All his denials were very precise—and they were easily to be verified by the means he had suggested—so that there was now very little left of the terrible evidence which weighed so heavily upon the “little Baron,” or of “the crime of conspiracy against the security of the State,” with which he was charged. The slight clue, indicated by Bourcard’s arrest, but damaged by the papers seized at Elgersweier, was completely destroyed when the latter was declared to be mentally afflicted. In short, the tragic adventure which had overtaken d’Auerweck seemed to have been the result of the most vexatious misunderstanding; at least, that is what his cross-examiner expressed to him when he left him.
“You can now consider your case to be finished, and you can see how it is possible to find one’s self compromised by unfortunate coincidences, without any one being to blame.”
Encouraged by this assurance, the Baron suffered patiently in spite of the passing of much time. He knew that he was not forgotten at the Grand Duke’s Court. Dalberg, the Ambassador, had already managed to convey to him some money, with which to defray the first expense of his visit to the Temple, and yonder, at Elgersweier, Madame d’Auerweck was in receipt of assistance from Carlsruhe; for, as a matter of fact, the mother, grandmother, and children, robbed as they were of the head of the family, had been suddenly plunged into the most terrible state of want.
The poor woman, in spite of her condition, desired only one thing: to obtain a passport so as to be able to get to Paris. With this object she overwhelmed the Ambassador of Baden with letters, in which she also implored him to help to set her husband free.
“I know that he is innocent, your Excellency,” she continually wrote to him, “and if your Excellency wants any more proofs of my husband’s peaceful habits, I will rout out all the available evidence to prove it. My husband can only benefit by the search ... and I am sure that your Excellency has pity for my terrible plight and that of my poor little children.”
Dalberg ended by getting annoyed with these letters.
“I receive frequent epistles from Madame d’Auerweck,” he wrote to Carlsruhe; “but this wifely impatience is waste of time, because I can do nothing as long as the presence of the prisoner is necessary for the conduct of the case.”
In the mean time, the Baron, by way of killing time, drew up a second justificatory memorandum, which must doubtless have staggered Desmarets. In it he exposed all the hiatus in his cross-examination, and the absence of any proof against him. Why was it that he was not set at liberty, now that the falsity of the accusations brought against him had been so completely demonstrated? For he had just heard that the Minister of Police had received a very detailed report, which proved his residence, in succession, in the Grand Duchy of Baden from 1798 to 1800, in Offenburg from 1802 to 1803, and in Schutterwald up to September, 1806; it mentioned his journey to Rothenburg and to Nuremberg in 1805, and declared that—
“wherever the said d’Auerweck had lived, he had always conducted himself peacefully and with decency, and had never meddled in politics; that, on the contrary, he had always been occupied with building, agriculture, botany, and rural economy, which had been partly proved by many of the papers found upon him at the time of his arrest.”
So M. Desmarets and his master were in possession of an unquestionable justification of the Baron’s protests. It was, indeed, inconceivable that they would continue to keep him in confinement, and, what is worse, without putting any fresh questions to him.