The condemned man arrived upon the square and demanded to speak. All Paris had awaited his death; it was now compelled to await his disclosures. Cartouche, whom torture had failed to break, had just discovered a solitary scaffold standing before him. Thereupon began the depositions, the comings and goings, the nocturnal arrests. The man whose history they wished to bring to an end was suddenly opening that of scores of others.
The time is November 1721. For several weeks past, his name has filled the salons, the playhouses, and the magistrates’ dossiers. Men discern his hand behind every robbery, deem him shielded by high protectors, and ascribe to him an authority that renders each confederate a subject of his clandestine realm. This sovereignty among thieves owed much to fear; it owed no less to the secret relish an orderly city takes in recounting how a single man mocks the whole of its constabulary. The victims, naturally, found considerably less diversion in it than did the auditors.
Cartouche directed criminal enterprises, consorted with accomplices, and engaged in acts of violence that were in no way theatrical. Yet renown had already begun to clothe him in an existence far vaster than his own. Beneath a single name were subsumed petty larcenies, highway assaults, murders, and exploits whose true authors remained to be untangled. The chieftain became a convenient cipher; for the courts as for the inquisitive public, laying bare his network promised to explain a great portion of Parisian disorder.
His downfall came from within. Du Châtelet, a soldier and confederate, supplied intelligence to those who hunted him down. Contemporary accounts dwell upon this betrayal, which was all the more striking as the informer was no man of blameless virtue returning to duty. Barbier, an advocate and observer of Parisian life, himself imputes to him a hand in a murder. This charge must be preserved at its source; it suffices to demonstrate that the arrest was not related as the plain encounter of a culprit with honest folk. A man was purchasing his own deliverance by surrendering the rest.
On the 15th of October, Cartouche was taken. The minute circumstances of this capture soon furnished the town with a fund of witticisms and sudden turns; the essential object was secured: he who had been deemed elusive entered the Châtelet. Yet imprisonment, far from removing him from public scrutiny, brought the figure closer to the crowd. It was now possible to interrogate him, to observe his person, to record his speech. The model was possessed at last; it remained only to reproduce it.
The actors let no time slip by while the occasion was hot. By October, Cartouche already had his doubles upon the Parisian boards. Spectators could applaud the brigand while magistrates were preparing the indictment of his crimes. Thus, almost at the very same hour, one and the same man offered a menace to public safety and a receipt to the box-offices. The affair laid bare an embarrassing rivalry: justice sought to produce an example; the spectacle had already produced a star.
Barbier notes the triumph of the two comedies without wondering long at this singular proximity. His journal possesses in this regard a precious candour: the business of the Palais de Justice, the King’s festivities, scandals, and public executions jostle one another there just as they did in common talk. Cartouche was not alone in occupying the minds of Paris. He held there, nonetheless, a place whose consequence disquieted his gaolers. The prisoner’s celebrity threatened to nourish the admiration that his capture was intended to destroy.
On the eve of All Saints’ Day, he was secretly transferred to the Conciergerie, into the Montgomery Tower. The removal was effected by night. The chronicler insists upon the secrecy, the precautions taken, and the contrast between decent sustenance and a redoubled guard. This prisoner over whom the city fought in its storytelling had to be made once more a man severed from the world, powerless to escape it either through his own cunning or through the aid of those whose interest lay in keeping him from the interrogatories.
The inquest broadened. Barbier then counted forty-seven detainees, men and women, and reported fresh captures. It was no longer merely a matter of establishing the chieftain’s deeds, but of pursuing the connections opened by confessions and denunciations. Every name brought the prospect of a confrontation; every confrontation threatened to deliver several others. The confederacy, once so formidable when it enabled joint action, became a fatal weakness the moment the word of one could immure his fellow.
The Tournelle of the Parlement laboured upon the trial. The requisitions pointed to capital punishment; the decree was pronounced on the 26th of November. It would be deceitful to cast these proceedings in the mould of a modern trial, with a public defence unfolded before the gaze of a courtroom. The preliminary inquiry remained locked within the rules of its age, and the condemned man was yet to undergo the question prior to execution. They demanded of his flesh what his lips had refused to surrender.
On the 27th of November, he endured torture without making the expected disclosures. Upon the Place de Grève, a vast concourse had assembled. Rooms overlooking the spectacle had found takers; curiosity already had its tariff. Several executions were appointed to take place. Yet delays mounted, daylight dwindled, the preparations altered, and when Cartouche was led forth, he saw only that which was reserved for him. He demanded his reporting judge, Arnaud de Bouëx. He was conducted to the Hôtel de Ville.
Wherefore did he speak then? Barbier reports two explanations: disappointment at seeing no one attempt his rescue, or the influence of the confessor. He inclines toward the former. We are under no obligation to choose in his stead, still less to transform a conjecture into an authentic final thought. The fact itself is sufficiently striking: the depositions occupied the night and dragged on until the morrow, while carriages brought fresh suspects and the curious lingered upon the square.
The chronicler adds details of an apparent composure: a repast, one draught refused in favour of another, the request to see once more a woman to whom the condemned man wished to bid farewell. These anecdotes contributed to humanising one whom the selfsame witness styled a scoundrel. They must remain reported relations, without causing us to forget what was transacting in the neighbouring chambers. While one man prepared for death, his words were exposing other lives to arrest and judgment.
According to Barbier’s journal, Cartouche was executed on Friday, the 28th of November 1721. The proceedings against his associates went forward. The end of the chieftain did not close the dossiers he had opened during his final night; neither did it make an end of the figure whom the stage and popular narratives had established among Parisian celebrities. The body could be destroyed. The name already possessed too many who made their living by it.
Wherefore this affair cannot be reduced to the death of an audacious thief. It displays a network undone by its own ties, a magistracy dependent upon self-interested disclosures, and a city transforming its terror into an amusement before even hearing all the victims. Cartouche had long lived upon the goods of others. After his capture, many began to live upon him.