Then came a period of splendid notoriety:he held his court,he gave an easy rein to his wit,he received duchesses and princes with an air of amiable patronage.Few there were of his visitants who left him without a present of gold,and thus the universal robber was further rewarded by his victims.His portrait hung in every house,and his thin,hard face,his dry,small features were at last familiar to the whole of France.M.
Grandval made him the hero of an epic`Le Vice Puni.'Even the theatre was dominated by his presence;and while ArlequinCartouche was greeted with thunders of applause at the Italiens,the more serious Fran<c,>ais set Cartouche upon the stage in three acts,and lavished upon its theme the resources of a then intelligent art.M.Le Grand,author of the piece,deigned to call upon the king of thieves,spoke some words of argot with him,and by way of conscience money gave him a hundred crowns.
Cartouche set little store by such patronage.He pocketed the crowns,and then put an end to the comedy by threatening that if it were played again the companions of Cartouche would punish all such miscreants as dared to make him a laughing stock.For Cartouche would endure ridicule at no man's hand.At the very instant of his arrest,all barefooted as he was,he kicked a constable who presumed to smile at his discomfiture.His last days were spent in resolute abandonment.True,he once attempted to beat out his brains with the fetters that bound him;true,also,he took a poison that had been secretly conveyed within the prison.But both attempts failed,and,more scrupulously watched,he had no other course than jollity.
Lawyers and priests he visited with a like and bitter scorn,and when,on November 27,1721,he was led to the scaffold,not a word of confession or contrition had been dragged from him.
To the last moment he cherished the hope of rescue,and eagerly he scanned the crowd for the faces of his comrades.But the gang,trusting to its leader's nobility,had broken its oath.
With contemptuous dignity Cartouche determined upon revenge:
proudly he turned to the priest,begging a respite and the opportunity of speech.Forgotten by his friends,he resolved to spare no single soul:he betrayed even his mistresses to justice.
Of his gang,forty were in the service of Mlle.de Montpensier,who was already in Spain;while two obeyed the Duchesse de Ventadour as valetsdepied.His confession,in brief,was so dangerous a document,it betrayed the friends and servants of so many great houses,that the officers of the Law found safety for their patrons in its destruction,and not a line of the hero's testimony remains.The trial of his comrades dragged on for many a year,and after Cartouche had been cruelly broken on the wheel,not a few of the gang,of which he had been at once the terror and inspiration,suffered a like fate.Such the career and such the fitting end of the most distinguished marauder the world has known.Thackeray,with no better guide than a chapbook,was minded to belittle him,now habiting him like a scullion,now sending him forth on some petty errand of clyfaking.But for all Thackeray's contempt his fame is still undimmed,and he has left the reputation of one who,as thief unrivalled,had scarce his equal as wit and dandy even in the days when Louis the Magnificent was still a memory and an example.
III
A PARALLEL
(SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE)
IF the seventeenth century was the golden age of the hightobyman,it was at the advent of the eighteenth that the burglar and streetrobber plied their trade with the most distinguished success,and it was the good fortune of both Cartouche and Sheppard to be born in the nick of time.Rivals in talent,they were also near contemporaries,and the Scourge of Paris may well have been famous in the purlieus of Clare Market before Jack the SlipString paid the last penalty of his crimes.As each of these great men harboured a similar ambition,so their careers are closely parallel.Born in a humble rank of life,Jack,like Cartouche,was the architect of his own fortune;Jack,like Cartouche,lived to be flattered by noble dames and to claim the solicitude of his Sovereign;and each owed his preeminence rather to natural genius than to a sympathetic training.
