gs and queens are human beings. They like a fair and open trial.
Mary Stuart prayed for it in vain, from the Estates of Scotland, and
from Elizabeth. Charles I. asked for public trial in vain, from the
Estates of Scotland, at the time of the unsolved puzzle of 'The
Incident.' Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette had the publicity they
wanted; to their undoing. The Parlement was to acquit Rohan of the
theft of the necklace (a charge which Jeanne tried to support by a
sub-plot of romantic complexity), and that acquittal was just. But
nothing was said of the fatal insult which he had dealt to the Queen.
Villette, who had forged the royal name, was merely exiled, left free
to publish fatal calumnies abroad, though high treason, as times went,
was about the measure of his crime. Gay d'Oliva, whose personation of
the Queen also verged on treason, was merely acquitted with a
recommendation 'not to do it again.' Pretty, a young mother, and
profoundly dissolute, she was the darling of Liberal and _sensible_
hearts.

Jeanne de Valois, indeed, was whipped and branded, but Jeanne, in
public opinion, was the scapegoat of a cruel princess, and all the mud
was thrown on the face of the guiltless Queen. The friends of Rohan
were all the clergy, all the many nobles of his illustrious house, all
the courtly foes of the Queen (they began by the basest calumnies,
the ruin that the people achieved), all the friends of Liberal ideas,
who soon, like Freteau de Saint-Just, had more of Liberalism than they
liked.

These were the results which the King obtained by offering to the
Cardinal his choice between the royal verdict and that of the public
Court of Justice. Rohan said that, if the King would pronounce him
innocent, he would prefer to abide by the royal decision. He _was_
innocent of all but being a presumptuous fool; the King might, even
now, have recognised the fact. Mud would have been thrown, but not all
the poached filth of the streets of Paris. On the other hand, had
Louis withheld the case from public trial, we might still be doubtful
of the Queen's innocence. Napoleon acknowledged it: 'The Queen was
innocent, and to make her innocence the more public, she wished the
Parlement to be the judge. The result was that she was taken to be
guilty.' Napoleon thought that the King should have taken the case
into his own hand. This might have been wisdom for the day, but not
for securing the verdict of posterity. The pyramidal documents of the