ith the
severity of a Biblical Jehovah. Moreover, the infirmity which was the
worry of his life, the childish lisp which, in his opinion, had alone
prevented him from shining as a public prosecutor, made him ferociously
ill-tempered, incapable of any intelligent indulgence. There were smiles,
which he divined, as soon as he raised his sharp, shrill little voice, to
ask his first questions. That droll voice of his took away whatever
majesty might have remained attached to these proceedings, in which a
man's life was being fought for in a hall full of inquisitive, stifling
and perspiring folks, who fanned themselves and jested. Salvat answered
the judge's earlier questions with his wonted weariness and politeness.
While the judge did everything to vilify him, harshly reproaching him
with his wretched childhood and youth, magnifying every stain and every
transgression in his career, referring to the promiscuity of his life
between Madame Theodore and little Celine as something bestial, he, the
prisoner, quietly said yes or no, like a man who has nothing to hide and
accepts the full responsibility of his actions. He had already made a
complete confession of his crime, and he calmly repeated it without
changing a word. He explained that if he had deposited his bomb at the
entrance of the Duvillard mansion it was to give his deed its true
significance, that of summoning the wealthy, the money-mongers who had so
scandalously enriched themselves by dint of theft and falsehood, to
restore that part of the common wealth which they had appropriated, to
the poor, the working classes, their children and their wives, who
perished of starvation. It was only at this moment that he grew excited;
all the misery that he had endured or witnessed rose to his clouded,
semi-educated brain, in which claims and theories and exasperated ideas
of absolute justice and universal happiness had gathered confusedly. And
from that moment he appeared such as he really was, a sentimentalist, a
dreamer transported by suffering, proud and stubborn, and bent on
changing the world in accordance with his sectarian logic.

"But you fled!" cried the judge in a voice such as would have befitted a
grasshopper. "You must not say that you gave your life to your cause and
were ready for martyrdom!"

Salvat's most poignant regret was that he had yielded in the Bois de
Boulogne to the dismay and rage which come upon a tracked and hunted man
and impel him to do all he