This pronouncement was greeted with mighty uproar. Derisive laughter, cat’s calls, whistling, strident shouts made riotous confusion. Only two persons in the crowded room appeared serene. One was the accused, the other her judge. The Moniteur says that throughout the whole proceedings the attitude of the accused was astonishingly calm: “d’une sérénité étonnante.” She looked straight before her, sometimes at the President, but more often her eyes appeared to be fixed on the tricolour flag draped over the wall above his head, and ornamented with a red cap and the words writ largely: “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ou la Mort.”
And so too was the President equally serene. Outwardly. He stood upright whilst the turmoil continued, with head erect and hands held behind his back. Insults and jeers flew at him from every side. But he never winced. The rabble called him, “Traitor, Liar, Tyrant!” and various other names impossible to record. But he waited in seeming patience, until the crowd, eager to hear more, fell to comparative stillness once more. Then Pochart’s rasping voice cut through the silence, like the sound of a file against metal.
“You’ll have to substantiate that statement, Citizen President,” he said.
“My statements need no substantiation,” Chauvelin retorted coolly. “The word of a representative of the people is sufficient against any witness.”
And while Pochart was considering a suitable repartee, Danou put in smoothly:
“Should we not hear the next witness, Citizen Lieutenant Godet, before we discuss the matter?”
“Yes, yes!” the crowd yelled in response.
Scenting the unusual, the crowd was more excited than was its wont. Of late these hasty trials, six to the hour, with condemnation as a foregone conclusion, had become monotonous. One condemnation had been very much like another. But here was something novel. The rumour had already spread like wildfire that the accused was no less than the daughter of the President, Citizen Chauvelin, who was well known in the councils of State, a prominent member of many committees, and, some said, a personal friend of the great Robespierre. Here in truth was a test of supreme patriotism; a judge called upon to condemn his own daughter if she be guilty. And of course she was guilty, or she would not be here. There was no sympathy for either of them, only interest in the issue of this amazing trial. The crowd did not like the prisoner’s attitude, what they called her aristocratic airs and disdainful ways; even the children pointed grimy little fingers at her and hurled the poisonous darts of loathsome epithets at the aristo.
Thus was the scene prepared for the entrance of Lieutenant Godet, who stepped up to the witness’ platform with a display of self-assurance and a swagger that charmed the women. He was a man after their own heart, a real sans culotte in grimy rags, unkempt, unshaved, unwashed, the type of which the martyr Jean Paul Marat had been the most perfect exponent.
Conversations, objurgations, murmurs even were stilled; the click-click of knitting needles alone made a soft accompaniment to Citizen Godet’s replies to the Public Prosecutor’s preliminary questions. It was indeed a remarkable, an amazing, an almost unbelievable tale, which he had to tell. And gradually as he unfolded the various details of this extraordinary adventure a hush fell over the crowded room, very like the calm which nature assumes ere she sends forth the thunders of her wrath.
Godet, still with this air of self-assurance, related how he and the soldiers under his command, as well as the whole commune of Laragne had been tricked by a band of English spies whose actions proved them to have been in league with Amédé Colombe and with the accused. He told of the magnificently dressed soldiers. Their raid on the premises of Colombe the grocer of the Rue Haute. Their march through the village. Their captain’s swagger. His orders to himself, Godet, and to the real soldiers of the revolutionary army.
Still the crowd gave no sign of approbation, or disapprobation. Only that ominous, expectant hush which presaged a storm. The accused, always serene, smiled—so the Moniteur avers—as she encountered the President’s glance. Smiled cheerfully and trustfully. But the President’s face was inscrutable, and the colour of wax.
And then Godet went on to relate the long, weary tramp along the mountain roads. The dust. The fatigue. The want of food. He told how ci-devant Frontenac and Amédé Colombe wrested from the hands of justice, were presently taken to some unknown place of safety, while the soldiers of the Republic were left by the wayside, to perish of fatigue or inanition.
He had finished speaking, and still the click-click of the knitting needles was the only sound that broke the silence. The witness, sensing this silence, feeling its menace, had lost something of his arrogance; the hand with which he stroked his shaggy moustache trembled perceptibly. The accused, overcome by the heat, wiped her forehead with the corner of her apron, then she smiled once more across at her father.
And suddenly through the solemn stillness a woman’s shrill voice was raised:
“Those English spies did make a fool of thee, I am thinking, Citizen Godet!”
This suddenly relieved the tension. It was like a dam let loose. In a moment every kind of call and of cry, of laughter and of groan rang from end to end of the room.
“The English have made a fool of thee!”
Within a minute or two this became a general cry, accompanied by the stamping of feet, and loud and prolonged laughter, both malevolent and derisive. Godet, ludicrous in his bewilderment, rolled terror-filled eyes, whilst vainly trying to raise his voice above the din. The Moniteur says definitely that the accused put her hands to her ears. The uproar was in truth deafening.
A few moments of this confusion, and the next, Chauvelin was on his feet clanging his bell. His stentorian voice rose above the tumult, demanded silence, and in the lull that
