Honore de Balzac (25 page)

The examination of the Messieurs d'Hauteserre corroborated this
testimony, and was in harmony with their preliminary dispositions. The
necessity of some reason for their ride suggested to each of them the
excuse of hunting. The peasants had given warning, a few days earlier,
of a wolf in the forest, and on that they had fastened as a pretext.

The public prosecutor, however, pointed out a discrepancy between the
first statements of the Messieurs d'Hauteserre, in which they mentioned
that the whole party hunted together, and the defence now made by the
Messieurs de Simeuse that their purpose on that day was the valuation of
the forest.

Monsieur de Grandville here called attention to the fact that as the
crime was not committed until after two o'clock in the afternoon, the
prosecution had no ground to question their word when they stated the
manner in which they had employed their morning.

The prosecutor replied that the prisoners had an interest in concealing
their preparations for the abduction of the senator.

The remarkable ability of the defence was now felt. Judges, jurors, and
audience became aware that victory would be hotly contested. Bordin and
Monsieur de Grandville had studied their ground and foreseen everything.
Innocence is required to render a clear and plausible account of its
actions. The duty of the defence is to present a consistent and probable
tale in opposition to an insufficient and improbable accusation. To
counsel who regard their client as innocent, an accusation is false.
The public examination of the four gentlemen sufficiently explained the
matter in their favor. So far all was well. But the examination of Michu
was more serious; there the real struggle began. It was now clear to
every one why Monsieur de Grandville had preferred to take charge of the
servant's defence rather than that of his masters.

Michu admitted his threats against Marion; but denied that he had made
them violently. As for the ambush in which he was supposed to have
watched for his enemy, he said he was merely making his rounds in his
park; the senator and Monsieur Grevin might perhaps have been alarmed at
the sight of his gun and have thought his intentions hostile when they
were really inoffensive. He called attention to the fact that in the
dusk a man who was not in the habit of hunting might easily fancy a gun
was pointed at him, whereas, in point of fact, it was held in his hand
at half-cock. To explain the condition of his clothes when arrested, he
said he had slipped and fallen in the breach on his way home. "I could
scarcely see my way," he said, "and the loose stones slipped from under
me as I climbed the bank." As for the plaster which Gothard was bringing
him, he replied as he had done in all previous examinations, that he
wanted it to secure one of the stone posts of the covered way.

The public prosecutor and the president asked him to explain how he
could have been at the top of the covered way engaged in mending a
stone post and at the same time in the breach of the moat leading to the
chateau; more especially as the justice of peace, the gendarmes and the
forester all declared they had heard him approach them from the lower
road. To this Michu replied that Monsieur d'Hauteserre had blamed him
for not having mended the post,—which he was anxious to have finished
because there were difficulties about that road with the township,—and
he had therefore gone up to the chateau to report that the work was
done.

Monsieur d'Hauteserre had, in fact, put up a fence above the covered way
to prevent the township from taking possession of it. Michu seeing
the important part which the state of his clothes was likely to play,
invented this subterfuge. If, in law, truth is often like falsehood,
falsehood on the other hand has a very great resemblance to truth.
The defence and the prosecution both attached much importance to this
testimony, which became one of the leading points of the trial
on account of the vigor of the defence and the suspicions of the
prosecution.

Gothard, instructed no doubt by Monsieur de Grandville, for up to that
time he had only wept when they questioned him, admitted that Michu had
told him to carry the plaster.

"Why did neither you nor Gothard take the justice of peace and the
forester to the stone post and show them your work?" said the public
prosecutor, addressing Michu.

"Because," replied the man, "I didn't believe there was any serious
accusation against us."

All the prisoners except Gothard were now removed from the courtroom.
When Gothard was left alone the president adjured him to speak the truth
for his own sake, pointing out that his pretended idiocy had come to an
end; none of the jurors believed him imbecile; if he refused to answer
the court he ran the risk of serious penalty; whereas by telling the
truth at once he would probably be released. Gothard wept, hesitated,
and finally ended by saying that Michu had told him to carry several
sacks of plaster; but that each time he had met him near the farm. He
was asked how many sacks he had carried.

"Three," he replied.

An argument hereupon ensued as to whether the three sacks included the
one which Gothard was carrying at the time of the arrest (which reduced
the number of the other sacks to two) or whether there were three
without the last. The debate ended in favor of the first proposition,
the jury considering that only two sacks had been used. They appeared
to have a foregone conviction on that point, but Bordin and Monsieur de
Grandville judged it best to surfeit them with plaster, and weary them
so thoroughly with the argument that they would no longer comprehend the
question. Monsieur de Grandville made it appear that experts ought to
have been sent to examine the stone posts.

"The director of the jury," he said, "has contented himself with merely
visiting the place, less for the purpose of making a careful examination
than to trap Michu in a lie; this, in our opinion, was a failure of
duty, but the blunder is to our advantage."

On this the Court appointed experts to examine the posts and see if one
of them had been really mended and reset. The public prosecutor, on his
side, endeavored to make capital of the affair before the experts could
testify.

"You seem to have chosen," he said to Michu, who was now brought
back into the courtroom, "an hour when the daylight was waning, from
half-past five to half-past six o'clock, to mend this post and to cement
it all alone."

"Monsieur d'Hauteserre had blamed me for not doing it," replied Michu.

"But," said the prosecutor, "if you used that plaster on the post you
must have had a trough and a trowel. Now, if you went to the chateau
to tell Monsieur d'Hauteserre that you had done the work, how do you
explain the fact that Gothard was bringing you more plaster. You
must have passed your farm on your way to the chateau, and you would
naturally have left your tools at home and stopped Gothard."

This overwhelming argument produced a painful silence in the courtroom.

"Come," said the prosecutor, "you had better admit at once that what you
buried was
not a stone post
."

"Do you think it was the senator?" said Michu, sarcastically.

Monsieur de Grandville hereupon demanded that the public prosecutor
should explain his meaning. Michu was accused of abduction and the
concealment of a person, but not of murder. Such an insinuation was
a serious matter. The code of Brumaire, year IV., forbade the public
prosecutor from presenting any fresh count at the trial; he must keep
within the indictment or the proceedings would be annulled.

The public prosecutor replied that Michu, the person chiefly concerned
in the abduction and who, in the interests of his masters, had taken the
responsibility on his own shoulders, might have thought it necessary to
plaster up the entrance of the hiding-place, still undiscovered, where
the senator was now immured.

Pressed with questions, hampered by the presence of Gothard, and brought
into contradiction with himself, Michu struck his fist upon the edge of
the dock with a resounding blow and said: "I have had nothing whatever
to do with the abduction of the senator. I hope and believe his enemies
have merely imprisoned him; when he reappears you'll find out that the
plaster was put to no such use."

"Good!" said de Grandville, addressing the public prosecutor; "you have
done more for my client's cause than anything I could have said."

The first day's session ended with this bold declaration, which
surprised the judges and gave an advantage to the defence. The lawyers
of the town and Bordin himself congratulated the young advocate. The
prosecutor, uneasy at the assertion, feared that he had fallen into some
trap; in fact he was really caught in a snare that was cleverly set for
him by the defence and admirably played off by Gothard. The wits of the
town declared that he had white-washed the affair and splashed his own
cause, and had made the accused as white as the plaster itself. France
is the domain of satire, which reigns supreme in our land; Frenchmen
jest on a scaffold, at the Beresina, at the barricades, and some will
doubtless appear with a quirk upon their lips at the grand assizes of
the Last Judgment.

On the morrow the witnesses for the prosecution were examined,—Madame
Marion, Madame Grevin, Grevin himself, the senator's valet, and
Violette, whose testimony can readily be imagined from the facts
already told. They all identified the five prisoners, with more or less
hesitation as to the four gentlemen, but with absolute certainty as to
Michu. Beauvisage repeated Robert d'Hauteserre's speech when he met
them at daybreak in the park. The peasant who had bought Monsieur
d'Hauteserre's calf testified to overhearing that of Mademoiselle de
Cinq-Cygne. The experts, who had compared the hoof-prints with the shoes
on the horses ridden by the five prisoners and found them absolutely
alike, confirmed their previous depositions. This point was naturally
one of vehement contention between Monsieur de Grandville and the
prosecuting officer. The defence called the blacksmith at Cinq-Cygne
and succeeded in proving that he had sold several horseshoes of the same
pattern to strangers who were not known in the place. The blacksmith
declared, moreover, that he was in the habit of shoeing in this
particular manner not only the horses of the chateau de Cinq-Cygne, but
those from other places in the canton. It was also proved that the horse
which Michu habitually rode was always shod at Troyes, and the mark of
that shoe was not among the hoof-prints found in the park.

"Michu's double was not aware of this circumstance, or he would have
provided for it," said Monsieur de Grandville, looking at the jury.
"Neither has the prosecution shown what horses our clients rode."

He ridiculed the testimony of Violette so far as it concerned a
recognition of the horses, seen from a long distance, from behind, and
after dusk. Still, in spite of all his efforts, the body of the evidence
was against Michu; and the prosecutor, judge, jury, and audience were
impressed with a feeling (as the lawyers for the defence had foreseen)
that the guilt of the servant carried with it that of the masters. So
the vital interest centred on all that concerned Michu. His bearing
was noble. He showed in his answers the sagacity with which nature had
endowed him; and the public, seeing him on his mettle, recognized his
superiority. And yet, strange to say, the more they understood him the
more certainty they felt that he was the instigator of the outrage.

The witnesses for the defence, always less important in the eyes of a
jury and of the law than the witnesses for the prosecution, seemed to
testify as in duty bound, and were listened to with that allowance. In
the first place neither Marthe, nor Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre
took the oath. Catherine and the Durieus, in their capacity as servants,
did not take it. Monsieur d'Hauteserre stated that he had ordered Michu
to replace and mend the stone post which had been thrown down. The
deposition of the experts sent to examine the fence, which was now read,
confirmed his testimony; but they helped the prosecution by declaring
they could not fix the exact time at which the repairs had been made; it
might have been several weeks or no more than twenty days.

The appearance of Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne excited the liveliest
curiosity; but the sight of her cousins in the prisoners' dock after
three weeks' separation affected her so much that her emotions gave
the audience an impression of guilt. She felt an overwhelming desire to
stand beside the twins, and was obliged, as she afterwards admitted, to
use all her strength to repress the longing that came into her mind
to kill the prosecutor so as to stand in the eyes of the world as a
criminal beside them. She testified, with simplicity, that riding from
Cinq-Cygne and seeing smoke in the park of Gondreville, she had supposed
there was a fire; at first she thought they were burning weeds or brush;
"but later," she added, "I observed a circumstance which I offer to the
attention of the Court. I found in the frogging of my habit and in the
folds of my collar small fragments of what appeared to be burned paper
which were floating in the air."

"Was there much smoke?" asked Bordin.

"Yes," replied Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne, "I feared a conflagration."

"This is enough to change the whole inquiry," remarked Bordin. "I
request the Court to order an immediate examination of that region of
the park where the fire occurred."

The president ordered the inquiry.

Grevin, recalled by the defence and questioned on this circumstance,
declared he knew nothing about it. But Bordin and he exchanged looks
which mutually enlightened them.

"The gist of the case is there," thought the old notary.