ALL HUMAN societies have what is known to the theatre as an ‘under-stage’. The social earth is everywhere mined and tunnelled, for better or for worse. There are higher and lower galleries, upper and lower strata in that subsoil which sometimes collapse under the weight of civilization, and which in our ignorance and indifference we tread underfoot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine very near the surface. The catacombs, that dark cradle of primitive Christianity, lay waiting for the chance to explode under the Caesars and flood the world with light. For in the deepest shadow there is latent light. The volcano is filled with darkness capable of bursting into flame; lava at the start is black. Those catacombs where the first Mass was celebrated were not only the cellars of Rome, they were the under-stage of the world.
Beneath the social structure, that complex labyrinth, there are tunnellings of every kind. There are mines of religion and philosophy, politics, economics and revolution, galleries driven in the name of a theory or a principle, or mined in anger. Voices call from one gallery to the next. Utopias are born in these subterranean channels and spread their roots all ways. Sometimes they meet and fraternize. Rousseau offers his pickaxe to Diogenes, who lends his lantern in return. Calvin takes issue with Socin, the Italian heretic. But nothing can check or diminish the pressure of all these pertinacious activities, the huge concourse of energy seething in darkness, rising and falling and by slow degrees transforming the upper world from below and the outer world from within; a vast, secret turbulence. Society is scarcely aware of this process of burrowing which, leaving the surface untouched, gnaws at its entrails. So many different underground levels, different objectives, different harvests. And what comes of it all? The future.
The deeper one goes, the more unpredictable are the workers. At the level which social philosophy can recognize, good work is done; at a lower level it becomes doubtful, of questionable value; at the lowest level it is fearsome. There are depths to which the spirit of civilization cannot penetrate, a limit beyond which the air is not breatheable by men; and it is here that monsters may be born.
This descending ladder is a strange one, each of its rungs a platform where philosophy of some kind takes its stand and where its workers may be found, some divine and some misshapen. Below Hus there is Luther, below Luther Descartes, below Descartes Voltaire, below Voltaire Condorcet, below Condorcet Robespierre, below Robespierre Marat, below Marat Babeuf … and so on until, past the borderline separating the indistinct from the invisible, we are confusedly aware of shadowy figures that perhaps do not yet exist. Those belonging to yesterday are ghosts; those belonging to tomorrow are embryos. The mind’s eye dimly perceives them. This conception of the future is a vision for philosophers. A foetal world in the womb of the state, unimaginable in shape.
Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier are also there, in divergent galleries. Indeed, although these underground pioneers are all linked by an invisible bond of which they are nearly always unaware, believing themselves to be isolated, their works are very different, the light shed by each being in conflict with that of the others. Their life and work may be uplifting or it may be tragic. Nevertheless, whatever the gulf between them, from the highest to the most obscure, the wisest to the most insane, they have this in common: they are all disinterested. Marat is as forgetful of self as was Jesus. They leave themselves wholly out of account, being concerned with something else. Their eyes are all intent upon one thing. They are searching for an Absolute. The greatest may have all Heaven in his eyes; but the least of them, no matter how confined, still has in his gaze a pale glimmer of the Infinite. So, no matter what he does, we must honour the man who bears this sign – a gleam of starlight in his eyes.
But there is another sign, that of the eye wholly without light.
It is here that evil has its source. Before the eye that sees nothing we must take heed and tremble. The social order has its black moles.
Below all those mines that we have spoken of, the many galleries, the huge complex of progressive or Utopian tunnellings, far deeper in the earth, lower than Marat, lower than Babeuf, far, far below all this and having no connection with those higher levels, there is the lowest level of all, the ultimate underworld. It is a terrible place, the pit of darkness, the stronghold of the blind. It is the threshold of the abyss.
Here disinterest vanishes and a demon is manifest – the spirit of each for himself. The sightless monster howls and scrabbles in the darkness. Anarchy lurks in that void.
The wild figures, half-animal, almost ghosts, that prowl in the darkness have no concern with universal progress, neither the thought nor the word is known to them, nothing is known to them but the fulfilment of their individual cravings. They are scarcely conscious, having within them a terrifying emptiness. They have two mothers, two foster-mothers, ignorance and poverty, a single guiding principle, that of necessity, and a single appetite, for all the satisfactions of the flesh. They are brutishly and fiercely voracious, not in the manner of a tyrant but of a tiger. By an inevitable process, by the fateful logic of darkness, the child nurtured in misery grows up to be a criminal, and what arises out of that lowest level of society is not the confused search for an Absolute but an affirmation of matter itself. The man becomes a beast of prey. Hunger and thirst are the point of departure and to be Satan is the final goal. It was from this cavern that Lacenaire, the poet and assassin, emerged.
We have glanced in previous chapters at a compartment on a higher level, the political, revolutionary, and philosophical world of the students. As we have seen, it is essentially a high-minded, upright, and honest world, capable of error certainly, and guilty of error, but deserving of respect since the error embraces heroism. The objective in that part of the mine may be summed up in a single word – progress. We must now peer more closely into the horror of this deepest depth.
There exists beneath the social structure – and, we must insist on this, it will continue to exist until ignorance has been done away with – a great cavern of evil. It is below all the other workings of the mine, and hostile to them all, infused with a hatred that admits of no exceptions. It knows no philosophers; its knives have never cut a pen; its darkness is utterly removed from the sublime dimness of the writing room. The blackened fists clenched beneath that stifling roof have never opened to turn the pages of a book or newspaper. The very revolutionaries on the higher level are aristocrats and exploiters to the denizens of that world, which has but a single aim, the destruction of everything.
Everything, including those higher levels which it execrates. In its hideous pullulation it undermines not merely the existing social order, but all philosophy and science, all law and human thought, civilization, progress, revolution itself. Its names are simply theft, prostitution, violence, assassination. It is darkness seeking chaos, walled-in with ignorance.
All the other levels seek to abolish it. That is what all their strivings amount to, their philosophy of progress, their contemplation of the Absolute no less than their striving to improve existing conditions. Do away with that cavern of ignorance and you destroy the burrowing mole which is crime. We can sum it up in very few words. The real threat to society is darkness.
Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same void, inhabit the same flesh, are dissolved in the same ashes. But ignorance infecting the human substance turns it black, and that incurable blackness, gaining possession of the soul, becomes Evil.
During the years 1830–35 a quartet of villains, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, and Montparnasse, ruled the underworld of Paris.
Gueulemer was an unsung Hercules whose dwelling was the sewer under the Arche-Marion. He was six feet in height, with muscles of steel, a cavernous chest, the frame of a giant and a bird-brain. To see him was to think of the Farnese Hercules clad in cotton trousers and a velveteen jacket. With his monumental build he might have been a subduer of monsters, but he had found it simpler to become one himself. Something less than forty years of age, flat-footed, with close-cropped hair, shaggy cheeks and a small beard, it is not hard to picture the man. His muscles cried out for work, his stupidity would have none of it. He was a man of aimless strength and a casual murderer. In origin he was believed to be a Creole. Probably he had served for a time under Marshal Brune, having been a labourer in Avignon in 1855. It was after this that he took to crime.
The physical frailty of Babet was in sharp contrast to the burliness of Gueulemer. Babet was lean and cunning, transparent-seeming but unfathomable. One could see daylight between his bones but nothing in his eyes. He professed to be a chemist, had been a bartender chez Bobèche and a clown in Bobino’s circus; and he had played in vaudeville at Saint-Mihiel. He was a man of affectations, a fluent talker who underlined his smiles and put his gestures in inverted commas. His present trade was selling plaster busts of ‘the Head of State’ in the streets, in addition to which he drew teeth. He had exhibited freaks at fairs, and owned, besides a voice-trumpet, a caravan bearing the legend: ‘Babet, dental artist, conducts scientific experiments on metals and metalloids, removes teeth, including stumps left behind by his colleagues. Price one tooth 1.50 frs., two teeth 2.00 frs., three teeth 2.50 frs. Do not miss this opportunity’ (which meant, have as many out as possible). He had been married and had children, but did not know what had become of either wife or offspring, having mislaid them the way one mislays a handkerchief. He read the newspapers, which set him apart in the world he inhabited. Once, in the days when he and his family had been travelling the roads in their caravan, he had read a story in the Messager about a woman who had borne a child with a calf’s head that seemed likely to live. ‘Worth a fortune!’ he had exclaimed. ‘Catch my wife being clever enough to produce a child like that!’ Eventually he had abandoned these pursuits to ‘take on Paris’ – his own expression.
As for Claquesous, he was darkness incarnate. He waited for nightfall before showing himself, creeping out of his hole at dusk and returning to it before daybreak. Nobody knew the whereabouts of this hole. Even after dark, in the company of his confederates, he evaded questions. Was his name really Claquesous? No, it was not. ‘My name is, Mind-your-own-business,’ he said. If anyone showed a light he put on a mask. He was a ventriloquist. Babet said,’ Claquesous is a night-bird with two voices.’ He was mysterious, roving and frightening. No one knew if he had a real name, Claquesous being a nickname, or if he had a voice of his own, since his belly spoke more often than his mouth, or even if he had a face, since no one had ever seen anything but the mask. He vanished like a ghost and reappeared as though he had sprung out of the earth.
Finally, Montparnasse, a sorry creature. He was scarcely more than a child, a youth of under twenty with a pretty face, cherry-lips, glossy dark hair and the brightness of Springtime in his eyes. He had all the vices and aspired to all the crimes, feeding on evil an appetite that hungered always for worse. He was an urchin turned vagabond, a vagabond turned desperado, smooth, effeminate, graceful, strongly-built, pliant and ferocious. He wore his hat with the left-hand brim turned up to display a lock of hair, in the fashion of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence. His tail-coat was of excellent cut but frayed. Montparnasse was a fashion-plate living in squalor and committing murder, and the root cause of all his crimes was his desire to be well-dressed. The first wench who had praised his looks had instilled blackness in his heart, transforming Abel into Cain. Finding that he was handsome, he wanted to be elegant: but the highest elegance is idleness, and idleness in the poor is another name for crime. Few night-prowlers were as much feared as he. At the age of eighteen he had several murders to his credit; more than one dead body lay behind him, face down with arms outstretched in a pool of blood. Hair waved and pomaded, a slender waist, a woman’s hips and the chest and shoulders of a Prussian officer, cravat meticulously tied, a flower in his button-hole, a murmur of women’s admiration accompanying him and a blackjack in his pocket – such was this flower of the underworld.
These four formed a single, Protean body, wriggling through the meshes of the law, evading the scrutiny of Vidocq ‘in diverse guises, tree, flame and fountain’, exchanging names and stratagems, vanishing into their own shadow, each the confidant and protector of the others, changing their outer aspect as one takes off a false nose at a masked ball, sometimes merging together to the point of being one person and at other times so multiplying themselves that they might be taken for a mob. They were not four men but a sort of four-headed monster preying wholesale on Paris, a monstrous embodiment of the evil lurking in the catacombs of society.
Thanks to their many and various enterprises, and their network of criminal contacts, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse had become in some sort the headquarters of villainy throughout the Département de la Seine. They were the setters of traps, the stabbers in the back. Persons desiring this kind of service, men with dark ambitions, applied to them. They put forward a project, and the foursome saw to it that it was carried out. They worked to specification, and were always able to find suitable assistants where additional manpower was needed, and provided the job covered the expense. Where the drama required a supporting cast they hired them, having at their disposal a company of small-time actors sufficient for any play.
They were accustomed to meet at nightfall, the time of their awakening, in the wasteland near the Salpêtrière. Here they took counsel together; with twelve hours of darkness ahead of them, they decided upon its use.
This four-man syndicate was known to the underworld by the name of ‘Patron-Minette’. In the old popular slang, which is fast disappearing, ‘Patron-Minette’ meant ‘morning’ and ‘Entre chien et loup’ meant ‘evening’; no doubt the name was a reference to the conclusion of their labours, daybreak being the hour when ghosts vanish and thieves disperse. They were always referred to by this name. When the President of the Assize Court visited Lacenaire in gaol he mentioned a crime which Lacenaire denied having committed. ‘Then who was it?’ he asked. Lacenaire’s reply was mystifying to the magistrate but intelligible to the police: ‘It may have been Patron-Minette’.
One may sometimes deduce the nature of a play from the names of the characters; in the same way, one may get some idea of the nature of a gang. Here then are the names of the principal accomplices of Patron-Minette, names still to be found in the police archives:
Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille.
Brujon (there was a dynasty of Brujons, of whom mention will be made later).
Boulatruelle, the road-mender whom we have already met.
Laveuve.
Finistère.
Homère Hogu, a black man.
Mardisoir.
Dépèche.
Fauntleroy, alias Bouguetière.
Glorieux, an ex-convict.
Barrecarrosse, alias Monsieur Dupont.
Lesplanade-du-Sud.
Poussagrive.
Carmagnolet.
Kruideniers, alias Bizarro.
Mangedentelle.
Les-pieds-en-1’air.
Demi-liard, or Deux-milliards.
Et cetera.
We may omit the rest, which were not the worst. Faces can be put to all those names. They stand, not only for individuals, but for types, each representing a variety of the misshapen fungi growing in the underworld of civilization.
Those persons, wary of letting their faces be seen, were not such as one passes in the street. In daytime, wearied by the wild happenings of the night, they slumbered in the abandoned lime-kilns and quarries of Montmartre and Montrouge, and sometimes in the sewers. They went to ground.
What has become of them? They still exist, as they have always done; and so long as society remains unchanged, they will continue to be what they are. One generation will succeed another, born in that cavern noxious with the fumes that society exudes. Ghostlike they return and are always the same, only bearing different names and clad in different skins. The individual passes, but the race survives.
They have the same skills. From pickpocket to cut-throat, the race preserves its purity. They can spot the purse in a pocket, and the watch; gold and silver have a special smell for them. There are innocent citizens of whom one might say that they are born to be robbed; they recognize these and patiently pursue them. At the sight of a foreigner or a newcomer from the provinces they quiver in anticipation like a spider in its web.
Those men, if one encounters them or simply sees them at midnight in a deserted boulevard, are terrifying. They seem to be not men at all, but figures composed of living mist: as though they were a part of the darkness, having no other existence, and have only momentarily detached themselves from it to live a few minutes of monstrous life.
What is needed to exorcize these evil spirits? Light, and still more light. No bat can face the dawn. We must flood that underworld with light.