She looked straight across to Bibi, who was as pale as a waxen image.
“Fleur Chauvelin, nommée Armand.”
XXXV
There is no doubt that everything would have gone well, had it not been for Fleurette herself. Perhaps “well” is the wrong word: “differently” would be better. Nothing could have gone “well,” because even though Chauvelin had succeeded in obtaining an acquittal, his enemies would have returned immediately to the charge, and forced on the girl’s re-arrest even before she had left the Tribunal. There had been cases during the past few weeks, in Paris, in Lyons and so on, when prisoners were acquitted and re-arrested, retried, acquitted again, and again re-arrested. A regular cat-and-mouse game, at which Chauvelin himself was an adept. Nevertheless with a first acquittal there might have been some hope. And he practically had obtained that acquittal, when Fleurette herself ruined her chance, and caused her own condemnation. Chauvelin could have struck her for her folly. His love for her always pertained to that of a wild beast for its young; the instinct to devour in moments of peril. If she was destined to perish, then it should be by his own hand, not as a spectacle for the rabble to gloat on.
The Moniteur of the 22nd Messidor gives one or two interesting details concerning the trial of a country girl named Fleur Chauvelin, daughter of a Citizen Armand Chauvelin of the Central Committee of Public Safety, and member of the National Convention, and relates at full length the extraordinary incidents which marked its close. Looking back upon that memorable day, and on the solemn hour which saw the girl Fleur Chauvelin nommée Armand called to the bar of the accused, we visualize Chauvelin the father, presiding over that Tribunal of infamy, and having sent within the last half-hour half a dozen fellow-creatures callously to death, now seeing his own daughter, the only being in all the world whom he had ever loved, standing there before him, accused, condemned already in the eyes of the canaille.
There was no time wasted during the proceedings, wherein the accused was allowed neither jury nor advocate. The State as represented by its three nominees who sat as judges, was judge and jury and prosecutor all in one. It was men like Chauvelin who had invented this travesty of justice and eliminated all procedure devised by civilization for the protection of the accused.
The Public Prosecutor opened the proceedings by reading the indictment in mechanical monotone; it was identically the same as that framed against hundreds of others—guilty or innocent alike—the printed formula invented by the odious Foucquier-Tinville in which the words “Traitor,” and “Enemy of the Republic” were alone intelligible. All else was a jumble of words. The crowd was not listening. Their attention was fixed on the accused whose modest bearing and spotless attire seemed to arouse their spite and their derision, more than the rags and filth displayed by a previous prisoner had done.
When the reading of the indictment came to an end, Pochart sitting beside the Presiding Judge asked the usual question:
“Is the prisoner accused publicly or in secret?”
And the Public Prosecutor replied: “Publicly.”
Danou, the third judge then asked: “By whom?”
And again the Public Prosecutor gave reply:
“By one Adèle,” he said, “of unknown parentage, and by Citizen Lieutenant Godet of the revolutionary army.”
“And to what will these persons testify?”
“To the treason committed against the State by the accused and to her connection with the enemies of the Republic.”
After which Adèle was called. Her small ratlike face looked wan and pinched; her hands trembled visibly, and she wiped them continually against the ragged apron which she wore. She was obviously very nervous and never looked once in the direction of the accused, but she spoke clearly enough in a shrill, high-pitched voice. Questioned at first by the Public Prosecutor, she presently embarked more glibly upon her story, relating the events which were intended to condemn Fleurette. Chauvelin already knew the tale by heart. The soldiers on the bridge. The raid on the château. Fleurette’s halt that evening in the cottage of the widow Tronchet. Her assignation, through Adèle, with Amédé Colombe. The casket and wallet underneath her shawl, then transferred into young Colombe’s keeping.
Ofttimes Chauvelin tried to break into the girl’s narrative; he put stern questions to her, tried to intimidate her, to trip her into misstatements of obvious contradictions. But Adèle held her ground. Informer, ingrate, wanton though she was, she was speaking the truth and was not to be shaken. Hisses and boos from the crowd oft greeted the President’s cross-questionings, cries of approbation greeted Adèle’s spirited rejoinders. In the wordy warfare between herself and Chauvelin, she scored nearly every time. Encouraged by the sympathy of the rabble, she lost her nervousness, whilst he gradually lost his self-control. He had so much at stake, and she nothing but the satisfaction of vanity and of spite.
“Be not intimidated, citizeness,” Pochart put in forcefully at one moment, “let not powerful influences sway you from your duty.”
“Vas-y Adèle of unknown parentage!” one of the women shouted from above. “ ’Twas some aristo doubtless who betrayed thy mother. Let this aristo at least pay for her kind.”
Amidst thunderous applause Adèle stepped down from the bar. Chauvelin tried in vain to command silence, he was shouted down by the crowd.
“Thou’rt a true patriot, Citizen Chauvelin,” one woman called out lustily. “To have a traitor for a daughter is a curse. Her death will not be for thee a sacrifice.”
He waited in seeming patience, white to the lips, until the tumult had subsided, then calling all his reserves of strength, moral and mental, to his aid, he said in a calm firm voice:
“The witness has lied. The events which she has described could not have taken place in her presence seeing that on that day and at that hour she was in my house,
