Then in another hand:
“Get four members to sign this.”
Finally, the memorandum is endorsed in yet another hand:
“13th Germinal.—A policeman took this the same day.”[153]
It will thus be seen that the Committee was by no means sure of its ground. It had indeed procured through St. Just the decree preventing Danton from pleading at the bar of the Convention and permitting his trial, but it would require the most careful manœuvring upon their part to carry through such an affair. As we shall see, they just—and only just—succeeded.
The whole of the first day (the 13th Germinal, 2nd of April 1794) was passed in the formal questions and in the reading of accusations. Camille, on being asked his age and dwelling, made the blasphemous and striking answer which satisfied the dramatic sense, but was not a true reply to the main question.
Danton gave the reply so often quoted: “I am Danton, not unknown among the revolutionaries. I shall be living nowhere soon, but you will find my name in Walhalla.” The other answers, save that of Hérault, attempted no phrases.
Yet Guzman would have made more point of his assertion if he had chosen that moment to say, “I am Guzman, a grandee of Spain, who came to France to taste liberty, but was arrested for theft;” while the two Freys missed an historic occasion in not replying, “We are Julius and Emanuel Frey, sometime nobles of the Empire under the title of Von Schönfeld, now plain Jews employed by the Emperor as spies.”
The public prosecutor read the indictment. First at great length Amar’s report on the India Company. The details of the accusations which cost Fabre his life need not be entered into here. Suffice it to say that it was an indictment for corruption, for having suppressed or altered for money the decree of the Convention in the autumn before, and being accomplice in the extra gains which this had made possible—one of those wretched businesses with which Panama and South Africa have deluged modern France and England. It is an example of the methods of the tribunal that Fouquier managed to drag in Desmoulins’s name because he had once said, “People complain of not being able to make money now, yet I make it easily enough.”
The second group, the Freys, Guzman, the unfrocked priest D’Espagnac, and Diederichsen the Dane, were accused of being foreigners working against the success of the French armies, and at the same time lining their pockets. In the case of three of them the accusation was probably true. It was the more readily believed from the foreign origins of the accused, for France was full of spies, while the name of a certain contumacious Baron de Bartz made this list sound the more probable.