"I told you," replied M. Folgat, "we must find some plausible explanation."

"I am sure I am incapable of that."

The young lawyer seemed to reflect a moment, and then he said,--

"You have been a prisoner while I have been free. For a month now I have thought this matter over."

"Ah!"

"Where was your wedding to be?"

"At my house at Boiscoran."

"Where was the religious ceremony to take place?"

"At the church at Brechy."

"Have you ever spoken of that to the priest?"

"Several times. One day especially, when we discussed it in a pleasant way, he said jestingly to me, 'I shall have you, after all in my confessional.'"

M. Folgat almost trembled with satisfaction, and Jacques saw it.

"Then the priest at Brechy was your friend?"

"An intimate friend. He sometimes came to dine with me quite unceremoniously, and I never pa.s.sed him without shaking hands with him."

The young lawyer's joy was growing perceptibly.

"Well," he said, "my explanation is becoming quite plausible. Just hear what I have positively ascertained to be the fact. In the time from nine to eleven o'clock, on the night of the crime, there was not a soul at the parsonage in Brechy. The priest was dining with M. Besson, at his house; and his servant had gone out to meet him with a lantern."

"I understand," said M. Magloire.

"Why should you not have gone to see the priest at Brechy, my dear client? In the first place, you had to arrange the details of the ceremony with him; then, as he is your friend, and a man of experience, and a priest, you wanted to ask him for his advice before taking so grave a step, and, finally, you intended to fulfil that religious duty of which he spoke, and which you were rather reluctant to comply with."

"Well said!" approved the eminent lawyer of Sauveterre,--"very well said!"

"So, you see, my dear client, it was for the purpose of consulting the priest at Brechy that you deprived yourself of the pleasure of spending the evening with your betrothed. Now let us see how that answers the allegations of the prosecution. They ask you why you took to the marshes. Why? Because it was the shortest way, and you were afraid of finding the priest in bed. Nothing more natural; for it is well known that the excellent man is in the habit of going to bed at nine o'clock.

Still you had put yourself out in vain; for, when you knocked at the door of the parsonage, n.o.body came to open."

Here M. Magloire interrupted his colleague, saying,--

"So far, all is very well. But now there comes a very great improbability. No one would think of going through the forest of Rochepommier in order to return from Brechy to Boiscoran. If you knew the country"--

"I know it; for I have carefully explored it. And the proof of it is, that, having foreseen the objection, I have found an answer. While M. de Boiscoran knocked at the door, a little peasant-girl pa.s.sed by, and told him that she had just met the priest at a place called the Marshalls'

Cross-roads. As the parsonage stands quite isolated, at the end of the village, such an incident is very probable. As for the priest, chance led me to learn this: precisely at the hour at which M. de Boiscoran would have been at Brechy, a priest pa.s.sed the Marshalls' Cross-roads; and this priest, whom I have seen, belongs to the next parish. He also dined at M. Besson's, and had just been sent for to attend a dying woman. The little girl, therefore, did not tell a story; she only made a mistake."

"Excellent!" said M. Magloire.

"Still," continued M. Folgat, "after this information, what did M. de Boiscoran do? He went on; and, hoping every moment to meet the priest, he walked as far as the forest of Rochepommier. Finding, at last, that the peasant-girl had--purposely or not--led him astray, he determined to return to Boiscoran through the woods. But he was in very bad humor at having thus lost an evening which he might have spent with his betrothed; and this made him swear and curse, as the witness Gaudry has testified."

The famous lawyer of Sauveterre shook his head.

"That is ingenious, I admit; and I confess, in all humility, that I could not have suggested any thing as good. But--for there is a but--your story sins by its very simplicity. The prosecution will say, 'If that is the truth, why did not M. de Boiscoran say so at once? And what need was there to consult his counsel?'"

M. Folgat showed in his face that he was making a great effort to meet the objection. After a while, he replied,--

"I know but too well that that is the weak spot in our armor,--a very weak spot, too; for it is quite clear, that, if M. de Boiscoran had given this explanation on the day of his arrest, he would have been released instantly. But what better can be found? What else can be found? However, this is only a rough sketch of my plan, and I have never put it into words yet till now. With your a.s.sistance, M. Magloire, with the aid of Mechinet, to whom I am already indebted for very valuable information, with the aid of all our friends, in fine, I cannot help hoping that I may be able to improve my plan by adding some mysterious secret which may help to explain M. de Boiscoran's reticence. I thought, at one time, of calling in politics, and to pretend, that, on account of the peculiar views of which he is suspected, M. de Boiscoran preferred keeping his relations with the priest at Brechy a secret."

"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 pa.s.sionate 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 circ.u.mstances. 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."

"Very well," said M. Magloire again approvingly.

"And your other charges," continued M. Folgat, as if he were standing in court, and addressing the jury,--"your other charges have all the same weight. Our letter to Miss Dionysia--why do you refer to that? Because, you say, it proves our premeditation. Ah! there I hold you. Are we really so stupid and bereft of common sense? That is not our reputation.

What! we premeditate a crime, and we do not say to ourselves that we shall certainly be convicted unless we prepare an _alibi_! What! we leave home with the fixed purpose of killing a man, and we load our gun with small-shot! Really, you make the defence too easy; for your charges do not stand being examined."

It was Jacques's turn, this time, to testify his approbation.

"That is," he said, "what I have told Galpin over and over again; and he never had any thing to say in reply. We must insist on that point."

M. Folgat was consulting his notes.

"I now come to a very important circ.u.mstance, and one which I should, at the trial, make a decisive question, if it should be favorable to our side. Your valet, my dear client,--your old Anthony,--told me that he had cleaned and washed your breech-loader the night before the crime."

"Great G.o.d!" exclaimed Jacques.

"Well, I see you appreciate the importance of the fact. Between that cleaning and the time when you set a cartridge on fire, in order to burn the letters of the Countess Claudieuse, did you fire your gun? If you did, we must say nothing more about it. If you did not, one of the barrels of the breech-loader must be clean, and then you are safe."