"The concierge remembers nothing of that," interrupted M. Duval. "This is a fresh fact. We must certainly consider it. What happened next?"
"I went off in a cab to M. d'Ecquevillez, and handed the pistols to him. At half-past ten I returned home, to wait for my seconds. We arrived on the ground at half-past eleven. M. de Boignes received us coldly, with his hands in his pockets, and said: 'You do well to keep us waiting like this for you. Name of God! this isn't a summer morning. We think there is not sufficient motive to fight a duel.' I answered frigidly, but politely, that I did not agree with him, and that I was in the hands of my seconds."
"But one of them, M. de Flers," remarked the President, "thought the quarrel trifling and said so. Another thing. Why did M. d'Ecquevillez tell us that the pistols belonged to him? Remember, he has given us details as to where he got them."
"I ignore details," was the lofty response.
"If you do, we don't," returned the judge.
A vigorous denial was made by de Beauvallon to the suggestion that he was familiar with the pistols used in the duel. To convince the jury that he was not to be believed, the opposing counsel then told them that he had once pawned a watch belonging to somebody else. When the judge expressed himself shocked at such depravity, de Beauvallon, says a report, "hung his head and wept."
Nor did d'Ecquevillez, the other defendant, cut a very happy figure. His real name was said to be Vincent, and aspersions were cast on his right to dub himself a "Count." He swore he had never admitted that the pistols belonged to him, and that de Beauvallon had borrowed them from the gunsmith, Desvismes. The latter, however, calling on heaven for support, declared the statement to be a "wicked invention."
Believing in the efficacy of numbers in getting up their case, forty-six witnesses were assembled by the prosecution. Mlle Lièvenne, the first of them to be examined, brought with her an atmosphere of the theatre, "adopting a flashy costume, in deplorably bad taste." "This," says a chronicler, "took the form of a blue velvet dress, a scarlet shawl, and a pearl-grey mantle." Altogether, a striking colour-scheme. But it did not help her. To the indignation of the examining-counsel, she affected to remember nothing, declaring that she had been "too busy at the supper-table, looking after the company."
The other young women, described as "more or less actresses," who had also been present, appeared to be suffering from a similar loss of memory. Their minds, they protested, were absolutely blank as to what had happened at the restaurant and very little could be extracted from them. When they had given their evidence, they looked for seats in the body of the court. The Rouen ladies, however, having somewhat rigid standards, would not permit them to sit between the wind and their propriety.
"Things are coming to a pretty pass," they declared, "when play-actresses imagine they can sit beside respectable women like ourselves."