“I need hardly tell you, gentlemen, I suppose, that I am innocent,” said he, addressing Monsieur Mouilleron, Monsieur Lousteau-Prangin, and the clerk. “I can only beg you to help me to prove my innocence. I know nothing about the matter—”
When the judge had explained to Joseph all the evidence against him, ending with Max’s deposition, Joseph was astounded.
“Why,” said he, “I did not leave the house till past five; I walked down the Grand’ Rue, and at half-past five I was gazing at the front of your parish church at Saint-Cyr. I stopped to speak for a moment to the bell-ringer, who was about to toll the Angelus, asking him some questions about the building, which had struck me as quaint and unfinished. Then I crossed the vegetable market, where the women were already collecting. From thence I went by the Place Misère and the Pont-aux-Anes to the mill of Landrôle, where I quietly watched the ducks for five or six minutes; the miller’s men must have noticed me. I saw some women coming to the washing-place; they must be there still; they began to laugh at me, remarking that I was no beauty; I replied that an ugly case might contain jewels. I went along the avenue as far as Tivoli, where I talked to the gardener. … Verify all these statements, and do not arrest me, I beg, for I give you my word of honor to remain in your office till you are convinced of my innocence.”
This rational statement, made without any hesitation, and with the ease of a man sure of his case, made some impression on the lawyers.
“Well, we must summons and find all these people,” said Monsieur Mouilleron, “but that is not to be done in a day. Make up your mind, in your own interest, to remain in the lockup of the Palais de Justice.”
“Then let me write to reassure my mother, poor woman.—Oh, you may read the letter!”
The request was too reasonable to be refused, and Joseph wrote these few lines:
“Do not be uneasy, my dear mother; the mistake of which I am the victim will be easily cleared up, and I have given the clue. Tomorrow, or perhaps this evening, I shall be free. I embrace you; and say to Monsieur and Madame Hochon how grieved I am by this worry, which is indeed no fault of mine, for it is the result of some mistake which I do not yet understand.”
When this letter arrived, Madame Bridau was half-dead of nervous terrors, and the remedies Monsieur Goddet was persuading her to sip had no effect whatever. But the reading of this letter was like a balm; after a few hysterical sobs Agathe sank into the quiescence that succeeds such a crisis.
When Monsieur Goddet came again to visit his patient, he found her regretting having left Paris.
“God is punishing me,” said she, with tears in her eyes. “Oh, my dear godmother, ought I not to have trusted in Him, and have looked to His mercy for my brother’s fortune?”
“Madame,” said Hochon in her ear, “if your son is innocent, Max is an utter villain, and we shall not overmatch him in the business; so go back to Paris.”
“And how is Monsieur Gilet going on?” asked Madame Hochon of the doctor.
“The wound is serious, but not mortal. A month of care, and he will be all right again. I left him writing to Monsieur Mouilleron to request him to release your son,” said he to Madame Bridau. “Oh! Max is a good fellow. I told him what a state you were in; and then he remembered a detail of the murderer’s dress, which proved to him that he could not be your son; the assassin had on list shoes, and it is perfectly certain that your son went out walking in boots.”
“Ah! God forgive him the ill he has done me!”
At nightfall a man had left a note for Gilet, written in a feigned hand, and in these words:
“Captain Gilet must not leave an innocent man in the hands of the law. The person who dealt the blow promises not to repeat it if Monsieur Gilet delivers Monsieur Joseph Bridau without denouncing the real culprit.”
On reading this letter, which he burnt, Max wrote to Monsieur Mouilleron a note mentioning the remark he had made to Monsieur Goddet, begging him to release Joseph, and to come and see him that he might explain matters.
By the time this note reached Monsieur Mouilleron, Lousteau-Prangin had already proved the truth of Joseph’s account of himself, by the evidence of the bell-ringer, of a market-woman, of the washerwomen, the men of the mill, and the gardener from Frapesle. Max’s letter finally demonstrated the innocence of the accused, whom Monsieur Mouilleron himself escorted back to Monsieur Hochon’s. Joseph was received by his mother with such eager tenderness, that, like the husband in la Fontaine’s fable, this poor misprized son was thankful to chance for an annoyance which had secured him such a demonstration of affection.
“Of course,” said Monsieur Mouilleron, with an all-knowing air, “I saw at once, by the way you faced the mob, that you were innocent; but in spite of my convictions, you see, when you know what Issoudun is, the best way to protect you was to take you to prison as we did. I must say you put a good face on the matter.”
“I was thinking of something else,” replied the artist simply. “I know an officer who told me that he was once arrested in Dalmatia under somewhat similar circumstances, on his way home from an early morning walk, by an excited mob.—The similarity struck me, and I was studying all those heads with the idea of painting a riot in 1793. … And then I was saying to myself, ‘Greedy wretch! you
