“I do,” protested Deroulede loudly.

“And will you tell the court why you are so ready to publicly accuse yourself of treason against the Republic, knowing full well all the consequences of your action?”

“Would any Frenchman care to save his own life at the expense of a woman’s honour?” retorted Deroulede proudly.

A murmur of approval greeted these words, and Tinville remarked unctuously: 

“Quite so, quite so.  We esteem your chivalry, Citizen-Deputy.  The same spirit, no doubt, actuates you to maintain that the accused knew nothing of the papers which you say you destroyed?”

“She knew nothing of them.  I destroyed them; I did not know that they had been found; on my return to my house I discovered that the Citizeness Juliette Marny had falsely accused herself of having destroyed some papers surreptitiously.”

“She said they were love letters.”

“It is false.”

“You declare her to be pure and chaste?”

“Before the whole world.”

“Yet you were in the habit of frequenting the bedroom of this pure and chaste girl, who dwelt under your roof,” said Tinville with slow and deliberate sarcasm.

“It is false.”

“If it be false, Citizen Deroulede,” continued the other with the same unctuous suavity, “then how comes it that the correspondence which you admit was treasonable, and therefore presumably secret—­how comes it that it was found, still smouldering, in the chaste young woman’s bedroom, and the torn letter-case concealed among her dresses in a valise?”

“It is false.”

“The Minister of Justice, Citizen-Deputy Merlin, will answer for the truth of that.”

“It is the truth,” said Juliette quietly.

Her voice rang out clear, almost triumphant, in the midst of the breathless pause, caused by the previous swift questions and loud answers.

Deroulede now was silent.

This one simple fact he did not know.  Anne Mie, in telling him the events in connection with the arrest of Juliette, had omitted to give him the one little detail, that the burnt letters were found in the young girl’s bedroom.

Up to the moment when the Public Prosecutor confronted him with it, he had been under the impression that she had destroyed the papers and the letter-case in the study, where she had remained alone after Merlin and his men had left the room.  She could easily have burnt them there, as a tiny spirit lamp was always kept alight on a side table for the use of smokers.

This little fact now altered the entire course of events.  Tinville had but to frame an indignant ejaculation: 

“Citizens of France, see how you are being befooled and hoodwinked!”

Then he turned once more to Deroulede.

“Citizen Deroulede...” he began.

But in the tumult that ensued he could no longer hear his own voice.  The pent-up rage of the entire mob of Paris seemed to find vent for itself in the howls with which the crowd now tried to drown the rest of the proceedings.