The young advocate resided in the Rue Fontanier, in the popular trading quarter of the town. The son of a peasant of the environs, he had studied law in Paris, where for a short time he had frequented many young men of Socialist views. But hitherto, for lack of one of those great causes which class a man, he had not bound himself to any party. In accepting a brief in Simon's case, that case which made his colleagues of the bar tremble, he had decided his future. He studied it and became impassioned on finding himself in presence of all the public powers, all the forces of reaction, which, in order to save the old rotten framework of society from destruction, were coalescing and striving to ruin a poor and guiltless man. And the rise of militant Socialism was at the end of it all, the salvation of the country by the new force of which the freed masses now disposed.
[4] A tribunal discharging the duties of a grand jury.—Trans.
'Well, so there is to be a battle!' Delbos exclaimed gaily, when he received his visitors in his little study, littered with books and papers. 'Ah! I cannot tell if we shall conquer, but at all events we shall do the others some harm.'
Short, dark, and wiry, with eyes of fire and tongue of flame, he possessed an admirable voice and an extraordinary gift of eloquence, at once enthusiastic, logical, and precise. David, however, was struck by his apparent doubt of victory and repeated what he had been saying for a week past: 'Conquer? Oh! we shall certainly do so. Where can a jury be found that would dare to convict my brother without proofs?'
Delbos looked at him, and then began to laugh, saying: 'Let us go down into the street, my poor friend, and the first twelve citizens we get together will spit in your face and call you a dirty Jew. You don't read Le Petit Beaumontais, and you are ignorant of the beautiful souls and minds of your contemporaries. But all allusions would be dangerous and culpable: is that not so, Monsieur Froment?'
Then, as Marc spoke of the disappointment he had experienced when visiting influential persons, Delbos, wishing to free his client's brother of his erroneous views, insisted on the subject. No doubt they had a friend in Salvan, but he was sorely threatened, and, instead of defending others, needed to be defended himself. Then Le Barazer would sacrifice something to the fire, suffering Simon to go to his fate and reserving all his authority and influence for the defence of secular education. Next Lemarrois, the once incorruptible Republican, was unknowingly on that path of disquietude which leads straight to reaction. Then came Marcilly, at the mention of whose name Delbos was all afire. No trust whatever was to be placed in him, he had always lied, and to-morrow he would become a renegade and a traitor. Indeed, one would obtain only fair words from all those folks; nothing in the way of deeds was to be expected, neither an act of frankness nor one of courage.
Having thus judged the university men and the politicians, Delbos passed to the judicial world. He was convinced that Magistrate Daix had suspected the truth, but had set it on one side, terrified as he was by the perpetual quarrels which his wife stirred up in order to prevent him from releasing the dirty Jew. And in acting as he had done he had surely experienced great perturbation of conscience, for at bottom he was honest. But, apart from him, one had to fear the Procureur de la République, the frisky Raoul de La Bissonnière, whose speech to the jury would certainly prove ferocious. Vain of his petty noblesse, it seemed to La Bissonnière great condescension on his part to serve the Republic, and he meant to be rewarded for doing so by rapid advancement, which he hastened as best he could, fawning on both the Government and the Congregations, zealous too as a patriot and an anti-semite. As for President Gragnon, in him one would have a jovial judge, a hard drinker, a keen sportsman, fond of petticoats, addicted to witticisms, affecting brusqueness, not certainly sceptical, without soul or faith, and at the mercy of the stronger side. Finally, there would be the jury, the composition of which it was easy to foresee. One might expect a few representatives of the manufacturing and trading classes, some professional men, clerks, and retired officers, and all would have poisoned minds, all would tremble for their skins, and yield to the general dementia.
'So, you see,' Delbos concluded bitterly, 'your brother, forsaken by everybody since he so awkwardly requires help when fear respecting the result of the elections paralyses even the friends of truth and justice, will have a fine collection of stupidity, egotism, and cowardice to judge him.' And, as David preserved dolorous silence, he added: 'Oh! we shall not allow ourselves to be devoured without raising an outcry. But I prefer to show you things as they are. And now let us examine the position with respect to the case itself.'
He could tell what views would be set forth by the prosecution. Pressure had been brought to bear on the witnesses from all sides. Quite apart from public opinion in the midst of whose vitiated atmosphere they lived, they were certainly being worked upon by occult powers, caught in a skilfully contrived skein of daily exhortations which dictated to them the statements they were to make. Mademoiselle Rouzaire now declared peremptorily that she had heard Simon come home at a quarter to eleven o'clock on the night of the crime. Even Mignot now fancied that he had heard footsteps and voices about the same hour. Then influence must have been exercised on Simon's pupils, the Bongard, Doloir, Savin, and Milhomme children, with the object of extracting from them statements unfavourable to the prisoner. Little Sébastien Milhomme, for instance, had now declared, while sobbing distressfully, that he had never seen his cousin Victor with any copy-slip coming from the Brothers' school; and apropos of that affair, people spoke of an unexpected visit that Madame Edouard Milhomme had lately received from a distant cousin, General Jarousse, who commanded the division garrisoned at Beaumont. He had never previously confessed his relationship to the lady stationer, but had suddenly remembered it, and paid her that friendly call.
Moreover, the prosecution insisted on the failure of all efforts to find any tramp who might have committed the crime, as had been originally suspected. It also asserted that it had vainly sought any witness, guard, or wayfarer, who had seen Simon returning from Beaumont to Maillebois on foot. On the other hand, it had failed to establish that he had returned by train, for no railway employé remembered having seen him; besides which several return tickets had not been given up on the night of the crime. But it seemed that the evidence of Brother Fulgence and Father Philibin would be very grave, particularly that of the latter, who would prove that the copy-slip connected with the crime had really belonged to Simon's school. And to make things complete, two handwriting experts of the prosecution, Masters Badoche and Trabut, had declared that they fully recognised Simon's initials, an E and an S intertwined, in the faint and virtually illegible paraph on the slip.