Where can i read papillon online

Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Henri Charriere Papillon Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Check and mate.

I, who was innocent, was found guilty. French society in the person of Prosecutor Pradel had succeeded in eliminating for life a young man of twenty-five. And no reduced sentences, if you please! This heaping platter was served to me with the toneless voice of President Bevin.

The room was silent, everyone held his breath, my heart beat a little faster. The jury looked at me or bowed their heads; they seemed ashamed. Have you anything to say? The farce is played out. A murder has been solved by your police and your justice; you should be content. And those of my underworld friends who were in the courtroom applauded.

They knew the truth about this murder and this was their way of showing they were proud of me for not squealing. We went back to the small room where we had waited before the trial. There the police handcuffed me, and then I was chained to one of them, my right wrist to his left.

No one spoke. I asked for a cigarette. The guard gave me one and lit it. Each time I lifted it to my mouth or took it away, the policeman had to raise or lower his arm to follow my motions. I finished about three-quarters of the cigarette. Still not a word. The paddy wagon was waiting for us. We all found places on the benches. They left without a word, but just before leaving—surprise—the sergeant shook my handcuffed hand.

They must be crazy! Chin up! What does it say? Do they actually think the blow that just hit me could make me want to commit suicide?

Starting tomorrow, I go into action. As I was drinking my coffee the next morning, I asked myself, Should I appeal? Would I have better luck in another court? And how much time would I lose doing it? One year, maybe eighteen months … and what for? To get twenty years instead of life? 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. I asked myself. Better keep your trap shut. 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. 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. What would I do after I escaped? For now that I had my plan I never doubted for a moment that I would.

Then the two informers. Or at least as many as possible. I kept my eyes closed, the handkerchief over them for protection, and I could see the trunk very clearly, looking very innocent but crammed with explosives, the trigger carefully primed to set them off.

At that hour there would be at least one hundred and fifty cops in the room, receiving their orders for the day and listening to reports. How many steps were there to climb? I had to get it right. I must figure exactly the time it would take to get the trunk from the street to its destination at the very second it was to explode. And who would carry the trunk? All right; be bold. But would they obey?

What if it was my luck that, out of all those idiots, I picked the only two intelligent men in the force? I must think of something else. And I thought and thought. I would not admit that nothing would ever be percent sure. I lay down again without the blindfold. The minutes dragged. And that light, that goddamned light! I wet the handkerchief and put it back on.

The cold water felt good and its weight made the cloth stick to my eyes. From then on I always did this. The long hours I spent piecing together my future revenge were so intense that I began to feel as if the project were already under way. Every night, and even parts of the day, I wandered through Paris as if my escape were already a fact: I would escape and I would return to Paris. But what about the jury? Were those bastards to go on leading peaceful lives?

Those old crocks must have gone home, smug and satisfied at having done their duty with a capital D—full of importance, puffed up with pride in front of their neighbors, and the wives waiting, hair uncombed, to guzzle soup with them. All right now. What should I do with the jury? Nothing—that was the answer. They were a pitiful bunch, really not responsible. As I write down these thoughts I had so many years ago, thoughts that come back now to assail me with such terrible clarity, I am struck by how absolute silence and total isolation were able to lead a young man shut up in a cell into a true life of the imagination.

He literally lived two lives. He took flight and wandered wherever he liked: to his home, his father, his mother, his family, his childhood, all the different stages of his life.

And more important still, the castles in Spain that his fertile brain invented induced a kind of schizophrenia, and he began to believe he was living what he dreamed.

Thirty-six years have passed and yet it taxes my memory scarcely at all to write what I actually thought at that point in my life. But what about the prosecutor? Moreover, thanks to Alexandre Dumas, I had just the right recipe.

Yes, that was it. Then my turn would begin I am face to face with him; I see him with extraordinary clarity beneath my closed eyelids. I look at him the same way he looked at me in court. I feel the warmth of his breath on my face. Huge drops of sweat run down his apoplectic face. Yes, I hear my questions; I listen to his replies. I live the moment intensely. Papillon you so blithely consigned to hard labor for life. Do you think now it was worth all those plodding years to educate yourself, spending all those nights on Roman codes, learning Greek and Latin, sacrificing your youth?

To get you where, you bastard? Where you could create a better social code? Convince the mob that peace is the most important thing in the world? Preach a saving new religion? Or simply influence others to become better men, or at least stop being bad? Tell me, did you use your knowledge to save men? Only one ambition moved you. To climb, climb.

Climb the ladder of your wretched career. To you, glory was being the best caterer to the bagne , the most generous provider to the hangman and the guillotine.

How well I remember your smile when you heard the verdict, your look of triumph! So go ahead. Scream, scream as much as you like, as loud as you like. What am I going to do with you? Let you starve to death?

No, not good enough. No, that comes later. That tongue you prostituted to your glorious career! I walked and I walked, my head spun, but I stayed face to face with him … until all of a sudden the lamp went out and the pale light of day crept into my cell through the bars of the window. How come? Was it morning already? Did I spend the whole night avenging myself? What beautiful hours those were!

How fast it went, this long, long night! I listened as I sat on my bed. Absolute silence. From time to time, a small tic on my door. It was the guard in noiseless slippers raising the small iron slide so that he could fasten his eye to the tiny hole and watch me without my seeing him.

The machinery conceived by the French Republic was now in its second phase. It functioned wonderfully well; the first phase had eliminated a troublesome man. The man must neither die too quickly, nor must he escape by committing suicide. They needed him. What would the Penal Administration do if there were no prisoners? So he must be watched, and he must go to the bagne in order to justify the lives of other bureaucrats.

Hearing the tic again, I had to smile. At least, not the way you fear—by suicide. I ask only one thing: that I stay as healthy as possible and leave soon for French Guiana. Heh, my old prison guard who makes that tic all the time, I know your colleagues are no choir boys. Later on, I was able to confirm the fact that the founding father of the bagnes had not been lying.

Clack, clack, a wicket eight inches square opened in the middle of my door. I was handed coffee and a piece of bread weighing almost two pounds. As a convict, I no longer had the right to eat in the restaurant, but so long as I had money, I could buy cigarettes and a little food at the modest canteen. The Conciergerie was the waiting room for solitary confinement.

I smoked a Lucky Strike with delight, six francs sixty the pack. I bought two. I found a small note slipped inside the bread. It was from Dega, instructing me to go to the delousing room.

I took out the matches and there they were, three fat and healthy lice. I knew what I was to do. And so the next day I met Dega there. No guards. We were alone. I have connections and might get five years off. You are crazy! Does hard labor scare you? Every year they lose eighty percent of the men. Each convoy replaces another and the convoys carry between eighteen hundred and two thousand men.

If you escape these, you stand a good chance of being assassinated for your plan or dying in a break. They were human dregs. They spent nine months of the year in the hospital. Can you see yourself doing ten years in solitary? Look at me now, alone in my cell twenty-four hours a day, with no books, no way to get out, nobody to speak to. If you want the truth, Papi, yes. Everybody knows I was a millionaire. For a cavale , we need nobody. I know how to use a compass and sail a boat.

What more do you want? A few moments later the door opened. He went his way and I went mine. Dega had been caught in the scandal of the counterfeit National Defense bonds. A forger had made them in a very original way. He bleached five-hundred-franc bonds and reprinted them with the number 10, It was a beautiful job. Since the paper was the same, the banks accepted them without question. This had been going on for some years, and the Treasury had just about given up when one day they caught a man named Brioulet red-handed.

By he was already a millionaire. One night a pretty, well-dressed girl came up to the bar. She asked for Monsieur Louis Dega. He gave me the address of your bar and told me to come and ask you for twenty thousand francs to pay the lawyer. This was too much for the poor woman; she ran out in tears. Then she went back to Paris and told her husband. Brioulet was furious. The next day he spilled everything to the examining judge and formally accused Dega of being the man who had furnished the counterfeit bonds.

A month later Dega, the forger, the printer and eleven accomplices were arrested at the same time in different places and put behind bars. They appeared before the Assizes of the Seine and the trial lasted fourteen days.

Each prisoner was defended by a top lawyer. Brioulet never retracted. The upshot was that for twenty thousand miserable francs and an idiot remark, the biggest crook in France was ruined and stuck with fifteen years at hard labor.

This was the man with whom I had just signed a life-and-death pact. One, two, three, four, five and turn. I smoked, I was alert, my morale was good and I felt ready for anything. I promised myself not to think about revenge for the moment.

Suddenly a cry, a horrible anguished cry of despair, penetrated the door of my cell. What was it? It sounded like a man being tortured. But this was no police station. No way of finding out. They shattered me, those screams in the night. What force they must have had to penetrate my padded door!

No doubt someone had gone mad. It was so easy in these cells where nothing ever happened. Out loud I asked myself, What the hell does it matter to you? Think of yourself, only of yourself and your new partner, Dega. I bent down, straightened up, then gave myself a sharp whack on the chest.

It really hurt, so everything was all right: the muscles of my arms were in good shape. What about my legs? The Chinese invented the drop of water falling on the head. The French invented silence. They suppressed every possible distraction. No books, no paper, no pencil, the window with its thick bars completely covered with planks of wood, although a few holes let a little light through.

That harrowing cry left me deeply troubled. I charged around the cell like a beast in a cage. I was really alone; nothing would ever reach me but screams. The door opened. It was an old priest. A priest is standing there, right in front of you. Good evening, my son. Forgive me for not coming sooner, but I was on holiday. How are you? With no further ceremony, the kind old man came into my cell and sat down on my cot.

And for an underworld killing, they gave you hard labor for life? Was it premeditated? It makes no difference, my child. The Blessed Lord loves all his children, baptized or not. Will you please repeat each word I say? His eyes were so gentle and his wide face glowed with such kindness that I was ashamed to refuse him.

He was kneeling; I did the same. Our Father who art in Heaven … Tears came into my eyes, and when the good father saw them, he put his pudgy finger to my cheek, caught a large tear, brought it to his lips and licked it.

Your tears, my son, are the greatest reward that God could give me. Thank you. He got up and kissed me on the forehead.

I tore my hand away and, without knowing what I was doing, leaped off the bed and stood in the middle of the room. Oh no! Not that. You want me to tell you something, Father? Go to cell number thirty-seven and tell Dega to ask his lawyer to get him sent to the jail in Caen; tell him I did it today. And you will make your life over, I feel it. You have the eyes of a good boy and you have a noble soul. One week later, at four in the morning, seven of us were lined up in the corridor of the Conciergerie.

The guards were there in full strength. Put your clothes in front of you. Turn around, take one step back! We each found ourselves in front of a package. The cotton undershirt I was wearing a moment before was replaced by a heavy stiff shirt of unbleached cloth, and my handsome suit by a jacket and pants of coarse sackcloth. My shoes vanished and I shoved my feet into a pair of sabots. Until that day we had looked like normal men.

I glanced at the other six: what a horror! Our individuality was gone; in two minutes we had been transformed into convicts. With our escort of twenty guards we came to the courtyard, where, each in turn, we were wedged into the narrow cells of a police van. We were off to Beaulieu, the jail in Caen. He sat enthroned behind an Empire desk on a platform three feet high. Silence is required at all times. There are two doors available to you: one, if you behave, leads to the bagne , the other to the cemetery.

Bad behavior, even the smallest infraction, is punished by sixty days in the dungeon with only bread and water. No one has survived two consecutive sentences there. He addressed Pierrot le Fou, who had been extradited from Spain. What was your profession? Infuriated by the answer, the director shouted, Take this man away! Immediately the toreador was knocked down, bludgeoned by four or five guards and carried out. We could hear him shout, You shitheads!

We heard then the Ah! Only the sound of something being dragged along the cement floor. By a stroke of luck, Dega was put in the cell next to me. But first we were introduced to a one-eyed, red-headed monster at least six foot five who held a brand-new bullwhip in his right hand. He was the trusty, a prisoner who served the guards as official torturer.

With him around, the guards could beat the men without exerting themselves, and if someone died in the process, they were guiltless in the eyes of the Administration. Later on, during a short stay in the infirmary, I learned all about this human beast. The director deserved congratulations for having chosen his executioner so well.

He had been a quarryman by profession. One day, in the small northern town where he lived, he had the idea of committing suicide and killing his wife at the same time. For this purpose he used a good-sized stick of dynamite. Ghastly explosion. Result: his wife literally had to be gathered up in spoonfuls, part of the house collapsed, three children were crushed to death under the debris, together with a woman of seventy.

Others were injured in varying degrees. As for Tribouillard, he lost part of his left hand—only his little finger and part of his thumb remained—and his left eye and ear. He also had a head wound that required surgery. One, two, three, four, five, and turn … one, two, three, four, five, and turn So began again the interminable shuttle between the wall and the door of the cell.

You were not allowed to lie down during the day. At five in the morning a strident whistle woke you up. You had to get up, make your bed, wash, and either walk or sit on a stool attached to the wall. You were not allowed to lie down! Crowning refinement of the penal system: the bed folded against the wall, and there it remained.

Fourteen hours of walking. To master the art of performing this continuous movement automatically, you had to learn to keep your head down, hands behind your back, walk neither too fast nor too slow, keep your steps the same length and turn automatically on the left foot at one end of the cell, on the right at the other.

One, two, three, four, five The cells were better lighted than those at the Conciergerie and you could hear noises from the outside, some from the disciplinary section, but also a few from the countryside beyond. At night you could catch the sounds of laborers whistling or singing on their way home from work, happy on a good cup of cider. I had a Christmas present: through a crack in the planks that covered my window, I could see the countryside all covered with snow and a few big trees picked out by the full moon.

Just like a Christmas card. Shaken by the wind, the trees had dropped their mantles of snow, black silhouettes against the white.

It was Christmas; it was even Christmas in part of the prison. The Administration had made an effort for the convicts in transit: we were allowed to buy two squares of chocolate. I said two squares, not two bars. The restrictions of justice had turned me into a pendulum.

This shuttle back and forth in my cell made up my entire universe. It had been mathematically worked out. Nothing, absolutely nothing was to be left in the cell. The prisoner must have no distractions. Had I been caught looking through the crack in my window, I would have been severely punished.