The man cried thief with a conviction that instantly drove back those who stood about him; Elisabetha, however, did not draw back at all, for nothing is more certain to mark out a guilty soul, amid a frightened crowd, than an eagerness to appear a stranger to the misfortunes of others.
She held by the hand a lad who gazed upon the stalls with the earnest appetite of children for whom almost nothing is ever bought. The despoiled merchant struck at his pockets. He had known them for so long that he seemed to reproach them personally for their treason; his purse had been there but a minute before, and the distance that now parted him from it seemed narrow enough that a shout might yet call it back.
“Bar the way!”
A vendor wheeled his cart across the lane. Elisabetha looked upon the obstacle, then upon the boy, whose fingers had tightened within her own. The child knew nothing; that was perhaps what threatened to undo them both, for he was about to ask aloud why she kept him from looking behind them.
She crouched down to pull up his stocking.
She Who Knew How to Labor
Before renown bestowed upon her the name of Schwarze Lies, Elisabetha Gassner had known those employments by which one subsists without ever quite managing to live: knitting, seasonal day-labor, the mornings that begin anew before one has finished counting what the preceding ones brought in. A family had formed around her; necessities had multiplied, and theft, at first mingled with other shifts, had assumed a place it would never again relinquish.
It would be false to turn every hunger into an excuse, and every poverty into a criminal vocation. Yet it would be almost indecently convenient to recount the life of a thief without ever inquiring into those years when she did not yet bear that name. Judicial sentences arrive at the close; they cast a fierce glare upon the deeds they chastise, whilst leaving in shadow the paths by which one arrived at them.
Gassner had acquired sufficient coin to taste also of a settled existence, of a hearth whose door one may push open without waiting for another’s leave to enter. Then the arrest of the pair, in 1781, shattered that settlement. There followed flight, Switzerland, the Tyrol, fresh wanderings, another companion. The road, which had once offered a prospect of deliverance, became the very shape of her life.
Upon the highway, one carries little. It is necessary, therefore, that this little yield much.
The Market Closes In
Elisabetha slowly tied the ribbon of the child’s stocking. The merchant continued to shout. A man had begun to scrutinize the passers-by with that self-importance so readily assumed by those whom chance, for a few moments, endows with the right to command their fellows.
“Let no one stir.”
The boy opened his mouth. She pressed a finger to his lips, then asked whether he was cold; he answered no, astonished that anyone should trouble over such a matter whilst the adults seemed occupied with far weightier concerns. She nevertheless drew from her basket an old garment and laid it across his shoulders. Beneath the cloth, she had wrapped that which must not be seen.
The improvised sentinel came up to them. He looked first at Elisabetha, then at the basket. She held it out to him without waiting to be asked. Within he found thread, a crust of bread, objects of so familiar a poverty that he felt almost ashamed to bestow his attention upon them.
“Did you see nothing?”
“A great many folk,” she replied. “It is market day.”
A few persons smiled. The merchant, for his part, was in no temper to relish the jest. He pointed at the child, then at the garment cast over him. Elisabetha felt the small hand slip from her grasp: the boy had understood that they were about to search him, and his fear, hitherto biddable, became a thing she could no longer govern.
She might have attempted one further movement, a distraction, that final dexterity to which men later attribute the genius of thieves whenever fortune has deigned to lend them a hand. She looked upon the boy, and did nothing.
The Price of the Deed
The coat slipped. The purse fell to the earth with a sound that all heard distinctly, though but an instant earlier one had been forced to shout to make oneself understood.
The merchant caught it up, counted, recounted; it seemed as though the very presence of his money rendered him still less capable of believing it had vanished. The man who had barred the passage seized Elisabetha by the arm. The lad burst into tears, not because he knew what awaited a thief, but because an unknown woman was now dragging him away from her who had brought him to the market.
Gassner’s roads closed in at last. Her life came to an end at Oberdischingen, where she was executed in 1788. Between the offenses and the penalty lies a judicial dossier from which posterity has retained chiefly those episodes best suited to the making of a legend; the rest—the family ties, the wanderings, the daily toil—is less easily preserved in common talk.
Men recounted, in particular, the robbery suffered by Count Schenk von Castell, a celebrated figure in the pursuit of malefactors. In the versions that circulated, the tale took on that perilous perfection which anecdotes acquire when long polished: the thief and her judge, a purse and a vengeance—everything seemed to fit together. Yet historical inquiry urges us to distinguish between actual participation and retrospective embellishment.
A fine story becomes no truer merely because it can be contained in a single sentence.
What the Boy Carried Away
We find our child once more, grown old enough now to earn his bread, seated one evening before a man recounting the marvelous cunning of Schwarze Lies. Around the table, they laugh at the despoiled count; they marvel at the tricks a poor woman was said to have played upon the mighty. The young man listens in silence. Of the market, he has preserved neither the value of the purse nor the countenance of the merchant, but only the shame he felt when the garment was lifted from his shoulders.
“She was never taken,” the storyteller maintains.
The boy grown to manhood moves his hand toward his glass, then draws it back. He might set them right. He might tell of the bread in the basket, the seized arm, that childish trust employed without asking his leave. But he understands that these details would find no place in a tale wherein every listener has come to rejoice in the humiliation of the rich.
He rises and pays for his drink.
At the door, someone asks why he does not remain until the end. He replies that he knows it. And, as laughter breaks out anew behind him, he mechanically checks the pocket where he keeps his few coins; then he lets his hand fall, ashamed once more of that gesture which no one, this time, had seen him make.