They shook hands with me, in the heartiest manner, and said: "Remember, we are all your friends, your best, your only friends. You can always rely on us. Briand, Bunau-Varilla, will defend you. With such protectors, you are absolutely safe, and your little Marthe too. The law cannot touch you, in these circumstances."...
They went to the door. Then M. Hutin came back. He had forgotten something of considerable importance:
"Whatever happens, don't change anything of what you have told us.... You and your daughter are lost if you do!"...
They went at last. I had been racked and tortured for four hours; I was bruised, and broken, and bleeding; and in the agony of my pain I sank to the floor, and lay there, wishing with all my heart for the relief of death. Then, mercifully, everything went blank....
I could not better compare that "Night of the Confession" than to a terrible nightmare. In a nightmare appear the people one has seen or has been talking about during the preceding hours.... Twice that day, I had been asked about M. Bdl.; twenty times I had been spoken to about Alexandre Wolff. And there were the anonymous letters. I quoted a whole passage of one of those letters, to my tormentors, as in a trance, and that made up part of my "confession." "Wolff had come to steal.... He had threatened to declare that I ordered him to murder my husband and my mother, if I denounced him...." This theory of the crime had been time after time suggested to me in letters. And thus, I spoke about M. Borderel and accused Wolff. And when I saw Mariette at the window making signs to me, I felt sure the letters were right and that Wolff was the murderer....
Perhaps, alas, the poor woman realised that those men were making me say what they pleased, and she trembled for the son she loved.
A nightmare indeed!... But after a nightmare, one comes back to life, peace, and even happiness, and exclaims: "Thank Heaven, it is not true; it was only an awful dream!" ... But after my nightmare, I awoke to worse tortures: I awoke to find myself torn away from my child, arrested, and thrown into prison. The ghastly drama was not ended; it had only just begun.
Would to God that I could forget that nightmare, but, alas! I remember it in every painful detail, as I set it down here. I hardly understood what I was told or what I said; I was clay in the hands of the two men who in their professional zeal stopped at nothing to wrench from me matter for sensational copy—but clay retains impressions. They made me lose my reason for a time, but not my memory, and after three years, the details of that awful night of agony are still so cruelly vivid in my mind that my hand trembles as I write. My whole being shudders, I hear the men's harsh voices, I feel their hands close upon my wrists—and the pen falls from my nerveless fingers....
I will now quote—in all fairness—the narrative of the "night of the confession" as M. Hutin made it to M. André—the judge who replaced M. Leydet—on November 27, 1908 (two days later):
"I wish first of all to state that in this affair I merely acted as a journalist, and that I have never in any way confused such a rôle with that of the Law."