CHAPTER XXIX
THE TRIAL
I WAS at last taken to the guards' room, close to the Court of Assize. Whilst I sat in a corner I heard a municipal guard say to another: "Look at her dress! The papers are wrong!"
Later, I discovered the meaning of this remark. It appears that some well-intentioned newspaper had informed its readers that I had had a wonderful mourning-dress made by Worth or Paquin especially for the trial! As a matter of fact, I wore the very dress and the same toque in which I had arrived at Saint-Lazare a year before!
I also heard that, apart from judges, jurymen, witnesses, officials of the court, barristers, representatives of the press, and a very limited attendance of the public at the back of the Court (the law stipulates that trials must be public), no one would be allowed to be present.
A number of persons came to give me all kinds of contradictory advice. "Don't be haughty," said one, "for that would displease the jury"; "Don't look depressed or ashamed, for that would suggest guilt," said another; one barrister recommended me not to look "unnatural," and some one else urged me not to look "natural, for an innocent woman accused of murder could not possibly look herself at her trial!" M. Desmoulin said: "I'll be present at the trial and remain to the end, not far from you. Your agony is nearing its end. Be brave, and, above all, do as your counsel tells you, and change or add nothing to your previous statements." Dr. Socquet—whom I had never seen before, but who was most devoted and useful to me all through that harrowing trial—gave me a soothing potion to drink. Meanwhile the guards smoked their pipes and their cigarettes, and watched me—a few in a suspicious and disagreeable manner, but most of them with kindness and sympathy.
I could hear a great buzz of excitement coming from the Court: the noise of hundreds of feet and hundreds of voices, exclamations, bursts of laughter even—exactly like the buzz one hears at a theatre, on a first night, before the curtain goes up. My heart beat within me like a heavy hammer. My head throbbed with pain and fever as if it would burst, and my hands and feet were icy cold.
A voice suddenly said, close to me: "Come, Madame."
I rose automatically and, between two municipal guardsmen, walked along a short passage. A door was opened before me. I stepped into the Court of Assize and entered the dock. There were guards near me and behind me. Absolute silence reigned. Everything was dark... so dark. I shuddered. Then I heard voices just before and a little below me: my three counsel were there standing by their bench, talking to me, encouraging me. I threw my veil back over my hat and shoulders and tried to listen to Maître Aubin and his secretaries. Gradually I grew used to the surroundings. When I raised my head—it seemed ages, but was probably a few seconds only after I had entered the dock—I saw, first of all, a group of men wrapped in shadow—the jury—in a dock similar to mine, just opposite me under large windows through which filtered the dismal light of a rainy November day. I felt the light on my face. Near the jury, at a kind of desk, was seated a man in a red robe, whom I knew well: M. Trouard-Riolle, the Advocate-General, with a hawklike face, a bald scalp, a receding forehead, a thin long nose, ferrety eyes behind a pince-nez, a double chin, and a fat neck, knitted brows and sneering lips under a narrow close-cropped moustache.... Between the jury and me was the well of the Court, a wide space, empty save for a semi-circular bar, held on three uprights—the witness-bar—and a table on which I saw the "exhibits": gags of wadding, an alpenstock, the brandy bottle, coils of cord too....
On the right, at a few yards from me, on a platform, sits M. de Valles, with a judge on either side of him. All three wear red robes. M. de Valles toys with an ivory paper knife. Before him is placed the huge dossier of my case, that extraordinary dossier which I know by heart. In the shadow, behind the three judges' arm-chairs are a number of persons, "guests of honour," I presume. On the left of the dock are scores of barristers in their black gowns and white rabats, including one or two women-barristers. Behind them, tightly pressed together, a small army of journalists, and at the other end of the Court, behind a wooden partition, the public: "les cent veinards" (the "hundred lucky ones"), as I was told later on, those privileged few were called who had bought the right to stand there, from the poor wretches who spent night and day outside the Palace of Justice to sell their place to the highest bidder, shortly before noon (at which time the doors were thrown open and just one hundred "members of the public" admitted).
I have no clear recollection of what took place at first. I only remember a mass of faces floating, as it were, on a dark ocean of black gowns and clothes. The only touches of colour were the white scarves of the barristers and the scarlet gowns of the judges.