By 1967 proceedings against me had lapsed. I left for France by myself; to keep the business running properly you had to have authority and courage and the power of making yourself respected, and only Rita could do that. She said to me, "Go and embrace your people in their own homes; go and pray at your father's grave."
I went back to France by way of Nice. Why Nice? Together with my visa, the French consulate in Caracas had given me a document verifying the lapse of proceedings; but as he handed the papers to me, the consul said, "Wait until I have instructions from France about the conditions under which you can return." They didn't have to spell it out. If I went back to the consul and he had received the reply from Paris, he would tell me I was _forbidden to enter the Département of the Seine_ for _life_. But I had every intention of making a trip to Paris.
This way I avoided getting the notification; and since I had neither received nor signed it, I would be committing no offense unless the consul learned that I'd left and told the police at the Paris airport to hand me the notification. Hence my two stops- I should arrive at Nice as though I were coming from Spain.
1930-1967: thirty-seven years had gone by.
Fourteen years of the road down the drain: twenty-two years of freedom, twenty of them with a home, which meant that I could go straight, reintegrated into society.
In 1956, there'd been a month with my people in Spain; then a gap of eleven years, though during these eleven years our many letters had kept me in contact with my family.
In 1967 I saw them all. I went into their homes, I sat at their tables, I had their children on my knee and even their grand. children. Grenoble, Lyons, Cannes, Saint-Priest and then SaintPeray, where I found Tante Ju in my father's house, still faithful at her post.
I listened to Tante Ju as she told me why Pap had died before his time. He watered his garden himself and he carried the cans for hours and hours over a distance of more than two hundred yards. "Just imagine that, my dear, at his ages He could have bought a rubber hose, but Lord above, he was as stubborn as a mule. And one day, as he was carrying these watering cans, his heart failed."
I could just see my father lugging those heavy cans all the way to his beds of lettuces, tomatoes and stringbeans. And I could see him obstinately persisting in not getting the hose his wife, Tante Ju, kept begging him to buy. And I could see him, that country schoolmaster, stopping to draw breath and to mop his forehead, advise a neighbor or give a botany lesson to one of his grandsons.
Before going to see his grave in the cemetery, I asked Tante Ju to go with me on his favorite walks. And we went at the same pace he used to go, following the same stony paths lined with rushes, poppies and daisies until a milestone or some bees or the flight of a bird would remind Tante Ju of some little happening long ago that had touched them. Then, quite delighted, she would recall for me how my father had told her about his grandson's being stung by a wasp. "There, Henri, do you see? He was standing just there."
I listened, with my throat constricted, thirsty for more, still more of the smallest details about my father's life. "You know, J u," my father had said to her, "when my boy was very small, five or six at the most, he was stung by a wasp when we were out for a walk-not once, like my grandson, but twice. Well, he never cried at all; and on top of that, we had the greatest difficulty keeping him from going off to look for the wasps' nest to destroy it. Oh, Riri was so brave!"
I did not travel on into the Ardèche; I went no farther than Saint-Peray. For my return to my village I wanted Rita with me.
I got out of the train at the Gare de Lyon, and put my bags in a locker at the station so as not to have to fill out a registration form at the hotel. And then, once more, there was the asphalt of Paris under my feet.
But this asphalt was not my asphalt until I was in my own district, Montmartre. I went there by night, of course. The only sun the Papillon of the Thirties knew was that of the electric lights.
And here it was, Montmartre: the Place Pigalle and the Pierrot Café and the moonlight and the Passage Elysee des Beaux-Arts and the heilbenders whooping it up and the jokers and the whores and the pimps that anyone in the know could recognize right off just by the way they walked, and the joints crammed tight with people at the bar. But all this was just my first impression.
Thirty-seven years had gone by, and nobody took any notice of me. Who was going to look at an old man of sixty? The girls might even ask me upstairs, and the young men might be so disrespectful as to elbow me out of my place at the bar.
Just one more stranger, a possible client, a provincial manufacturer-that's what this well-dressed, tie-wearing gent must be; a middle-class guy, another who had lost his way at this late hour and in this dubious bar. You could see right away he wasn't used to these parts; you could feel he was uneasy.
Sure I was uneasy, and that was understandable. These were not the same people or the same faces; at the first whiff you could tell that everything was mixed up now. Pigs, lesbians, flits, knowit-aIls, squares, blacks, and Arabs; there were only a few characters from Marseille or Corsica, speaking with a southern accent, to remind me of the old times. It was a completely different world from the one I had known.
There wasn't even what there had always been in my timetables with groups of poets, painters or actors, with their long hair that reeked of Bohemia and an avant-garde intellectuality. Now every silly little jerk had long hair.
I wandered from bar to bar like a sleepwalker, and I climbed stairs to see if the pool tables of my youth were still on the second floor, and I civilly refused a guide's offer to show me Montparnasse. But I did ask him, "Do you think that since 1930 Montmartre has lost the soul it had in those days?"
I felt like slapping him down for an answer that insulted my own personal Montmartre: "Oh, but Monsieur, Montmartre is immortal. I've lived here forty years, seeing I came when I was ten, and believe me, Place Pigalle, Place Blanche, Place Clichy and all the streets running off them are just the same and always will be the same forever."
I fled from the dreary bastard and walked along under the trees on the raised part in the middle of the avenue. From here, yes- as long as you didn't see the people clearly, as long as you saw only their shapes-from here, yes, Montmartre was still the same. I went slowly toward the very spot where I was alleged to have shot Roland Lepetit on the night of March 25-26, 1930.
The bench, probably the same bench repainted every year (a public bench might perfectly well last thirty-seven years with wood that thick), the bench was there, and the lamppost, and the bar over the way, and the half-closed shutters on the house opposite, they were still there. They were the first, the only, the true witnesses of the tragedy; they knew very well the man who fired that night was not me. Why didn't they say so?
People went by, unconcerned, never noticing this sixty-year-old man leaning against a tree, the same tree that had been there when the shot was fired.
Twenty-four I was in 1930, when I used to run down the Rue Lepic, that street I can still walk up pretty briskly. The ghost has come back in spite of you all; he's pushed back the gravestone under which you buried him alive. Stop, stop, you half-blind creatures passing by! Stop and have a look at an innocent man who was condemned for a murder on this very ground, before these same trees and these same stones-stop and ask these dumb witnesses, ask them to speak out today. And if you lean close, you will hear them whispering faintly, "No, this man was not here at half past three on the night of twenty-fifth to twenty-sixth March thirty-seven years ago."
"Where was he, then?" the doubters will ask. Simple: I was in the Iris Bar, maybe a hundred yards from here. In the Iris Bar, when a taxi driver burst in, crying, "There was a shot outside just now."
"It wasn't true," said the pigs. "It wasn't true," said the boss and the waiter of the Iris, prompted by the pigs.
Once again I saw the inquiry; I saw the trial: I could not avoid being brought face to face with the past. You want to live through it again, man? Nearly forty years have passed, and you still want to go through that nightmare again? You're not afraid this going back will make you long for a revenge you gave up ages ago?
Sit down there, on this same green bench, the one that saw the killing just opposite the Rue Germain-Pilon, right here on the Boulevard de Clichy, by the Clichy Bar-Tabac, where the tragedy began after the inquiry.
It's the night of March 25-26: half past three in the morning. A man comes into the Clichy and asks for Madame Nini.
"That's me," a tart says.
"Your man's just been shot in the guts. Come on; he's in a taxi."
Nini runs after the unknown guy, together with a girl friend. They get into the taxi, where Roland Lepetit is sitting on the back seat. Nini asks the unknown guy who told her to come, too. He says, "I can't," and disappears.
"Quick, the Lariboisière hospital!"
It was only during the drive that the taxi driver, a Russian, learned that his passenger was wounded: he had not noticed anything before. The moment his fare was unloaded at the hospital he hurried off to tell the police what he knew: he had been hailed by two men arm in arm outside 17, boulevard de Clichy: only one of them got in-Roland Lepetit. The other told him to drive to the Clichy Bar and followed on foot. This man went into the bar and came out with two women; then he vanished. The two women told him to drive to the Lariboisière hospital: "It was during the trip that I learned the man was wounded."
The police carefully wrote all this down; they also wrote down Nini's declaration that her boyfriend had played cards all that night in that same bar where she plied her trade, had played cards with an unknown man; he'd played dice and had a drink at the bar with some men, still _all of them unknown_; and Roland had left after the others, _alone_. There was nothing in Nini's statement to indicate that anyone had come to fetch him. He'd gone out by himself, after the others, the unknowns, had left.
A commissaire and a cop, Commissaire Gérardin and Inspector Grimaldi, questioned the dying Roland Lepetit in the presence of his mother. The nurses had told them his condition was hopeless. I quote their report; it's been published in a book written to pull me to pieces, with a preface and therefore a guarantee by a _commissaire divisionnaire_, Paul Romain. Here it is. The two pigs are questioning Legrand:
"Here beside you you have the police commissaire and your mother, the holiest relationship in the world. Tell the truth. Who shot you?"
He replied, "It was Papillon Roger."
We asked him to swear that he had really told the truth. "Yes, Monsieur, I have told you the truth."
We withdrew, leaving the mother beside her son.
So what happened on the night of March 25, 1930, was clear and straightforward: the man who fired was Papillon _Roger_.
This Roland Lepetit was a pork butcher and a pimp, who put his girl friend Nini out to work for him: he lived with her at 4, rue Elysee des Beaux-Arts. He was not really a member of the underworld, but, like all those who hung around Montmartre and all the genuine crooks, he knew several Papillons. And because he was afraid they might arrest another Papillon instead of the one who had killed him, he was exact about the Christian name. For although he was fond of living outside the law, like all squares he also wanted the police to punish his enemy. A Papillon, sure, but Papillon _Roger_.
Everything came flooding back to me in this accursed place. I must have run through this file in my head a thousand times; I'd learned it by heart in my cell, like a Bible, because my lawyers had given it to me and I'd had time to engrave it on my mind before the trial.
So there was Lepetit's statement before he died; and the declaration of Nini, his girl. Neither of them named me as the killer.
Now four men come upon the stage. On the night of this job they went to the Lariboisière hospital to ask:
(1) if the wounded man was in fact Roland Lepetit;
(2) what condition he was in.
The pigs were told at once, and they began a search. Since these men did not belong to the underworld and were not concealing themselves, they had come on foot and they left on foot. They were picked up as they were walking down the Avenue Rochechouart and kept in custody at the station in the XVIII arrondissement.
They were:
Georges Goldstein, 24; Roger Dorm, 24; Roger Jourmar, 21; Emile Cape, 18.
All the statements they made to the commissaire of the XVIII arrondissement station on the very day of the killing were cut and dried. Goldstein stated that in a gathering of people he had been told that a man called Lepetit had been wounded-shot _three times_ with a revolver. Thinking it might be his friend Roland Lepetit, who was often in that district, he walked to the hospital to find out. On the way he met Dorin and then the two others and asked them to go with him. The others knew nothing about the business, and they did not know the victim.
The commissaire asked Goldstein, "Do you know Papillon?"
"Yes, a little. I've met him now and then. He knew Lepetit; _that's all I can tell you_."
So what of it? What does this Papillon mean? There were five or six of them in Montmartre!
Dorm's statement: Goldstein asked him to go along to the Lariboisière to inquire after a friend _whose name he did not mention_. Dorm went into the hospital with him; and Goldstein asked if the Lepetit who had been brought in was seriously wounded.
"Do you know Lepetit? Do you remember Papillon Roger?" the commissaire asked.
"I don't know Lepetit, either by name or by sight. I do know a man called Papillon, having seen him in the street. He is very well known and they say he is a terror. I know nothing more."
The third man to be questioned, Jourmar, said that when Goldstein came out of the hospital, having gone in alone with Dorm, he said, "It's certainly my buddy."
So before he went in, he was not sure about it, right?
The commissaire: "Do you know Papillon Roger and a man called Lepetit?"
"I know a man called Papillon who hangs around Pigalle. The last time I saw him was about three months ago."
The same with the fourth thief. He didn't know Legrand. A Papillon, yes, but only by sight.
In her first statement the mother also confirmed that her son had said Papillon _Roger_.
So far, everything was plain, clear-cut and exact. All the chief witnesses gave their evidence in complete freedom before a local commissaire without being prompted, threatened, or guided.
In short, Roland was in the Clichy Bar before the tragedy, and all the people present were unknown. They may have been playing cards or dice, which meant they were acquaintances of Roland's, but still they were unknown. What was odd, and indeed disturbing, was that they remained unknown until the very end.
Second point: Roland Lepetit was _the last to leave the bar, and he left it by himself_; his own girl said so. Nobody came to fetch him. A very little while after he went out, he was wounded by a man whom he positively identified on his deathbed as Papillon Roger. The man who came to tell Nini was another unknown; and he, too, was to remain so. Yet he was the one who helped Lepetit into the taxi immediately after the shooting- an unknown man who walked along with the cab as far as the bar where he was going to warn Nini. And this essential witness was to remain unknown, although everything he had just done proved he belonged to the underworld, to Montmartre, and that he was therefore known to the pigs. Strange.
Third point: Goldstein, who was to be the prosecution's chief witness, _did not know_ who had been wounded and went to the Lariboisière hospital to find out whether it was his friend Lepetit.
The only clues as to this Papillon were that he was called Roger and that he was said to be a terror.
Was I a terror at twenty-four? Was I dangerous? No, but maybe I was on the way to becoming both. It's certain that I was a tough guy, an "undesirable" then; but it's also certain that at only twenty-four I could not have become set forever as one particular type of man. It's also certain that at that age, having been only two years in Montmartre, I could not have been either the head of a gang or the terror of Pigalle. Certainly I disturbed public order; and certainly I was suspected of having taken part in big jobs, but nothing had ever been proved against me. Sure, they had pulled me in several times and grilled me pretty hard at 36, quai des Orfèvres, but without ever getting anything out of me, either a confession or a name. Sure, after the tragedy of my childhood, and after my time in the navy, and after the government had refused me a steady career, I had made up my mind to live outside that society of clowns and to let them know it. Sure, every time I was picked up and grilled at the Quai des Orfèvres for an important job they thought I was mixed up in, I insulted my torturers and humiliated them in every possible way, even telling them that one day I'd be in their place, the shits, and they would be in my power. So of course the pigs, humiliated through and through, might have said to themselves, "This Papillon, we'll have to clip his wings the first chance we have."
But still, I was only twenty-four! My life wasn't just a matter of resentment and rancor against society and the squares who obeyed its damn-fool rules: it was also _life itself_, continually on the move, sending off showers of sparks. It's true I'd pulled some serious nonsense; yes, but it was not wicked nonsense. Besides, when I was taken in there was only one conviction on my file: four months' suspended sentence for receiving stolen goods. Did I deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth just for having humiliated the pigs and just because I might turn dangerous one day?
It all began when the criminal police took the business over. The word went round Montmartre that they were looking for all the Papillons-Little Papillon, Pussini Papillon, Papillon Trompe-la-Mort, Papillon Roger, etc.
As for me, I was just plain Papillon; or sometimes, to avoid confusion, One-Thumb Papillon. But it was no part of my way of life to hobnob with the pigs, and I moved off fast: yes, that was true. I went on the run.
And why did you do that, Papi, since it wasn't you?
You ask that now? Have you forgotten that by the time you were twenty-four you had already been tortured several times at the Quai des Orfèvres? You were never really fond of being knocked about, or of all those exquisite tortures: the way they shoved your head under the water until you were perishing for want of air and you didn't know whether you were dead or alive; the way the pigs would give your balls five or six twists and leave them so swollen you walked like an Argentine gaucho for weeks on end; the way they crushed your nails in a paper press till the blood spurted and the nails came off; the way they beat you with a rubber truncheon that wounded your lungs, so blood poured out of your mouth; and the way those two-hundred-pound bruisers would jump up and down on your belly as if it were a trampoline. Is it your age, Papi, or have you lost your memory? There were a hundred reasons for going on the run right away. It was a break that didn't carry you too far; since you weren't guilty, there was no need to go abroad; just a little hideout near Paris would be enough. Soon they'd pick up the Papillon Roger in question, or at least identify him; and then fine, you'd jump into a taxi and be back in Paris. No more danger for your balls or your nails or all the rest.
Only this Papillon Roger was never identified. There was no culprit.
Then all at once a wanted man was produced like magic. This Papillon Roger? Simple: you just wipe out the Roger and you pick up plain Papillon, the nickname of Henri Charrière. The trick's done: all that's left is to pile up the evidence. It's no longer an honest, impartial inquiry into the truth, but the total fabrication of _a culprit_.
Policemen, don't you see, need _to solve a murder case_ to deserve promotion in their very noble, very honest career. Now this Papillon has everything going for him as a culprit. He's young, and there is something of the procurer about him… We'll say his girl's a whore. He's a thief, and he's been in trouble with the police several times; but he's either got off on a dismissed charge or he's been acquitted.
And then into the bargain the guy is a difficult bastard; he curses us to hell when we arrest him, he sneers at us, humiliates us, names his dog after our chief of police, and sometimes he says, "You'd be well advised to grill a little more gently, if you want to reach retirement age." These threats of punishing us one day for our "modern" and "thoroughgoing" methods of interrogation worry us. So go right ahead, man. We're covered on all sides.
That was the sinister beginning of it all, Papi. Twenty-four you were, when those two lousy pigs flushed you out at SaintCloud on April 10, while you were eating snails.
Oh, they went right ahead, all right! What drive, what zeal, what steadiness, what passion, what diabolical cunning it took to get you into the dock one day, and for the court to deliver that blow that knocked you out for fourteen years!
It wasn't so easy to turn you into the guilty man, Papi. But the inspector in charge of the job, Mayzaud, a Montmartre specialist, was so eager to send you down that it was open war between him and your lawyers even in the court, with insults, complaints and foul blows; and right beside Mayzaud was the plump little Goldstein, one of those phony bastards who lick the underworld's feet in the hope of being accepted.
Very amenable, this Goldstein! Mayzaud said he met him maybe a hundred times _by chance_ during the inquiry. This precious witness stated _on the very day of the killing_ that in a crowd of people he had heard someone named Roland had got three bullets in the guts, and he had then gone to the hospital to ask the exact identity of the victim. More than three weeks later, on April 18, after many contacts with Mayzaud, this same Goldstein changed his story: On the night of March 25-26, before the killing, he had met me with two unknown men. I had asked him where Lepetit was. Goldstein: "At the Clichy." As soon as I left him, Goldstein went to warn Lepetit. While he was talking to Lepetit one of Papillon's companions asked Lepetit to come outside. Goldstein himself went out a little later and saw Papillon and Lepetit talking quietly; but he did not linger. Later, coming back to the Place Pigalle, he once more met Papillon, who told him he had just shot Lepetit and asked him to go to the Lariboisière and see what state Lepetit was in, and to warn him to keep his mouth shut.
For of course, I, who was described to the Court as a terror, a member of the underworld all the more dangerous because of my intelligence and Cunning; of course I would hang around the Place Pigalle, right on the spot where I'd shot a guy, until Goldstein came that way again. Do I stand there like a signpost on some little Ardèche lane, so that the pigs only have to come strolling along to ask me how I'm doing?
This Goldstein was not such a fool as all that; the day after his statement he hightailed it to England.
Meanwhile I stood up for myself stoutly. "Goldstein? Don't know him. I may have seen him; may even have exchanged a few words with him, like you do with people always around the same district, without knowing who you're talking to." I really could not fit a mug to that name; so much so that it was only when we were brought face to face that I succeeded in identifying him. And I was so taken aback that a little square I didn't know should make such a detailed charge against me, that I wondered what crime he could have committed-nothing much for sure, he was such a dreary runt-for the pigs to have such a hold on him. I am still wondering; sexual offenses? Cocaine?
Without him, without his successive statements, which added new material to the pigs' case every time he opened his trap, without him nothing held together. Nothing.
And now there appeared something that at first sight looked miraculous but later turned out to be exceedingly dangerous- indeed fatal. A diabolical police plot, a horrible trap that I and my lawyers fell into headfirst. I thought it meant safety, but it was disaster. Because there was nothing solid in the file: Goldstein's successive bits of evidence were all very improbable. The file had so little body to it that my alleged killing lacked even a motive. Since I had no cause to dislike the victim, and since I was not raving mad, I was as out of place in this job as a hair in the soup; and any jury at all, even one made up of the dullest idiots on earth, could hardly fail to realize it.
So the police invented a motive; and the one who provided it was a pig who had been working Montmartre for the last ten years, Inspector Mazillier.
One of my lawyers, Maitre Eeffey, liked wandering about Montmartre in his free time; and he met this pig,.who told him he knew what had really happened bn the night of March 25-26, and that he was prepared to tell-implying that what he had to say would be in my favor. We said to ourselves, either he's motivated by professional honesty or else-which is more likely- there's some rivalry between Mayzaud and him.
And _we_ called him as a witness. _We_ did.
But what Mazillier had to say was not at all what we had expected. He stated that he knew me well and that I had done him many favors. Then he added, "Thanks to the information provided by Charrière I have been able to carry out several arrests. As for the circumstances in connection with the murder, _I know nothing about them_. But I have heard it said [Lord, how many "I have heard it said"s we had during my trial!] that Charrière was the object of ill will on the part of persons unknown to me who disapproved of his relations with the police."
And there was the reason for the murder! I'd killed Roland Lepetit during a quarrel because he was spreading it around Montmartre that I squealed, that I was an informer.
When was this statement of Inspector Mazillier's made? April 14. And when did Goldstein make his, the one that contradicted his statement on the day of the killing? April 18, _four days after Mazillier's_.
When the court of first instance was presented with this padded, elastic evidence, this mass of rumors, lies and prompted statements, they sensed there was something fishy about the whole thing. Because although you often put them all into the same bag, Papi, as if judges, pigs, jurymen, the law and the prison administration were all part of the same conspiracy you must admit that there have been some exceedingly honest judges.
As a result, the first court _refused_ to send me before the assizes with that phony file, and sent all the evidence back to the investigating magistrate, insisting upon _further inquiry_.
The pigs were utterly infuriated; they found witnesses everywhere-in prison, just about to be let out or just having been let out. But the further inquiry produced nothing, absolutely nothing, not the slightest clue or the least suggestion of new and serious evidence.
In the end, without anything fresh-still a bad bouillabaisse made with all the wrong fish-the file was at last allowed to be sent up to the assizes.
And now came the clap of thunder. Something happened that is almost never seen in the legal world: the public prosecutor, the man whose job it is to protect society by putting as many defendants as possible behind bars-the public prosecutor who had been given the brief to act against me, took it with the tips of his fingers, as though he were holding it with tongs, and put it back on the desk, saying, "I won't act in this case. It smells fishy and prefabricated: give it to someone else."
How splendid he looked, Maître Raymond Hubert, when he came to tell me this extraordinary news at the Conciergerie! "Can you imagine it, Charrière! Your file is so unconvincing, a prosecutor has refused to have anything to do with it and has asked for the brief to be given to someone else!"
… It was cool that night on the bench in the Boulevard de Clichy. I walked up and down under the shadow of the trees; I did not want to walk into the light for fear of interrupting the magic lantern as it projected these pictures from thirty-seven years ago. I turned up the collar of my overcoat, and pushed back my hat a little, to air my head. I Sat down again, pulled my coat over my legs, and then, with my back to the avenue, I slid my legs over the bench and sat the other way around, my arms leaning on the back as they had leant on the rail of the dock during my first trial in July, 1931.
Because there was not just one trial for me. _There were two_. The first in July, the other in October.
It all went too well, Papi! The court was not blood-red, like a slaughterhouse; it was more like an enormous boudoir. In the flooding light of that marvelous July day, the hangings, the carpets and the judges' robes were almost pale pink. And in this court, a smiling, kindly, rather skeptical presiding judge, so little convinced by what he had read in the file that he opened pro. ceedings like this: "Charrière, Henri, as the indictment does not entirely correspond with what we should have liked to see in it, will you explain your case to the court and the jury yourself?"
The president of an assize court asking the defendant to lay open his case! You remember that sun-filled July assize and those wonderful judges? It was too good to last, Papi. Those judges conducted the proceedings with such impartiality, the president calmly and honestly looking for the truth, asking the pigs embarrassing questions, worrying Goldstein, pointing out his contradictions, and allowing my lawyers and me to ask him awkward questions-it was too splendid; it was sunlit justice, a holiday sitting with the judges in your favor.
The first important witness, already primed by the pigs, was the mother. I don't think it was out of bad faith that she had adopted the pigs' insinuations. She really did so unconsciously.
The mother no longer said that she and the commissaire had heard "Papillon Roger." Now she stated that what she had heard was, "It's Papillon. Goldstein knows him." She had forgotten the Roger and she had added the "Goldstein knows him," words that Commissaire Gérardin and Inspector Grimaldi did not hear. Odd that a commissaire should not write down something as important as that, don't you think?
Maître Gautrat, the lawyer appearing for the family, wanted me to ask the victim's mother to forgive me. I said to her, "Madame, I do not have to ask your forgiveness because I did not kill your son. I express my sorrow for your grief; that is all I can do."
But Commissaire Gérardin and Inspector Grimaldi changed nothing of their first statement: Legrand had said, "It was Papillon Roger," that was all.
Now the key witness came forward: Goldstein. Using a recording machine at 36, quai des Orfèvres, this witness had made five or six statements, three of which were used. Each one accused me; it did not matter if they were contradictory-each time they brought a fresh piece of wood to the framework the police were building up. Sitting on the bench thirty-six years later, I could see Goldstein as if he were right in front of me. He spoke in a low voice: he scarcely raised his hand when he said, "I swear it."
When he had finished his statement, Maître Beffey went for him. "Goldstein, how many times have you met Inspector Mayzaud 'by chance'? He himself states that he has met you and talked to you about this case 'by chance' several times. It's curious, Goldstein. In your first statement you said you knew nothing about the affair; then you knew Papillon; after that you said you had met him on the night of the crime, before it was committed; then he tells you go to Lariboisière and see how Lepetit is getting on. How do you explain these differing statements?"
Goldstein's only reply was to repeat, "I was afraid, because in Montmartre Papillon is terribly dangerous."
I made a gesture of protest and time president said to me, "Defendant, have you any questions to ask the witness?"
"Yes, Monsieur le Président." I looked straight at Goldstein. "Goldstein, turn this way and look me in the face. What is it that makes you lie and accuse me falsely? What crime of yours does Mayzaud know about? What crime are you paying for with these lying statements?"
The shit trembled as he looked me in the face, but he did manage to bring out the words "I'm telling the truth" quite distinctly.
I could have killed the swine! I turned toward the court. "Gentlemen of the court, gentlemen of the jury, the public prosecutor says I am an intelligent, sharp-witted, knowing character; but the witness's evidence shows me to be a perfect idiot, and I'll prove it to you. Admitting something as important as this, telling a man you don't know at all you've just killed his friend, is the act of a total imbecile. Yet I don't know Goldstein." And turning toward Goldstein I went on, "Goldstein, please name one single person in Paris or in the whole of France who can say he has seen us talking together even once."
"I don't know anyone who could testify to that."
"Right. Please name a bar, restaurant, or eating place in Montmartre, Paris, or anywhere in France where we have eaten or drunk together even once."
"I've never eaten or drunk with you."
"Very well. You say the first time you met me that extraordinary night I had two men with me. Who were they?"
"I don't know them."
"Nor do I. Now say quickly, without hesitating, where I told you to meet me with the answer you were to bring back from the hospital, and say whether you mentioned that place to the men who went with you. And if you did not mention it to them, why not?"
No answer.
"Reply, Goldstein. Why don't you reply?"
"I didn't know where to find you."
Maitre Raymond Hubert: "So my client sends you on an errand as important as this-he sends you to find out Roland Lepetit's condition, and you did not know where to give him the answer? It is as absurd as it is unbelievable!"
Yes, it was unbelievable all right; but it was even more unbelievable that the whole indictment had been allowed to be built up on the successive accusations of this dreary jerk who, although carefully coached by the pigs, did not even have wits enough to give a quick answer.
The president: "Charrière, the police claim that you killed Lepetit because he called you an informer. What have you to say to that?"
"I've had dealings with the police six times, and each time I came away with the charge dismissed or an acquittal, except for my four months' suspended sentence. I've never been arrested with another man; I've never had another man arrested. It makes no sense that when I am in the hands of the police I stay mum, and when I'm at liberty I inform on my friends."
"An inspector says you are an informer. Call Inspector Mazillier."
"I state that Charrière was an informer, one who enabled me to arrest several dangerous individuals, and that this was known in Montmartre. As to the Lepetit affair, I know nothing about it."
"What have you to say to that, Charrière?"
"It had been on Maître Beffey's advice that I had asked for this inspector to be called at the inquiry; Maitre Beffey had told me Mazillier knew the truth about the murder of Lepetit. And now I see that both my counsel and I fell into a horrible trap. Inspector Mazillier, when he advised Maître Beffey to call him, said he knew all about the killing; my counsel believed him, and so did I. We imagined that either he was an honest cop or there was some rivalry between him and Mayzaud that led him to give evidence about his crime. But now, as you see yourself, he says he knows nothing about it.
"On the other hand, it's clear that the inspector's statements at last provided the missing motive for my alleged crime. This statement, coming from a policeman, was a godsend: it preserved the framework of the accusation and gave some body to an indictment that just didn't hold together. Because there's no doubt that without the help given by Mazillier, the indictment would have fallen to pieces, in spite of all Inspector Mayzaud's efforts. The dodge is so obvious that it's astonishing the prosecution should ever have used it."
I fought on and I said, "Gentlemen of the court, gentlemen of the jury, if I'd been a police informer, one of two things would have happened: either I wouldn't have killed Roland Lepetit for calling me a squealer-because a character as low as that takes such an insult without batting an eyelid-either I wouldn't have killed him at all, or, if I had shot him, the police would have played the game: they would never have gone after my blood with all this zeal and all this clumsiness, if I'd been so useful to them. More than that, they would have closed their eyes or fixed some gimmick to make it look as though 1 was acting in legitimate self-defense. Plenty of precedents of that kind could be quoted; but fortunately for me they don't apply. Monsieur he Président, may I ask the witness a question?"
"Yes."
Knowing what I was up to, Maître Raymond Hubert asked the court to free Inspector Mazillier from his professional secrecy, otherwise he would not be able to reply.
The president: "By its discretionary powers, the court releases Inspector Mazillier from his professional secrecy, and requires him, in the interests of truth and justice, to answer the question the defendant is about to put to him."
"Mazillier, name one single man in France, the colonies or abroad whom you have arrested because of my information."
"I cannot reply."
"You're a liar, Inspector! You can't reply because there's never been one!"
"Charrière, moderate your language," said the president.
"Monsieur le Président, I'm defending two things here, my life and my honor."
But the incident went no further. Mazillier withdrew.
And the other witnesses, how they came rolling up! All cut from the same cloth, all the handiwork of the pigs at 36, quai des Orfèvres, Paris.
And your last explanation, Papi, don't you remember that? The last and the most logical of them all. I can still hear it. "Gentlemen, play it straight with me and listen to what I have to say: It is a fact that Lepetit got only one bullet; he was shot once only; he remained on his feet, he walked off alive, he was allowed to take a taxi. That means the man who shot him did not want to kill him; otherwise he'd have fired four, five, six shots the way we do in the underworld. Anyone who knows Montmartre knows that. So suppose it was me, and suppose I confess and say, 'Gentlemen, this man, for such-and-such a reason, right or wrong, had a row with me or accused me of something; he put his hand in his pocket, and as he was an underworld sort like me, I was afraid, so I fired just one shot to defend myself.' If I said that, at the same time I'd be proving I didn't mean to kill him because he went off on his own feet and alive. Then I would end up by saying to you, 'Since an inspector says I'm very useful to the police, I ask you to accept my confession and to treat the business as unintentional homicide.'"
The court listened in silence: thoughtful, it seemed to me. I went on, "Ten times, a hundred times, both Maître Raymond Hubert and Maître Beffey have asked, 'Was it you who fired? If it was you, say so. You'll get five years at the outside, maybe even less. You'll still be very young when you come out.' But, gentlemen of the court and gentlemen of the jury, I can't take that path, not even to save myself from the guillotine or penal servitude, _because I'm innocent and I've been framed by the police_."
All this in that sunny courtroom where they let me explain things properly. Poor credulous kid, couldn't you see it was too good to last?
For this was the point where Mayzaud quickly thought up a gimmick. Afraid his fifteen months of effort might be reduced to nothing, he did what was forbidden. During a pause in the hearing he came to see me in the room where I was watched by the _Gardes républicains_, and which he had no right to enter. He came up to me and he had the nerve to say, "Why don't you say it was Corsican Roger?"
Completely taken aback, I said, "But I don't know any Corsican Roger."
He talked for a moment, walked quickly out, went to the prosecuting counsel and said to him, "Papillon's just confessed to me that it was Corsican Roger."
And now what this accursed Mayzaud wanted to happen did happen. The trial was stopped, in spite of my protests. Yet I still fought on and I said, "For the last eighteen months Inspector Mayzaud has been saying there's only one Papillon in this case and that it's me; Inspector Mayzaud says there's no doubt that I am Lepetit's killer; Inspector Mayzaud says he's brought honest, unanswerable witnesses who prove my guilt without the shadow of a doubt. Since the police have found all the necessary witnesses and proofs against me, why is their whole framework collapsing? So isn't this whole mass of evidence a pack of lies? And is just one new name tossed into the arena enough for it to seem uncertain anymore that Papillon is guilty? Since you say you've got all the proofs of my guilt, is it merely on the existence of some imaginary Corsican Roger that the trial is to be stopped and started all over again? Just because of some imaginary Corsican Roger, thought up by Mayzaud if you believe me, or thought up by me, if you trust him once again? It's impossible: I demand that the proceedings should go on: I demand to be judged. I beg it of you, gentlemen of the jury and Monsieur le Président!"
You'd won, Papi, you'd very nearly won; it was the honesty of the prosecuting counsel that made you lose. Because this man, Cassagnau, stood up and said, "Gentlemen of the jury, gentlemen of the court, I cannot proceed -.. I no longer know -. – the incident must be expunged.. – I ask the court to postpone the trial and order a further inquiry."
Just that, Papi, just those three phrases of Maître Cassagnau prove that you were condemned on a rotten charge. Because if this upright lawyer had had something clear, straight and unanswerable in his hands, he would not have said, "Stop the trial; I can no longer proceed."
He would have said, "Just one more of Charrière's inventions: the defendant wants to lead us astray with his Corsican Roger. We do not believe a word of it, gentlemen; here I have everything that is required to prove Charrière guilty, and I shall not fail to do so."
But he did not say that, and why not? Because in his conscience he did not fully believe in his brief, and because he must have begun asking himself questions about the honesty of the pigs who had put it together.
The trial was stopped, and they ordered a supplementary inquiry, _the second in this case_.
One of the newspapers said, "Such a lack of conviction is most unusual."
Of course the supplementary inquiry provided _no new facts whatsoever_. Corsican Roger? Of course he was never found. During this further inquiry the _Gardes republicains_ played it straight; when they were asked about the incident in July they gave evidence against Mayzaud. In any case, how could a man who proclaimed his innocence, and proved it logically, and felt the court favorably inclined toward him, how could this man throw the whole thing up and suddenly say, "I was there but I wasn't the one who fired; it was Corsican Roger?"
And what about the other trial, Papi? The last, the decisive hearing: there where the dry guillotine began to work, there where at twenty-five your youth and your faith in life received the great hammer blow of a life sentence; where Mayzaud, sure of himself once more, apologized to the prosecuting counsel and admitted having made a mistake in July; where you shouted at him, "I'll rip off your mask, Mayzaud!"… do you really want to hive through all that again?
Do you really want to see that courtroom again, and that gray, unhappy day? How many times do I have to tell you that thirtysix years have gone by since then? Do you want to feel that savage blow on the jaw again, the swipe that forced you to struggle for thirty-six years to be able to sit on this bench in the Boulevard de Clichy, in your Montmartre? Yes, indeed; I want to go down those first steps of the ladder that took me to the very bottom of the pit of human degradation, I want to go down them one by one again, so as to have a better notion of the road I traveled.
How different it was when I entered the second courtroom, a good-looking boy in a perfectly cut double-breasted suit. In the first place the sky was so low and rainy they had to light the chandeliers. This time everything was draped in red, blood-red. Carpets, hangings, judges' robes-as if they had all been dipped in the basket that holds the heads of guillotined men. This time the judges were not about to go off for their holidays; they had just returned from them; it was not the same as July.
The old hands of the law courts, the attorneys and magistrates and so on, know better than anyone how the weather, the time of the year, the character of the presiding judge, his mood that day, the mood of the prosecuting counsel and the jury, the defendant's and his lawyers' fitness-their form-can sometimes influence the scales of justice.
This time the president did not pay me the compliment of asking me to explain my case myself; he was quite satisfied with the monotonous voice of the clerk of the court reading out the indictment.
The twelve bastards who made up the jury had brains as damp and dreary as the weather; you could see that in their moist, dull, haif-witted eyes. They lapped up the baloney of the indictment.
There was absolutely nothing human about the prosecuting counsel.
I felt all this the moment I glanced quickly round the court. And I had sized it up exactly; during the two days the trial lasted they hardly let me speak at all.
And now came the same statements, the same evidence, as in July. No point in going over it in detail; it was the same party beginning all over again with the one difference that, if I felt outraged, and if I sometimes burst out, they shut me up at once.
There was only one really new fact, the appearance of the taxi driver Lellu Fernand, the witness for my alibi, who had not had time to give his evidence before the postponement in July-the only witness the pigs had never been able to find: a myth, according to them.
Yet he was an essential witness for me, because he stated that when he went into the Iris Bar saying "There's just been a shot," _I was there_.
They accused him of being a put-up witness.
Here, on the green bench, thirty-six years later, fury seized hold of me again; I felt neither the cold nor the drizzle that had begun to fall.
Once again I saw the boss of the Iris Bar come into the witness box and state that I could not have been in his place when Lellu came in to say there had been a shot outside, because two weeks before he had forbidden me to enter his bar. That meant I was such a bloody fool that in a job as serious as this, with my freedom and perhaps my life at stake, the alibi I gave involved a place where I was not allowed to go! And his waiter confirmed his evidence. Naturally they forgot to add that permission to stay open until five in the morning was a favor granted by the police, and that if they told the truth their closing time would be brought back to two o'clock. The boss was defending his till and the waiter his tips.
Maître Raymond Hubert did all he could, and so did Maître Beffey-a Maître Beffey so disgusted that he reached the point of open war with Mayzaud, who, in confidential police reports, tried to damage his standing as a lawyer by giving details of sexual matters that had nothing to do with the case.
Now it was the end, I was the last to speak. What could I say? "I'm innocent. I've been framed by the police. That's all."
The jury and the court withdrew. An hour later they returned and I stood up while they went back to their places. Then in his turn the president rose: he was about to read the sentence. "Prisoner at the bar, stand up."
And so firmly did I believe I was in the court, there under the trees in the Boulevard de Clichy, that I jumped to my feet, forgetting that my legs were pinned against the back of the bench, which made me fall back on my ass.
So it was sitting, not standing as I ought to have been, that there under the boulevard trees in 1967, I heard the toneless voice of the president who, in October, 1931, pronounced this sentence: "You are condemned to penal servitude for life. Guards, take the prisoner away."
I was just about to hold out my hands; but there was no one to put on the handcuffs; there were no _Gardes républicains_ beside me. There was no one except a poor old woman curled up at the far end of the bench, with newspapers on her head to protect her from the cold and the rain.
I untwisted my legs. Standing at last, I let them get over their stiffness and then, lifting the papers, I put a hundred-franc note into the hands of this old woman, sentenced to extreme poverty for life. For me, "life" had hasted only fourteen years.
And still keeping under the trees in the middle of the Boulevard de Clichy, I walked along to Place Blanche, pursued by the last image of that trial-myself standing to receive the unbelievable blow that wiped me out of Montmartre, my Montmartre, for nearly forty years.
I had scarcely reached that wonderful square before the magic lantern went out, and all I saw were a few bums sitting there at the exit from the Metro, squatting with their heads on their knees, asleep.
Quickly I hooked round for a cab. There was nothing here to attract me, neither the shadow of the trees that hid the glare of artificial light nor the brilliance of the square, with its Moulin Rouge blazing away for all it was worth. One reminded me too much of my past, and the other proclaimed, "You don't belong here anymore." Everything, yes, everything had changed; get out quick if you don't want to see that the memories of your twenties are dead and buried.
"Hey! Taxi! Gare de Lyon, please."
In the suburban train that took me back to my nephew's, I recalled all the newspaper articles that Maître Raymond Hubert had given me to read after my conviction. Not one of them could avoid speaking of the doubt that had hung over the whole case; _Le Journal_ gave it the headline "A Dubious Case."
I hooked up these papers later.
An article from _L'Humanite_ of October 28 deserves to be quoted at length.
CHARRIERE-PAPILLON CONDEMNED TO PENAL SERVITUDE
FOR LIFE
In spite of the persisting doubt as to the identity of the real Papillon, the jury of the Seine convicted Charrière of being the Papillon who is said to have killed Roland Lepetit on the Butte one night in March.
At the beginning of yesterday's hearing, the witness Goldstein, upon whose statements the whole charge rests, gave evidence. This witness, who remained in continual contact with the police and whom Inspector Mayzaud said he had seen more than a hundred times since the tragedy, made his statements on three separate occasions, each deposition being more serious than the last. It is clear that this witness is a loyal helper of the criminal police.
While the witness was uttering his accusations, Charrière listened closely. When Goldstein had finished, Charrière cried, "I don't understand, I don't understand this Goldstein: I have never done him any harm, and yet he comes here and pours out lies whose only aim is to get me sent to penal servitude."
Inspector Mayzaud was recalled. This time he claimed that Goldstein's evidence was spontaneous. But skeptical smiles were seen in court.
For the prosecution Siramy made a rambling closing speech in which he observed that there were several Papilions in Montmartre and even elsewhere. Nevertheless he asked for a conviction, though without being exact as to the sentence, which he left to the jury.
Maitre Gautrat, representing the family, comically held up penal servitude as a school of "moral betterment" and then asked that Charrière should be sent there for his own good, so as to be made an "honest man."
The counsels for the defense, Maitres Befley and Raymond Hubert, pleaded innocence. It did not follow that since Corsican Roger, otherwise Papillon, could not be found, Charrière, otherwise Papillon, was therefore guilty.
But after a long retirement the jury came back, bringing in the verdict of guilty, and the court sentenced Henri Charrière to penal servitude for life, awarding the family one franc damages.
For years and years I have asked myself this question: why did the police go all Out to screw a little crook who they _themselves_ said was one of their best helpers? I have found a single answer, the only logical one: they were covering up for someone else, and this someone else was a _genuine informer_.
The next day, in the sun, I went back to Montmartre. I found my old haunts again, the Rue Tholozé and the Rue Durantin; and the market in the Rue Lepic.
I went into 26, rue Tholozé to see the concierge, pretending to be looking for someone. My concierge had been a big fat woman with a hairy wart on her cheek. She had vanished, and a woman from Brittany had taken her place.
The Montmartre of my youth had not been stolen; no, everything was there, absolutely everything; but it had all changed. The dairy had turned into a laundromat, the local bar into a drugstore, and the fruit shop into an automat.
The Bandevez Bar, at the corner of the Rue Tholozé and the Rue Durantin, used to be the meeting place for women from the post office in the Place des Abbesses; they came and drank their little glass of _blanc-cassis_, and to make them fly off the handle we solemnly reproved them for getting blind drunk while their poor husbands were working. Well, the joint was still there; but the bar had been moved to the other side, and the two tables were no longer in their right place. What's more, the owner of the bar was a _pied noir_ from Algeria, and the customers were Arabs or Spaniards or Portuguese. Where can the old boss have vanished to-the fellow from the Auvergne?
I went up the steps that lead from the Rue Tholozé to the Moulin de Ia Galette. At least the handrail had not changed; it still ended as dangerously as ever. It was here that I had picked up a poor little old man who had fallen on his nose, not seeing well enough to make out that the rail stopped so soon. I stroked the rail: I saw the scene again and I heard the old man thank me: "Young man, you are truly kind and very well brought up. I congratulate you upon it, and I thank you." These simple words so disturbed me that I did not know how to set about picking up the gun I had dropped as I leaned over him; I did not want him to see that the good young man was maybe not as kind as all that.
Yes, my Montmartre was still there all right. It had not been stolen from me-they had just stolen the people.
That evening I went into a rough bar. I chose the oldest of all the old guys there and I said to him, "Excuse me, but do you know So-and-so?"
"Yes."
"Where is he?"
"Inside."
"And So-and-so?"
"Dead."
"And So-and-so?"
"Don't know him. But you ask a lot of questions. Who are you?"
He raised his voice a little on purpose, to attract the others' attention. It never misses. An unknown who just walks into a men's bar like that without introducing himself or having a friend-you have to find out what he's after.
"My name's Henri. I'm from Avignon and I've been in Colombia. That's why you don't know me. Be seeing you."
I did not linger but hurried off to catch my train so I'd be sure to sleep outside the Département of the Seine. At no price did I want them to notify me that I was forbidden to be there.
But I was in Paris. I was there. I went and danced at the little places round the Bastille. At Boucastel's and at the Bal.à-Jo I shoved my hat back and took off my tie. I even had the nerve to ask a skirt to dance just as I used to do when I was twenty, and in the same way. And as we waltzed to the sound of an accordion almost as good as Mimile Vacher's when I was young, the chick asked me what I did for a living and I told her I kept a house in the provinces: so I was looked upon with great respect.
I went and had lunch at La Coupole, and as if I had returned from another world I was simpleminded enough to ask a waiter whether they still bowled on the flat roof. He had been there twenty-five years, but my question absolutely stunned him.
At La Rotonde I looked for the painter Foujiya's corner, but in vain: my eyes gazed hopelessly at the furniture, the layout of the tables and the bar, looking for something that belonged to the past: disgusted at seeing that everything had been turned upsidedown and that they had destroyed everything I had known and loved, I walked straight out, forgetting to pay. The waiter grabbed my arm at the entrance to the Vavin Metro just by, and, as manners have been forgotten in France, he bawled the amount of the bill into my face and told me to pay up quick if I didn't want him to call a cop. Of course I paid, but I gave him such a paltry tip that as he left he threw it at me. "You can keep that for your mother-in-law. She must need it more than me!"
But Paris is Paris. As brisk as a young man, I walked right up the Champs-Elysées and then right down again, the Champs-Elysées lit with thousands of lights, with that light of Paris that warms you through and through and casts its wonderful spell, giving you a song in your heart. Ah, life is sweet in Paris!
There was not the least overexcitement in me, not the least longing for violence, as I stood there at the Porte Saint-Denis or in front of the old _L'Auto_ office in the Faubourg Montmartre, where Rigoulot, then champion of the world, used to lift a huge roll of newsprint. My heart was quiet as I passed in front of the chub where I used to play baccarat with Stavisky; and I went to watch the Lido show alone and perfectly calm. Quietly I mixed in the turmoil of Les Halles for a few hours-they, at least, were more or hess the same as before. It was only when I was in Montmartre that bitter words rose in my heart.
I stayed eight days in Paris. Eight times I went back to the scene of that famous murder.
Eight times I stroked the tree and then sat on the bench.
Eight times, with closed eyes, I put together all I knew of the inquiry and my two trials.
Eight times I saw the ugly faces of all those swine who manufactured my conviction.
Eight times I whispered, "This is where it all began, the theft of those fourteen years of your youth."
Eight times I repeated, "You have given up your revenge; that's fine; but never will you be able to forgive."
Eight times I asked God that as a reward for my giving up my revenge the same kind of thing should never happen to anyone else.
Eight times I asked the bench whether the false witness and the shifty pig had cooked up their next statement in this very place.
Eight times I went away, less and less bowed down, so that the last time I walked off as straight and supple as a young man, whispering to myself, "You won after all, man, since you're here, free, fit, beloved and master of your future. Don't go trying to find out what has happened to those others-they belong to your past. You're here, and that's chose to a miracle. And you can be sure that of all the people involved in this business, you're the happiest."