Thereupon a detective was ushered into the room. He wore a black gaberdine and a large hat with a turned-down brim. The man walked to and fro before me, and I was asked whether his attire was similar to that worn by the murderers. Then he put on a false beard, and again I was asked what remarks this performance suggested to me.
I said there was a great similarity between the detective's attire and that of the murderers, and gave various details about the gowns and hats of those murderers.
After M. Leydet and M. Hamard had gone, my daughter told me that my friend Mme. Darracq (wife of the motor-car manufacturer) wished to see me. I received her, of course, and she said she had come to beg me take Maître Aubin as counsel. As M. Leydet had just told me the same thing, I said I would.
At the same time I was at a loss to understand why I needed a counsel!
"Oh," said Mme. Darracq, "it is the usual thing. It is for the 'civil' proceedings against the criminals. You need assistance, legal advice."
All this was quite new to me.... Soon afterwards, Maître Aubin arrived, keen, full of life and fire and endowed with an amiable simplicity of character—as I was to find him all through my time of trouble. We had only a brief talk, for I felt very weak, and M. Aubin concluded: "Leydet is a very able magistrate; all will be well." And he added those words which I was to hear, week after week, for months and months: "We will find the murderers. Be patient.... We will find them!"
I remained about a fortnight with Count and Countess d'Arlon. Journalists came to me.... Doctor Acheray, hearing that the Matin "demanded" an interview, and knowing the almost unlimited power of certain newspapers for good—or evil—hastily handed the Matin a letter which I had written to him on the day before the murder, in which I asked him to examine my mother before her departure for Bellevue....
The letter duly appeared in the Matin, who, having thus received some exclusive information, had the generosity to publish a "favourable" article!
Ah! had my beloved father only been alive then! How he would have swept away this army of men who henceforth dogged my steps, hung pitilessly on my heels and hounded me down—and this not because they thought me guilty or innocent, not because they wished to assist me in finding the murderers—as they one and all proclaimed, in spoken and in written words (I possess all their letters in which I was naïve enough to believe)—but because I represented, in this age of sensation, that priceless asset, "good copy." They did not stop to think whether they were ruining me, sapping my health and my reason; it was nothing to them that by causing me for nearly two years what they called, with supreme jubilation, "The most talked of woman in the world," they inevitably paved the way for exaggerations and misrepresentations, and excited public opinion against me, for the world exaggerates what is bad rather than what is good, and scandal and murder have an exciting smack and flavour which noble qualities can never hope to possess. My intense love for my mother, the help I had given my husband in his work, the long weeks I had spent nursing him, the numberless services I had rendered not only to the needy and the poor, not only to my family and my husband's, but to friends, to important personages even, the difficulties I had surmounted by sheer will-power and devotion, the good side of my life, in short—all that was carefully ignored. Who wanted to hear about such trifles!... No, no, what every man and every woman wanted to find in the papers as soon as he or she got up in the morning and whilst enjoying their breakfast was, "What has she said? What has she done?" And the public had to be catered for according to its taste. Whether I had said or done nothing of the slightest importance did not matter. Nothing was without importance. The most common-place remark can be turned by a writer who knows his trade into a sensational, exclusive and lengthy article!... And when no journalist could approach me—well... they did not consider themselves beaten by such a trifle as that: they turned, twisted, triturated the statements I had made before—or was supposed to have made—until they could extract some fresh substance, some further sensation, to throw to their hungry readers.
The newspapers which showed themselves my worst and most unjust enemies did not do so at all times; that I readily admit. And there were a few, very few, journals who were impartial and fair to the end, among them the Liberté and the Temps. But what is one to think of a country where newspapers are allowed to make almost any statements, whether only partly true, or even not true at all, when before and even during a trial for murder they can, without being interfered with, deliberately rouse public opinion against the accused person; call him or her an assassin, discuss, analyse and comment, and make it difficult for a jury, who leaves the court after each sitting and go home and read the papers, to judge according to their conscience, however honest and clear-minded they may be!