It required only that a single man should recognise him. Christophe Rostan might change his name, alter his attire, pass himself off as another prisoner or as a soldier; yet at the conclusion of all his contrivances, he unfailingly met an eye that cast him back into his own history. At Rochefort, a guard remembered him despite his mustaches. A few years later, it was a fellow convict who singled him out. Between these two moments of recognition, he had surmounted obstacles far more formidable than a familiar face.
Within the gaolhouse we picture on the evening of 4 March 1820, a clerk rereads the notation inscribed upon a transfer warrant. The prisoner is to be conveyed to the Île d'Oléron. The man had declared himself a deserter from a colonial battalion; the orders naturally followed this intelligence. A guard passes, halts, and looks more closely. The destination entered upon the sheet has not changed. Yet he whom they thought to dispatch thither has just changed his name.
The Soldier Returned to the Galleys
Rostan had plied several callings: a stocking weaver, a public scribe, and subsequently a soldier. At the age of nineteen, he had been sentenced to ten years of hard labour for complicity in burglary with breaking and entering. The 1827 gazette account that traces his career provides no date for this initial judgment. It next reveals him confined at Rochefort, then transferred to Lorient on 14 June 1818. He was thus acquainted with multiple places of detention before attempting to persuade his gaolers that he belonged to an entirely different class of captive.
He broke out of Lorient in 1820 and reached Nantes in the company of a woman, pushing on to Varades, near Ancenis. Apprehended by the gendarmerie, he furnished an assumed name and avowed himself a deserter. He did not ask them to believe in his freedom; he merely offered his captors another pretext for holding him. This explanation would have allowed him to proceed towards a military destination had his passage through Rochefort not brought him once more before someone acquainted with his features.
This recognition arrested the projected transfer. He was returned to the bagne, placed in the double chain, and, on 7 June, sentenced to three additional years. The first disguise of his identity had failed to efface what a guard had preserved in memory. For an administration that moved men alongside their paperwork, such a recollection proved decisive intelligence; for Rostan, it signified an inexorable return to the very ground he had sought to put behind him.
The Money of the Other Convicts
Towards the close of 1823, a door of the general storehouse was forced. Two convicts had hidden their savings there; three hundred and ninety francs vanished. These men must be accorded their rightful place in the affair. The bagne contained not merely warders, convicts, and the stores of the arsenal. Certain prisoners also possessed a small hoard, set aside by their own industry, which another might wrest from them.
Suspicion fell upon Rostan. He was reputed to be in debt to his fellows and penniless; yet he was said to have recently exchanged gold coin. A search brought to light several pieces concealed within his shoe. His replies were deemed evasive. This convergence of circumstances might have given the despoiled men the conviction that they knew the culprit; yet it proved insufficient for the court. Rostan was discharged of the accusation for want of evidence.
In our scene within the storehouse, one of the two men takes up a tool he had left beside his former hiding place. He hesitates before laying it in the selfsame spot. The others labour on; he cannot know which among them have heard tell of the search of the shoe. Naming a man might afford him an explanation, but never his money. He ends by slipping the tool closer to his person, resuming his task with an attention that is no longer bent solely upon his labour.
The chronicler was to return to this theft when a subsequent flight appeared to pursue an analogous design. Yet his deduction does not amount to a fresh conviction. A reputation may cast over every subsequent gesture the shadow of an earlier suspicion; it cannot supply what was wanting at the bar of judgment. Rostan might stand condemned in other affairs while remaining legally cleared of this one.
The Clothes from the Ropery
In June 1824, a bolt of stolen sailcloth was discovered upon him. He concealed himself within the precincts of the general storehouse, where he remained undiscovered for two days. He was at last recaptured as he attempted to cross into another courtyard. On 9 July, the court sentenced him, for the theft and the attempted escape, to eight years of hard labour and to the branding reserved by the judgment for such punishment. He was once more locked away; his thirst for flight had not been dulled by the penalty.
On 21 July, while at labour, he escaped once more and succeeded in remaining hidden within the ropery until nightfall. The vast workshop, once deserted, afforded him something more than mere shelter. In the offices and adjoining rooms, he laid hands upon clothing: a frock coat, a cap, a pair of trousers. He ultimately made his way into the town. The prisoner had not merely changed his ground; he had acquired the means to offer anyone he might cross the figure of a man engaged in ordinary affairs.
The town gates stood open. Rostan did not make immediately for the countryside. The account places him during the morning near the victualling storehouse, where stood a chest destined to pay the labouring convicts. The correspondent imputes this presence to the temptation of a further theft. Such is his interpretation of the observed conduct; we possess no admission from Rostan disclosing the true motive for his lingering.
Towards noon, he secreted himself beneath a staircase of the establishment. A workman, having marked his movements, gave the alarm to his fellows. A search was conducted and Rostan discovered. The liberty won during the night had closed in upon him within a precinct where he ought never to have been found. On 11 August 1824, these latest acts earned him a sentence of hard labour for life.
In the office of our following scene, the owner of a purloined garment examines that which has just been restored to him. He holds it by the shoulders, seeks any rent in the cloth, then folds it without trying it on. Someone had passed part of the night within this fabric to become another man. He might wish to ask where it was found, but his companion is already speaking of locks to be repaired. The ropery must resume its service.
The Man the Sack Could Not Conceal
The authorities petitioned for Rostan’s transfer to Brest. Pending the order, he was stationed near the ward door, heavily ironed and exposed directly to the eyes of his keepers. The removal sought by the authorities was intended to resolve a problem their ordinary arrangements could no longer master. Rostan, for his part, was to attempt his departure before they could convey him away.
On 2 September, he succeeded in quitting the ward and subsequently the bagne by assuming the appearance of a convict on fatigue duty. A sack carried across his shoulders concealed a portion of his face; his garb did not immediately attract the warders' attention. The familiar bearing of a man bowed beneath a burden opened a passage that his identity would have barred. He was already far off, relates the gazette, when a galley slave recognised him and hastened to denounce him.
On 7 September, a fresh decree imposed upon him three years of the double chain. The transfer then took place. Two gendarmes escorted him towards Brest, bound upon a cart. It is upon this road that the chronicle given by the article breaks off. The correspondent may count the flights, the sentences, and the years; he tells us nothing of what became of Rostan within his new prison. Nothing warrants the addition of a final escape, a release, or a death to this known end.
There remains a succession of images in which one believes at first to behold another man: the passing deserter, the labourer laden with timber, the townsman in altered dress, the carrier of a sack. In each, Rostan sought a place where his name would not be demanded. Physical barriers gave way at times; yet recognition brought him back repeatedly to that name.
The clerk of our opening scene, were he to return to his papers, might perhaps find therein the warrant that was to dispatch a deserter to Oléron. We imagine him setting this sheet apart from a docket he has been instructed to file away. There is scarcely anything to alter to relate another journey: a name, a destination, a few lines of script. Yet he is slow to return the document to its place. Between the two seaports, it is the selfsame man who is being transported.