Papillon Read Online Free

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. A few days more and I’d have nothing. 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 was spending my odd change because they’d be taking it all anyway to pay the costs of “justice.”
    I found a small note slipped inside the bread. It was from Dega, instructing me to go to the delousing room. “You’ll find three lice in the matchbox.” I took out the matches and there they were, three fat and healthy lice. I knew what I was to do. I must show them to the guard and tomorrow he’d send me and all my belongings, including my mattress, to the steam room to kill all the parasites—except me, of course. And so the next day I met Dega there. No guards. We were alone.
    “Thanks, Dega. Thanks to you I got my plan .”
    “Does it bother you?”
    “No.”
    “When you go to the toilet, wash it well before you put it back.”
    “Right. I think it’s good and tight because the bills are still in perfect condition. And I’ve been carrying it for seven days.”
    “I’m glad it’s working.”
    “What are you planning to do, Dega?”
    “I’m going to play crazy. I don’t want to go to the bagne . Here in France I’ll do maybe eight or ten years. I have connections and might get five years off.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Forty-two.”
    “You are crazy! If you lose ten or fifteen years, you’ll be an old man when you get out. Does hard labor scare you?”
    “Yes, and I’m not ashamed to say I’m scared of the bagne . It’s terrible in Guiana, you know. 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 don’t catch leprosy, you get yellow fever, or dysentery, which can finish you off, or tuberculosis, or malaria. If you escape these, you stand a good chance of being assassinated for your plan or dying in a break. Believe me, Papillon, I’m not saying this to discourage you, but I know what I’m talking about. I’ve known several cons who returned to France after even short terms—five to seven years. They were human dregs. They spent nine months of the year in the hospital. As for escaping, it’s not as easy as you think.”
    “I believe you, Dega, but I have confidence in myself, and I’m not going to hang around there, that’s for sure. I’m a good sailor, I know the sea, and I’m going to waste no time making a break. Can you see yourself doing ten years in solitary? Even if they take away five—and there’s no guarantee they will—do you think you can stand complete isolation without going nuts? 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. Those hours aren’t sixty minutes long, but six hundred. And that’s not the whole story either.”
    “Maybe so, but you’re young and I’m forty-two.”
    “Listen, Dega, what are you really afraid of? Is it the other cons?”
    “If you want the truth, Papi, yes. Everybody knows I was a millionaire. And from there to killing me because they think I’m carrying fifty or a hundred thousand francs around isn’t a very long step.”
    “Listen, do you want to make a deal? Promise me you won’t go to the nut house, and I promise I’ll always stick by you. We’ll help each other out. I’m strong and quick, I learned to fight early, and I’m good with a knife. So don’t worry. The other cons won’t just respect us; they’ll be afraid of us. For a cavale , we need nobody. You’ve got dough, I’ve got dough. I know how to use a