‘Between midnight and one o’clock in the morning,’ explained this prosperous villain, ‘the prison will be set on fire…thanks to my machinations. Someone may be burned, but what does that matter? The certain thing is that we shall make our escape. Three men, accomplices and friends of mine, will meet us, and I can answer to you for your liberty.’
The hand of heaven, which had just punished my innocence, became the servant of crime so far as my protectress was concerned. Once the fire had started the conflagration became terrible. Ten people were burned alive, but we made our escape in safety. The same day we managed to reach the cottage of a poacher who lived in the forest of Bondy. He was thus a different kind of rogue, yet nevertheless an intimate friend of our band.
‘Now you are free, my dear Sophie,’ la Dubois said to me, ‘and you can choose whatever kind of life seems to suit you best; but if you listen to me you will renounce your virtuous ways, which, as you see, have never succeeded in helping you. Your misplaced delicacy conducted you right to the foot of the gallows, yet a frightful crime has saved me from a similar fate. Just look at the value which goodness has in the world, and then consider whether it is worth dying for. You are young and pretty; and, if you like, I will take care of your future in Brussels. I am going there, because that is where I was born, and within two years I can place you at the very peak of fortune. But I warn you that it will certainly not be by the narrow paths of virtue that I will promote your success. At your age it is necessary to engage in more than one profession, as well as to serve in more than one intrigue, if you wish to make your way to the top with any promptitude. Do you understand me, Sophie? – Do you understand me? Decide quickly because we must be on the move. We are safe here only for a few hours.’
‘Oh, Madame,’ I replied to my benefactress, ‘I am obliged to you for so much, since you have saved my life; yet it fills me with despair when I consider that this was possible only by way of the commission of a crime. And you may be very sure that had it been necessary for me to participate in it I would rather have died than done so. I know but too well the dangers I have courted in abandoning myself to those sentiments of honesty which for ever spring up in my heart, but whatever the thorns of virtue may be I shall always prefer them to the false glow of prosperity and those unreliable advantages which momentarily accompany crime. Thanks be to heaven, my religious convictions will never desert me, and if providence renders my way of life difficult it is only in order the more abundantly to recompense me in a better world. It is this hope which consoles me, this hope which softens all my griefs, calms my complaints, fortifies me in adversity and enables me fearlessly to encounter any evils with which I may be faced. This joy would immediately be extinguished in my heart were I to stain myself with crime – and, to the fear of even more terrible reverses in this world, I should add the frightening expectation of those punishments which celestial justice reserves in the beyond for those who outrage it.’
‘I’m afraid you have some absurd ideas which will quickly take you to the workhouse, my girl,’ exclaimed la Dubois, frowning. ‘Believe me, you will be well advised to give up your ideas of celestial justice, of punishment, or rewards to come. Those things are all best forgotten as soon as you leave school, for their only result is to help cause you to starve to death – if you are stupid enough to believe them once you have launched out on a life of your own. The hardness of the rich justifies the rascality of the poor, my child; if humanity reigned in their hearts, then virtue would become established in ours; but so long as our misfortunes, and our patience in enduring them, so long as our good faith and our submission serve only to multiply our chains, then we can lay our crimes at their door, and we would be fools indeed were we to refuse to profit by them when they can to some extent ameliorate the yoke with which we are burdened.
‘Nature caused us all to be born equal, Sophie; and if chance has been pleased to disorganise the original plan of her general laws, it is for us to correct such caprices, and to recover, by our adroitness, the usurpations of those who are stronger than us. I love to hear them – those rich gentlemen, those judges and magistrates – I love to hear them preach of virtue to us. It must be very difficult to avoid theft when one has three times more than is necessary for living in comfort; it must be equally difficult never to think of murder when one is surrounded only by the adulations of sycophants, or the submission of absolute slaves; likewise it must be enormously distressing to be temperate and sober when one is perpetually surrounded by the most succulent delicacies; and people must experience a great deal of trouble in being honest when they have no reason to lie.
‘But we, Sophie, we whom this barbarous providence which you are foolish enough to idolise has condemned to crawl on the earth as a serpent crawls in the grass – we who are disdained because we are poor, humiliated because we are weak, and who at length find nothing but bitterness and care over the whole surface of the globe – could you wish us to forbear from crime when it is her hand alone which opens for us the door of life, sustains and maintains life in us, and saves us from losing it? You would, it seems, prefer us to be perpetually submissive and humble whilst those who control us retain for themselves every favour which fortune can grant, we having only the experience of pain, hardship, and sorrow, with the addition of tears, the iron-mark of infamy, and, finally, the scaffold!
‘No, Sophie, no – either this providence which you so revere has been created solely for our scorn – or that is not the intention…Get to know it better, get to know it better and you will soon be convinced that whenever it places us in a position where evil becomes necessary for us, granting us at the same time the possibility of exercising this evil, it is because evil, just as much as good, serves its laws; and it gains equally as much from the one as from the other. We were created in a state of equality, and the man who disturbs this state is not more culpable than he who seeks to re-establish it. Both men are activated by given motives, and each must follow his impulse, tying a bandage round his eyes and enjoying the game.’
I confess that if ever I was shaken it was by the seductions of this clever woman. But a voice louder than hers combated the sophisms she wished to plant in my heart. I listened to it, and asserted for the last time that I had decided never to allow myself to be corrupted.
‘Ah, well!’ exclaimed Dubois. ‘Do what you wish. I leave you to your evil fate – but if ever you happen to get yourself hanged, which you can hardly escape since the destiny which watches over crime inevitably sacrifices virtue, remember, at least, never to mention us.’
While we were reasoning in this fashion, the three companions of la Dubois were drinking with the poacher; and, as wine commonly has the effect of causing the malefactor to forget his past criminal offences, often inviting him to augment them at the very edge of the precipice from which he has just escaped, so did the miscreant wretches who surrounded me feel a desire to amuse themselves at my expense before I had time to run away from them. Their principles, their morals, combined with the sinister location in which we found ourselves, and the apparent security from the law which they felt they at present enjoyed, together with their drunkenness, my age, my innocence, and my figure, all encouraged them in their project. They rose from the table, held counsel amongst themselves and consulted la Dubois – proceedings the mystery of which made me shudder with horror, and which resulted in my having to decide whether, before leaving them, I would pass through the hands of all four willingly or by force. If I did it willingly they would each give me a crown to help me on my way, since I had refused to accompany them. If, on the other hand, they were obliged to use force to settle the matter, the thing would be done all the same, but the last of the four to enjoy me would plunge a knife into my breast and they would bury me immediately afterwards at the foot of a tree.
I leave you to imagine, Madame, the effect which this execrable proposition had on me. I threw myself at the feet of la Dubois, begging her to be my protectress yet a second time; but the villainous creature just laughed at my terrifying situation – which to her seemed a mere nothing.
‘Gracious heavens!’ she said, ‘– just look at you, so miserable and unhappy simply because you are obliged to serve successively four big boys built like these! In Paris, my