n is false.
The public examination of the four gentlemen sufficiently explained the
matter in their favor. So far all was well. But the examination of Michu
was more serious; there the real struggle began. It was now clear to
every one why Monsieur de Grandville had preferred to take charge of the
servant's defence rather than that of his masters.

Michu admitted his threats against Marion; but denied that he had made
them violently. As for the ambush in which he was supposed to have
watched for his enemy, he said he was merely making his rounds in his
park; the senator and Monsieur Grevin might perhaps have been alarmed at
the sight of his gun and have thought his intentions hostile when they
were really inoffensive. He called attention to the fact that in the
dusk a man who was not in the habit of hunting might easily fancy a gun
was pointed at him, whereas, in point of fact, it was held in his hand
at half-cock. To explain the condition of his clothes when arrested, he
said he had slipped and fallen in the breach on his way home. "I could
scarcely see my way," he said, "and the loose stones slipped from under
me as I climbed the bank." As for the plaster which Gothard was bringing
him, he replied as he had done in all previous examinations, that he
wanted it to secure one of the stone posts of the covered way.

The public prosecutor and the president asked him to explain how he
could have been at the top of the covered way engaged in mending a
stone post and at the same time in the breach of the moat leading to the
chateau; more especially as the justice of peace, the gendarmes and the
forester all declared they had heard him approach them from the lower
road. To this Michu replied that Monsieur d'Hauteserre had blamed him
for not having mended the post,--which he was anxious to have finished
because there were difficulties about that road with the township,--and
he had therefore gone up to the chateau to report that the work was
done.

Monsieur d'Hauteserre had, in fact, put up a fence above the covered way
to prevent the township from taking possession of it. Michu seeing
the important part which the state of his clothes was likely to play,
invented this subterfuge. If, in law, truth is often like falsehood,
falsehood on the other hand has a very great resemblance to truth.
The defence and the prosecution both attached much importance to this
testimony, which became one of the leading points of the trial
on acco