“Oh, that would have been most unfortunate!” broke in M. Magloire.  “We are not only religious at Sauveterre, we are devout, my good colleague,—­excessively devout.”

“And I have given up that idea.”

Jacques, who had till now kept silent and motionless, now raised himself suddenly to his full height, and cried, in a voice of concentrated rage,—­

“Is it not too bad, is it not atrocious, that we should be compelled to concoct a falsehood?  And I am innocent!  What more could be done if I were a murderer?”

Jacques was perfectly right:  it was monstrous that he should be absolutely forced to conceal the truth.  But his counsel took no notice of his indignation:  they were too deeply absorbed in examining minutely their system of defence.

“Let us go on to the other points of the accusation,” said M. Magloire.

“If my version is accepted,” replied M. Folgat, “the rest follows as a matter of course.  But will they accept it?  On the day on which he was arrested, M. de Boiscoran, trying to find an excuse for having been out that night, has said that he had gone to see his wood-merchant at Brechy.  That was a disastrous imprudence.  And here is the real danger.  As to the rest, that amounts to nothing.  There is the water in which M. de Boiscoran washed his hands when he came home, and in which they have found traces of burnt paper.  We have only to modify the facts very slightly to explain that.  We have only to state that M. de Boiscoran is a passionate smoker:  that is well known.  He had taken with him a goodly supply of cigarettes when he set out for Brechy; but he had taken no matches.  And that is a fact.  We can furnish proof, we can produce witnesses, we had no matches; for we had forgotten our match-box, the day before, at M. de Chandore’s,—­the box which we always carry about on our person, which everybody knows, and which is still lying on the mantelpiece in Miss Dionysia’s little boudoir.  Well, having no matches, we found that we could go no farther without a smoke.  We had gone quite far already; and the question was, Shall we go on without smoking, or return?  No need of either!  There was our gun; and we knew very well what sportsmen do under such circumstances.  We took the shot out of one of our cartridges, and, in setting the powder on fire, we lighted a piece of paper.  This is an operation in which you cannot help blackening your fingers.  As we had to repeat it several times, our hands were very much soiled and very black, and the nails full of little fragments of burnt paper.”

“Ah! now you are right,” exclaimed M. Magloire.  “Well done!”

His young colleague became more and more animated; and always employing the profession “we,” which his brethren affect, he went on,—­

“This water, which you dwell upon so much, is the clearest evidence of our innocence.  If we had been an incendiary, we should certainly have poured it out as hurriedly as the murderer tries to wash out the blood-stains on his clothes, which betray him.”