“Has he been able to see his mistresses?” he wondered. “Has my aunt succeeded in catching those damned females? Have the Duchesses and Countesses bestirred themselves and prevented his being examined? Has Lucien had my instructions? And if ill-luck will have it that he is cross-questioned, how will he carry it off? Poor boy, and I have brought him to this! It is that rascal Paccard and that sneak Europe who have caused all this rumpus by collaring the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs for the certificate Nucingen gave Esther. That precious pair tripped us up at the last step; but I will make them pay dear for their pranks.
“One day more and Lucien would have been a rich man; he might have married his Clotilde de Grandlieu.—Then the boy would have been all my own!—And to think that our fate depends on a look, on a blush of Lucien’s under Camusot’s eye, who sees everything, and has all a judge’s wits about him! For when he showed me the letters we tipped each other a wink in which we took each other’s measure, and he guessed that I can make Lucien’s lady-loves fork out.”
This soliloquy lasted for three hours. His torments were so great that they were too much for that frame of iron and vitriol; Jacques Collin, whose brain felt on fire with insanity, suffered such fearful thirst that he unconsciously drank up all the water contained in one of the pails with which the cell was supplied, forming, with the bed, all its furniture.
“If he loses his head, what will become of him?—for the poor child has not Theodore’s tenacity,” said he to himself, as he lay down on the camp-bed—like a bed in a guard-room.
A word must here be said about this Theodore, remembered by Jacques Collin at such a critical moment. Theodore Calvi, a young Corsican, imprisoned for life at the age of eighteen for eleven murders, thanks to the influential interference paid for with vast sums, had been made the fellow convict of Jacques Collin, to whom he was chained, in 1819 and 1820. Jacques Collin’s last escape, one of his finest inventions—for he had got out disguised as a gendarme leading Theodore Calvi as he was, a convict called before the commissary of police—had been effected in the seaport of Rochefort, where the convicts die by dozens, and where, it was hoped, these two dangerous rascals would have ended their days. Though they escaped together, the difficulties of their flight had forced them to separate. Theodore was caught and restored to the hulks.
Indeed, a life with Lucien, a youth innocent of all crime, who had only minor sins on his conscience, dawned on him as bright and glorious as a summer sun; while with Theodore, Jacques Collin could look forward to no end but the scaffold after a career of indispensable crimes.
The thought of disaster as a result of Lucien’s weakness—for his experience of an underground cell would certainly have turned his brain—took vast proportions in Jacques Collin’s mind; and, contemplating the probabilities of such a misfortune, the unhappy man felt his eyes fill with tears, a phenomenon that had been utterly unknown to him since his earliest childhood.
“I must be in a furious fever,” said he to himself; “and perhaps if I send for the doctor and offer him a handsome sum, he will put me in communication with Lucien.”
At this moment the turnkey brought in his dinner.
“It is quite useless my boy; I cannot eat. Tell the governor of this prison to send the doctor to see me. I am very bad, and I believe my last hour has come.”