The wall had been scaled. It was beyond the wall that Jean Arigonde lost his liberty once again, upon the path leading to the river. He had succeeded in shedding his irons, quitting the timber yard, and keeping pace with his companions in their flight; yet he had not gained sufficient ground for the water to put a barrier between them and their guards. At Rochefort, in May 1827, a few moments more would have altered the course of his existence. Their loss was to add years to his sentence.
In the courtroom as we may imagine it some weeks later, a man seeks his age upon a sheet of paper. Twenty-two years. He then looks up at the prisoner standing alongside four fellow convicts and returns to the figure, as though he might have misread the line. The young man speaks with ease; yet his garments designate him before ever he opens his lips. The yellow and the red draw every eye. He has been clad in the livery of a danger that must henceforth be watched for wherever he may stand.
The Peddler and the Jewels
Jean Arigonde was born in Carouge, Switzerland. He was plying the trade of an itinerant peddler in Toulouse when the first conviction recorded in the press account cut short this wandering existence. On 14 May 1824, at nineteen years of age, the Assize Court of Haute-Garonne condemned him to fifteen years of hard labour for complicity in a nocturnal theft of jewels, committed by means of housebreaking and false keys. The newspaper account furnishes neither the depositions nor the precise share he took in the enterprise. It records merely the judgment and the departure for the penal hulks.
At such an age, fifteen years spanned a duration almost as long as the life he could remember. Henceforth, he was bound to labour in a naval port, under ceaseless watch, moving only to the rhythm of permitted paces. The man accustomed to roaming the roads to sell his wares now found himself confined within a perimeter where every stray step might constitute an infraction. There were still goods, workshops, burdens to be borne; but one no longer moved amongst them on one’s own account.
We may picture a morning’s labour prior to his first flight. A free workman points out where a load is to be set down; Arigonde gazes past the appointed spot, toward the men passing in and out of the gates. The workman repeats his command, believing he has not been heard. The convict resumes his motion. This momentary distraction left no trace in the official dossier; it merely allows us to linger for an instant beside a young man for whom the sight of an open passage had never ceased to signify a possibility.
The Freedom That Led Back to the Dock
On 18 July 1825, Arigonde made his escape. The following month, on 17 August, a correctional tribunal in Angoulême sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment for the theft of a watch in an inn. Between these two dates, the newspaper leaves an empty space that one might easily furnish with taverns, pursuits, and chance encounters. It says nothing of them. All that reaches us of this brief liberty amounts to another object taken from another man, followed by a fresh sentence.
Subsequently recognized as an escaped galley slave, he was conducted back to Rochefort. On 8 October, the maritime tribunal visited upon him three additional years for his July flight. Thus, the escape had not merely failed to deliver him from his original sentence. A theft committed outside the bagne and the very fact of having broken out had produced two new judicial determinations. With each return, the horizon of his future seemed to recede a little further.
On 27 March 1826, he fled once more. During the night of 28 to 29 March, at Mauzé, near Niort, he committed a theft for which the Assize Court of Charente-Inférieure condemned him, on 11 July, to twenty years of hard labour, taking into account his status as a recidivist. On 18 September, having been returned to the hulks, he received a further three years for the escape. The succession is dry and austere in the writing. It was no less so in the documents produced against him: a flight, a theft, a conviction, a return.
These facts forbid us from painting Arigonde as an innocent persecuted merely for seeking to breathe the air of freedom. Nor do they compel us to read into each evasion a wanton desire to defy his gaolers. The recorded sentences recount the acts for which he was punished; they afford no insight into what he hoped for at the moment of taking flight. The newspaper correspondent marvels at his ease and daring, then scoffs at what he terms the squandering of his youth. Between these two appraisals, the young man continued to seek an exit.
In our evocation of his return, a clerk compares an earlier physical description with the one just handed to him. He recognizes the name before lifting his eyes. He must append the new ruling to those that already crowd the sheet. Arigonde waits before him. The clerk bids him speak louder to verify a detail; the prisoner complies, and that clear voice renders momentarily more uneasy the clerk’s task of prolonging his servitude upon paper.
The Timber Yard of 29 May
On 29 May 1827, Arigonde was at work stacking timber at the far end of the port, close to the perimeter wall. The gang numbered some thirty-six pairs of convicts. This labour brought men, materials, and the wall within immediate reach of one another. Seizing a propitious moment, five prisoners undertook to flee together. The chronicle emphasizes the swiftness of their action; it reveals neither their preparations nor the words in which they resolved to try their fortune.
They slipped their irons and made use of the yard timber to scale the barrier. The last of them was spotted in the act of crossing. The alarm sounded instantly. From that moment forth, it no longer sufficed to break out of the arsenal; they had to outrun men who knew precisely which way to give chase. The band had not secured the requisite lead. The fugitives were overtaken upon the riverbank. One of them, whom the article leaves unnamed, was seized in the water by a sailor in a skiff.
It is fitting that this man remain nameless. Arigonde is the figure the journalist chose to follow, and the temptation is strong to attribute to him the water, the struggle beside the boat, the final desperate effort. To do so would be to rob an unknown comrade of what the record never restored to him. We know that Arigonde was retaken with the rest. We do not know which of them reached the water.
In the timber yard, in our imagined scene of their return, the free workman looks upon the spaces left vacant. He is ordered to resume the stacking. He directs one piece of timber to be moved, then a second; the labour returns to its customary order. He recognized Arigonde among the men marched back, but takes care to utter no word before the guards. On the morrow, orders must again be given for the timber. He does not know whether they will be addressed to the same men.
What Three More Years Could Add
On 16 June, Arigonde appeared in the dock for this third escape. The tribunal pronounced an extension of three years to his term. His four companions, already under life sentences, received three years of the double chain. The distinction gave tangible form to two manners of punishment: for the latter, rendering detention more arduous; for him, postponing its termination yet again.
The newspaper attempted to tally all the sentences and announce the age at which Arigonde might hope to see his native land once more. Its reckoning contradicts itself in the figures it sets in print. It would be imprudent today to deduce from them any certain date of release. The penalties enumerated demonstrate the gravity of his plight clearly enough without our elevating a chronicler’s arithmetic to the status of a prison register. The final fact this article allows us to retain is the fresh conviction of June 1827.
We find in this source neither his discharge, nor any subsequent escape, nor his death. His history does not conclude upon a scaffold contrived to satisfy the demand for an ending. It halts beside a twenty-two-year-old man upon whom three more years have just been laid, and who is led back into the confines whence he fled.
The spectator of our opening scene takes up his paper once more. He had jotted Arigonde’s age in the margin, unsure of what he would do with the notation. Beside it, he writes down the duration of the new sentence. The two numbers remain separated by a blank space. He folds the sheet and pockets it; out in the open air, he is free to choose the path by which he will return home.