The trial opened on December 15th in the great hall of the Palais.  A crowd, chiefly peasants, collected as soon as the doors were opened in the part reserved for the public.  A platform had been raised for the twenty-three prisoners, among whom all eyes searched for Mme. Acquet, very pale, indifferent or resigned, and Mme. de Combray, very much animated and with difficulty induced by her counsel to keep silent.  Besides the president, Carel, the court was composed of seven judges, of whom three were military; the imperial and special Procurer-General, Chopais-Marivaux, occupied the bench.

From the beginning it was evident that orders had been given to suppress everything that could give political colour to the affair.  As neither d’Ache, Le Chevalier, Allain nor Bonnoeil was present, nor any of the men who could claim the honour of being treated as conspirators and not as brigands, the judges only had the small fry of the plot before them, and the imperial commissary took care to name the chiefs only with great discretion.  He did it by means of epithets, and in a melodramatic tone that caused the worthy people who jostled each other in the hall to shiver with terror.

Never had the gilded panels, which since the time of Louis XII had formed the ceiling of the great hall of the Palais, heard such astonishing eloquence; for three hours the Procurer Chopais-Marivaux piled up his heavy sentences, pretentious to the point of unintelligibility.  When, after having recounted the facts, the magistrate came to the flight of Mme. Acquet and her sojourn with the Vanniers and Langelley, and it was necessary without divulging Licquet’s proceedings to tell of her arrest, he became altogether incomprehensible.  He must have thought himself lucky in not having before him, on the prisoners’ bench, a man bold enough to show up the odious subterfuges that had been used in order to entrap the conspirators and obtain their confessions; there is no doubt that such a revelation would have gained for the two guilty women, if not the leniency of the judges, the sympathy at least of the public, who all over the province were awaiting with anxious curiosity the slightest details of the trial.  The gazettes had been ordered to ignore it; the Journal de Rouen only spoke of it once to state that, as it lacked space to reproduce the whole trial, it preferred to abstain altogether; and but for a few of Licquet’s notes, nothing would be known of the character of the proceedings.

The interrogation of the accused and the examination of the witnesses occupied seven sittings.  On Thursday, December 22d, the Procurer-General delivered his charge.  The prosecution tried above all to show up the antagonism existing between Mme. de Combray and M. Acquet de Ferolles.  The latter’s denunciations had borne fruit; the Marquise was represented as having tried “to get rid of her son-in-law by poisoning his drink.”  And the old story