XCVIII. L'auberge de la Cloche et de la Bouteille.

XCVIII

The Inn of the Bell and the Bottle.

And now, let us leave Mlle Danglars and her friend rolling along the road to Brussels, and return to poor Andrea Cavalcanti, so unfortunately arrested in the flight of his fortune.

He was, despite his still tender age, a very clever and very intelligent young man, this M. Andrea Cavalcanti.

Accordingly, at the first rumors that penetrated into the salon, we have seen him gradually draw near the door, cross one or two rooms, and finally disappear.

One circumstance which we have forgotten to mention, and which nevertheless must not be omitted, is that in one of those two rooms which Cavalcanti crossed was displayed the bride's trousseau—cases of diamonds, cashmere shawls, Valenciennes lace, English veils, all that composes, in fine, that world of tempting objects whose very name makes a young girl's heart leap with joy, and which is called the bridal basket.

Now, in passing through that room—which proves that not only was Andrea a very intelligent and very clever young man, but also far-sighted—he seized the richest of all the ornaments exposed.

Furnished with this viaticum, Andrea had felt himself half as light again for jumping out the window and slipping between the hands of the gendarmes.

Tall and well-built as an ancient wrestler, muscular as a Spartan, Andrea had run for a quarter of an hour, not knowing where he was going, and with the sole aim of getting away from the place where he had nearly been caught.

Setting out from the Rue du Mont-Blanc, he had found himself, with that instinct for the barriers which thieves possess as the hare does for its form, at the end of the Rue Lafayette.

There, suffocated, panting, he stopped.

He was perfectly alone, and had on his left the Clos Saint-Lazare, a vast desert, and on his right Paris in all its depth.

"Am I lost?" he asked himself. "No, if I can put forth an amount of activity superior to that of my enemies. My safety has therefore become simply a question of myriameters."

At that moment he caught sight, coming up from the top of the Faubourg Poissonnière, of a hackney cabriolet whose driver, morose and smoking his pipe, seemed to wish to regain the outskirts of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, where, no doubt, he made his usual abode.

"Holloa, friend!" said Benedetto.

"What is it, citizen?" asked the driver.

"Is your horse tired?"

"Tired! ah, well, yes! He has done nothing all the blessed day. Four wretched trips and twenty sous in tips, seven francs in all; I have to give the boss back ten!"

"Will you add to those seven francs these twenty here, eh?"

"With pleasure, citizen; it's not to be despised, twenty francs. What must be done for that? let's see."

"A very easy thing, if your horse is not tired, however."

"I tell you he'll go like a zephyr; all that's needed is to say which way he's to go."

"Toward Louvres."

"Ah! ah! known: the country of ratafia?"

"Exactly. It is simply a matter of catching up with one of my friends, with whom I am to hunt tomorrow at La Chapelle-en-Serval. He was to wait for me here with his cabriolet until half past eleven: it is midnight; he will have grown tired of waiting for me and gone off alone."

"That's likely."

"Well, will you try to catch him up?"

"I ask nothing better."

"But if we do not catch him by Le Bourget you shall have twenty francs; if we do not catch him by Louvres, thirty."

"And if we do catch him?"

"Forty!" said Andrea, who had hesitated a moment, but who had reflected that he risked nothing in promising.

"That's a go!" said the driver. "Get up, and off we go. Prroum!..."

Andrea got up into the cabriolet, which, at a rapid pace, crossed the Faubourg Saint-Denis, skirted the Faubourg Saint-Martin, crossed the barrier, and took the interminable Villette road.

There was no question of overtaking that chimerical friend; nevertheless, from time to time, of belated passers-by or of cabarets still awake, Cavalcanti inquired after a green cabriolet drawn by a bay-brown horse; and, as on the Flanders road there circulate a good number of cabriolets, and nine tenths of cabriolets are green, information rained at every step.

He had just been seen passing; he was not more than five hundred, two hundred, a hundred paces ahead; at last, they passed him—it was not he.

Once the cabriolet was itself passed; it was by a calash rapidly borne along at the gallop of two post horses.

"Ah!" said Cavalcanti to himself, "if I had that calash, those two good horses, and above all the passport that was needed to take them!"

And he sighed deeply.

That calash was the one carrying Mlle Danglars and Mlle d'Armilly.

"Onward! onward!" said Andrea, "we cannot be long in joining him."

And the poor horse resumed the furious trot it had kept up since the barrier, and arrived all in a lather at Louvres.

"Decidedly," said Andrea, "I see plainly that I shall not rejoin my friend, and that I shall kill your horse. Therefore it is better that I stop. There are your thirty francs; I am going to lodge at the Red Horse, and the first conveyance in which I find a place, I shall take. Good evening, my friend."

And Andrea, after putting six five-franc pieces into the driver's hand, lightly leaped down upon the pavement of the road.

The driver joyfully pocketed the sum and took at a walk the road back to Paris; Andrea pretended to make for the Red Horse hotel; but after stopping a moment against the door, hearing the sound of the cabriolet losing itself on the horizon, he resumed his course, and with a very high-stepping gymnastic pace covered two leagues.

There he rested; he must be quite near La Chapelle-en-Serval, where he had said he was going.

It was not fatigue that stopped Andrea Cavalcanti: it was the need to come to a resolution, it was the necessity of adopting a plan.

To go by diligence was impossible; to take the post was equally impossible. To travel in either way a passport is absolutely necessary.

To remain in the department of the Oise, that is to say, in one of the most open and most watched departments of France, was still impossible, impossible above all for a man expert like Andrea in criminal matters.

Andrea sat down on the edge of the ditch, let his head fall between his two hands, and reflected.

Ten minutes later, he raised his head; his resolution was taken.

He covered with dust one whole side of the overcoat which he had had time to snatch from the antechamber and button over his ball dress, and, making for La Chapelle-en-Serval, went boldly to knock at the door of the only inn in the place.

The host came to open.

"My friend," said Andrea, "I was going from Mortefontaine to Senlis when my horse, which is a difficult animal, shied and sent me ten paces off. I must arrive tonight at Compiègne on pain of causing the gravest anxiety to my family; have you a horse to let?"

Good or bad, an innkeeper always has a horse.

The innkeeper of La Chapelle-en-Serval called the stable boy, ordered him to saddle _the White_, and woke his son, a child of seven, who was to ride pillion behind the gentleman and bring back the quadruped.

Andrea gave twenty francs to the innkeeper, and, in drawing them from his pocket, let fall a visiting card.

That visiting card was one of his friends from the Café de Paris; so that the innkeeper, when Andrea had gone and he had picked up the card fallen from his pocket, was convinced that he had let his horse to Count de Mauléon, 25 Rue Saint-Dominique: such were the name and address found on the card.

The White did not go fast, but he went with an even and assiduous step: in three hours and a half Andrea covered the nine leagues that separated him from Compiègne; the town hall clock was striking four as he arrived on the square where the diligences stop.

There is at Compiègne an excellent hotel, which those remember even who have lodged there but once.

Andrea, who had made a halt there in one of his trips in the environs of Paris, remembered the Inn of the Bell and the Bottle: he oriented himself, saw by the light of a street lamp the signboard, and, having dismissed the child, to whom he gave all the small change he had about him, went to knock at the door, reflecting very justly that he had three or four hours before him, and that the best was to guard himself, by a good sleep and a good supper, against the fatigues to come.

It was a waiter who came to open.

"My friend," said Andrea, "I come from Saint-Jean-au-Bois, where I dined; I meant to take the coach that passes at midnight; but I lost myself like a fool, and here I have been walking in the forest for four hours. So give me one of those pretty little rooms that look onto the courtyard, and have a cold fowl and a bottle of Bordeaux sent up to me."

The waiter had no suspicion: Andrea spoke with the most perfect unconcern, he had a cigar in his mouth and his hands in the pockets of his overcoat; his clothes were elegant, his beard fresh, his boots irreproachable; he looked like a belated neighbor, that was all.

While the waiter prepared his room, the hostess got up: Andrea greeted her with his most charming smile, and asked her if he could not have number 3, which he had already had on his last visit to Compiègne; unfortunately number 3 was taken by a young man traveling with his sister.

Andrea seemed in despair; he was not consoled until the hostess had assured him that number 7, which was being prepared for him, had absolutely the same layout as number 3; and, warming his feet and chatting of the last Chantilly races, he waited until he was told his room was ready.

It was not without reason that Andrea had spoken of those pretty apartments looking onto the courtyard; the courtyard of the Inn of the Bell, with its triple row of galleries that gave it the air of a playhouse, with its jasmines and clematises that climb along its colonnades, light as a natural decoration, is one of the most charming inn entrances in the world.

The fowl was fresh, the wine old, the fire bright and crackling: Andrea surprised himself supping with as good an appetite as if nothing had happened to him.

Then he went to bed, and fell asleep almost at once with that implacable sleep which a man always finds at twenty, even when he has remorse.

Now, we are forced to admit that Andrea might have had remorse, but that he had none.

Such was Andrea's plan, a plan which had given him the better part of his security.

With daylight he would rise, leave the hotel after rigorously paying his bills; gain the forest, buy, under pretext of making painting studies, the hospitality of a peasant; procure a woodcutter's costume and an axe, strip off the lion's casing to take that of the workman; then, his hands earthy, his hair darkened by a lead comb, his complexion tanned by a preparation whose recipe his old comrades had given him, gain, from forest to forest, the nearest frontier, marching by night, sleeping by day in the woods or in the quarries, and approaching inhabited places only to buy from time to time a loaf.

Once past the frontier, Andrea would turn his diamonds into money, add the price he drew from them to some ten banknotes which he always carried about him in case of accident, and he would find himself again at the head of some fifty thousand livres, which did not seem to his philosophy too harsh a makeshift.

Besides, he counted much on the interest the Danglars had in stifling the noise of their mishap.

This is why, besides fatigue, Andrea slept so quickly and so well.

Moreover, to be woken earlier, Andrea had not closed his shutters and had only contented himself with shooting the bolts of his door and leaving quite open, on his night table, a certain very pointed knife whose excellent temper he knew and which never left him.

At about seven in the morning, Andrea was awakened by a ray of sun which came, warm and brilliant, to play upon his face.

In every well-organized brain, the dominant idea—and there is always one—is that which, after having fallen asleep last, also illuminates first the awakening of thought.

Andrea had not fully opened his eyes than the dominant idea already held him and whispered in his ear that he had slept too long.

He jumped out of bed and ran to his window.

A gendarme was crossing the courtyard.

The gendarme is one of the most striking objects that exist in the world, even for the eye of a man without anxiety: but for a timorous conscience which has some reason to be so, the yellow, the blue and the white of which his uniform is composed take frightful tints.

"Why a gendarme?" Andrea asked himself.

Suddenly he answered himself, with the logic the reader has already had occasion to remark in him:

"A gendarme is nothing to be astonished at in an inn; but let us dress."

And the young man dressed with a rapidity that the few months of fashionable life he had led in Paris had not been able to make him lose.

"Good," said Andrea as he dressed, "I shall wait until he is gone, and when he is gone I shall slip away."

And even as he said these words, Andrea, re-booted and re-cravatted, softly gained his window and lifted the muslin curtain a second time.

Not only had the first gendarme not gone, but the young man perceived a second blue, yellow and white uniform at the foot of the stairs, the only one by which he could descend, while a third, on horseback and musket in hand, stood sentinel at the great street door, the only one by which he could go out.

That third gendarme was significant to the last degree, for before him extended a semicircle of curious onlookers who hermetically blocked the inn door.

"They are looking for me!" was Andrea's first thought. "The devil!"

Pallor invaded the young man's brow; he looked around him anxiously.

His room, like all those on that floor, had no outlet but onto the outer gallery, open to every gaze.

"I am lost!" was his second thought.

Indeed, for a man in Andrea's situation, arrest meant: the assizes, sentence, death, death without mercy and without delay.

For an instant he convulsively compressed his head between his two hands.

During that instant he nearly went mad with fear.

But soon, from that world of thoughts clashing in his head, a thought of hope sprang forth; a pale smile traced itself on his bleached lips and contracted cheeks.

He looked around him; the objects he sought were gathered on the marble of a writing desk: they were a pen, ink and paper.

He dipped the pen in the ink and wrote, with a hand he commanded to be steady, the following lines, on the first leaf of the notebook:

"I have no money to pay, but I am not a dishonest man; I leave as pledge this pin which is worth ten times what I have spent. I shall be forgiven for having slipped away at daybreak; I was ashamed!"

He drew his pin from his cravat and placed it on the paper.

This done, instead of leaving his bolts shot, he drew them, even left his door ajar, as if he had gone out of his room forgetting to close it, and slipping into the chimney like a man accustomed to such gymnastics, he drew to him the paper front representing Achilles at Deidamia's, effaced with his very feet the trace of his steps in the ashes, and began to climb the curved flue which offered him the only way of safety in which he still hoped.

At that very moment, the first gendarme who had caught Andrea's eye was mounting the stairs, preceded by the police commissioner, and supported by the second gendarme who guarded the foot of the stairs, who might himself expect reinforcement from him who stood at the door.

It was to this circumstance that Andrea owed this visit, which with so much trouble he was disposing himself to receive.

At daybreak, the telegraphs had played in all directions, and each locality, warned almost immediately, had awakened the authorities and launched the public force in search of the murderer of Caderousse.

Compiègne, a royal residence; Compiègne, a hunting town; Compiègne, a garrison town, is abundantly provided with authorities, gendarmes and police commissioners; the visits had therefore begun as soon as the telegraphic order arrived, and the Inn of the Bell and the Bottle being the first hotel of the town, they had quite naturally begun with it.

Besides, according to the report of the sentinels who during that night had been on guard at the town hall (the town hall adjoins the Inn of the Bell), according to the report of the sentinels, we say, it had been ascertained that several travelers had alighted during the night at the inn.

The sentinel who had been relieved at six in the morning recalled, at the moment he had just been posted, that is to say at four and some minutes, having seen a young man mounted on a white horse having a little peasant behind him, which young man had alighted on the square, dismissed peasant and horse, and had gone to knock at the Inn of the Bell, which had opened before him and closed again upon him.

It was on this young man so singularly belated that suspicion had fixed.

Now, this young man was none other than Andrea.

It was fortified by these data that the police commissioner and the gendarme, who was a corporal, made their way toward Andrea's door; this door was ajar.

"Oh! oh!" said the corporal, an old fox nurtured in the wiles of the state, "a bad sign, an open door! I should like it better barred with triple bolt!"

Indeed, the little letter and the pin left by Andrea on the table confirmed or rather supported the sad truth. Andrea had fled.

We say supported, because the corporal was not a man to yield to a single proof.

He looked around him, plunged his eye under the bed, undoubled the curtains, opened the wardrobes, and at last stopped at the chimney.

Thanks to Andrea's precautions, no trace of his passage remained in the ashes.

However, it was an outlet, and in the circumstances in which they found themselves, every outlet must be the object of a serious investigation.

The corporal therefore had a fagot and straw brought, stuffed the chimney as he would have a mortar, and set fire to it.

The fire made the brick walls crack; an opaque column of smoke shot up the flues and mounted toward the sky like the somber jet of a volcano, but he did not see the prisoner fall, as he expected.

It was that Andrea, from his youth in struggle with society, was worth a gendarme, that gendarme being raised to the respectable grade of corporal; foreseeing therefore the fire, he had gained the roof and lay crouched against the flue.

For an instant he had some hope of being saved, for he heard the corporal calling the two gendarmes and crying aloud to them:

"He is no longer there."

But in stretching his neck gently, he saw that the two gendarmes, instead of withdrawing, as was the natural thing, on a first announcement, he saw, we say, that on the contrary the two gendarmes redoubled their attention.

In his turn he looked around him: the town hall, a colossal building of the sixteenth century, rose like a dark rampart, to his right, and through the openings of the monument one could plunge into all the nooks and corners of the roof, as from the top of a mountain one plunges into the valley.

Andrea understood that he was about to see appear, at one of those openings, the head of the gendarme corporal.

Discovered, he was lost; a chase on the roofs offered him no chance of success.

He resolved therefore to descend again, not by the same way he had come, but by an analogous way.

He sought with his eyes that one of the chimneys from which he saw no smoke issue, reached it crawling on the roof, and disappeared by its orifice without having been seen by anyone.

At the same instant, a little window of the town hall opened and gave passage to the head of the gendarme corporal.

For an instant that head remained motionless like one of those stone reliefs that decorate the building; then with a long sigh of disappointment the head disappeared.

The corporal, calm and dignified as the law of which he was the representative, passed without answering the thousand questions of the crowd massed on the square, and re-entered the inn.

"Well?" asked in their turn the two gendarmes.

"Well, my lads," replied the corporal, "the brigand must truly have outdistanced us this morning at a good hour; but we are going to send onto the road to Villers-Cotterêts and to Noyon and search the forest, where we shall indubitably catch him."

The honorable functionary had barely, with the intonation peculiar to gendarme corporals, given birth to that sonorous adverb, when a long cry of fright, accompanied by redoubled tinkling of a bell, rang out in the inn courtyard.

"Oh! oh! what is that?" cried the corporal.

"There is a traveler who seems in great haste," said the host. "What number is ringing?"

"Number 3."

"Run there, waiter!"

At that moment, the cries and the noise of the bell redoubled.

The waiter took to his heels.

"Not so," said the corporal, stopping the servant; "he who rings seems to me to be asking for something other than the waiter, and we are going to serve him a gendarme. Who lodges at number 3?"

"The little young man arrived with his sister last night in a post-chaise, and who asked for a room with two beds."

The bell rang a third time with an intonation full of anguish.

"Help! Mr. Commissioner!" cried the corporal; "follow me and fall in behind."

"One moment," said the host; "to room number 3 there are two stairs: an outer, an inner."

"Good!" said the corporal; "I shall take the inner, it is my department. Are the carbines loaded?"

"Yes, corporal."

"Well, keep watch outside, you others, and if he tries to flee, fire on him; he is a great criminal, so says the telegraph."

The corporal, followed by the commissioner, disappeared at once in the inner stair, accompanied by the murmur that his revelations about Andrea had just aroused in the crowd.

This is what had happened:

Andrea had very adroitly descended to two thirds of the chimney, but, arrived there, his foot had failed him, and, despite the support of his hands, he had descended with more speed and above all more noise than he would have wished. That would have been nothing if the room had been solitary; but unhappily it was occupied.

Two women were sleeping in a bed; this noise had awakened them.

Their glances had fixed toward the point from which the noise came, and through the opening of the chimney they had seen a man appear.

It was one of those two women, the blonde, who had uttered that terrible cry of which the whole house had rung, while the other, who was brunette, springing to the bellpull, had given the alarm, shaking it with all her strength.

Andrea was, as one sees, having a run of ill luck.

"For pity's sake!" he cried, pale, distracted, without seeing the persons to whom he addressed himself; "for pity's sake! do not call; save me! I do not wish to harm you."

"Andrea the assassin!" cried one of the two young women.

"Eugénie! Mlle Danglars!" murmured Cavalcanti, passing from fright to stupor.

"Help! help!" cried Mlle d'Armilly, taking the bell from Eugénie's inert hands, and ringing with even more force than her companion.

"Save me, I am pursued!" said Andrea, joining his hands; "for pity, for grace, do not deliver me up!"

"It is too late, they are coming up," replied Eugénie.

"Well, hide me somewhere, you will say you were afraid without cause to be afraid; you will divert suspicion, and you will have saved my life."

The two women, pressed one against the other wrapping themselves in their covers, remained mute at that supplicating voice; all apprehensions, all repugnances clashed in their minds.

"Well, be it!" said Eugénie; "take the way back by which you came, wretch; begone, and we shall say nothing."

"Here he is! here he is!" cried a voice on the landing; "here he is, I see him!"

Indeed, the corporal had glued his eye to the keyhole, and had caught sight of Andrea standing and supplicating.

A violent blow with the butt made the lock fly, two others made the bolts fly; the broken door fell inward.

Andrea ran to the other door, giving onto the courtyard gallery, and opened it, ready to precipitate himself.

The two gendarmes were there with their carbines and covered him.

Andrea had stopped short; standing, pale, his body slightly thrown back, he held his useless knife in his clenched hand.

"Flee, then!" cried Mlle d'Armilly, in whose heart pity returned as fright went out of it; "flee, then!"

"Or kill yourself!" said Eugénie, with the tone and the pose of one of those vestals who, in the circus, ordered with the thumb, to the victorious gladiator, to finish his prostrate adversary.

Andrea shuddered and looked at the young girl with a smile of contempt which proved that his corruption comprehended not that sublime ferocity of honor.

"Kill myself?" he said, throwing down his knife; "what for?"

"But you said it!" cried Mlle Danglars; "they will condemn you to death, they will execute you like the last of criminals!"

"Bah!" replied Cavalcanti, crossing his arms; "one has friends."

The corporal advanced toward him, sword in hand.

"Come, come," said Cavalcanti, "sheathe, my brave fellow, it is not worth making such a fuss, since I surrender."

And he held out his hands to the handcuffs.

The two young girls looked with terror at that hideous metamorphosis which was operating before their eyes, the man of the world stripping his casing and becoming again the man of the galleys.

Andrea turned toward them, and with the smile of impudence:

"Have you any commission for your father, Mlle Eugénie?" said he, "for, in all probability, I am returning to Paris."

Eugénie hid her head in her two hands.

"Oh! oh!" said Andrea, "there is no cause to be ashamed, and I bear you no grudge for having taken the post to run after me... Was I not almost your husband?"

And upon that jest Andrea went out, leaving the two fugitives prey to the sufferings of shame and to the comments of the assembly.

An hour later, both clothed in their women's dress, they got up into their traveling calash.

The inn door had been closed to withdraw them from the first glances; but it was nonetheless necessary, when that door was opened, to pass amid a double hedge of curious onlookers, with flaming eyes and murmuring lips.

Eugénie lowered the blinds; but if she no longer saw, she still heard, and the noise of snickering reached her.

"Oh, why is not the world a desert?" she cried, throwing herself into Mlle d'Armilly's arms, her eyes sparkling with that rage which made Nero wish that the Roman world had but a single head, so as to cut it off with a single blow.

The next day, they alighted at the Hotel de Flandre, at Brussels.

Since the day before, Andrea had been committed to the Conciergerie.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”