Papillon by Henri Charrière Read Free Book Online

he’d know. So I asked him coldly, “How much is in it?”
    “Twenty-five thousand francs.”
    Without another word I took his plan . Very clean it was, too, and right there in front of him I pushed it up my anus, wondering if it was possible for a man to carry two. I had no idea. I stood up, put my pants back on.... It was all right. It didn’t bother me.
    “My name is Ignace Galgani,” he said before leaving. “Thanks, Papillon.”
    I went back to Dega and told him the story.
    “It’s not too heavy?”
    “No.”
    “O.K. then.”
    We tried to get in touch with the men who had escaped before, if possible with Julot or Le Guittou. We were hungry for information: what it was like over there, how they treated you, how to keep your plan , etc. As luck would have it, we fell in with a very unusual character. He was a Corsican who had been born in the bagne . His father was a guard and lived with his wife on the Iles du Salut. He had been born on the Ile Royale, one of the three islands, the others being Saint-Joseph and Diable (Devil’s Island), and—oh destiny!—he was going back not as a guard’s son but as a convict.
    He had been given twelve years at hard labor for burglary with forced entry. He was nineteen, open-faced, with clear bright eyes. We could tell right away that he was a victim of circumstance. He knew very little about the underworld, but he would be useful in giving us information on what lay ahead. He told us about life on the islands where he had lived for fourteen years. We learned, for example, that his nurse on the islands had been a convict, a famous gangster who got his on the Butte in a duel with knives over the beautiful eyes of Casque d’Or.
    He gave us some invaluable advice: we must plan our escape from Grande Terre; from the islands it would be impossible. Then, we mustn’t get listed as dangerous, for with this label we’d no sooner land at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, our destination, than we’d be interned for years or for life, depending on how dangerous they thought we were. In general, fewer than 5 percent were interned on the islands. The others stayed on Grande Terre. The islands were healthy, but Grande Terre—as Dega had already told us—was a real bitch of a place: all sorts of diseases gradually drained a con, or he met with various forms of sudden death.
    We hoped we wouldn’t be interned on the islands. But I felt a knot in my throat: what if I had already been labeled dangerous? With my life sentence, the business with Tribouillard and the director, I was not in good shape.
    Saint-Martin-de-Ré was bursting at the seams with prisoners. There were two categories: between eight hundred and a thousand convicts, and nine hundred relégués . To be a convict, you had to have done something serious or, at least, been accused of having done something serious. The sentences ranged from seven years of hard labor to life. A convict granted a reprieve from the death penalty automatically got life. With the relégués it was different. A man became a relégué after three to five convictions. It’s true they were incorrigible thieves and you could understand why society had to protect itself. On the other hand, it was shameful for a civilized people to employ this extra form of punishment. The relégués were small-time thieves—and clumsy ones, since they were caught so often—and being a relégué in my time came to the same thing as a life sentence. No nation has the right to revenge itself or rush to eliminate people just because they cause society anxiety. They should be healed instead of given such inhuman punishment.
    We had now been on Saint-Martin-de-Ré seventeen days. We knew that the name of the ship taking us to the bagne was La Martinière . It was to carry eighteen hundred convicts. Eight or nine hundred of us were gathered in the courtyard of the fortress. We had been standing in rows of ten for about an hour, filling the courtyard. A door opened and out came a