Such words hurt beyond description, but I managed to reply:
"Monsieur, Marguerite Japy does not receive her friends in a prison-parlour."
M. Simon, my three counsel and the guards, nearly clapped their hands.
Another time, he suddenly placed under my eyes photographs of the bodies of my husband and my mother, as they had been found on the morning after the crime.... I have been told that all I said was: "Poor mother, poor Adolphe; at any rate, they probably did not suffer much, they must have died very quickly... there is no expression of agony on their faces. I wish I too had died that night."
M. André tore the photographs from my hands; his dramatic move had not had the result he expected.
The most extraordinary incident—I could say comical, had the circumstances not been so tragic—during that eventful and harrowing period, took place towards the end of the Instruction.
M. André, haunted by the thought of my guilt or rather by the thought that he must find me guilty, stood up and suddenly exclaimed in his usual hoarse and angry voice, and underlining, as it were, his every word with threatening gestures: "Yes, you are guilty! I tell you that you have strangled your own husband and your own mother, with your own hands, your powerful assassin's hands!"
Now I have unusually small hands, and scores of times Bonnat and Henner have sketched or painted them, and made amusing remarks about "those ridiculously tiny hands." I stretched out my arms, and placed my hands under the very eyes of the examining magistrate.
In spite of his blind fury, he was able to realise their size, but he was not going to allow himself to be thwarted by such a trifling matter.