The Substitute
by
He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond.
He spoke thus to the judge:
“I am called Jean Francois Leturc, and for six months I was with the man who sings and plays upon a cord of catgut between the lanterns at the Place de la Bastille. I sang the refrain with him, and after that I called, ‘Here’s all the new songs, ten centimes, two sous!’ He was always drunk, and used to beat me. That is why the police picked me up the other night. Before that I was with the man who sells brushes. My mother was a laundress; her name was Adele. At one time she lived with a man on the ground-floor at Montmartre. She was a good work-woman and liked me. She made money because she had for customers waiters in the cafes, and they use a good deal of linen. On Sundays she used to put me to bed early so that she could go to the ball. On week-days she sent me to Les Freres, where I learned to read. Well, the sergeant-de-ville whose beat was in our street used always to stop before our windows to talk with her–a good-looking chap, with a medal from the Crimea. They were married, and after that everything went wrong. He didn’t take to me, and turned mother against me. Every one had a blow for me, and so, to get out of the house, I spent whole days in the Place Clichy, where I knew the mountebanks. My father-in-law lost his place, and my mother her work. She used to go out washing to take care of him; this gave her a cough–the steam…. She is dead at Lamboisiere. She was a good woman. Since that I have lived with the seller of brushes and the catgut scraper. Are you going to send me to prison?”
He said this openly, cynically, like a man. He was a little ragged street-arab, as tall as a boot, his forehead hidden under a queer mop of yellow hair.
Nobody claimed him, and they sent him to the Reform School.
Not very intelligent, idle, clumsy with his hands, the only trade he could learn there was not a good one–that of reseating straw chairs. However, he was obedient, naturally quiet and silent, and he did not seem to be profoundly corrupted by that school of vice. But when, in his seventeenth year, he was thrown out again on the streets of Paris, he unhappily found there his prison comrades, all great scamps, exercising their dirty professions: teaching dogs to catch rats in the the sewers, and blacking shoes on ball nights in the passage of the Opera–amateur wrestlers, who permitted themselves to be thrown by the Hercules of the booths–or fishing at noontime from rafts; all of these occupations he followed to some extent, and, some months after he came out of the house of correction, he was arrested again for a petty theft–a pair of old shoes prigged from a shop-window. Result: a year in the prison of Sainte Pelagie, where he served as valet to the political prisoners.
He lived in much surprise among this group of prisoners, all very young, negligent in dress, who talked in loud voices, and carried their heads in a very solemn fashion. They used to meet in the cell of one of the oldest of them, a fellow of some thirty years, already a long time in prison and quite a fixture at Sainte Pelagie–a large cell, the walls covered with colored caricatures, and from the window of which one could see all Paris–its roofs, its spires, and its domes–and far away the distant line of hills, blue and indistinct upon the sky. There were upon the walls some shelves filled with volumes and all the old paraphernalia of a fencing-room: broken masks, rusty foils, breast-plates, and gloves that were losing their tow. It was there that the “politicians” used to dine together, adding to the everlasting “soup and beef,” fruit, cheese, and pints of wine which Jean Francois went out and got by the can–a tumultuous repast interrupted by violent disputes, and where, during the dessert, the “Carmagnole” and “Ca Ira” were sung in full chorus. They assumed, however, an air of great dignity on those days when a newcomer was brought in among them, at first entertaining him gravely as a citizen, but on the morrow using him with affectionate familiarity, and calling him by his nickname. Great words were used there: Corporation, Responsibility, and phrases quite unintelligible to Jean Francois–such as this, for example, which he once heard imperiously put forth by a frightful little hunchback who blotted some writing-paper every night: