Chapter 11: Let Loose

Little Dorrit

by Charles Dickens

A late, dull autumn night was closing in upon the river Saone.
The stream, like a sullied looking-glass in a gloomy place, reflected
the clouds heavily; and the low banks leaned over here and there, as
if they were half curious, and half afraid, to see their darkening
pictures in the water. The flat expanse of country about Chalons lay
a long heavy streak, occasionally made a little ragged by a row of
poplar trees against the wrathful sunset. On the banks of the river
Saone it was wet, depressing, solitary; and the night deepened
fast.

One man slowly moving on towards Chalons was the only visible
figure in the landscape. Cain might have looked as lonely and
avoided. With an old sheepskin knapsack at his back, and a rough,
unbarked stick cut out of some wood in his hand; miry, footsore, his
shoes and gaiters trodden out, his hair and beard untrimmed; the
cloak he carried over his shoulder, and the clothes he wore, sodden
with wet; limping along in pain and difficulty; he looked as if the
clouds were hurrying from him, as if the wail of the wind and the
shuddering of the grass were directed against him, as if the low
mysterious plashing of the water murmured at him, as if the fitful
autumn night were disturbed by him.

He glanced here, and he glanced there, sullenly but shrinkingly;
and sometimes stopped and turned about, and looked all round him.
Then he limped on again, toiling and muttering.

'To the devil with this plain that has no end! To the devil
with these stones that cut like knives! To the devil with this
dismal darkness, wrapping itself about one with a chill! I hate
you!'

And he would have visited his hatred upon it all with the scowl
he threw about him, if he could. He trudged a little further; and
looking into the distance before him, stopped again. 'I, hungry,
thirsty, weary. You, imbeciles, where the lights are yonder, eating
and drinking, and warming yourselves at fires! I wish I had the
sacking of your town; I would repay you, my children!'

But the teeth he set at the town, and the hand he shook at the
town, brought the town no nearer; and the man was yet hungrier, and
thirstier, and wearier, when his feet were on its jagged pavement,
and he stood looking about him.

There was the hotel with its gateway, and its savoury smell of
cooking; there was the cafe with its bright windows, and its rattling
of dominoes; there was the dyer's with its strips of red cloth on the
doorposts; there was the silversmith's with its earrings, and its
offerings for altars; there was the tobacco dealer's with its lively
group of soldier customers coming out pipe in mouth; there were the
bad odours of the town, and the rain and the refuse in the kennels,
and the faint lamps slung across the road, and the huge Diligence,
and its mountain of luggage, and its six grey horses with their tails
tied up, getting under weigh at the coach office. But no small
cabaret for a straitened traveller being within sight, he had to seek
one round the dark corner, where the cabbage leaves lay thickest,
trodden about the public cistern at which women had not yet left off
drawing water. There, in the back street he found one, the Break of
Day. The curtained windows clouded the Break of Day, but it seemed
light and warm, and it announced in legible inscriptions with
appropriate pictorial embellishment of billiard cue and ball, that at
the Break of Day one could play billiards; that there one could find
meat, drink, and lodgings, whether one came on horseback, or came on
foot; and that it kept good wines, liqueurs, and brandy. The man
turned the handle of the Break of Day door, and limped in.

He touched his discoloured slouched hat, as he came in at the
door, to a few men who occupied the room. Two were playing dominoes
at one of the little tables; three or four were seated round the
stove, conversing as they smoked; the billiard-table in the centre
was left alone for the time; the landlady of the Daybreak sat behind
her little counter among her cloudy bottles of syrups, baskets of
cakes, and leaden drainage for glasses, working at her needle.

Making his way to an empty little table in a corner of the room
behind the stove, he put down his knapsack and his cloak upon the
ground. As he raised his head from stooping to do so, he found the
landlady beside him.

'One can lodge here to-night, madame?'

'Perfectly!' said the landlady in a high, sing-song, cheery
voice.

'Good. One can dine--sup--what you please to call it?'

'Ah, perfectly!' cried the landlady as before. 'Dispatch then,
madame, if you please. Something to eat, as quickly as you can; and
some wine at once. I am exhausted.'

'It is very bad weather, monsieur,' said the landlady.

'Cursed weather.'

'And a very long road.'

'A cursed road.'

His hoarse voice failed him, and he rested his head upon his
hands until a bottle of wine was brought from the counter. Having
filled and emptied his little tumbler twice, and having broken off an
end from the great loaf that was set before him with his cloth and
napkin, soup-plate, salt, pepper, and oil, he rested his back against
the corner of the wall, made a couch of the bench on which he sat,
and began to chew crust, until such time as his repast should be
ready. There had been that momentary interruption of the talk about
the stove, and that temporary inattention to and distraction from one
another, which is usually inseparable in such a company from the
arrival of a stranger. It had passed over by this time; and the men
had done glancing at him, and were talking again.

'That's the true reason,' said one of them, bringing a story he
had been telling, to a close, 'that's the true reason why they said
that the devil was let loose.' The speaker was the tall Swiss
belonging to the church, and he brought something of the authority of
the church into the discussion--especially as the devil was in
question.

The landlady having given her directions for the new guest's
entertainment to her husband, who acted as cook to the Break of Day,
had resumed her needlework behind her counter. She was a smart,
neat, bright little woman, with a good deal of cap and a good deal of
stocking, and she struck into the conversation with several laughing
nods of her head, but without looking up from her work.

'Ah Heaven, then,' said she. 'When the boat came up from Lyons,
and brought the news that the devil was actually let loose at
Marseilles, some fly-catchers swallowed it. But I? No, not I.'

'Madame, you are always right,' returned the tall Swiss.
'Doubtless you were enraged against that man, madame?'

'Ay, yes, then!' cried the landlady, raising her eyes from her
work, opening them very wide, and tossing her head on one side.
'Naturally, yes.'

'He was a bad subject.'

'He was a wicked wretch,' said the landlady, 'and well merited
what he had the good fortune to escape. So much the worse.'

'Stay, madame! Let us see,' returned the Swiss, argumentatively
turning his cigar between his lips. 'It may have been his
unfortunate destiny. He may have been the child of circumstances.
It is always possible that he had, and has, good in him if one did
but know how to find it out. Philosophical philanthropy
teaches--'

The rest of the little knot about the stove murmured an
objection to the introduction of that threatening expression. Even
the two players at dominoes glanced up from their game, as if to
protest against philosophical philanthropy being brought by name into
the Break of Day.

'Hold there, you and your philanthropy,' cried the smiling
landlady, nodding her head more than ever. 'Listen then. I am a
woman, I. I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know
what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world
here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that
there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good
in them--none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest
without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as
enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human
heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of
the way. They are but few, I hope; but I have seen (in this world
here where I find myself, and even at the little Break of Day) that
there are such people. And I do not doubt that this man--whatever
they call him, I forget his name--is one of them.'

The landlady's lively speech was received with greater favour at
the Break of Day, than it would have elicited from certain amiable
whitewashers of the class she so unreasonably objected to, nearer
Great Britain.

'My faith! If your philosophical philanthropy,' said the
landlady, putting down her work, and rising to take the stranger's
soup from her husband, who appeared with it at a side door, 'puts
anybody at the mercy of such people by holding terms with them at
all, in words or deeds, or both, take it away from the Break of Day,
for it isn't worth a sou.'

As she placed the soup before the guest, who changed his
attitude to a sitting one, he looked her full in the face, and his
moustache went up under his nose, and his nose came down over his
moustache.

'Well!' said the previous speaker, 'let us come back to our
subject. Leaving all that aside, gentlemen, it was because the man
was acquitted on his trial that people said at Marseilles that the
devil was let loose. That was how the phrase began to circulate, and
what it meant; nothing more.'

'How do they call him?' said the landlady. 'Biraud, is it
not?'

'Rigaud, madame,' returned the tall Swiss.

'Rigaud! To be sure.'

The traveller's soup was succeeded by a dish of meat, and that
by a dish of vegetables. He ate all that was placed before him,
emptied his bottle of wine, called for a glass of rum, and smoked his
cigarette with his cup of coffee. As he became refreshed, he became
overbearing; and patronised the company at the Daybreak in certain
small talk at which he assisted, as if his condition were far above
his appearance.

The company might have had other engagements, or they might have
felt their inferiority, but in any case they dispersed by degrees,
and not being replaced by other company, left their new patron in
possession of the Break of Day. The landlord was clinking about in
his kitchen; the landlady was quiet at her work; and the refreshed
traveller sat smoking by the stove, warming his ragged feet.

'Pardon me, madame--that Biraud.'

'Rigaud, monsieur.'

'Rigaud. Pardon me again--has contracted your displeasure,
how?'

The landlady, who had been at one moment thinking within herself
that this was a handsome man, at another moment that this was an
ill-looking man, observed the nose coming down and the moustache
going up, and strongly inclined to the latter decision. Rigaud was a
criminal, she said, who had killed his wife.

'Ay, ay? Death of my life, that's a criminal indeed. But how
do you know it?'

'All the world knows it.'

'Hah! And yet he escaped justice?'

'Monsieur, the law could not prove it against him to its
satisfaction. So the law says. Nevertheless, all the world knows he
did it. The people knew it so well, that they tried to tear him to
pieces.'

'Being all in perfect accord with their own wives?' said the
guest.

'Haha!'

The landlady of the Break of Day looked at him again, and felt
almost confirmed in her last decision. He had a fine hand, though,
and he turned it with a great show. She began once more to think
that he was not ill-looking after all.

'Did you mention, madame--or was it mentioned among the
gentlemen-- what became of him?' The landlady shook her head; it
being the first conversational stage at which her vivacious
earnestness had ceased to nod it, keeping time to what she said. It
had been mentioned at the Daybreak, she remarked, on the authority of
the journals, that he had been kept in prison for his own safety.
However that might be, he had escaped his deserts; so much the
worse.

The guest sat looking at her as he smoked out his final
cigarette, and as she sat with her head bent over her work, with an
expression that might have resolved her doubts, and brought her to a
lasting conclusion on the subject of his good or bad looks if she had
seen it. When she did look up, the expression was not there. The
hand was smoothing his shaggy moustache. 'May one ask to be shown to
bed, madame?'

Very willingly, monsieur. Hola, my husband! My husband would
conduct him up-stairs. There was one traveller there, asleep, who
had gone to bed very early indeed, being overpowered by fatigue; but
it was a large chamber with two beds in it, and space enough for
twenty. This the landlady of the Break of Day chirpingly explained,
calling between whiles, 'Hola, my husband!' out at the side door.

My husband answered at length, 'It is I, my wife!' and
presenting himself in his cook's cap, lighted the traveller up a
steep and narrow staircase; the traveller carrying his own cloak and
knapsack, and bidding the landlady good night with a complimentary
reference to the pleasure of seeing her again to-morrow. It was a
large room, with a rough splintery floor, unplastered rafters
overhead, and two bedsteads on opposite sides. Here 'my husband' put
down the candle he carried, and with a sidelong look at his guest
stooping over his knapsack, gruffly gave him the instruction, 'The
bed to the right!' and left him to his repose. The landlord, whether
he was a good or a bad physiognomist, had fully made up his mind that
the guest was an ill-looking fellow.

The guest looked contemptuously at the clean coarse bedding
prepared for him, and, sitting down on the rush chair at the bedside,
drew his money out of his pocket, and told it over in his hand. 'One
must eat,' he muttered to himself, 'but by Heaven I must eat at the
cost of some other man to-morrow!'

As he sat pondering, and mechanically weighing his money in his
palm, the deep breathing of the traveller in the other bed fell so
regularly upon his hearing that it attracted his eyes in that
direction. The man was covered up warm, and had drawn the white
curtain at his head, so that he could be only heard, not seen. But
the deep regular breathing, still going on while the other was taking
off his worn shoes and gaiters, and still continuing when he had laid
aside his coat and cravat, became at length a strong provocative to
curiosity, and incentive to get a glimpse of the sleeper's face.

The waking traveller, therefore, stole a little nearer, and yet
a little nearer, and a little nearer to the sleeping traveller's bed,
until he stood close beside it. Even then he could not see his face,
for he had drawn the sheet over it. The regular breathing still
continuing, he put his smooth white hand (such a treacherous hand it
looked, as it went creeping from him!) to the sheet, and gently
lifted it away.

'Death of my soul!' he whispered, falling back, 'here's
Cavalletto!'

The little Italian, previously influenced in his sleep, perhaps,
by the stealthy presence at his bedside, stopped in his regular
breathing, and with a long deep respiration opened his eyes. At
first they were not awake, though open. He lay for some seconds
looking placidly at his old prison companion, and then, all at once,
with a cry of surprise and alarm, sprang out of bed.

'Hush! What's the matter? Keep quiet! It's I. You know me?'
cried the other, in a suppressed voice.

But John Baptist, widely staring, muttering a number of
invocations and ejaculations, tremblingly backing into a corner,
slipping on his trousers, and tying his coat by the two sleeves round
his neck, manifested an unmistakable desire to escape by the door
rather than renew the acquaintance. Seeing this, his old prison
comrade fell back upon the door, and set his shoulders against it.

'Cavalletto! Wake, boy! Rub your eyes and look at me. Not the
name you used to call me--don't use that--Lagnier, say Lagnier!'

John Baptist, staring at him with eyes opened to their utmost
width, made a number of those national, backhanded shakes of the
right forefinger in the air, as if he were resolved on negativing
beforehand everything that the other could possibly advance during
the whole term of his life.

'Cavalletto! Give me your hand. You know Lagnier, the
gentleman. Touch the hand of a gentleman!'

Submitting himself to the old tone of condescending authority,
John Baptist, not at all steady on his legs as yet, advanced and put
his hand in his patron's. Monsieur Lagnier laughed; and having given
it a squeeze, tossed it up and let it go.

'Then you were--' faltered John Baptist.

'Not shaved? No. See here!' cried Lagnier, giving his head a
twirl; 'as tight on as your own.'

John Baptist, with a slight shiver, looked all round the room as
if to recall where he was. His patron took that opportunity of
turning the key in the door, and then sat down upon his bed.

'Look!' he said, holding up his shoes and gaiters. 'That's a
poor trim for a gentleman, you'll say. No matter, you shall see how
Soon I'll mend it. Come and sit down. Take your old place!'

John Baptist, looking anything but reassured, sat down on the
floor at the bedside, keeping his eyes upon his patron all the
time.

'That's well!' cried Lagnier. 'Now we might be in the old
infernal hole again, hey? How long have you been out?'

'Two days after you, my master.'

'How do you come here?'

'I was cautioned not to stay there, and so I left the town at
once, and since then I have changed about. I have been doing odds
and ends at Avignon, at Pont Esprit, at Lyons; upon the Rhone, upon
the Saone.' As he spoke, he rapidly mapped the places out with his
sunburnt hand upon the floor. 'And where are you going?'

'Going, my master?'

'Ay!'

John Baptist seemed to desire to evade the question without
knowing how. 'By Bacchus!' he said at last, as if he were forced to
the admission, 'I have sometimes had a thought of going to Paris, and
perhaps to England.'

'Cavalletto. This is in confidence. I also am going to Paris
and perhaps to England. We'll go together.'

The little man nodded his head, and showed his teeth; and yet
seemed not quite convinced that it was a surpassingly desirable
arrangement.

'We'll go together,' repeated Lagnier. 'You shall see how soon
I will force myself to be recognised as a gentleman, and you shall
profit by it. It is agreed? Are we one?'

'Oh, surely, surely!' said the little man.

'Then you shall hear before I sleep--and in six words, for I
want sleep--how I appear before you, I, Lagnier. Remember that. Not
the other.'

'Altro, altro! Not Ri--' Before John Baptist could finish the
name, his comrade had got his hand under his chin and fiercely shut
up his mouth.

'Death! what are you doing? Do you want me to be trampled upon
and stoned? Do you want to be trampled upon and stoned? You would
be. You don't imagine that they would set upon me, and let my prison
chum go? Don't think it!' There was an expression in his face as he
released his grip of his friend's jaw, from which his friend inferred
that if the course of events really came to any stoning and
trampling, Monsieur Lagnier would so distinguish him with his notice
as to ensure his having his full share of it. He remembered what a
cosmopolitan gentleman Monsieur Lagnier was, and how few weak
distinctions he made.

'I am a man,' said Monsieur Lagnier, 'whom society has deeply
wronged since you last saw me. You know that I am sensitive and
brave, and that it is my character to govern. How has society
respected those qualities in me? I have been shrieked at through the
streets. I have been guarded through the streets against men, and
especially women, running at me armed with any weapons they could lay
their hands on. I have lain in prison for security, with the place
of my confinement kept a secret, lest I should be torn out of it and
felled by a hundred blows. I have been carted out of Marseilles in
the dead of night, and carried leagues away from it packed in straw.
It has not been safe for me to go near my house; and, with a beggar's
pittance in my pocket, I have walked through vile mud and weather
ever since, until my feet are crippled--look at them! Such are the
humiliations that society has inflicted upon me, possessing the
qualities I have mentioned, and which you know me to possess. But
society shall pay for it.'

All this he said in his companion's ear, and with his hand
before his lips.

'Even here,' he went on in the same way, 'even in this mean
drinking-shop, society pursues me. Madame defames me, and her guests
defame me. I, too, a gentleman with manners and accomplishments to
strike them dead! But the wrongs society has heaped upon me are
treasured in this breast.'

To all of which John Baptist, listening attentively to the
suppressed hoarse voice, said from time to time, 'Surely, surely!'
tossing his head and shutting his eyes, as if there were the clearest
case against society that perfect candour could make out.

'Put my shoes there,' continued Lagnier. 'Hang my cloak to dry
there by the door. Take my hat.' He obeyed each instruction, as it
was given. 'And this is the bed to which society consigns me, is it?
Hah. Very well!'

As he stretched out his length upon it, with a ragged
handkerchief bound round his wicked head, and only his wicked head
showing above the bedclothes, John Baptist was rather strongly
reminded of what had so very nearly happened to prevent the moustache
from any more going up as it did, and the nose from any more coming
down as it did.

'Shaken out of destiny's dice-box again into your company, eh?
By Heaven! So much the better for you. You'll profit by it. I
shall need a long rest. Let me sleep in the morning.'

John Baptist replied that he should sleep as long as he would,
and wishing him a happy night, put out the candle. One might have
Supposed that the next proceeding of the Italian would have been to
undress; but he did exactly the reverse, and dressed himself from
head to foot, saving his shoes. When he had so done, he lay down
upon his bed with some of its coverings over him, and his coat still
tied round his neck, to get through the night.

When he started up, the Godfather Break of Day was peeping at
its namesake. He rose, took his shoes in his hand, turned the key in
the door with great caution, and crept downstairs. Nothing was astir
there but the smell of coffee, wine, tobacco, and syrups; and
madame's little counter looked ghastly enough. But he had paid
madame his little note at it over night, and wanted to see nobody--
wanted nothing but to get on his shoes and his knapsack, open the
door, and run away.

He prospered in his object. No movement or voice was heard when
he opened the door; no wicked head tied up in a ragged handkerchief
looked out of the upper window. When the sun had raised his full
disc above the flat line of the horizon, and was striking fire out of
the long muddy vista of paved road with its weary avenue of little
trees, a black speck moved along the road and splashed among the
flaming pools of rain-water, which black speck was John Baptist
Cavalletto running away from his patron.