“God bless you, Monsieur l’Abbe!” said Theodore in French.
Trompe-la-Mort, more Carlos Herrera, more the canon than ever, left the condemned cell, rushed back to the hall, and appeared before Monsieur Gault in affected horror.
“Indeed, sir, the young man is innocent; he has told me who the guilty person is! He was ready to die for a false point of honor—he is a Corsican! Go and beg the public prosecutor to grant me five minutes’ interview. Monsieur de Granville cannot refuse to listen at once to a Spanish priest who is suffering so cruelly from the blunders of the French police.”
“I will go,” said Monsieur Gault, to the extreme astonishment of all the witnesses of this extraordinary scene.
“And meanwhile,” said Jacques, “send me back to the prison-yard where I may finish the conversion of a criminal whose heart I have touched already—they have hearts, these people!”
This speech produced a sensation in all who heard it. The gendarmes, the registry clerk, Sanson, the warders, the executioner’s assistant—all awaiting orders to go and get the scaffold ready—to rig up the machine, in prison slang—all these people, usually so indifferent, were agitated by very natural curiosity.
Just then the rattle of a carriage with high-stepping horses was heard; it stopped very suggestively at the gate of the Conciergerie on the quay. The door was opened, and the step let down in such haste, that every one supposed that some great personage had arrived. Presently a lady waving a sheet of blue paper came forward to the outer gate of the prison, followed by a footman and a chasseur. Dressed very handsomely, and all in black, with a veil over her bonnet, she was wiping her eyes with a floridly embroidered handkerchief.
Jacques Collin at once recognized Asie, or, to give the woman her true name, Jacqueline Collin, his aunt. This horrible old woman—worthy of her nephew—whose thoughts were all centered in the prisoner, and who was defending him with intelligence and mother-wit that were a match for the powers of the law, had a permit made out the evening before in the name of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse’s waiting-maid by the request of Monsieur de Serizy, allowing her to see Lucien de Rubempre, and the Abbe Carlos Herrera so soon as he should be brought out of the secret cells. On this the Colonel, who was the Governor-in-Chief of all the prisons had written a few words, and the mere color of the paper revealed powerful influences; for these permits, like theatre-tickets, differ in shape and appearance.
So the turnkey hastened to open the gate, especially when he saw the chasseur with his plumes and an uniform of green and gold as dazzling as a Russian General’s, proclaiming a lady of aristocratic rank and almost royal birth.
“Oh, my dear Abbe!” exclaimed this fine lady, shedding a torrent of tears at the sight of the priest, “how could any one ever think of putting such a saintly man in here, even by mistake?”