The Erckmann-Chatrian MEGAPACK ®. Emile Erckmann

have I done?” I asked one of my guards.

      He looked at his companion with a strange smile and said:

      “Hans…he’s asking what he’s done!”

      That smile made my blood run cold.

      Soon the carriage was enveloped in deep shadow and the hooves of the horses echoed under a vault. We were entering the Raspelhaus or Penitentiary…I was escaping Rap’s tender mercies only to end up in a dungeon from which not many poor devils have had the opportunity to extricate themselves.

      Big dark courtyards; lines of windows just like in a hospital decked with guttering; not so much as a tuft of grass or a festoon of ivy, not even a weathervane in prospect…such were my new lodgings. It was enough to make you tear your hair out by the fistful.

      The policemen, accompanied by the jailer, showed me into a temporary cell.

      The jailer, if memory serves me right, was called Kasper Schlüssel and, with his grey woollen bonnet, the stem of his pipe stuck between his teeth and the bunch of keys on his belt, he came over to me like the Owl god people worship in the Caribbean. He had his great round gilded eyes that can see in the dark, his curved nose and his bull neck.

      Schlüssel locked me up with a minimum of fuss like a person putting socks into a wardrobe, his mind elsewhere. As for me, my hands behind my back, head bowed, I stood there for more than ten minutes without moving from the spot. Then I looked at my cell. It had just been newly whitewashed and its walls were still empty of graffiti, apart from a gallows roughly drawn in one corner by the previous inmate. The light came through a bull’s-eye window situated nine or ten feet up from the floor; the furniture consisted of a bale of straw and a bathtub.

      I sat down on the straw, my hands around my knees, in a state of dejection beggaring belief.…

      Almost simultaneously I heard Schlüssel crossing the corridor. He re-opened the door of my cell and told me to follow him. He still had as his attendants the two shillelagh men. Resolutely I dogged his heels.

      We passed through long galleries lit here and there by internal windows. I perceived behind a grille the notorious Jick-Jack who was due to be executed the following day. He was wearing a strait jacket and singing in a raucous voice:

      “I am the king of these mountains!”

      When he saw me, he shouted:

      “Yo, comrade! I’ll keep a place for you at my right hand.”

      The two policemen and the Owl god exchanged smiles with one another while I could feel goose bumps up and down my spine.

      CHAPTER III

      Schlüssel shepherded me into a very dark, high-ceilinged courtroom, furnished with benches in a semi-circle. The appearance of this deserted courtroom, its two high windows protected by grilles, its crucifix of old oakwood stained brown on which the arms of Christ lay stretched out with the head sorrowfully resting on a shoulder, awoke in me I know not what religious fear in keeping with my present situation and my lips moved as they framed a prayer.

      I had not prayed for a long time, but misfortune always takes us back to thoughts of submissiveness… Man is such a small thing!

      Facing me, on a raised dais, two people were sitting with their backs to the light, which kept their faces shaded from me. I could see it was Van Spreckdal, however, by his aquiline nose picked out by a slanting reflection of the pane. The man with him was fat—he had plump, full cheeks and wore a judge’s robe, as did Van Spreckdal.

      Sitting below them was the clerk of the court, Conrad. He was sitting at a low table, tickling the lobe of his ear with the feather of his quill pen. He stopped when I arrived to look at me with curiosity.

      I was made to sit down and Van Spreckdal, raising his voice, spoke to me:

      “Christian Venius, where did you get this drawing from?”

      He showed me the nocturnal sketch then still in his possession. It was passed to me… After I had examined it, I answered:

      “I drew it myself.”

      This utterance on my part was followed by a fairly long silence; the clerk of the court, Conrad, was writing down my answer. I heard his pen hurrying over the paper and thought: “What does the question I have just been asked mean? It has no connection with the kick that I aimed at Rap’s back.”

      “You drew it yourself,” Van Spreckdal resumed. “What is the subject of it?”

      “It’s a subject out of my own head.”

      “You didn’t copy these details from somewhere?”

      “No, sir. I imagined all of them.”

      “The accused would do well to reflect on the truth of what he is saying,” said the judge severely. “Do not lie to the court.”

      I went red in the face and cried out exaltedly:

      “I have told it the truth.”

      “Write that down, clerk of the court,” Van Spreckdal ordered.

      The quill pen raced afresh.

      “And this woman,” the judge went on, “this woman being murdered on the edge of a well… Did you imagine her as well?”

      “I must have done.”

      “You’ve never seen her before?”

      “Never.”

      Van Spreckdal got to his feet as if indignant, then, sitting down again, appeared to consult in a low voice with his fellow judge.

      Those two dark profiles, silhouetted against the light-filled backdrop of the window, the three men standing behind me…the silence in the amphitheatre…all these things made me shudder.

      “What have they got against me? What have I done?” I muttered to myself.

      Suddenly Van Spreckdal said to my guards:

      “Take the prisoner back to the carriage. We’re leaving for the

       Metzgerstrasse.”

      Then he addressed me directly:

      “Christian Venius,” he cried, “the situation that you find yourself in is most regrettable…Pull yourself together and consider that if human justice is unbending…you can still seek the pardon of a merciful God…You can even merit it by confessing your crime!”

      These words stunned me like a blow from a hammer…I recoiled from them with arms outstretched crying:

      “My God! What a nightmare!”

      And I fainted.

      When I came round the carriage was rolling slowly through the street and another carriage was in front of us. The two policemen were still there. One of them, while we were still moving, offered a pinch of snuff to his colleague. I too automatically stretched out my fingers to the snuffbox, but he pulled it away from me sharply.

      I felt my face go red with shame and I turned my head to one side in order to hide my emotion.

      “If you look outside,” said the owner of the snuffbox, “we’ll have to put handcuffs on you.”

      “I hope the devil strangles you, you scurvy knave!” I thought to myself inwardly. And as the carriage had just stopped, one of them got down while the other held me back by the neck. Then, seeing his comrade ready to catch me, he pushed me out roughly.

      These infinite precautions to ensure I did not run away augured nothing good, but I still had not the foggiest idea of just how serious the accusation was that was hanging over me when a frightful incident finally opened my eyes to it and plunged me into despair.

      I had just been pushed into a low alleyway with broken and uneven flagstones. All along the wall there ran a yellowish ooze exhaling a fetid stench. I walked among shadows with the two men behind me. Further