The condemned man demanded that the sheet be returned to him, not because it contained an error, but because the copyist had misplaced a comma; and the young man, who had prepared himself to meet a monster, felt before this grammarian’s scruple a confusion of which he was afterwards somewhat ashamed.
His name was Émile. A bookseller had engaged him to produce a fair copy of manuscript pages intended for the press—a task sufficiently ill-paid that he had not at first inquired to whom they belonged. He learned it only upon seeing the name inscribed upon the first leaf: Pierre-François Lacenaire. In the coffee-houses where Émile took his meals, that name was uttered with a mingling of dread and curiosity; certain patrons seemed almost aggrieved that a murderer should possess wit enough not to resemble their notion of what a murderer ought to be.
The man took back his page, traced a correction upon it, and handed it to him with polite composure.
“Now, it says what I intend.”
Émile looked at the sentence. It stated that circumstances had driven its author to his ruin.
A Place Apart
Lacenaire had killed. Jean-François Chardon and his mother were among his victims; Pierre Victor Avril had borne a hand in the double murder. These names, which amply explained why a man should find himself in the grasp of justice, were already insufficient to appease the public curiosity. People wished to know how he spoke, what he wrote, whether he knew fear, whether he knew remorse; from his bearing in the face of death, they seemed to await a revelation that would at last confer upon his crime a form worthy of the regard bestowed upon it.
In the Conciergerie, Lacenaire wrote memoirs and verses. We ought not to wonder that a condemned man should still seek to dispose of something: his time, his voice, the image he would leave behind. Yet such an endeavor assumes a singular power when the man knows how to turn a phrase, and when his readers, flattered to be admitted into his confidence, momentarily forget those who can no longer answer him.
Émile was yielding to the charm. He had little money, a literary ambition of which he spoke only to such friends as were incapable of mockery, and that weakness common to novices which consists in believing that every remarkable intelligence must be, at bottom, an ally. The condemned man asked his counsel; no free author had yet done as much.
The Unsigned Leaf
One evening, among the sheaf of papers entrusted to him, Émile found a page in another hand. The script was slower, more laboured, bearing cancellations that betrayed less an ambition of style than the sheer difficulty of saying precisely what was meant. It spoke of a woman awaiting her son; the name of Chardon appeared in the margin.
He asked the bookseller whence the paper had come. The man shrugged his shoulders. Papers accumulated upon papers; whatever might shed light upon the affair might perhaps find its place at the back of the volume. What mattered above all was that the transcription be finished before morning.
Émile spent the night over the leaf. He knew neither who had written it nor whether every circumstance was true. One thing alone was certain: the voice heard within it did not seek to be admired. It demanded that one remember a door, an expected meal, a severed habit. The dead, hitherto filed away in his mind under the dry term of victims, recovered that multitude of ordinary gestures of which a life is composed before another comes to dispose of it.
By morning, he had copied the page with greater care than all those that had preceded it.
The Rejected Correction
When he saw Lacenaire again, he presented him with the leaf. The man ran his eye over it, paused at the name set down in the margin, then laid the paper beside him.
“That is none of mine.”
“Yet it concerns the very same affair.”
“You confound the affair with my memoirs.”
The distinction was exact. It was indeed so exact that Émile remained without an answer. He had thought to bring a complement; he discovered that a narrative possesses frontiers, and that he who traces them may leave outside precisely what proves inconvenient to him.
Lacenaire asked him for the ensuing pages. His voice had not altered in the least. Émile would have preferred anger—an outburst that might have rendered the situation plainer; but the man showed himself merely annoyed that a clerk should debate the composition he had been hired to transcribe.
“Do you not wish it to be known, then?”
The condemned man raised his eyes.
“I wish you to do your work.”
Émile took up the sheaf. He was hungry, he was behind in his rent, and the bookseller would not pay him for a lesson in conscience. He resumed his labor, therefore, with this difference: that every sentence in which the narrator adjusted his circumstances henceforth made him hear the sound of a door being shut upon someone within.
What the Cover Did Not Tell
Lacenaire was guillotined on January 9, 1836. His writings appeared that same year under a title promising memoirs, revelations, and poems. The volume offered the reader several ways of entering into the existence of the condemned man; no binding was bound to warrant that one would find therein the rightful place of those he had sent to their deaths.
Émile received his wages on a rainy afternoon. The bookseller counted out the coin, reproached him for a few delays, and then asked whether he was at liberty for another copying task. He replied that he would be ready on the morrow. In the beginning, one rarely earns enough to refuse employment on the strength of the discoveries it has permitted one to make.
He had, however, preserved a duplicate of the unsigned leaf. For many years, he kept it among his own manuscripts, between the opening of a novel and a comedy whose second act no one had ever cared to read. When a friend one day asked why he mingled this clumsy prose with his own writings, he replied that it served to remind him to let characters speak who possessed no wit.
His friend took it for a writer’s jest.
Émile did not disabuse him. He knew now that a man may win the final word through his talent, and that it falls then to someone else to assume the less brilliant duty of restoring the forgotten names to the front page.