The History of a Crime by Victor Hugo (android pdf ebook reader txt) 📖

from a regiment of cavalry drawn up in order. He was quietly conversing with two of his comrades of the fight, Huy and Lorrain. Suddenly, he perceives himself and his companions surrounded by a company of sergents de ville; a man touches his arm and says to him, "You are Cournet; I arrest you."

"Bah!" answers Cournet; "My name is Lépine."

The man resumes,—

"You are Cournet. Do not you recognize me? Well, then, I recognize you; I have been, like you, a member of the Socialist Electoral Committee."

Cournet looks him in the face, and finds this countenance in his memory. The man was right. He had, in fact, formed part of the gathering in the Rue Saint Spire. The police spy resumed, laughing,—

"I nominated Eugène Sue with you."

It was useless to deny it, and the moment was not favorable for resistance. There were on the spot, as we have said, twenty sergents de ville and a regiment of Dragoons.

"I will follow you," said Cournet.

A fiacre was called up.

"While I am about it," said the police spy, "come in all three of you."

He made Huy and Lorrain get in with Cournet, placed them on the front seat, and seated himself on the back seat by Cournet, and then shouted to the driver,—

"To the Prefecture!"

The sergents de ville surrounded the fiacre. But whether by chance or through confidence, or in the haste to obtain the payment for his capture, the man who had arrested Cournet shouted to the coachman, "Look sharp, look sharp!" and the fiacre went off at a gallop.

In the meantime Cournet was well aware that on arriving he would be shot in the very courtyard of the Prefecture. He had resolved not to go there.

At a turning in the Rue St Antoine he glanced behind, and noticed that the sergents de ville only followed the fiacre at a considerable distance.

Not one of the four men which the fiacre was bearing away had as yet opened their lips.

Cournet threw a meaning look at his two companions seated in front of him, as much as to say, "We are three; let us take advantage of this to escape." Both answered by an imperceptible movement of the eyes, which pointed out the street full of passers-by, and which said, "No."

A few moments afterwards the fiacre emerged from the Rue St. Antoine, and entered the Rue de Fourcy. The Rue de Fourcy is usually deserted, no one was passing down it at that moment.

Cournet turned suddenly to the police spy, and asked him,—

"Have you a warrant for my arrest?"

"No; but I have my card."

And he drew his police agent's card out of his pocket, and showed it to Cournet. Then the following dialogue ensued between these two men,—

"This is not regular."

"What does that matter to me?"

"You have no right to arrest me."

"All the same, I arrest you."

"Look here; is it money that you want? Do you wish for any? I have some with me; let me escape."

"A gold nugget as big as your head would not tempt me. You are my finest capture, Citizen Cournet."

"Where are you taking me to?"

"To the Prefecture."

"They will shoot me there?"

"Possibly."

"And my two comrades?"

"I do not say 'No.'"

"I will not go."

"You will go, nevertheless."

"I tell you I will not go," exclaimed Cournet.

And with a movement, unexpected as a flash of lightning, he seized the police spy by the throat.

The police agent could not utter a cry, he struggled: a hand of bronze clutched him.

His tongue protruded from his mouth, his eyes became hideous, and started from their sockets. Suddenly his head sank down, and reddish froth rose from his throat to his lips. He was dead.

Huy and Lorrain, motionless, and as though themselves thunderstruck, gazed at this gloomy deed.

They did not utter a word. They did not move a limb. The fiacre was still driving on.

"Open the door!" Cournet cried to them.

They did not stir, they seemed to have become stone.

Cournet, whose thumb was closely pressed in the neck of the wretched police spy, tried to open the door with his left hand, but he did not succeed, he felt that he could only do it with his right hand, and he was obliged to loose his hold of the man. The man fell face forwards, and sank down on his knees.

Cournet opened the door.

"Off with you!" he said to them.

Huy and Lorrain jumped into the street and fled at the top of their speed.

The coachman had noticed nothing.

Cournet let them get away, and then, pulling the check string, stopped the fiacre, got down leisurely, reclosed the door, quietly took forty sous from his purse, gave them to the coachman, who had not left his seat, and said to him, "Drive on."

He plunged into Paris. In the Place des Victoires he met the ex-Constituent Isidore Buvignier, his friend, who about six weeks previously had come out of the Madelonnettes, where he had been confined for the matter of the Solidarité Républicaine. Buvignier was one of the noteworthy figures on the high benches of the Left; fair, close-shaven, with a stern glance, he made one think of the English Roundheads, and he had the bearing rather of a Cromwellian Puritan than of a Dantonist Man of the Mountain. Cournet told his adventure, the extremity had been terrible.

Buvignier shook his head.

"You have killed a man," he said.

In "Marie Tudor," I have made Fabiani answer under similar circumstances,—

"No, a Jew."

Cournet, who probably had not read "Marie Tudor," answered,—

"No, a police spy."

Then he resumed,—

"I have killed a police spy to save three men, one of whom was myself."

Cournet was right. They were in the midst of the combat, they were taking him to be shot; the spy who had arrested him was, properly speaking, an assassin, and assuredly it was a case of legitimate defence. I add that this wretch, a democrat for the people, a spy for the police, was a twofold traitor. Moreover, the police spy was the jackal of the coup d'état, while Cournet was the combatant for the Law.

"You must conceal yourself," said Buvignier; "come to Juvisy."

Buvignier had a little refuge at Juvisy, which is on the road to Corbeil. He was known and loved there; Cournet and he reached there that evening.

But they had hardly arrived when some peasants said to Buvignier, "The police have already been here to arrest you, and are coming again to-night."

It was necessary to go back.

Cournet, more in danger than ever, hunted, wandering, pursued, hid himself in Paris with considerable difficulty. He remained there till the 16th. He had no means of procuring himself a passport. At length, on the 16th, some friends of his on the Northern Railway obtained for him a special passport, worded as follows:—

"Allow M. ——, an Inspector on the service of the Company, to pass."

He decided to leave the next day, and take the day train, thinking, perhaps rightly, that the night train would be more closely watched.

On the 17th, at daybreak, favored by the dim dawn, he glided from street to street, to the Northern Railway Station. His tall stature was a special source of danger. He, however, reached the station in safety. The stokers placed him with them on the tender of the engine of the train, which was about to start. He only had the clothes which he had worn since the 2d; no clean linen, no trunk, a little money.

In December, the day breaks late and the night closes in early, which is favorable to proscribed persons.

He reached the frontier at night without hindrance. At Neuvéglise he was in Belgium; he believed himself in safety. When asked for his papers he caused himself to be taken before the Burgomaster, and said to him, "I am a political refugee."

The Burgomaster, a Belgian but a Bonapartist—this breed is to be found—had him at once reconducted to the frontier by the gendarmes, who were ordered to hand him over to the French authorities.

Cournet gave himself up for lost.

The Belgian gendarmes took him to Armentières. If they had asked for the Mayor it would have been all at an end with Cournet, but they asked for the Inspector of Customs.

A glimmer of hope dawned upon Cournet.

He accosted the Inspector of Customs with his head erect, and shook hands with him.

The Belgian gendarmes had not yet released him.

"Now, sir," said Cournet to the Custom House officer, "you are an Inspector of Customs, I am an Inspector of Railways. Inspectors do not eat inspectors. The deuce take it! Some worthy Belgians have taken fright and sent me to you between four gendarmes. Why, I know not. I am sent by the Northern Company to relay the ballast of a bridge somewhere about here which is not firm. I come to ask you to allow me to continue my road. Here is my pass."

He presented the pass to the Custom House officer, the Custom House officer read it, found it according to due form, and said to Cournet,—

"Mr. Inspector, you are free."

Cournet, delivered from the Belgian gendarmes by French authority, hastened to the railway station. He had friends there.

"Quick," he said, "it is dark, but it does not matter, it is even all the better. Find me some one who has been a smuggler, and who will help me to pass the frontier."

They brought him a small lad of eighteen; fair-haired, ruddy, hardy, a Walloon35 and who spoke French.

"What is your name?" said Cournet.

"Henry."

"You look like a girl."

"Nevertheless I am a man."

"Is it you who undertake to guide me?"

"Yes."

"You have been a smuggler?"

"I am one still."

"Do you know the roads?"

"No. I have nothing to do with the roads."

"What do you know then?"

"I know the passes."

"There are two Custom House lines."

"I know that well."

"Will you pass me across them?"

"Without doubt."

"Then you are not afraid of the Custom House officers?"

"I'm afraid of the dogs."

"In that case," said Cournet, "we will take sticks."

They accordingly armed themselves with big sticks. Cournet gave fifty francs to Henry, and promised him fifty more when they should have crossed the second Custom House line.

"That is to say, at four o'clock in the morning," said Henry.

It was midnight.

They set out on their way.

What Henry called the "passes" another would have called the "hindrances." They were a succession of pitfalls and quagmires. It had been raining, and all the holes were pools of water.

An indescribable footpath wound through an inextricable labyrinth, sometimes as thorny as a heath, sometimes as miry as a marsh.

The night was very dark.

From time to time, far away in the darkness, they could hear a dog bark. The smuggler then made bends or zigzags, turned sharply to the right or to the left, and sometimes retraced his steps.

Cournet, jumping hedges, striding over ditches, stumbling at every moment, slipping into sloughs, laying hold of briers, with his clothes in rags, his hands bleeding, dying with hunger, battered about, wearied, worn out, almost exhausted, followed his guide gaily.

At every minute he made a false step; he fell into every bog, and got up covered with mud. At length he fell into a pond. It was several feet deep. This washed him.

"Bravo!" he said. "I am very clean, but I am very cold."

At four o'clock in the morning, as Henry had promised him, they reached Messine, a Belgian village. The two Custom House lines had been cleared. Cournet had nothing more to fear, either from the Custom House nor from the coup d'état, neither from men nor from dogs.

He gave Henry the second fifty francs, and continued his journey on foot, trusting somewhat to chance.

It was not until towards evening that he reached a railway station. He got into a train, and at nightfall he arrived at the Southern Railway Station at Brussels.

He had left Paris on the preceding morning, had not slept an hour, had been walking all night, and had eaten nothing. On searching in his pocket he missed his pocket book, but found a crust of bread. He was more delighted at the discovery of the crust than grieved at the loss of his pocket-book.