“Was it not in Trianon that you first came to know the woman La Motte?”
“I never saw her!”
“Was she not your victim in the affair of the necklace?”
“She could not be, for I had never known her!”
“You still deny it?”
“I have no plan to deny. It is the truth, and I shall always say the same.”
It is a passage of great moment, for here indeed the prisoner said precisely what was true and precisely what all, even those who would befriend her, least believed to be true. She would pretend a love for the French and a keen regard for their glory—even for the success of their armies. She would pretend to have obeyed the King and not to have led him; to have desired nothing for her son, but only the welfare of the people. Trapped and abandoned, she thought every answer, however false, legitimate; but in that one thing in which her very friends had doubted her, another spirit possessed her and her words were alive with truth.
After that episode no further movement followed. There was opened before the Court (as the law compelled) her little pocket and the trinkets taken from her on the day of her imprisonment: the poor relics of her affection—the lock of hair, the miniature—were laid before the Judges. They heard Simon, the cobbler, in whose house her son was lodged—perhaps she looked more curiously at his face than at others—but he had nothing to say. They heard the porter of the Temple and sundry others who had seen, or pretended to have seen, her orders for the payments of sundry thousands—but all that business was empty and all those hours were wasted: it was not upon such vanities that the mind of Paris and of the crowded Court was turned, but upon the line of Flemish hills a long way off and upon the young men climbing up against the guns.
Paris and the mob in the street outside that Court of Justice and the hundreds crammed within it strained to hear, not Valazé, nor Tiset, nor any other useless witness, but some first breath of victory that might lift off them the oppression of those days; nay, some roaring news of defeat and of Coburg marching upon them: then at least before their vision was scattered by the invader, they could tear this Austrian woman from her too lenient Judges for a full vengeance before they themselves and that which they had achieved should die. At the best or at the worst they panted for a clear knowledge of their fortune; but on through the day and well into the afternoon, when the Court rose for its brief interval, no hint or rumour even had come to Paris from before Maubeuge.