o dissuade him from undertaking the
defence of his wife, and to ruin the little testimony for the defence
that Ducolombier had collected. It seems that this scoundrelly
proceeding immediately enlightened the eminent advocate as to the
preliminaries of the drama, for from this day he proved for the Combray
family not only a brilliant advocate, but a friend whose devotion never
diminished.

The trial opened on December 15th in the great hall of the Palais. A
crowd, chiefly peasants, collected as soon as the doors were opened in
the part reserved for the public. A platform had been raised for the
twenty-three prisoners, among whom all eyes searched for Mme. Acquet,
very pale, indifferent or resigned, and Mme. de Combray, very much
animated and with difficulty induced by her counsel to keep silent.
Besides the president, Carel, the court was composed of seven judges, of
whom three were military; the imperial and special Procurer-General,
Chopais-Marivaux, occupied the bench.

From the beginning it was evident that orders had been given to suppress
everything that could give political colour to the affair. As neither
d'Ache, Le Chevalier, Allain nor Bonnoeil was present, nor any of the
men who could claim the honour of being treated as conspirators and not
as brigands, the judges only had the small fry of the plot before them,
and the imperial commissary took care to name the chiefs only with great
discretion. He did it by means of epithets, and in a melodramatic tone
that caused the worthy people who jostled each other in the hall to
shiver with terror.

Never had the gilded panels, which since the time of Louis XII had
formed the ceiling of the great hall of the Palais, heard such
astonishing eloquence; for three hours the Procurer Chopais-Marivaux
piled up his heavy sentences, pretentious to the point of
unintelligibility. When, after having recounted the facts, the
magistrate came to the flight of Mme. Acquet and her sojourn with the
Vanniers and Langelley, and it was necessary without divulging Licquet's
proceedings to tell of her arrest, he became altogether
incomprehensible. He must have thought himself lucky in not having
before him, on the prisoners' bench, a man bold enough to show up the
odious subterfuges that had been used in order to entrap the
conspirators and obtain their confessions; there is no doubt that such a
revelation would have gained for the two guilty women, if not the
leniency of the judges, th