“It is they who have done it all!...  They have mis-represented me!...  Since they have brought about my ruin, I am going to tell what I know.”

In his account the lawyer passed lightly over what had occurred in the Council of War.  Professional secrecy and patriotic interest prevented greater explicitness.  The session had lasted from morning till night, Freya revealing to her judges all that she knew....  Then her defender had spoken for five hours, trying to establish a species of interchange in the application of the penalty.  The guilt of this woman was undeniable and the wickedness that she had carried through was very great, but they should spare her life in exchange for her important confessions....  Besides, the inconsequence of her character should be taken into consideration ... also, that vengeance of which the enemy had made her the victim....

With Freya he had waited, until well on into the night, the decision of the tribunal.  The defendant appeared animated by hope.  She had become a woman again:  she was talking placidly with him and smiling at the gendarmes and eulogizing the army....  “Frenchmen, gentlemen, were incapable of killing a woman....”

The maitre was not surprised at the sad and furrowed brows of the officers as they came out from their deliberations.  They appeared discontented with their recent vote, and yet at the same time showed the serenity of a tranquil countenance.  They were soldiers who had just fulfilled their full duty, suppressing every purely masculine instinct.  The one deputed to read the sentence swelled his voice with a fictitious energy.... “Death!...”  After a long enumeration of crimes Freya was condemned to be shot:—­she had given information to the enemy that represented the loss of thousands of men and boats, torpedoed because of her reports, on which had perished defenseless families.

The spy nodded her head upon listening to her own acts, for the first time appreciating their enormity and recognizing the justice of their tremendous punishment.  But at the same time she was relying upon a good-natured reprieve in exchange for all which she had revealed, upon a gallant clemency ... because she was she.

As the fatal word sounded, she uttered a cry, became ashy pale, and leaned upon the lawyer for support.

“I do not want to die!...  I ought not to die!...  I am innocent.”

She continued shrieking her innocence, without giving any other proof of it than the desperate instinct of self-preservation.  With the credulity of one who wishes to save herself, she accepted all the problematical consolations of her defender.  There remained the last recourse of appealing to the mercy of the President of the Republic:  perhaps he might pardon her....  And she signed this appeal with sudden hope.

The lawyer managed to delay the fulfillment of the sentence for two months, visiting many of his colleagues who were political personages.  The desire of saving the life of his client was tormenting him as an obsession.  He had devoted all his activity and his personal influence to this affair.