“Lucien made a will by which he leaves you three hundred thousand francs.”
“Poor, poor chap! poor boy!” cried Jacques Collin. “Always too honest! I was all wickedness, while he was goodness—noble, beautiful, sublime! Such lovely souls cannot be spoiled. He had taken nothing from me but my money, sir.”
This utter and complete surrender of his individuality, which the magistrate vainly strove to rally, so thoroughly proved his dreadful words, that Monsieur de Granville was won over to the criminal. The public prosecutor remained!
“If you really care for nothing,” said Monsieur de Granville, “what did you want to say to me?”
“Well, is it not something that I have given myself up? You were getting warm, but you had not got me; besides, you would not have known what to do with me——”
“What an antagonist!” said the magistrate to himself.
“Monsieur le Comte, you are about to cut off the head of an innocent man, and I have discovered the culprit,” said Jacques Collin, wiping away his tears. “I have come here not for their sakes, but for yours. I have come to spare you remorse, for I love all who took an interest in Lucien, just as I will give my hatred full play against all who helped to cut off his life—men or women!
“What can a convict more or less matter to me?” he went on, after a short pause. “A convict is no more in my eyes than an emmet is in yours. I am like the Italian brigands—fine men they are! If a traveler is worth ever so little more than the charge of their musket, they shoot him dead.
“I thought only of you.—I got the young man to make a clean breast of it; he was bound to trust me, we had been chained together. Theodore is very good stuff; he thought he was doing his mistress a good turn by undertaking to sell or pawn stolen goods; but he is no more guilty of the Nanterre job than you are. He is a Corsican; it is their way to revenge themselves and kill each other like flies. In Italy and Spain a man’s life is not respected, and the reason is plain. There we are believed to have a soul in our own image, which survives us and lives for ever. Tell that to your analyst! It is only among atheistical or philosophical nations that those who mar human life are made to pay so dearly; and with reason from their point of view—a belief only in matter and in the present.
“If Calvi had told you who the woman was from whom he obtained the stolen goods, you would not have found the real murderer; he is already in your hands; but his accomplice, whom poor Theodore will not betray because she is a woman——Well, every calling has its point of honor; convicts and thieves have theirs!