CHAPTER XLIX.
Silent as was the sentinel after the restoration of his musket, it was, nevertheless, unanimously voted that our enterprise was a failure. Accordingly, the bar was replaced, the window closed, our implements stowed in the mattresses, and ourselves packed beneath the blankets, in momentary expectation of a visit from the jailer and military commander. We passed the night in feverish expectation, but our bolts remained undrawn.
Bright and early, with a plenteous breakfast, appeared our spirited Spaniards, and, as the turnkey admitted and locked them in, they burst into a fit of uproarious laughter at our maladroit adventure. The poor sentinel, they said, was found, at the end of his watch, stretched on the ground in a sort of fainting fit and half frozen. He swore, in accounting for a bleeding skull, that an invisible hand from the store-room beneath us, had dealt him a blow that felled him to the earth! His story was so silly and maudlin, that the captain of the guard, who remembered the festival and knew the tipsiness of the entire watch, gave no heed to the tale, but charged it to the account of New Year and eau de vie. We were sadly jeered by the lasses for our want of pluck, in forsaking the advantage fortune had thrown in our way, and I was specially charged to practise my hand more carefully with the lazo, when I next got a chance on the plantations of Cuba, or among the vaqueros of Mexico.
As we expected the daily visit from the punctual inspector, to try our bars with his iron rod, we hastened to secure our window, and stuffing all the fissures with straw and rags, so as almost to exclude light, we complained bitterly to the official of the cold wind to which the apertures exposed us, and thus prevented him from touching the sash. Besides this precaution, we thought it best to get rid of our tools and cord in the same way we received them; and thus terminated our project of escape.
Soon after, I heard from a relative in Paris, that my petition had been presented to Louis Philippe, whose reception of it encouraged a hope for my pardon. The news somewhat restored us to the good humor that used to prevail in our party, but which had been sadly dashed since our failure. Even Monsieur Germaine, saw in our anticipated liberation, a phantom of encouragement for himself, and began to talk confidentially of his plans. He fancied that I had been gradually schooled into a taste for misdemeanor, so that he favored me with innumerable anecdotes of swindling, and countless schemes of future robbery. By making me an incipient accomplice, he thought to secure my aid either for his escape or release.
I will take the liberty to record a single specimen of Germaine’s prolific fancy in regard to the higher grades of elegant felony, and will leave him to the tender mercy of the French government, which allows no bail for such chevaliers but chastises their crime with an iron hand.
We had scarcely recovered from our trepidation, when the forger got up one morning, with a radiant face, and whispered that the past night was fruitful to his brain, for he had planned an enterprise which would yield a fortune for any two who were wise and bold enough to undertake it.
Germaine was a philosophic felon. It was perhaps the trick of an intellect naturally astute, and of a spirit originally refined, to reject the vulgar baseness of common pilfering. Germaine never stole or defrauded;—he only outwitted and outgeneralled. If he spoke of the world, either in politics or trade, he insisted that shams, forgeries, and counterfeits were quite as much played off in the language, address and dealings of statesmen, merchants, parsons, doctors, and lawyers, as they were by himself and his accomplices. The only difference between the felon and the jury, he alleged, existed in the fact that the jury was in the majority and the felon in the vocative. He advocated the worst forms of liberty and equality; he was decidedly in favor of a division of property, which he was sure would end what the law called crime, because all would be supplied on the basis of a common balance. Whenever he told his ancient exploits or suggested new ones, he glossed them invariably with a rhetorical varnish about the laws of nature, social contracts, human rights, meum and tuum; and concluded, to his perfect satisfaction, with a favorite axiom, that “he had quite as much right to the world’s goods as they who possessed them.”
A hypocritical farrago of this character always prefaced one of Germaine’s tales, so that I hardly ever interrupted the rogue when he became fluent about social theories, but waited patiently, in confidence that I was shortly to be entertained with an adventure or enterprise.
The forger began his story on this occasion with a most fantastical and exaggerated account of the celebrated Santissima Casa of Loretto, which he imagined was still endowed with all the treasures it possessed anterior to its losses during the pontificate of Pius VI. He asserted that it was the richest tabernacle in Europe, and that the adornments of the altar were valued at several millions of crowns,—the votive offerings and legacies of devotees during a long period of time.