elihood be regarded as a villain
of the very deepest dye; but so far as I can make him out, he suffered
merely from a total absence of moral and mental responsibility. He seems
really to have persuaded himself that he was an ill-used man, and until
circumstances became too strong for him, to have acted in accordance
with his own queer code of honour.

I have listened to many 'great speakers in my time, but never to one who
displayed such fire and force and fluency and so wide an emotional range
as Maitre Labori. When he arose to address the jury for the defence,
he seemed to hurl himself into his subject with every fibre of soul
and body. He gesticulated with all the vehemence of a man engaged in
a deadly bout with the rapier, and the impetuous torrent of his speech
dashed on as if nothing could arrest it. I remember thinking to myself
that twenty minutes of this would bring him to the limit of his forces,
but he went on for hours, as if he were incapable of fatigue. At one
point of his speech he used the words: "Un heros comme Zola." There were
some two hundred privileged spectators of the scene, all squeezed into a
sort of pen at the extreme end of the court, and nearly everyone of them
held a latchkey in readiness, so that he might whistle down it if the
orator afforded any opportunity for derision. A shrill scream of sound
rose as Labori uttered the words. He paused and faced squarely round
upon his interrupters, turning his back on the tribunal. The
clamour lasted for a minute and then died away, and then with a cold
incisiveness, in strange contrast with his previous manner, he addressed
the crowd. "I repeat the phrase--a hero like Zola. I tell you that his
courage, his honesty and his devotion will be held in reverence by
his countrymen long after you have sunk into your unremembered and
unhonoured graves." He towered there in silence for a full half minute
and there was not so much as a murmur of reply. "Eh bien!" he said, "je
resume," and turning round to the tribunal he took up his speech at
the point at which it had been arrested. The rebuke was enough; he was
interrupted no more.

Zola read a statement in his own defence and was in a condition of
pitiable nervous agitation from the beginning of it to the end. The
foolscap pages he held in his hand quivered as if they were stirred
by the hot air rising from a stove, and in his anxiety to be heard
throughout the court he pitched his voice too high. In the mid