, who is my father?"

"I came to tell you."

"Ah!" cried Benedetto, his eyes sparkling with joy.

At this moment the door opened, and the turnkey, addressing Bertuccio:

"Pardon, sir," said he, "but the examining magistrate awaits the prisoner."

"It is the close of my interrogation," said Andrea to the worthy steward... "The devil take the importunate fellow!"

"I will return tomorrow," said Bertuccio.

"Good!" said Andrea. "Messieurs the gendarmes, I am all yours... Ah! dear sir, do leave a dozen crowns at the registry so that they may give me here what I need."

"It shall be done," replied Bertuccio.

Andrea held out his hand, Bertuccio kept his in his pocket, and there merely made some silver pieces ring.

"That is what I meant," said Andrea, grimacing a smile, but quite subdued by the strange tranquillity of Bertuccio.

"Could I have been mistaken?" said he to himself getting into the oblong and grated carriage called the _salad basket_. "We shall see! So, until tomorrow!" added he turning toward Bertuccio.

"Until tomorrow!" replied the steward.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”