"I had put my foot in it, right up to the knee, so I pretended to gaze out of the window.
"'Chambardeau,' then said the judge, after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, 'and you, fille[30] Robinson, you have both tried to obstruct the course of justice and to defeat its aim, but truth cannot be hidden from it.' He went on like that for ten minutes, old chap, and then he said to Chambardeau that, as there was nothing against him, he would be released, and then he went for me, calling me a sanguinary ruffian, one of those men who are a disgrace to society, and all sorts of tommy rot of the same kind. He concluded his little speech by saying that I would be sent for trial before the Tribunal Correctionnel,[31] where he hoped I would be made an example of, and then he dismissed us.
"Chambardeau and myself were taken back to gaol with the tourniquet[32] on, held by a Garde municipal, and Mimi had just time to tell me that she would see about getting a good barrister to defend me. I told her to try and get a fellow called Lehautier, who had already got me off once: he could speak, that man, something grand. The last time he defended me, he told the judges that if I was before them it was because I was an orphan who had had no mother to look after my youth—the old lady was at the time doing five years under an alias!—and he talked them round so well that he actually drew tears from them, and I was acquitted.
"Chambardeau was released the following day, but it was not till a month later that I was tried. My counsel came to see me twice before the trial, and I did not like his ways. Mimi could not manage to secure Lehautier, who had become a great man, and wanted 300 francs (£12) to take my case up, so she got that little chap for 50 francs (£2). If you had seen the side he put on! 'Don't tell me that you are guilty,' he began, 'because, if you tell me so, my conscience'—en va donc! (get along) his conscience!—well, his conscience would not allow him to defend me. I told him, therefore, the story we had concocted, but he said that would never do, and advised me to say that it was true that I had stabbed Chambardeau, but that he had begun the row, and that I only acted in self-defence. And a jolly mess he made of it: he never told Chambardeau nor Mimi anything about what they had to swear; so they swore all wrong, and then the judge presiding over the court put me all sorts of questions about my previous convictions; and he then called me a demoralised scoundrel and what not, and in the end I got two months! And," added Titi, violently shaking me by the blouse, "you call that justice! It was a fair fight, all fair and square, and I got two months for it. Ah malheur! That's what they call a Republic. If we had both been fine gentlemen, and fought a duel with swords, and, instead of bleeding Chambardeau a bit, I had stuck my sword right through his guts, every one would have said what a fine fellow I was. Instead of that, because I am only Martin, alias Titi de la Villette, I get two months, and they call me a scoundrel. Ah malheur! malheur! malheur! Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.[33] That's all right for those who've got money, but the poor people, on s'en fiche! (Who cares about them?)"
I am bound to admit that Titi was right on some points; but, unfortunately, he did not realise to what depths of degradation he had fallen.
There is not the slightest doubt that, taken as a whole, the lowest classes in large towns, like Paris, Marseilles, Lyons, and others, are far more degraded than the people belonging to the same class of society in England, and the French military service, instead of raising these men to a higher plane, only brings down to their level those who belong to the better classes, such as peasants, small clerks, and so on. It is true that now men who have been convicted before serving their time are, as I have explained, sent to special battalions in Algeria; but still, even to this day, the three years every able-bodied Frenchman has to serve in the army are nothing but a period of ceaseless degradation for men possessing any self-respect. The system, one must acknowledge it, works better in Germany; and the British army cannot, of course, be compared to either these armies in which every citizen has to serve; but I feel certain that had the troopers of my regiment been placed under the command of British officers, things would have been very different from what they were. Most of the troopers who were constantly punished would, with gentler treatment—and if the Sergeants and officers, instead of bullying them, had appealed to their sense of honour, and to their better feelings—have proved some of the smartest and most reliable troopers in the whole regiment. Instead of that they soon became discouraged, and ceased to care whether they were punished or not. When my Sergeant, after asking me how I liked the Salle de Police, added: "You will soon get accustomed to it," he condensed in those words all the reasons which make a blindly rigid system of discipline a complete failure.