Papillon Read Free

labor for life last in France?”
    I paced back and forth in my cell. I had sent a consoling wire to my wife and another to my sister, who, alone against the world, had tried to defend her brother.
    It was over. The curtain was down. My people would suffer more than I, and my poor father far away in the provinces would have a hard time carrying this heavy cross.
    With a start I came to my senses. You’re innocent, sure, but who believes you? I asked myself. Stop going around claiming your innocence; they’ll just laugh at you. Getting life for a pimp, and on top of that saying it was somebody else who did it—that’s too thick. Better keep your trap shut.
    So much for that. The first thing to do was to make contact with another con who wanted to break out.
    I thought of a man from Marseilles called Dega. I’d probably see him at the barber’s. He went every day for a shave. I asked to go too. When I arrived, there he was with his nose to the wall. I noticed him just as he was surreptitiously letting another man go ahead of him so that he would have longer to wait his turn. I took a place directly next to him, forcing another man to step aside. I spoke very fast, under my breath.
    “Well, Dega, how’s it going?”
    “O.K., Papi. I got fifteen years. What about you? I heard they really screwed you.”
    “Yes. I got life.”
    “Are you going to appeal?”
    “No. I’m going to eat and keep in shape. You’ve got to be strong, Dega. Someday we’re going to need strong muscles. Got any money?”
    “Yes. Ten thousand francs in pounds sterling. * What about you?”
    “Not a sou.”
    “Want a piece of advice? Get some and get it fast. Hubert’s your lawyer? He’s a bastard, he’ll never lift a finger. Send your wife to Dante with a loaded plan . Tell her to give it to Dominique-le-Riche and I guarantee you’ll get it.”
    “Ssh. The guard’s looking at us.”
    “So you’re having a little chat?”
    “Oh, nothing interesting,” Dega answered. “He says he’s feeling sick.”
    “What’s he got? Courtroom indigestion?” The slob burst out laughing.
    So this was it. I was on the road of the condemned already. A man makes jokes and laughs like crazy at the expense of a kid of twenty-five who’s in for life.
    I got my plan . It was a highly polished aluminum tube, that unscrewed right in the middle. It had a male half and a female half. It contained 5600 francs in new bills. When I got it, I kissed it. Yes, I kissed that little tube, two and a half inches long and as thick as your thumb, before shoving it into my anus. I took a deep breath so that it would lodge in the colon. It was my strongbox. They could make me take off all my clothes, spread my legs apart, make me cough or bend over double, for all the good it would do them. The plan was high up in the large intestine. It was a part of me. Inside me I carried my life, my freedom … my road to revenge. For that’s what was on my mind. Revenge. That’s all that was, in fact.
    It was dark outside. I was alone in my cell. A bright light shone from the ceiling so that the guard could see me through a little hole in the door. The powerful light blinded me. I placed a folded handkerchief over my sore eyes. I stretched out on the mattress on my iron bed and, lying there without a pillow, went over and over the details of that terrible trial.
    To make you understand this long story as it unfolds and what sustained me in my struggle, I may have to be a little long-winded just now. I must tell you everything that happened and what I saw in my mind’s eye during those first days after I was buried alive.
    What would I do after I escaped? For now that I had my plan I never doubted for a moment that I would.
    Well, I’d make it back to Paris as fast as possible. And the first man I’d kill would be that stool pigeon, Polein. Then the two informers. But two informers weren’t enough, I had to kill all informers. Or at least as many as possible. I’d fill a