“I was the General Secretary of War of my King,” said he.  “When I had to give orders to the generals under me, of whom I was the chief, I had the right to put thereon the royal imprint of Don Carlos.  I was given all the papers incident to the granting of orders and grades in the army, and I had the seal of the King—­the seal of the Royal King.”

But, unfortunately for the prisoner, the seals upon the papers turned out to be the legitimate arms of Spain and not those of Don Carlos, and as a finale he ingenuously identified the seal of the Mayor of Madrid as that of his “Royal King.”

Next came a selection of letters of nobility, sealed and signed in the name of Pope Leo the Thirteenth.  These, he asserted, must have been placed there by his enemies.  “I am a soldier and a general of honor, and I never did any such trafficking,” he cried grandly, when charged with selling bogus patents of nobility.

He explained some of his correspondence with the Lapierres and his famous bill for twelve thousand dollars by saying that when he found out that the inheritance Tessier did not exist he had conceived the idea of making a novel of the story—­a “fantastic history”—­to be published “in four languages simultaneously,” and asserted solemnly that he had intended printing the whole sixteen feet of bill as part of the romance.

Then, to the undisguised horror of the unfortunate General, at a summons from the prosecutor an elderly French woman arose in the audience and came to the bar.  The General turned first pale, then purple.  He hotly denied that he had married this lady in France twenty-three years ago.

“Name of a name!  He had known her!  Yes—­certainly!  But she was no wife of his—­she had been only his servant.  The other lady—­the Hibernian—­was his only wife.”  But the chickens had begun to come home to roost.  The pointed mustaches drooped with an unmistakable look of dejection, and as he marched back to his seat his shoulders no longer had the air of military distinction that one would expect in a general of a “Royal King.”  His head sank on his chest as his deserted wife took the stand against him—­the wife whom, he had imagined, he would never see again.

Any one could have seen that Elizabeth de Moreno was a good woman.  Her father’s name, she said, was Nichaud, and she had first met the prisoner twenty-three years ago in the village of Dalk, in the Department of the Tarne, where, in 1883, he had been convicted and sentenced for stealing bed linen from the Hotel Kassam.  She had remained faithful to him in spite of his disgrace, and had visited him daily in prison, bringing him milk and tobacco.  On his liberation she had married him and they had gone to live in Bordeaux.  For years they had lived in comfort, and she had borne him eight children.  He had never been to any war and was neither a general nor, so far as she had known, a friend of Don Carlos.  She had supposed that