"The character of Gautran has been exposed and laid bare in all its vileness; the minuteness of the evidence is surprising; not the smallest detail has been overlooked or omitted to complete the picture of a ferocious, ignorant, and infamous being. Guilty, he deserves no mercy; innocent, he is not to be condemned because he is vile.
"In the world's history there are records of countries and times in which it was the brutal fashion to bring four-footed animals to the bar of justice, there solemnly to try them for witchcraft and evil deeds; and you will find upon examination of those records of man's incredible folly and ignorance, that occasionally even these beasts of the earth--pigs and such-like--have been declared innocent of the crimes of which they have been charged. I ask no more for Gautran than the principle involved in these trials. Judge him, if you will, as you would an animal, but judge him in accordance with the principles of justice, which neither extenuates nor maliciously and unreasonably condemns.
"The single accusation of the murder of Madeline, a flower-girl, is the point to be determined, and you must not travel beyond it to other crimes and other misdeeds of which Gautran may have been guilty.
"It has been proved that the prisoner is possessed of great strength, that he is violent in his actions, uncontrollable in his passions, and fond of inflicting pain and prolonging it. He has not a redeeming feature in his coarse, animal nature. Thwarted, he makes the person who thwarts him suffer without mercy. An appeal to his humanity would be useless--he has no humanity; when crossed, he has been seen to behave like a wild beast. All this is in evidence, and has been strongly dwelt upon as proof of guilt. Most important is this evidence, and I charge you not for one moment to lose sight of it.
"I come now to the depiction of the murdered girl, as it has been presented to you. Pretty, admired, gentle in her manners, and poor. Although the fact of a person being poor is no proof of morality, we may accept it in this instance as a proof of the girl's virtue. She was fond of life: her disposition was a happy one; she was in the habit of singing to herself.
"Thus we have the presentment of a young girl whose nature was joyous, and to whom life was sweet.
"Another important piece of evidence must be borne in mind. She possessed strength, greater strength than would have been supposed in a form so slight. This strength she would use to protect herself from injury: it has been proved that she used it successfully to protect herself from insult. In the whole of this case nothing has been more forcibly insisted upon than that she resisted her murder, and that there was a long and horrible struggle in which she received many injuries, wounds, bruises, and scratches, and in which her clothes were rent and torn.
"This struggle, in the natural order of things, could not have been a silent one; accompanying the conflict there must have been outcries, frenzied appeals for mercy, screams of terror and anguish. No witness has been called who heard such sounds, and therefore it must be a fact that the murder must have been committed some time after Gautran's threat, 'I will kill you, I will kill you!' was heard by persons who passed along the bank of the river in the darkness of that fatal night. Time enough for Gautran to have left her; time enough for another--lover or stranger--to meet her; time enough for murder by another hand than that of the prisoner who stands charged with the commission of the crime.
"I assert, with all the force of my experience of human nature, that it is impossible that Gautran could have committed the deed. There was a long and terrible struggle--a struggle in which the murdered girl's clothes were torn, in which her face, her hands, her arms, her neck, her sides were bruised and wounded in a hundred cruel ways. Can you for one moment entertain the belief that, in this desperate fight in which two persons were engaged, only one should bear the marks of a contest so horrible? If you bring yourselves to this belief it must be by the aid of prejudice, not of reason. Attend to what follows.
"On the very morning after the murder, within four hours of the body being discovered in the river, Gautran was arrested. He wore the same clothes he had worn for months past, the only clothes he possessed. In these clothes there was not a rent or tear, nor any indication of a recent rent having been mended. How, then, could this man have been engaged in a violent and prolonged hand-to-hand conflict? It is manifestly impossible, opposed to all reasonable conjecture, that his garments could have escaped some injury, however slight, at the hands of a girl to whom life was very sweet, who was strong and capable of resistance, and who saw before her the shadow of an awful fate.