As he entered, Cerizet gave a rapid glance at the old man, whose head lay on a pillow brown with grease and without a pillow-case; his angular profile, like those which engravers of the last century were fond of making out of rocks in the landscapes they engraved, was strongly defined in black against the green serge hangings of the tester. Toupillier, a man nearly six feet tall, was looking fixedly at some object at the foot of his bed; he did not move on hearing the groaning of the heavy door, which, being armed with iron bolts and a strong lock, closed his domicile securely.
“Is he conscious?” said Cerizet, before whom Madame Cardinal started back, not having recognized him till he spoke.
“Pretty nearly,” she replied.
“Come out on the staircase, so that he doesn’t hear us,” whispered Cerizet. “This is how we’ll manage it,” he continued, in the ear of his future mother-in-law. “He is weak, but he isn’t so very low; we have fully a week before us. I’ll send you a doctor who’ll suit us,—you understand? and later in the evening I’ll bring you six poppy-heads. In the state he’s in, you see, a decoction of poppy-heads will send him into a sound sleep. I’ll send you a cot-bed on pretence of your sleeping in the room with him. We’ll move him from one bed to the other, and when we’ve found the money there won’t be any difficulty in carrying it off. But we ought to know who the people are who live in this old barrack. If Perrache suspects, as you think, about the money, he might give an alarm, and so many tenants, so many spies, you know—”
“Oh! as for that,” said Madame Cardinal, “I’ve found out already that Monsieur du Portail, the old man who occupies the first floor, has charge of an insane woman; I heard their Dutch servant-woman, Katte, calling her Lydie this morning. The only other servant is an old valet named Bruneau; he does everything, except cook.”
“But the binder and the stitcher down below,” returned Cerizet, “they begin work very early in the morning—Well, anyhow, we must study the matter,” he added, in the tone of a man whose plans are not yet decided. “I’ll go to the mayor’s office of your arrondissement, and get Olympe’s register of birth, and put up the banns. The marriage must take place a week from Saturday.”
“How he goes it, the rascal!” cried the admiring Madame Cardinal, pushing her formidable son-in-law by the shoulder.
As he went downstairs Cerizet was surprised to see, through one of the small round windows, an old man, evidently du Portail, walking in the garden with a very important member of the government, Comte Martial de la Roche-Hugon. He stopped in the courtyard when he reached it, as if to examine the old house, built in the reign of Louis XIV., the yellow walls of which, though of freestone, were bent like the elderly beggar they contained. Then he looked at the workshops, and counted the workmen. The house was otherwise as silent as a cloister. Being observed himself, Cerizet departed, thinking over in his mind the various difficulties that might arise in extracting the sum hidden beneath the dying man.
“Carry off all that gold at night?” he said to himself; “why, those porters will be on the watch, and twenty persons might see us! It is hard work to carry even twenty-five thousand francs of gold on one’s person.”
Societies have two goals of perfection; the first is a state of civilization in which morality equally infused and pervasive does not admit even the idea of crime; the Jesuits reached that point, formerly presented by the primitive Church. The second is the state of another civilization in which the supervision of citizens over one another makes crime impossible. The end which modern society has placed before itself is the latter; namely, that in which a crime presents such difficulties that a man must abandon all reasoning in order to commit it. In fact, iniquities which the law cannot reach are not left actually unpunished, for social judgment is even more severe than that of courts. If a man like Minoret, the post-master at Nemours [see “Ursule Mirouet”] suppresses a will and no one witnesses the act, the crime is traced home to him by the watchfulness of virtue as surely as a robbery is followed up by the detective police. No wrong-doing passes actually unperceived; and wherever a lesion in rectitude takes place the scar remains. Things can be no more made to disappear than men; so carefully, in Paris especially, are articles and objects ticketed and numbered, houses watched, streets observed, places spied upon. To live at ease, crime must have a sanction like that of the Bourse; like that conceded by Cerizet’s clients; who never complained of his usury, and, indeed, would have been troubled in mind if their flayer were not in his den of a Tuesday.