The Assassin
The guilty man was defended by a very young counsel; it was his first brief, and he spoke as follows:
“The facts, gentlemen of the jury, are undeniable. My client, a respectable man, an employee without a stain on his character, a gentle and timid man, has assassinated his employer in a burst of rage that seems incomprehensible. Will you allow me to explain the psychology of this crime, if I may so call it, extenuating nothing and excusing nothing? You shall judge it after that.
“Jean-Nicholas Lougère is the son of honourable parents, who have brought him up to be a simple-minded and reverent man.
“In that lies his crime: in reverence! It is a feeling, gentlemen, hardly known among us today, its name only seems still to exist, and it has lost all its force. You must find your way into certain retired and modest families to rediscover there this austere tradition, this religious devotion to a thing or a man, to a sentiment or a belief still invested with sacred awe, this faith which tolerates neither doubt nor smile, nor the merest whisper of suspicion.
“A man is not an upright man, a really upright man, in the full sense of the phrase, unless he is a reverent one. The reverent man has his eyes shut. He believes. We others, whose eyes are wide open to the world, who live here, in this palace of justice which is the sewer of society, into which every infamy is emptied, we others in whose ears are poured every tale of shame, who are the devoted defenders of every human villainy, the sustainers, not to say the souteneurs, of every shady character, male and female, from princes to slum vagabonds, we who welcome with indulgent kindness, with complaisance, with smiling benevolence, every guilty creature to defend them before you, we who—if we are truly in love with our profession and measure our legal sympathy by the greatness of the crime—we cannot retain a reverent mind. We see too closely the flood of corruption that runs from the highest in the State to the lowest dregs of society. We know too well how all decays, how all is given away or sold. Places, office, honours, sold blatantly in exchange for a little gold, delicately in exchange for titles or shares in industrial enterprises, or, more simply, bartered for a woman’s kiss. Our duty and our profession force us to be ignorant of nothing, to suspect everyone, for all men are suspect; and we are struck with astonishment when we are confronted by a man who, like the assassin seated here before you, is so possessed by the spirit of reverence that he is willing to become a martyr for it.
“We others, gentlemen, we cherish our honour as we do a desire for cleanliness, from dislike of base actions, from a feeling of personal dignity and pride; but we do not bear in the depths of our hearts a blind, innate, savage faith in it, as does this man.
“Let me tell you the story of his life.
“He was brought up as children used to be brought up, to regard human actions as divisible into two classes, good and evil. Good was set before him with an irresistible authority, that forced him to distinguish it from evil, as he distinguished day from night. His father was not of those superior beings who look out upon life from a lofty pinnacle, see the origin of faith, and recognise the social needs which created these distinctions.
“So he grew up, pious and trusting, fanatic and narrow-minded.
“At the age of twenty-two he married. He was married to a cousin whose upbringing had been like his own, who was as simple-minded and as pure as he was. He had the inestimable good fortune to share his life with an honest woman, truehearted, the rarest of beings and the most worthy of reverence. For his mother he felt the veneration that surrounds the mother in these patriarchal families, the devout worship that is offered only to divinities. He transferred some part of this devotion to his wife, lessened hardly at all by the familiarity of marriage. And he lived absolutely unaware of deceit, in a state of unshakable integrity and tranquil happiness which made him a being apart. Deceiving none, he never suspected that anyone could deceive him, of all people.
“Some time before his marriage he had entered as cashier the firm of M. Langlais, whom he has just assassinated.
“We know, gentlemen of the jury, from the evidence of Mme. Langlais, of her brother, M. Perthuis, her husband’s business associate, from every member of the family and from all the chief employees of the bank, that Lougère was a model employee as regards honesty, obedience, civility and deference to the heads of the business, and regularity of conduct.
“He was treated, moreover, with the consideration due
