“I mean to win his soul to heaven!” replied Jacques Collin fervently, seeing some other prisoners about him. And he joined the warder at the gate.
“He got in to save Madeleine,” said Fil-de-Soie. “We guessed rightly. What a boss he is!”
“But how can he? Jack Ketch’s men are waiting. He will not even see the kid,” objected le Biffon.
“The devil is on his side!” cried la Pouraille. “He claim our blunt! Never! He is too fond of his old chums! We are too useful to him! They wanted to make us blow the gaff, but we are not such flats! If he saves his Madeleine, I will tell him all my secrets.”
The effect of this speech was to increase the devotion of the three convicts to their boss; for at this moment he was all their hope.
Jacques Collin, in spite of Madeleine’s peril, did not forget to play his part. Though he knew the Conciergerie as well as he knew the hulks in the three ports, he blundered so naturally that the warder had to tell him, “This way, that way,” till they reached the office. There, at a glance, Jacques Collin recognized a tall, stout man leaning on the stove, with a long, red face not without distinction: it was Sanson.
“Monsieur is the chaplain?” said he, going towards him with simple cordiality.
The mistake was so shocking that it froze the bystanders.
“No, monsieur,” said Sanson; “I have other functions.”
Sanson, the father of the last executioner of that name—for he has recently been dismissed—was the son of the man who beheaded Louis XVI. After four centuries of hereditary office, this descendant of so many executioners had tried to repudiate the traditional burden. The Sansons were for two hundred years executioners at Rouen before being promoted to the first rank in the kingdom, and had carried out the decrees of justice from father to son since the thirteenth century. Few families can boast of an office or of nobility handed down in a direct line during six centuries.