At the bagne of Toulon, two men answered to the same name. One had been condemned to hard labour, had escaped, and had been recaptured. The other had never ceased to protest that he had been mistaken for someone else. He had been laden with heavier irons because he was believed to be uncommonly adept at slipping them; he had been clad in convict red; he had been sent to the labour gangs. At last, amid jeers, he had learned to answer whenever Sautel was called.
His name was Ange-Lucien Duclos-Legris. He was a sailor and had not yet reached the age of twenty when they first began to strip him of his existence. To restore it to him, his papers, his memories, and his scars had not sufficed. It had taken the real Sautel returning to claim his place.
The Empty Pocket
Duclos came from Châteauneuf, in Finistère. His father and mother were dead; he had left only a sister and a maternal grandmother, from whom his seafaring life had long kept him parted. Since 1823, he had served aboard several vessels, first as a cabin boy, then as an able seaman. The Béarnaise, the Galathée, the Georgette: the names of these ships marked the stages of a youth measured out in departures. At Brest, an abdominal wound had interrupted his service in a ship of the line. Thereafter, he had gone to sea again.
On 28 October 1827, having disembarked from the Melayo at Marseilles, he was issued a travel pass for Quimper and funds for the journey. On 10 November, in Lyons, he put up at Perrachon’s inn, on the Montée du Griffon. The innkeeper examined his paper, inscribed the traveller in the register, and returned the pass. Duclos had thus proved his identity to a man whose name and house were known to the world.
Two days later, emerging from the theatre onto the Place des Terreaux, an altercation broke out between him and a soldier. The police intervened; the soldier made off; the sailor remained in the hands of the authorities. At the Hôtel de Ville, he discovered that his waistcoat pocket had been slit with shears and his purse stolen. The next morning, when his papers were demanded, he searched his jacket for his travel pass. It, too, had vanished.
The gesture that follows belongs to our imaginative telling: Duclos turns out one pocket, then the other, runs his hand along the lining, and begins again, though everyone present has already seen that he will draw nothing from it. The assurance with which he had announced the document now renders this rummaging mortifying. He would return to the inn, point out the room where he slept, produce a witness. Before him, the magistrates expect not a story, but an instrument of paper he no longer possesses.
A Man Recognized by Others
At the house of detention, an inmate named Mignot, remanded on a charge of theft, believed he recognized in him an escaped convict from Toulon. Duclos protested his innocence. Yet the report spread through the prison, and the authorities sent inquiries to the seaports: was an escaped galley slave named Duclos known to them? The replies returned negative. This did not restore his freedom. The correctional tribunal of Lyons sentenced him to three months’ imprisonment for vagrancy.
He served his term. Then, as an administrative police measure, he was conveyed to Paris. In May 1828, at the prefecture, two former galley slaves recognized him in their turn. This time, they bestowed upon him another name: Jean-Louis Sautel. One even swore to have been shackled to him at the bagne. What could a lad without papers set against a man who claimed to have shared his chain?
Sautel was real enough. Born in Nîmes, sentenced in 1822 to six years of hard labour for burglary with housebreaking and scaling, he had fled for the first time in 1824. Recaptured that very day, he had received three additional years. A second escape, in February 1828, had put the authorities once more upon his trail. There was thus a fugitive at large ready to receive the face of Duclos, and two men confident enough in their identification that the sailor was henceforth scrutinized entirely through the lens of their certainty.
The physical descriptions were compared. The hair was similar, the complexions alike pale. Both bore a scar above the right eye; yet in Sautel’s case it ran horizontally, whereas Duclos’s dropped lower and was more deeply scored. Both possessed a wound upon the abdomen, but the sailor could account for his through the hazards of his naval service. The legs presented further scars, though situated in different places. A tattoo upon the left arm completed the comparison: a religious image on the one, a sort of pedestal on the other.
By dint of fixating on the mere presence of a mark, men ceased to see what the mark actually was. Duclos’s long, gaunt visage bore little resemblance to the round face of Sautel. The stature, the age, the nose all differed. The former was nineteen years of age; the latter, twenty-six. The resemblance required a great indulgence from those who maintained it. They showed far more indulgence to the theory than to the lad who disputed it.
Truth Taken for a Trick
He was conducted to the Ministry of the Navy. He supplied particulars concerning his life, his voyages, his service. The official verifications confirmed them: a seaman named Duclos did indeed figure in the registers, and what he related corresponded with that man. After so many hostile recognitions, here at last was a record that recognized him aright.
Yet the police clerks devised an explanation. Sautel might have encountered Duclos, learned his story, and borrowed it. Thus, the accuracy of his details no longer proved the truth of his words; it merely demonstrated how meticulously his falsehood had been prepared. His own past was transformed into that of a stranger at the very moment he succeeded in having it verified.
The young man was seized with violent convulsions. In these, too, they saw only a feint. This scene, recorded by the chronicle, marks the point where the interrogation closes like a trap: to speak accurately, to protest, to break down under the strain—all can be bent to confirm the imposed identity. The two former convicts persisted in their assertion. Duclos was dispatched to Bicêtre.
He remained there for some ten months. He wrote occasionally to his kin, receiving no answer. On 21 April 1829, he was riveted to the iron collar for the chain gang. Because he was Sautel and had already twice made good his escape, they selected for him a stouter neck-piece and a heavier chain. The precaution appeared prudent to those who took it. It laid the escapes of another man directly upon his neck.
Having set out on 22 April, the chain reached Toulon on 20 May. Duclos was stripped, washed, clothed in the convict uniform, and then sent to labour after the customary rest granted to new arrivals. His companions mocked him when he refused to answer to his borrowed name. At length, he began to answer the roll. Yielding to that word allowed him at least to endure the passing moment; it did not mean he had ceased to claim his own.
Confronting the Man He Was Supposed to Be
While he was being brought thither, the true Sautel had been retaken. Apprehended on 13 March 1829, he had been returned to Toulon on 7 May, thirteen days before the sailor. The men whom so many official examinations had collapsed into one were now lodged within the very same establishment. The error ran headlong into a difficulty that no suspicion of cunning could long dispel: they were obliged to explain which of the two Sautels was superfluous.
An inquiry was instituted. Duclos and Sautel were interrogated and confronted. This time, it was no longer a question of forcing a young face into conformity with an old description. The other man was there. The discrepancies possessed a body, a height, an age. The confrontation established beyond doubt that Duclos had been the victim of a misapprehension.
Let us imagine only that suspended interval following this recognition: the sailor waits for someone to suit action to the word. He has already seen exact facts turned against him. He does not dash toward an exit; he watches those who hold the mastery of his irons. The only gesture that counts is the one that strikes them off.
They removed the irons and the livery of the bagne. On 3 June, he was brought out, to be conducted to the cells of the courthouse. He immediately requested the counsel of Maître Colle. He was then transferred to the civil hospice, where the chronicle leaves him, still held in detention. A public subscription was opened in Toulon to come to his assistance. His early release was hoped for; it had not yet been announced.
In the final scene we imagine for him, Duclos raises his chin slightly as he adjusts his clothes. The iron collar is gone. Men may once more call him by his name, look upon his face without searching it for the traits of a fugitive. At the door, nevertheless, he must still wait to be let through.