"How was it with you?" asked Madame Graslin.
"Ah! there," replied Farrabesche, "I had luck; I never drew a lot to kill a convict; I never had to vote the death of any one of them; I never was punished; no man took a dislike to me; and I got on well with the three different men I was chained to; they all feared me but liked me. One reason was, my name was known and famous at the galleys before I got there. A /chauffeur/! they thought me one of those brigands. I have seen /chauffing/," continued Farrabesche after a pause, in a low voice, "but I never either did it myself, or took any of the money obtained by it. I was a refractory, I evaded the conion, that was all. I helped my comrades, I kept watch; I was sentinel and brought up the rear-guard; but I never shed any man's blood except in self-defence. Ah! I told all to Monsieur Bonnet and my lawyer, and the judges knew well enough that I was no murderer. But, all the same, I am a great criminal; nothing that I ever did was morally right. However, before I got there, as I was saying, two of my comrades told of me as a man able to do great things. At the galleys, madame, nothing is so valuable as that reputation, not even money. In that republic of misery murder is a passport to tranquillity. I did nothing to destroy that opinion of me. I was sad, resigned, and they mistook the appearance of it. My gloomy manner, my silence, passed for ferocity. All that world, convicts, keepers, young and old, respected me. I was treated as first in my hall. No one interfered with my sleep; I was never suspected of informing; I behaved honorably according to their ideas; I never refused to do service; I never testified the slightest repugnance; I howled with the wolves outside, I prayed to God within. My last companion in chains was a soldier, twenty-two years of age, who had committed a theft and deserted in consequence of it. We were chained together for four years, and we were friends; wherever I may be I am certain to meet him when his time is up. This poor devil, whose name is Guepin, is not a scoundrel, he is merely heedless; his punishment may reform him. If my comrades had discovered that religion led me to submit to my trials,--that I meant, when my time was up, to live humbly in a corner, letting no one know where I was, intending to forget their horrible community and never to cross the path of any of them,--they would probably have driven me mad."
"Then," said Madame Graslin, "if a poor young man, a tender soul, carried away by passion, having committed a murder, was spared from death and sent to the galleys--"
"Oh! madame," said Farrabesche, interrupting her, "there is no sparing in that. The sentence may be commuted to twenty years at the galleys, but for a decent young man, that is awful! I could not speak to you of the life that awaits him there; a thousand times better die. Yes, to die upon the scaffold is happiness in comparison."
"I dared not think it," murmured Madame Graslin.
She had turned as white as wax. To hide her face she laid her forehead on the balustrade, and kept it there several minutes. Farrabesche did not know whether he ought to go or remain.
Madame Graslin raised her head at last, looked at Farrabesche with an almost majestic air, and said, to his amazement, in a voice that stirred his heart:--"Thank you, my friend. But," she added, after a pause, "where did you find courage to live and suffer?"
"Ah! madame, Monsieur Bonnet put a treasure within my soul! and for that I love him better than all else on earth."
"Better than Catherine?" said Madame Graslin, smiling with a sort of bitterness.
"Almost as well, madame."
"How did he do it?"
"Madame, the words and the voice of that man conquered me. Catherine brought him to that hole in the ground I showed you on the common; he had come fearlessly alone. He was, he said, the new rector of Montegnac; I was his parishioner, he loved me; he knew I was only misguided, not lost; he did not intend to betray me, but to save me; in short, he said many such things that stirred my soul to its depths.
That man, madame, commands you to do right with as much force as those who tell you to do wrong. It was he who told me, poor dear man, that Catherine was a mother, and that I was dooming two beings to shame and desertion. 'Well,' I said to him, 'they are like me; I have no future.' He answered that I had a future, two bad futures, before me-- one in another world, one in this world--if I persisted in not changing my way of life. In this world, I should die on the scaffold.