The prisoner did not inquire whether his lands had ever been found. He asked instead whether the man he had dispatched to administer them was happy in his marriage. In the infirmary of the Rochefort penal colony, Anthelme Collet had lighted upon a subject upon which he could still discourse with authority: the happiness of others, of which he readily fancied himself the architect. The estates may well have been wanting; the nuptials, however, had indeed taken place. In his eyes, there remained at least that much to place to the credit of the enterprise.
The scene reaches us through an advocate who signed with a few points following an initial, in the Gazette des tribunaux of July 6, 1828. He relates having seen Collet, observed him in the bagne, and questioned him in the infirmary. The convict answered him sparingly until the name of that former officer was recalled—the man turned steward to an undiscoverable fortune. Then, the visitor recounts, his eyes quickened with life. He took an immediate interest in the outcome of the match he had fostered, concluding that he had, after all, secured the happiness of a great many folk.
The Lands That Could Not Be Found
The officer had made his acquaintance during one of those interludes in which Collet changed his station as other men change their lodgings. If the chronicler is to be believed, he had taken up quarters in the house of a police commissary, to whom he delivered his own description with consummate assurance. The sanctuary possessed wit: one seldom searches with equal fervor for a man who appears to have placed himself under surveillance. Collet’s prudence lay less in concealing himself than in rendering suspicion an act of ill breeding.
He spoke of broad lands bordering the Rhône and of a steward recently departed. The veteran offered his services. Collet accepted, yet appended a condition: the man must marry. A gentlewoman whom the officer was already courting would serve admirably; such an alliance, he declared, would furnish an additional pledge of the future steward’s permanence. Thus did the falsehood concerning the estates lean upon a genuine inclination. It was no longer obliged to engender the desire from whole cloth; it needed only to assign it a destination.
In the parting scene we imagine, the newly made husband folds his letter of credit with a scrupulous care to which his wife attaches grave importance. The paper contains their future and must remain unblemished. They have spoken of the house they shall inhabit, the callers they shall receive, the quiet habits they may at last assume. The soldier hesitates over where to keep the document, then slips it close against his breast. That small gesture reassures his wife: to her, he appears already to be discharging the duties of his new office.
Yet the narrative of the Gazette abandons the traveler to his pursuit of the estates. It names neither the officer nor the lady, supplies no marriage certificate, and does not attend their settlement. The chronicler’s jest resides entirely in this chase after domains that recede in the exact measure that one advances. In the hospital, Collet chose the other half of the tale: two souls had been wedded through his good offices. He struck from the ledger that which he had never possessed.
The Man Called Monseigneur
To render intelligible the reputation enjoyed by this convict, the advocate unfolds a prodigious career. The son of a carpenter from Belley and a former soldier, Collet is said to have become, in turn, a high dignitary of the Church, an inspector, a surgeon, and a teaching friar. The chronicle gathers these appointments with a swiftness that lends them the air of a pageant; we possess no archival rolls of these commissions here, precisely because fabricated commissions lie at the heart of the imposture related.
The episode at Nice remains the most dazzling. Collet is alleged to have forged a papal bull, donned a violet cassock, and received the honors due to a bishop. The gazette even credits him with ordinations and the triumph of a sermon borrowed from Bourdaloue. At the moment the gendarmes arrived to apprehend him, he is said to have bestowed his blessing upon them and passed straight through. One must leave this admirably arranged egress to the narrative that preserves it: a chronicle may easily turn an air of commanding authority into the final stroke of a scene for which it offers not a shred of proof.
Yet what the history lays bare demands no miracle. A habit calls forth a manner of speech; a manner of speech procures an introduction; that introduction then becomes the warranty offered to the next dupe. The spurious prelate was never left to sustain his character unassisted. All who had received him with honor found themselves committed, by the very warmth of their welcome, to the recognition of his dignity. To turn back would have cost each man a portion of his own credit.
The Prefect’s Dinner
The military persona obeys, within the article, the very same principle. A forged commission allegedly permitted Collet to pass himself off as an inspector general. He examines registers, requisitions funds for the outfitting of an army, and dangles decorations. The Gazette announces considerable sums—as much as three hundred thousand francs received at Nîmes and an equal sum at Montpellier. These figures belong to the journalistic account; without cashbooks to consult, their luster must not be taken for verification.
The Prefect of Montpellier likewise received a flattering promise. Presently, the pretended inspector was taken into custody. The affair might well have ended there; in the advocate’s version, the desire to divert a company of guests provided an avenue of escape. The prisoner was brought to a dinner party so that those assembled might behold the rogue who had duped so vast a world. Awaiting his entrance, he was placed in a pantry, behind a door guarded by two gendarmes.
There happened to be a cook’s livery within. Collet donned it, seized two platters, and traversed the residence with the hurried air of a servant in the midst of his duties. Those who had assembled to laugh at his audacity afforded him, all unawares, the opportunity to furnish a fresh example of it. The whole scene hinges upon an exchange of parts: they awaited an impostor to gawk at; they stepped aside for a servant at his labors. When the true cook came seeking his attire, the dinner guests discovered that their entertainment had quitted the house.
We follow the anecdote here as the Gazette arrays it, adding neither a repartee from the prefect nor a certificate of authenticity. It relates that following this flight, Collet remained in the immediate vicinity of the man charged with his pursuit. That proximity rounds out the comic lesson: authority gazes into the far distance to discover a man who had learned how to live under its very eyes. The reader laughs alongside the chronicler; those who had entrusted their funds doubtless found it far less easy to savor the merry denouement.
A Role That Liberates No More
The chronicle fixes the judicial close of this career at Le Mans, recording a sentence of penal servitude for forgery. It mentions the year 1819, while repeating that eight years of captivity had since elapsed—a chronology that does not strictly accord with its publication in 1828. We confine ourselves to the fact that it then depicted Collet as a convict held at Rochefort, with twelve years of his irons yet to run. His tale of adventures terminates in a precinct from which the prisoner could no longer escape by changing his coat.
The advocate attributes to him a carefully constructed defense. Collet is said to have explained that he had never shed blood, struck down a wayfarer, nor picked a lock to sustain his existence. He ringed his deeds with the litany of crimes he had refrained from committing. Thus it remained possible to present oneself as a man of delicate sensibility in the midst of an indictment for forgery: the victims had opened their doors with their own hands, and that circumstance seemed almost capable of being turned against them.
In the bagne, such fine distinctions restored to him no measure of freedom. The visitor describes him as being kept from the work gangs at first out of precaution, then petitioning to join them so that he might receive the modest privileges attached to labor. The man to whom the chronicle ascribed the art of opening municipal coffers was reduced to soliciting his place in supervised toil. He retained, according to the same witness, a composed bearing and a pronounced disdain for certain of his fellow captives.
The interview in the hospital finally restores the narrative to a single voice. The former steward is no longer there to tell what he found at the journey’s end. His wife cannot answer the inquiry concerning her happiness. Collet still occupies their place by dictating what ought to be remembered. He had not reconquered the gate, but he could yet attempt to reconquer the tale.
In our final imagined scene, the visitor closes his notebook. He had asked the convict what had become of a swindled man; he departs with a brilliant bon mot upon a successful marriage. Before quitting the ward, he casts a backward glance at his notes and leaves a blank space after the word “steward.” It is the place for the answer that neither of the two men present possessed the power to give.