Bernard Claude asked when he was to be tried. He had been languishing for more than three months at Sainte-Pélagie, and this inquiry, put to a law student visiting the prison, seemed to call for a straightforward piece of research. It was merely a matter of tracing his docket, ascertaining where the proceedings stood, and perhaps hastening some bureaucratic formality. The student went to make inquiries. His search yielded an answer the prisoner had no reason whatever to expect: he had already been judged.
On May 6, 1831, Bernard Claude had been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in absentia. He had not appeared in court. Yet he had been entirely at the disposal of the authorities, locked away since February, utterly unable to go either to the tribunal or anywhere else. His captivity had prevented his appearance; his absence had been deemed sufficient to carry the sentence through.
A Journey for a Christening
He was an itinerant musician. His calling required him to wander, to seek out audiences, to secure each day the means of subsistence, and to provide for an elderly mother and an indigent sister. He had come to Paris to stand as godfather to a child at the baptismal font. Two days after his arrival, on February 15, a commotion near the Rue Saint-Martin deflected the course of his sojourn.
On the previous day, riots had broken out at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. In the streets, anger against the clergy found voices only too eager to swell the chorus. An ecclesiastic passed by; the crowd raised hostile cries. Bernard joined those shouting, “Death to the Jesuits!” This cry was no harmless traveler’s ditty: it carried a direct threat to those it singled out. The account later furnished by his advocate does not dispute this, even as it endeavors to explain the thoughtlessness of the act and the fever of the hour.
The National Guard intervened. The crowd dispersed. Bernard remained behind and was taken into custody. From the guardhouse he was conducted to the Prefecture of Police, and thence to Sainte-Pélagie. The godfather’s journey came to an end behind an iron door, far from the christening that had brought him to the capital.
In the vigil we imagine for him, he begins by reckoning the days against what he ought to have been doing at liberty. At such an hour, he might have earned a few sous; on the morrow, set out on the road; the following week, sent word home. Gradually, these modest plans recede into an irrecoverable past. It is no longer the itinerary of his journey that he seeks to salvage. He needs only to know how long they intend to keep him.
A Question Asked Between Two Doors
Toward the end of May, Édouard Degouve-Denuncques, a student of law, visited Sainte-Pélagie. Bernard approached him, recounted his arrest, and begged him to discover the reasons for so protracted a delay. This encounter marked the true beginning of his deliverance. No dramatic portent had heralded it: simply, a man who possessed the right to leave the prison agreed to concern himself with another who did not.
The student repaired to the parquet of the Procureur Général. A deputy public prosecutor made the necessary inquiries and unearthed the conviction of May 6. Bernard had been sentenced by default to three months in prison, even as he was waiting in his cell for the warders to fetch him for his hearing. Degouve-Denuncques was not content merely to report what he had found. On May 29, he addressed a letter to the Keeper of the Seals; his missive appeared in the issue of the Gazette des tribunaux dated May 30–31.
In it, he denounced an administrative oversight and the prolongation of a confinement he considered unlawful. The phrase was his own, advanced in a public petition, and not the ruling of a court summoned to redress the wrong. Yet his contention rested upon an incontrovertible physical reality: the man treated by the law as an absconder had been entirely deprived of his own person. He had remained precisely where the State had placed him.
The student demanded an inquiry, a swift trial, and broached the prospect of an action for damages against the responsible officials. He invoked as well the mother and the sister. For a musician whose livelihood hung upon his freedom of movement, every day behind bars compounded the loss. Three months were not to be measured solely by nights endured at Sainte-Pélagie; they were measured equally in the remittances that no longer reached his kin.
Degouve-Denuncques calculated that a retrial might yet consume several weeks. Such a prospect was enough to plunge the captive into despair: the discovery of the blunder did not bring about immediate release. Indeed, two or three days prior to the publication of the letter and its accompanying editorial note, Bernard had been transferred to La Force. The gazette noted that he was pleading insistently to be returned to Sainte-Pélagie.
We may readily conceive the cruel ambiguity of such a departure: to hear one’s name called, to gather one’s meager belongings, to follow the guards, only to realize that one is not being led toward the street, but toward another cage. This passage, imagined in its outward gestures, remains tethered to the documented transfer. It was not yet the threshold he longed for; it was merely a fresh address at which they would have to find him.
The Parquet Hastens Its Step
The public letter, however, elicited a swift reply. On the very day following its dispatch, according to the student’s account, the Minister acknowledged receipt and announced that he was calling for particulars. Procureur Général Persil likewise summoned Degouve-Denuncques to his chambers. Bernard had just been transferred from La Force to the Conciergerie. This time, the removal was accompanied by a pledge: he would appear before his judges on Wednesday, or on Thursday at the latest.
The student received this sudden zeal without relinquishing his irony. After so much lethargy, such dispatch appeared almost suspicious: would there be time to observe the necessary legal formalities? He nevertheless thanked Persil for seeking to repair the injury, and then returned to the question of an action for damages. The matter no longer concerned merely a seditious cry raised in the thoroughfare; it threatened to expose those who had left a prisoner waiting for his day in court after having him condemned in his absence.
It was then that Persil proposed another path. Would not Bernard prefer to petition for clemency, rather than run the risk of a second conviction? The Procureur Général offered to lay the petition before the Minister himself and to secure the royal signature within forty-eight hours. The administrative machinery that had forgotten the man was now capable of pledging a precise and narrow deadline.
To Bernard, the two courses presented very different faces. A new trial might shed light on what had occurred, but it carried the hazard of a fresh sentence. A pardon promised a swift release, yet fell short of an acquittal. A choice had to be made in haste between a case reopened before the magistrates and immediate relief promised for the coming days. Degouve-Denuncques accepted the proposal; it is his acceptance, and not any private colloquy with the prisoner, that his published letter preserves for us.
Forty-Eight Hours at Last
The student’s second letter, published on June 4, thanked Persil with a courtesy whose teeth remained distinctly visible. Some observers, he wrote in substance, would see in this official benevolence a dexterous means of escaping an embarrassing predicament. He professed himself too deeply committed to the outcome to adopt such an interpretation without ingratitude. Yet the compliment exposed precisely what it claimed to set aside.
Above all, he expressed the hope that the Procureur Général’s subordinates would never again place him in such a dilemma: to accept a pardon or to face a trial fraught with disagreeable consequences. These lines convey an unmistakable trial of strength; they do not prove a secret bargain, nor any formal renunciation by Bernard of his right to seek redress. The student had compelled the authorities to take his intervention seriously. The prisoner, for his part, was awaiting the tangible fruit of these negotiations.
It came. Beneath the letter, the editorial staff appended a notice stating that Bernard Claude had been restored to liberty on the previous day. After the petitions, the transfers, the promises, and the nicely weighed phrases, this brief notice finally altered what he might do with his own body. The issue of June 4 announced his release; it proclaimed neither his innocence nor any monetary indemnity. It simply stated that he was no longer detained.
To bring our narrative to a close, let us grant him only a brief pause beyond the prison gate. He walks forward a few paces, slackens his stride, and gazes about him without waiting for anyone to point out his direction. It remains for him to recover his effects, his trade, and the people to whom he must send word; we do not presume to decide in what order he will do so. The street had led him to prison when he fell in behind the shouts of others. He is now free to resume his walk, at his own pace, with no one commanding him to follow.