The Sieur de Maubreuil had listened to all this tirade with fiery impatience, and his solicitor had only been able to pacify him by allowing him the pen and paper which he demanded. When M. de Vatimesnil's speech was over, Maubreuil passed what he had just written to the president, then rose and said:—"M. le président, as a man who expects to be assassinated at any moment, I place this political deposition in your hands. Frenchmen, it is my honour I am bequeathing to all you who are here present. As a man on the brink of appearing before God, I swear that it was M. de Talleyrand who, by means of M. Laborie, sent me; that the prince forced me to sit down in his own arm-chair; that he offered me two hundred thousand livres income and the title of duke, if I accomplished my mission satisfactorily;[1] furthermore, the Emperor Alexander offered me his own horses; but, I repeat, if I accepted the mission I am blamed for, it was to save the emperor and his family."
Here they again compelled Maubreuil to stop speaking, and the warders, taking hold of him by his shoulders, forced him down into his seat.
Then his lawyer, Me. Couture, rose, addressed the king's counsel once more, and begged for pity's sake that no notice should be taken of his client's mad words.
"Alas!" he cried, "the man whom you see before you, monsieur, is no longer M. de Maubreuil, but only the remains, the shade of M. de Maubreuil. A detention of three years, three hundred and ninety days of which has been spent in solitary confinement without communication with a soul, without even seeing his own counsel, has deranged his reason. He is now nothing but the ruins of a man. For the love of humanity, do not take account of a speech which can only tell against him!" The judges, greatly embarrassed by what they had just heard, although their business was but to decide on the simple question of the competence or incompetence of their tribunal, deferred sentence until the following Tuesday, 22 April.
Probably the delay was arranged, so those in court thought, in order to receive instructions from the château, and to act in accordance with those instructions.
THE SITTING OF 22 APRIL
Maubreuil was led in. He had scarcely entered the prisoner's dock before he violently pushed away the guard and cried out, "You have no right to maltreat me like this, warders; you have made me suffer quite enough the three years I have been in prison. It is a dastardly wicked thing! We are here before justice and not before the police! Let me rather be shot immediately than delivered over longer to the tortures of which I have been the victim for three years! No, never was greater cruelty exercised in the Prussian fortresses, in the dungeons of the Inquisition under the foundations of Venice! I am cut off from the world; my complaints are hushed up; my lawyer is forbidden to print and distribute my defence. I here express before all, my gratitude for his zeal and his devotion; but I am in despair that he has not based his defence on the information I have given him: he has not dared to do so."
Here silence was again imposed on the prisoner. The president then read the sentence, pronouncing that the tribunal de police correctionnelle declared its incompetence, and sent the prisoner to the assizes, on the ground that if the facts which had been laid bare were proved, they constituted a crime, and not a simple misdemeanour.
When the prisoner heard the sentence of incompetence to deal with the case pronounced he sighed deeply, and his face, changed by a long captivity, expressed dejection and despair. But he rallied his strength and cried—