The jurist comes to the irregularities in the preliminaries:
"Article 19 of the law of the 13 Brumaire, Year V, declares that, after closing the examination, the judge-advocate shall tell the prisoner to 'choose a friend as his defender.' The prisoner shall have 'the power to choose that defender' among every class of citizen present on the spot; if he declares that he is unable to make that choice, the judge-advocate shall make it for him.
"Ah, no doubt the Prince had no friends[618] among those who surrounded him; this fact was cruelly declared to him by one of the abettors of that horrible scene!... Alas, why were we not present! Why was the prince not allowed to make an appeal to the bar of Paris! There he would have found friends of his unhappiness, defenders of his misfortune. ... It was apparently with a view to making the judgment presentable in the eyes of the public that a new edition was drawn up at leisure.... The tardy substitution of a second form of judgment, in appearance more regular than the first (although equally unjust), in no way detracts from the heinousness of having put the Duc d'Enghien to death by virtue of a rough draft of a judgment, hastily signed, and not even signed by all the requisite parties."
*
Such is M. Dupin's luminous pamphlet. Nevertheless I do not know that, in an act of the nature of that which the author examines, the greater or lesser regularity holds an important place: whether the Duc d'Enghien was strangled in a post-chaise between Strasburg and Paris or killed in the wood of Vincennes makes no difference. But is it not providential to see men, after long years, some showing the irregularity of a murder in which they had taken no part, others hastening, unasked, to the bar of public accusal? What, then have they heard? What voice from on high has summoned them to appear?
*
After the great jurist, here comes a blind veteran: he has commanded the Grenadiers of the Old Guard; what that means brave men know. His last wound he received from Malet[619], whose powerless lead remained lost in a face which had never turned from the fire. "Afflicted with blindness, withdrawn from the world, consoled only by the care of his family," to use his own words, the judge of the Duc d'Enghien appears to issue from his tomb at the call of the sovereign judge; he pleads his cause[620] without self-delusion or excuses:
General Hulin's pamphlet.
"Let there be no mistake," he says, "as to my intentions. I am not writing through fear, since my person is under the protection of laws emanating from the Throne itself, and since, under the government of a righteous king, I have nothing to dread from violence or lawlessness.... I write to tell the truth, even in what may be to my own detriment! So I do not pretend to justify even the form or the substance of the judgment; but I wish to show under what a powerful union of circumstances it was delivered; I wish to remove from myself and my colleagues the suspicion of having acted as party men. If we are still to receive blame, I wish also that men should say of us:
"'They were very unfortunate.'"
*
General Hulin asserts that he was appointed president of a military commission without knowing its object; that when he arrived at Vincennes he was no wiser; that the other members of the commission knew as little; that M. Harel[621], the governor of the castle, told him, on being asked, that he knew nothing himself, adding: