For some months, however, he had been irritable and touchy, and when he opened a newspaper his broad and ruddy face would become covered with dolorous wrinkles and darkened with an angry purple.  Pyrot was the cause of it.  Justice Chaussepied could not understand how an officer could have committed so black a crime as to hand over eighty thousand trusses of military hay to a neighbouring and hostile Power.  And he could still less conceive how a scoundrel should have found official defenders in Penguinia.  The thought that there existed in his country a Pyrot, a Colonel Hastaing, a Colomban, a Kerdanic, a Phoenix, spoilt his hyacinths, his violin, his heaven, and his earth, all nature, and even his dinner with the Mesdemoiselles Helbivore!

In the mean time the Pyrot case, having been presented to the Supreme Court by the Keeper of Seals, it fell to Chaussepied to examine it and cover its defects, in case any existed.  Although as upright and honest as a man can be, and trained by long habit to exercise his magistracy without fear or favour, he expected to find in the documents he submitted to him proofs of certain guilt and obvious criminality.  After lengthened difficulties and repeated refusals on the part of General Julep, Justice Chaussepied was allowed to examine the documents.  Numbered and initialed they ran to the number of fourteen millions six hundred and twenty-six thousand three hundred and twelve.  As he studied them the judge was at first surprised, then astonished, then stupefied, amazed, and, if I dare say so, flabbergasted.  He found among the documents prospectuses of new fancy shops, newspapers, fashion-plates, paper bags, old business letters, exercise books, brown paper, green paper for rubbing parquet floors, playing cards, diagrams, six thousand copies of the “Key to Dreams,” but not a single document in which any mention was made of Pyrot.

XI.  CONCLUSION

The appeal was allowed, and Pyrot was brought down from his cage.  But the Anti-Pyrotists did not regard themselves as beaten.  The military judges re-tried Pyrot.  Greatauk, in this second affair, surpassed himself.  He obtained a second conviction; he obtained it by declaring that the proofs communicated to the Supreme Court were worth nothing, and that great care had been taken to keep back the good ones, since they ought to remain secret.  In the opinion of connoisseurs he had never shown so much address.  On leaving the court, as he passed through the vestibule with a tranquil step, and his hands behind his back, amidst a crowd of sight-seers, a woman dressed in red and with her face covered by a black veil rushed at him, brandishing a kitchen knife.

“Die, scoundrel!” she cried.  It was Maniflore.  Before those present could understand what was happening, the general seized her by the wrist, and with apparent gentleness, squeezed it so forcibly that the knife fell from her aching hand.