The Vatican swindle

by André Gide

III

At Naples Lafcadio went to a hotel near the station; he made a point of taking his trunk with him, because travellers without luggage are looked at askance, and because he was anxious not to attract attention; then he went out to buy a few necessary articles of toilette and another hat instead of the odious straw (beside which, it was too tight) which Fleurissoire had left him. He wanted to buy a revolver as well, but was obliged to put this purchase off, as the shops were already shutting.

The train he took next day started early, arriving in Rome in time for lunch.

His intention was not to approach Julius until after the newspapers had appeared with an account of the “crime.” The crime! This word seemed odd to him, to say the very least; and criminal as applied to himself totally inappropriate. He preferred adventurer—a word as pliable as his beaver and as easily twisted to suit his liking.

The morning papers had not yet mentioned the adventure. He awaited the evening ones with impatience, for he was eager to see Julius and to feel for himself that the game had begun; until then the time hung heavy on his hands, as with a child playing at hide-and-seek, who, no doubt, doesn’t want to be found, but wants, at any rate, to be sure he is being looked for. The vagueness of this state was one with which he was not as yet familiar; and the people he elbowed in the street seemed to him particularly commonplace, disagreeable and hideous.

When the evening came he bought the Corriere from a newspaper-seller in the Corso; then he went into a restaurant, but he laid the paper all folded on the table beside him and forced himself to finish his dinner without looking at it—out of a kind of bravado, and as though he thought in this way to put an edge on his desire; then he went out, and once in the Corso again, he stopped in the light of a shop window, unfolded the paper and on the second page saw the following head-line:

CRIME, SUICIDE ... OR ACCIDENT

He read the next few paragraphs, which I translate:

Last evening in the railway station at Naples, the company’s servants found a man’s coat in the rack of a first-class carriage of the train from Rome. In the inside pocket of this coat, which is of a dark brown colour, was an unfastened envelope containing six thousand-franc notes. There were no other papers by which to identify the missing owner. If there has been foul play, it is difficult to account for the fact that such a considerable sum of money should have been left in the victim’s coat; it may, at any rate, be inferred that the motive was not robbery.

There were no traces of a struggle to be seen in the compartment; but under one of the seats a man’s shirt-cuff was discovered with the link attached; this article was in the shape of two cats’ heads, linked together by a small silver-gilt chain, and carved out of a semi-transparent quartz, known as opalescent feldspar, and commonly called moonstone by jewellers.

A thorough investigation of the railway line is being made.

Lafcadio crumpled the paper up in his hand.

“What! Carola’s sleeve-links now! The old boy is a regular public meeting-place!”

He turned the page and read in the stop-press news:

RECENTISSIME
DEAD BODY FOUND ON RAILWAY LINE

Without waiting to read further, Lafcadio hurried to the Grand Hotel. He slipped his visiting-card into an envelope after adding the following words underneath his name:

Lafcadio Wluiki

would be glad to know whether Count Julius de Baraglioul is not in need of a secretary.

He sent it up.

A manservant at last came to where he was waiting in the hall, led him along various passages and ushered him in to where Julius was sitting.

His first glance showed Lafcadio a copy of the Corriere della Sera, which had been thrown down in a corner of the room. On a table in the middle a large, uncorked bottle of eau-de-Cologne was exhaling its powerful perfume. Julius held out his arms.

“Lafcadio! My dear fellow!... How very glad I am to see you!”

His ruffled hair waved in agitated fashion on his temples; he seemed strangely excited; in one hand he held a black spotted handkerchief, with which he fanned himself.

“You are certainly one of the persons I least expected to see, but the one in the world I was most wanting to talk to this evening.... Was it Madame Carola who told you I was here?”

“What an odd question!”

“Why! as I’ve just met her.... I’m not sure, though, that she saw me.”

“Carola! Is she in Rome?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“I’ve just this minute arrived from Sicily and you are the first person I have seen. I’ve no desire to see her.”

“I thought she was looking extremely pretty——”

“You’re not hard to please.”

“I mean, prettier than she did in Paris.”

“Exoticism, no doubt—but if you’re feeling randy....”

“Lafcadio! Such language from you to me isn’t permissible.”

Julius tried to look severe, but only succeeded in pulling a face. He went on:

“You find me in a great state of agitation. I’m at a turning-point of my career. My head is burning and I feel, as it were, giddy all over, as if I were going to evaporate. I have come to Rome for a sociological congress, and during the three days I’ve spent here I’ve been going from surprise to surprise. Your arrival is the finishing touch.... I don’t recognise myself any longer.”

He was striding about the room; suddenly he stopped beside the table, seized the bottle, poured a stream of scent on to his handkerchief, applied it like a compress to his forehead and left it there.

“My dear young friend—if you’ll allow me to call you so.... My new book! I think I’ve got the hang of it. The way in which you spoke to me of On the Heights in Paris, makes me think that you will not find this one uninteresting.”

His feet sketched a kind of pirouette; the handkerchief fell to the ground. Lafcadio hastened to pick it up and, as he was stooping, he felt Julius’s hand laid gently on his shoulder, just as once before he had felt Juste-Agénor’s. Lafcadio smiled and raised himself.

“I’ve known you such a short time,” said Julius, “and yet this evening I can’t help talking to you like a....”

He stopped.

“I’m listening like a brother, Monsieur de Baraglioul,” Lafcadio was emboldened to take up the words, “—since you allow me to.”

“You see, Lafcadio, in the set which I frequent in Paris—smart people, and literary people, and ecclesiastics and academicians—there is really nobody I can speak to—nobody, I mean, to whom I can confide the new preoccupations which beset me. For I must confess to you that, since our last meeting, my point of view has completely changed.”

“So much the better,” said Lafcadio impertinently.

“You can’t imagine, because you aren’t in the trade, how an erroneous system of ethics can hamper the free development of one’s creative faculties. So nothing is further from my old novels than the one I am planning now. I used to demand logic and consistency from my characters, and in order to make quite sure of getting them, I began by demanding them from myself. It wasn’t natural. We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us.”

Lafcadio continued to smile as he waited for what was to come next, amused to recognise, at this remove, the effect of his first remarks.

“How shall I put it, Lafcadio? For the first time I see before me a free field.... Can you understand what that means? A free field!... I say to myself that it always has been, always will be free, and that up till now the only things to hinder me have been impure considerations—questions of a successful career, of public opinion—the poet’s continual vain hope of reward at the hands of ungrateful judges. Henceforth I hope for nothing—except from myself—henceforth I hope for everything from myself—I hope for everything from the man who is sincere—everything and anything! For now I feel in myself the strangest possibilities. And as it’s only on paper, I shall boldly let myself go. We shall see! We shall see!”

He took a deep breath, flung himself back sideways with one shoulder-blade raised, almost as if a wing were already beginning to sprout, and as if he were stifling with the weight of fresh perplexities. He went on incoherently in a lower voice:

“And since the gentlemen of the Academy shut the door in my face, I’ll give them good cause for it; for they had none—no cause whatever.”

His voice suddenly turned shrill as he emphasised the last words; then he went on more calmly:

“Well, then, this is what I have imagined.... Are you listening?”

“With my whole soul,” said Lafcadio, still laughing.

“And do you follow me?”

“To the devil himself!”

Julius again soused his handkerchief and sat down in an arm-chair; Lafcadio sat himself astride on a chair opposite him.

“The hero is to be a young man whom I wish to make a criminal.”

“I see no difficulty in that.”

“Hum! hum!” said Julius, who was not to be done out of his difficulty.

“But since you’re a novelist, once you set about imagining, what’s to prevent you imagining things just as you choose?”

“The stranger the things I imagine, the more necessary it is to find motives and explanations for them.”

“It’s easy enough to find motives for crime.”

“No doubt ... but that’s exactly what I don’t want to do. I don’t want a motive for the crime—all I want is an explanation of the criminal. Yes! I mean to lead him into committing a crime gratuitously—into wanting to commit a crime without any motive at all.”

Lafcadio began to prick up his ears.

“We will take him as a mere youth. I mean him to show the elegance of his nature by this—that he acts almost entirely in play, and as a matter of course prefers his pleasure to his interest.”

“Rather unusual, I should say,” ventured Lafcadio.

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Julius, enchanted. “Then, we must add that he takes pleasure in self-control.”

“To the point of dissimulation.”

“We’ll endow him, then, with the love of risk.”

“Bravo!” exclaimed Lafcadio, more and more amused. “If, added to that, he is a fellow who can lend an ear to the demon of curiosity, I think your pupil will be done to a turn.”

Progressing in this way by leaps and bounds, each in turn overtaking and overtaken by the other, one would have likened them to two schoolboys playing leap-frog.

Julius. First of all, I imagine him training himself. He is an adept at committing all sorts of petty thefts.

Lafcadio. I’ve often wondered why more aren’t committed. It’s true that the opportunity of committing them usually occurs only to people who are free from want and without any particular hankerings.

Julius. Free from want! Yes, I told you so. But the only opportunities that tempt him are the ones that demand some skill—some cunning.

Lafcadio. And which run him, no doubt, into some danger.

Julius. I said that he enjoys risk. But swindling is odious to him; he doesn’t want to appropriate things, but finds it amusing to displace them surreptitiously. He’s as clever at it as a conjurer.

Lafcadio. And, besides, he’s encouraged by impunity.

Julius. Yes, but sometimes vexed by it too. If he isn’t caught, it must be because the job he set himself was too easy.

Lafcadio. He eggs himself on to take greater risks.

Julius. I make him reason this way....

Lafcadio. Do you really think he reasons?

Julius (continuing). The author of a crime is always found out by the need he had to commit it.

Lafcadio. We said that he was very clever.

Julius. Yes, and all the cleverer because he acts with perfect coolness. Just think! A crime that has no motive either of passion or need! His very reason for committing the crime is just to commit it without any reason.

Lafcadio. You reason about his crime—he merely commits it.

Julius. There is no reason that a man who commits a crime without reason should be considered a criminal.

Lafcadio. You’re too subtle. You have carried him to such a pitch that you have made him what they call “a free man.”

Julius. At the mercy of the first opportunity.

Lafcadio. I’m longing to see him at work. What in the world are you going to offer him?

Julius. Well, I was still hesitating. Yes, up till this very evening I was hesitating, and then, this very evening, the latest edition of the newspaper brought me just exactly the example I was in need of. A providential stroke! Frightful! Only think of it! My brother-in-law has just been murdered!

Lafcadio. What! the old fellow in the railway carriage was....

Julius. He was Amédée Fleurissoire. I had just lent him my ticket and seen him off at the station. An hour before starting he had taken six thousand francs out of the bank, and as he was carrying them on his person, he was a little bit anxious as he left me; he had fancies—more or less gloomy fancies—presentiments. Well, in the train....

But you’ve seen the paper?

Lafcadio. Only the head-lines.

Julius. Listen! I’ll read it to you. (He unfolded the Corriere.) I’ll translate as I go along.

“This afternoon, in the course of a thorough investigation of the line between Rome and Naples, the police discovered the body of a man lying in the dry bed of the Volturno, about five kilometers from Capua—no doubt the unfortunate owner of the coat that was found last night in a railway carriage. The body is that of a man of about fifty years of age. [He looked older than he really was.] No papers were on him which could give any clue to his identity. [Thank goodness! That’ll give me time to breathe, at any rate.] He had apparently been flung out of the railway carriage with sufficient violence to clear the parapet of the bridge, which is being repaired at this point and has been replaced by a wooden railing. [What a style!] The height of the bridge above the river is about fifteen metres. Death must have been caused by the fall, as the body bears no trace of other injuries. The man was in his shirt-sleeves; on his right wrist was a cuff similar to the one picked up in the railway carriage, but in this case the sleeve-link is missing. [What’s the matter?]”

Julius stopped. Lafcadio had not been able to suppress a start, for the idea flashed upon him that the sleeve-link had been removed since the committing of the crime—Julius went on:

“His left hand was found still clutching a soft felt hat....”

“Soft felt indeed! The barbarians!” murmured Lafcadio.

Julius raised his nose from the paper:

“What are you so astonished at?”

“Nothing! Nothing! Go on!”

“...soft felt hat much too large for his head and which presumably belongs to the aggressor; the maker’s name has been carefully removed from the lining, out of which a piece of leather has been cut of the size and shape of a laurel leaf....”

Lafcadio got up and went behind Julius’s chair so as to read the paper over his shoulder—and perhaps, too, so as to hide his paleness. There could no longer be any doubt about it; his crime had been tampered with; someone else had touched it up; had cut the piece out of the lining—the unknown person, no doubt, who had carried off his portmanteau.

In the meantime Julius went on reading:

“...which seems to prove the crime was premeditated. [Why this particular crime? My hero had perhaps merely taken general precautions just at random....] As soon as the police had made the necessary notes, the body was removed to Naples for the purposes of identification. [Yes, I know they have the means there—and the habit of preserving dead bodies....]”

“Are you quite sure it was he?” Lafcadio’s voice trembled a little.

“Bless my soul! I was expecting him to dinner this evening.”

“Have you informed the police?”

“Not yet. First of all, I must get clear in my own mind a little. I’m in mourning already, so from that point of view (as regards the dress question, I mean) there’s no need to bother; but you see, as soon as the victim’s name is published, I shall have to communicate with the family, send telegrams, write letters, make arrangements for the funeral, go to Naples to fetch the body.... Oh! my dear Lafcadio, there’s this congress I’ve got to attend—would you mind—would you consent to fetching the body in my place?”

“We’ll see about it.”

“That is, of course, if it won’t upset you too much. In the meantime I’m sparing my sister-in-law a period of cruel anxiety. She’ll never suspect from the vague accounts in the newspapers.... But to return to my subject. Well, then, when I read this paragraph in the paper, I said to myself: ‘This crime, which I can imagine to myself so easily, which I can reconstruct, which I can see—I know, I tell you, I know the reason for which it was committed; I know that if it hadn’t been for the inducement of the six thousand francs, it would never have been committed.’”

“But suppose....”

“Yes, yes. Let’s suppose for a moment that there had been no six thousand francs—or, better still, that the criminal didn’t take them—why, he’d have been my hero!”

Lafcadio in the meantime had risen; he picked up the paper which Julius had let fall, and opening it at the second page:

“I see,” he said in as cool a voice as he could muster, “I see that you haven’t read the latest news. That is exactly what has happened. The criminal did not take the six thousand francs. Look here! Read this: ‘The motive of the crime, therefore, does not appear to be robbery.’”

Julius snatched the sheet that Lafcadio held out to him, read it eagerly, then passed his hand over his eyes, then sat down, then got up abruptly, darted towards Lafcadio, and seizing him with both arms, exclaimed:

“The motive of the crime not robbery!” and he shook Lafcadio in a kind of transport. “The motive of the crime not robbery! Why, then”—he pushed Lafcadio from him, rushed to the other end of the room, fanned himself, struck his forehead, blew his nose—“Why, then, I know—good heavens!—I know why the ruffian murdered him.... Oh! my unfortunate friend! Oh, poor Fleurissoire! So it was true what he said! And I who thought he was out of his mind! Why, then, it’s appalling!”

Lafcadio awaited the end of this outburst with astonishment; he was a little irritated; it seemed to him that Julius had no right to evade him in this manner.

“I thought that was the very thing you....”

“Be quiet! You know nothing about it. And here am I wasting my time with you, spinning these ridiculous fancies!.... Quick! my stick! my hat!”

“Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

“To inform the police, of course!”

Lafcadio placed himself in front of the door.

“First of all, explain,” said he imperatively. “Upon my soul, anyone would think you had gone mad.”

“It was just now that I was mad.... Oh, poor Fleurissoire! Oh, unfortunate friend! Luckless, saintly victim! His death just comes in time to cut me short in a career of irreverence—of blasphemy. His sacrifice has brought me to reason. And to think that I laughed at him!”

He had again begun to pace up and down the room; suddenly he stopped and laying his hat and stick beside the scent bottle on the table, he planted himself in front of Lafcadio:

“Do you want to know why the ruffian murdered him?”

“I thought it was without a motive.”

“To begin with,” exclaimed Julius furiously, “there’s no such thing as a crime without a motive. He was got rid of because he was in possession of a secret ... which he confided to me—an important secret—over-important for him, indeed. They were afraid of him. That’s what it was. There!... Oh! it’s all very well for you to laugh—you understand nothing about matters of faith.” Then, very pale and drawing himself up to his full height: “I am the inheritor of that secret!”

“Take care! They’ll be afraid of you next.”

“You see how necessary it is to warn the police at once.”

“One more question,” said Lafcadio, stopping him again.

“No! Let me go. I’m in a desperate hurry. You may be certain that the continual surveillance under which they kept my poor brother and which terrified him to such a degree, will now be transferred to me—has now been transferred to me. You have no idea what a crafty set they are. Those people know everything, I tell you. It’s more important than ever that you should go and fetch the body instead of me. Now that I’m being watched as I am, there’s no knowing what mightn’t happen to me. Lafcadio, my dear fellow”—he clasped his hands imploringly—“I’ve no head at this moment, but I’ll make enquiries at the Questura as to how to get a proper authorisation. Where shall I send it to you?”

“I’ll take a room in this hotel. It’ll be more convenient. Good-bye, till to-morrow. Make haste! Make haste!”

He let Julius go. There was beginning to rise in him a feeling of profound disgust—a kind of hatred almost, of himself, of Julius, of everything. He shrugged his shoulders, and then took out of his pocket the Cook’s ticket, which he had found in Fleurissoire’s coat and which had the name of Baraglioul written on the first page; he put it on the table, well in sight, leaning it up against the scent bottle—then turned out the light and left the room.