The man drawing up the official report paused mid-line. He had caught the sound of the door, then footsteps; nothing in this ought to have stayed a deposition, for a village house where the local authorities had gathered was no cloister. He was merely awaiting the confirmation of a name. Ought he to write Léger, as had been said ever since the mendicant friar’s arrival, or Spadoni, as it was now proper to designate the accused? The two names could no longer serve the same man. Yet the fellow had just devised a third manner of presenting himself: absent.
The clerk raised his eyes, his quill suspended above the paper, as the rural constable returned alone. In that single moment, the very nature of the affair was transformed. A counterfeit certificate had brought the authorities to make an arrest; the genuine proces-verbal was about to remind them that committing a man’s custody to paper does not suffice to hold him. The fugitive’s entire art lay in that fleeting interval between the deed accomplished and the deed recorded.
The setting was Racquinghem, in the Pas-de-Calais. The counterfeit religious had appeared there in June 1831. He was a man of some thirty years, with black hair and dark brows; his frock coat, trousers, waistcoat, and cravat sustained the selfsame sober hue with remarkable perseverance. Such attire proved nothing, but it was well calculated to spare a hurried glance the trouble of further inquiry. The man was soliciting alms for the Abbey of Le Gard. He called himself Brother Léger, and this station, borne from threshold to threshold, opened parlours to him long before anyone dreamt of opening his credentials.
The Ailing Brother at the Foot of the Page
His staunchest traveling companion was a parchment. Upon it, according to the gazette that has preserved the escapade, were set the signatures and seals of the Bishops of Amiens, Arras, and Cambrai. Three eminent authorities united to answer for a solitary petitioner: it was quite enough to lend assurance to him who asked and tranquility to him who gave. The hand could reach into the purse without the conscience taking fright at its own imprudence.
Nevertheless, one difficulty remained. A prospective benefactor might well know the abbey’s customary quester, a Brother Olympiade, whose very existence threatened to render the newcomer an embarrassment. The document had provided against such an encounter. A postscript announced that Olympiade had fallen ill and that Léger had been dispatched in his stead. The objection thus turned into a recommendation: if one recognized the true monk’s name, that familiarity appeared to confirm the document that temporarily set him aside. It was a modest precaution, yet it disarmed a great many minds.
The parchment unfolded, Léger had only to wait. The benefactor would run his eyes over the lines, pause at the names he recognized, and glance up at the visitor; the latter indulged him in the pleasure of verifying his own good deed. Then the paper was folded once more, and a purse sprang open. The quester went his way with his credential intact, primed for the next house. Nothing wore thin upon it save the creases. A single recommendation could thus reap a harvest of trust, provided those to whom it was exhibited did not compare notes too soon.
One must also consider what followed upon his departure. For him who had bestowed an alme, the matter might linger as a gratifying memory, fading into an unspoken doubt of which nothing was said. The gazette assures us that several dupes preferred not to boast of their mishap. Such discretion amounted to another source of revenue for the collector: the shame of those he deceived conspired to keep his roads open. He bore off their silver; he left behind the burden of inventing excuses.
A Question Too Far
At Racquinghem, the parish priest scrutinized the visitor and his document. Brother Léger stood waiting for the customary sequence: a few benevolent words, the paper returned, perhaps a coin. But the priest continued to read. His finger returned to the name of Olympiade. A clarification was sought, then another, and the postscript, which had hitherto spared the quester any lengthy explanation, could no longer mend matters. The tone remained polite. Spadoni watched his parchment in the hands of a man who appeared in no haste to relinquish it.
Such a scene unfolds with a peculiar slowness. The petitioner has tendered his paper to shorten explanations, and now the paper only multiplies them. What was meant to speak in his stead is thrown back at him in the shape of questions. He must now uphold, with his own voice, the authority he had borrowed from three bishops. Outside, the village continues its daily round; for him, the entire world narrows to a few lines of script.
The local magistrates were summoned. Brother Léger confessed his imposture. His name was Jean Spadoni, born in Italy; he was a peddler by trade, residing at Écourt-Saint-Quentin, in the arrondissement of Arras, where he had taken a wife. The hawker possessed an actual life which the purported friar had merely overlaid without extinguishing. As the particulars were written down, he became once more a man whom one could locate, seek out at his fireside, or bring before his neighbours to be identified. The false monk had travelled under the aegis of imposing and distant names; Jean Spadoni must now answer for his own. Every detail brought him one step nearer the bar of the court.
It remained only to draw up the formal report. While this was being done, the prisoner was entrusted to the rural constable, an eighty-three-year-old veteran named Vidoc. The chance of the name was later to make the fortune of the gazette. The charge laid upon him was of a less amusing nature: to keep solitary watch over a far younger man, unmasked, threatened with criminal proceedings, and capable of calculating at a single glance what chances a sprint across the fields might afford. One need not mock the warder to comprehend the captive’s calculation.
The Door Was Enough
Spadoni begged leave to step outside to relieve a call of nature. Having failed through authority, he resorted to civility. He was no longer soliciting alms in the name of an abbey, but an ordinary indulgence—the sort one man grants another without suspecting he is handing him the open countryside.
The door was unlatched; Spadoni took to his heels. The constable hobbled out to see which way he had run, without venturing to give chase. He had then to retrace his steps to the gentlemen busy with their pens, to cross once more the threshold the prisoner had turned to such advantage, and to face men wholly absorbed in setting down the exposure of the forgery. Their first glance fell behind him. An explanation was awaited. Everything that had been unearthed at the cost of so much scrutiny had vanished in the time it took to step through a door.
The clerk reread what he had already set down upon the page. The civil registry was there, the assumed alias, the stratagem; the deposition appeared in order. It wanted only the event that had just occurred, and that addition overturned the whole. The constable was obliged to repeat how the prisoner had craved permission to step out. The quill moved, halted, and moved again. In the very chamber where all had been so well pleased with themselves for confounding a swindler, they were now left searching for someone to bear the blame.
The gendarmerie searched for Spadoni without success, at least up to the accounts published on February 2, 1832. Summoned to appear on January 12 before the correctional tribunal of Saint-Omer, he failed to present himself. A sentence of two years’ imprisonment was pronounced in contumaciam for the attempt to obtain money by means of a certificate he knew to be forged. The conviction was thus of a determinate duration, whereas the convict’s absence remained without any foreseeable term. The court had determined what Spadoni owed to justice; it remained only to lay hands upon the debtor who declined to pay.
The journalist, for his part, reached his conclusion by other means. He credited the aged constable with a pun upon this brother who was decidedly too light on his feet—brother Léger—while taking care to note that he could not vouch for the jest. That grain of doubt deserves to outlive the witticism. Perhaps Vidoc had said nothing of the kind; perhaps he had principally been asked why he had been left alone. In the miniature theatre of the judicial news item, the fugitive kept his legs and the watchman was given the punchline.
As for the benefactors, they vanish almost entirely from the chronicle. Their coin, their credulity, and the suspicion that might henceforth attend any legitimate visitation yielded no such happy turn of phrase. Yet it was at their doors that the tale had begun, and it was there that it left its mark: the next collector, bearing this time an authentic certificate, would perhaps find purses less readily unstrung. Spadoni had carried away far more than a handful of alms.