"Please, M. Beaumarchef, register my name as Caroline
Scheumal, and get me a real good place. ... It must be a cook, you understand,
and I want to do the marketing without the missus dodging around. ... Try and
find me a wealthy widower, or a young woman married to a very old fellow."
(Caught in the Net, Chapter 2).
Caroline Schimmel (as she is called in the rest of the
novel, this may be a type setter's error rather than the author's) is
using the services of Mascarin's "registry office for the engagement of
both male and female servants. ... Employers
say that he sends them the best of servants, and the domestics in their turn
assert that he only despatches them to good places." (Ibid.) The applicant servants are carefully managed; Gaston
de Gandelu's cook is "registered under class D, that is, for employment in
rather fast establishments." (Caught
in the Net, Chapter 10).
The
registry office is a front, which allows Mascarin to place his spies in any of
the respectable and noble households of Paris. As Mascarin explains: "The
police pay enormous sums to their street agents, while I, without opening my
purse, have an army of devoted adherents. I see perhaps fifty servants of both sexes
daily; calculate what this will amount to in a year." (Caught in a Net, Chapter 18) Mascarin is
a crafty businessman, and his business is information.
In his
office, "busily engaged in arranging those pieces of cardboard" that
he uses to file his information Mascarin mutters:
"What
a stupendous undertaking! but I have to work single-handed, and hold in my
hands all these threads, which for twenty years, with the patience of a spider,
I have been weaving into a web. No one, seeing me here, would believe this.
People who pass me by in the street say, 'That is Mascarin, who keeps a
servants' registry office;' that is the way in which they look upon me. Let
them laugh if they like; they little know the mighty power I wield in secret.
No one suspects me, no, not one." (Caught
in the Net, Chapter 10)
In a
chapter entitled "An Infamous Trade" (Caught in the Net, Chapter 18), Mascarin explains his business plan
to Marquis de Croisenau:
"Marquis,
as the summer goes on, you know that the ripest and reddest cherries are the
fullest flavored, just so, in the noblest and wealthiest of families in Paris
there is not one that has not some terrible and ghostly secret which is
sedulously concealed. Now, supposed that one man should gain possession of all
of them, would he not be sole and absolute master? ... I will be that
man!" (Ibid.)
Marquis
sums it up as "nothing but an elaborate and extended system of
blackmail." "Just so, Marquis, just so," Mascarin replies
"with an ironical smile." He practices an ancient and
well-established trade: "I know, at least, two thousand persons in Paris
who exist by the exercise of this profession; for I have studied them all, from
the convict who screws money out of his former companions, in penal servitude,
to the titled villain, who, having discovered the frailty of some unhappy
woman, forces her to give him her daughter as his wife." (Ibid.)
Paris,
according to Mascarin, is a vast anthill of victims and those who prey on them,
with an economic cycle where wealth and money is leeched out of respectable
citizens to a gallery of rogues, who in turn aspire to respectability (like
Mascarin and his partners) and become potential victims themselves for the next
generation of blackmailers. Toto Chupin, a petty criminal in Mascarin's employ,
is a member of this new generations scrabbling up through the criminal ranks
driven by greed and ambition.
Now
Mascarin has something planned something greater and more extraordinary than
the run-of-the-mill business of a blackmailer. His twenty years of scheming are
coming to fruition in "a serious undertaking ... full of peril." (Caught in the Net, Chapter 3)
Mascarin,
Dr Hortebise and Catenac have been in cahoots ever since they were young men - in Chapter 17
Mascarin gives "a short account of the rise and progress of this
association." Catenac, is a lawyer with a "special line of business.
He assayed rather risky matters, which might bring both parties into the
clutches of the criminal law, or at any rate, leave them with a taint upon both
of their names" (Caught in the Net,
Chapter 16). He is a gangsters' lawyer, Dr Hortebise is a medical charlatan:
"He had recently taken to homeopathy, and started a medical journal, which
he named The Globule, which died at
its fifth number." (Caught in the
Net, Chapter 3)
Now,
Mascarin explains: "we are getting old, and therefore have the greater
reason for making one more grand stroke to assure our fortune. ... I have said
this for years, and woven a web of gigantic proportions." (Caught in the Net, Chapter 3) Mascarin
has concocted two separate plots to secure himself a comfortable old age:
"If only one out of two operations ... succeeds, our fortune is
made." (Ibid.) One involves
Marquis de Croisenau and the second is "the affair of the Duke de
Champdoce" (Ibid.)
Somehow
Paul Violaine is to be involved in these plots. "What do you think of Paul
Violaine?" Mascarin asks Dr. Hortebise. "Suppose we found that he was
honest!" Hortebise replies. "I do not think that there is any chance
of that," Mascarin reassures him, "He is as weak as a woman, and as
vain as a journalist. Besides, he is ashamed at being poor." (Ibid.) Paul is on his way to becoming a criminal apprentice without knowing it.
In Caught in the Net, we sit in at the
meetings with the villains; we hear them explain their motivations, outline
their plots and we see them squabble amongst themselves. But because Mascarin
is holding his cards close to his chest, he does not reveal his entire scheme
to us at any stage. Gaboriau is performing a skilful balancing act allowing the reader learn just enough of the villain's plans to keep us hooked. The
villains discuss names, drop hints and refer to details that have not been
explained. It is left to us to try and piece together this
monstrous plot. As Dr Hortebise says at the end of Chapter 3: "If you are
ready, ... we will make a start."
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