Here the prisoner raised his voice.
"I accepted the commission to murder the emperor, but I accepted it only in order to save him and his family. Yes, my countrymen, I am not a miserable thief, as they are trying to make out. Frenchmen! I call you all to my aid. No, I am not a thief! No, lam not an assassin! On the contrary, I accepted a commission to save Napoleon and his family. It is true that, during the first outburst of my royalist enthusiasm, I did, along with several other people, attach a rope to the neck of Napoleon's statue, on the 31st of March, to pull it down from its pedestal in the place Vendôme; but I here acknowledge publicly that I served a thankless cause. Though I did insult Napoleon's statue, I have done good to him in the flesh. No, I am not an assassin! Frenchmen, my honour is in your hands. You will not be deaf to my entreaties."
Again they tried to stop M. de Maubreuil's mouth, but the harder they tried to silence him the louder he spoke.
"I accepted," he continued, "a commission to save Napoleon, his son and his family; I admit that, bribed, deluded and entangled by the Provisional Government to do it, I was foolish enough to tie the cross of the Legion of Honour to my horse's tail; I bitterly repent of doing so. I have donned that cross of heroes again now: see, here it is on my breast; I won it in Spain in fair fight."
Here the Sieur de Maubreuil succumbed to the efforts they made to drown his voice. The whole time he had been speaking, the president and the judges had been fruitlessly endeavouring to enforce silence. In vain did the president shout, "Warders, take him away, take him away! Do your duty, warders!" Maubreuil writhed, clutching hold of the bar, and, nearly strangled by the warders, he still went on:—
"M. le président, my respect for you is unbounded, but your acts and words are useless: they wished to assassinate the emperor, and I only accepted the commission which has brought me here in order to save him."
There was a tremendous noise, an uproar and shouts among the audience. Many Vendéens were present, relatives and friends of the prisoner, who was related to the family of la Roche-jaquelein. Before the prisoner was brought in, these had tried to influence public opinion in his favour, by talking of the mystery which enshrouded his mission, and by pointing out his unblemished devotion to the royal cause. Picture to yourself, then, their dismay when they saw the line of defence he adopted; their confusion when they heard their client speak so diametrically opposite to their expectations; their astonishment when they heard the name of Napoleon pronounced with respect by the prisoner, at a time when the conqueror of the Pyramids and of Marengo was only spoken of as Buonaparte; at the title of Emperor given to a man whom King Louis XVIII., dating the beginning of his reign from 1795, declared never to have reigned!
Me. Couture, M. de Maubreuil's counsel, was then allowed to speak. We will not report his speech, which was very long. He pleaded more on a legal technicality than on the matter of the charge. He spoke in the first instance of the injustice of Maubreuil being the only one arraigned, while d'Asies, Cotteville, and others who had acted in concert with him, were in full enjoyment of their liberty. He added that the trunks having been deposited without verification at M. de Vanteaux's, it could not be established who had abstracted the eighty-four thousand francs in gold. He referred to the marvellous manner in which some of the jewels that had been thrown by an unknown hand into the Seine had been recovered by a man named Huet, an ex-employé of the police, who, when fishing, had drawn up two diamond combs caught in his hooked line. Me. Couture went on to assert that the prisoner, to whom a mission of the gravest importance had been entrusted, ought not to be tried by an ordinary Court, and to prove his point, Me. Couture read the five different orders which had authorised M. de Maubreuil to call into requisition all the officials of the kingdom. The tenor of these orders was as follows:—
The first, signed by General Dupont, War Minister, authorised M. de Maubreuil to make use of the army, which was to obey all his demands, and commanded the authorities to furnish him with all the troops he might require, as he was charged with a mission of the highest importance. The second, signed by Anglès, Minister of Police, ordered all the police force throughout the kingdom of France to lend assistance to M. de Maubreuil to the same end. The third, signed by Bourrienne, Director-General of the Posts, ordered all post-masters to supply him with whatever horses he should require, and to consider themselves personally responsible for the least delay they might occasion him. The fourth, signed by General Sacken, Governor of Paris, enjoined the Allied troops to assist M. de Maubreuil. Finally, the fifth, which was in Russian, was addressed to those officers who did not understand French and who could not therefore have obeyed the preceding orders. From these documents Me. Couture argued that the king's council alone must have had cognisance of M. de Maubreuil's mission, and alone ought to decide the case.
After having replied to Me. Couture's pleading, the king's procurator set forth his reasons for regarding the tribunal correctionnel as incompetent in the present case, since the charges brought against the Sieur de Maubreuil constituted a crime, and were not those of a simple misdemeanour; that it was a question of a robbery under arms committed on the highway, and not merely a case of breach of confidence. For it was vain, he said, to try to allege the unlimited power with which the prisoner was vested; no power could authorise a citizen to run counter to existing laws; for if such a contention could be maintained it could be pursued to its logical conclusion and, in that case, it might be excusable to commit a murder or burn down a village. "As a matter of fact," continued M. de Vatimesnil, "we are advised that Maubreuil, acting as a Government agent, was endowed on that very count with a far graver responsibility, and the law ought to be set in force against him with the greater severity. No mission could excuse a man for having ill-treated a person travelling on the highways with a passport, and his crime assumed still graver proportions when that person happened to be an august princess, sprung from an illustrious house, allied to all the crowned heads of Europe, and travelling under the protection of a passport from her illustrious cousin, the Emperor of Russia, a princess who was entitled to double respect, both from her rank and because of the reverses of fortune she had recently experienced." "And," exclaimed the king's counsel, "with what indignation ought we to be seized, when we hear the accused uttering such libellous fables to avoid the course of justice! Who are those Frenchmen he addresses, whom he invokes to his aid? What faith could be put in such an unlikely story, as that he had received a mission against a person travelling under the safeguard of the most solemn treaties, signed by all the allied sovereigns? and if he did accept such a mission, was it not doubly mean to have accepted money for carrying it out, and then to have deceived those whom he pretended had given it him? Should he not be regarded henceforth as one of those hateful creatures known of all men, who, under pressure of an accusation, hatches conspiracies, and denounces unknown fellow-citizens, to the sole end of arresting or diverting justice?"