The Magnificent Montez Part 9

"I got up at seven o'clock," he said, "and went downstairs with the pistols which had been waiting for me at the concierge's when I returned home on the previous evening."

"The concierge remembers nothing of that," interrupted M. Duval. "This is a fresh fact. We must certainly consider it. What happened next?"

"I went off in a cab to M. d'Ecquevillez, and handed the pistols to him. At half-past ten I returned home, to wait for my seconds. We arrived on the ground at half-past eleven. M. de Boignes received us coldly, with his hands in his pockets, and said: 'You do well to keep us waiting like this for you. Name of G.o.d! this isn't a summer morning. We think there is not sufficient motive to fight a duel.' I answered frigidly, but politely, that I did not agree with him, and that I was in the hands of my seconds."

"But one of them, M. de Flers," remarked the President, "thought the quarrel trifling and said so. Another thing. Why did M. d'Ecquevillez tell us that the pistols belonged to him? Remember, he has given us details as to where he got them."

"I ignore details," was the lofty response.

"If you do, we don't," returned the judge.

A vigorous denial was made by de Beauvallon to the suggestion that he was familiar with the pistols used in the duel. To convince the jury that he was not to be believed, the opposing counsel then told them that he had once p.a.w.ned a watch belonging to somebody else. When the judge expressed himself shocked at such depravity, de Beauvallon, says a report, "hung his head and wept."

Nor did d'Ecquevillez, the other defendant, cut a very happy figure.

His real name was said to be Vincent, and aspersions were cast on his right to dub himself a "Count." He swore he had never admitted that the pistols belonged to him, and that de Beauvallon had borrowed them from the gunsmith, Desvismes. The latter, however, calling on heaven for support, declared the statement to be a "wicked invention."

Believing in the efficacy of numbers in getting up their case, forty-six witnesses were a.s.sembled by the prosecution. Mlle Lievenne, the first of them to be examined, brought with her an atmosphere of the theatre, "adopting a flashy costume, in deplorably bad taste."

"This," says a chronicler, "took the form of a blue velvet dress, a scarlet shawl, and a pearl-grey mantle." Altogether, a striking colour-scheme. But it did not help her. To the indignation of the examining-counsel, she affected to remember nothing, declaring that she had been "too busy at the supper-table, looking after the company."

The other young women, described as "more or less actresses," who had also been present, appeared to be suffering from a similar loss of memory. Their minds, they protested, were absolutely blank as to what had happened at the restaurant and very little could be extracted from them. When they had given their evidence, they looked for seats in the body of the court. The Rouen ladies, however, having somewhat rigid standards, would not permit them to sit between the wind and their propriety.

"Things are coming to a pretty pa.s.s," they declared, "when play-actresses imagine they can sit beside respectable women like ourselves."

Thereupon, the discomfited damsels withdrew to the hard benches of the public gallery.

Dumas, subpoenaed as a witness, drove all the way from Paris in a four-horsed carriage, with Mery as a travelling companion. When he took his place on the stand, M. de Tourville, affecting judicial ignorance, enquired his profession.

"If," returned the other, striking an att.i.tude, "I did not here happen to find myself in the country of the ill.u.s.trious Corneille, I should call myself a dramatist."

"Just so," was the caustic response, "but there are degrees among dramatists."

Taking this for encouragement, Dumas launched out into a disquisition on the history of the duello through the ages that was nearly as long as one of his own serials. In the middle of it, a member of the jury, anxious to be in the limelight, asked him a question.

"How does it happen," he enquired, "that Dujarier, who considered that a man of fas.h.i.+on must fight at least one duel, had never prepared himself by learning to shoot and fence?"

"I cannot tell you," was the reply. "My son, however, told me that he once accompanied him to a shooting-gallery. Out of twenty shots, he only hit the target twice."

Dumas made an exit as dramatic as his entry.

"I beg," he said, "that the honourable Court will permit me to return to Paris, where I have a new tragedy in five acts being performed this evening."

Lola Montez, garbed in heavy mourning, was the next summoned to give evidence.

"When," says one who was there, "she lifted her veil and removed her glove, to take the prescribed oath, a murmur of admiration ran through the gathering." To this an impressed reporter adds: "Her lovely eyes appeared to the judges of a deeper black than her lace ruffles."

The presiding judge had no qualms about enquiring her age; and she had none about lopping five years off it and declaring that she was just twenty-one. Nor did she advance any objection to being described, with Gallic candour, as the "mistress of Dujarier."

During her evidence, Lola Montez, probably coached by Dumas, did just what was expected of her. Thus, she shed abundant tears, struck pathetic att.i.tudes, and several times looked on the point of collapsing. But what she had to say amounted to very little. In fact, it was nothing more than an a.s.sertion that ill-feeling existed between Dujarier and de Ca.s.sagnac, the brother-in-law of de Beauvallon, and that the quarrel was connected with an alleged debt.

Dujarier, she said, had forbidden her to make de Beauvallon's acquaintance, or to attend the supper at the restaurant. He had returned from it in an excited condition at 6 o'clock the next morning and told her that he would have to accept a challenge.

"I was troubled about it," she said, "all day long. But for M.

Bertrand's a.s.surance that the encounter was to be with M. de Beauvoir, I would have gone to the police. You see, de Beauvoir was a high-minded gentleman, and would not have condescended to profit from the poor Dujarier's lack of skill."

"Did you not," enquired counsel, "say 'I am a woman of courage, and, if the meeting is in order, I will not stop it'?"

"Yes, but that was because I understood it was to be with de Beauvoir, and he would not willingly have harmed Dujarier. When I heard it was to be with de Beauvallon I exclaimed, 'My G.o.d! Dujarier is as good as dead!'"

"I myself," she added, "could handle a pistol more accurately than the poor Dujarier; and, if he had wanted satisfaction, I should have been quite willing to have gone out with M. de Beauvallon myself."

A murmur of applause met this a.s.surance. Lola's att.i.tude appealed to the spectators. She was clearly a woman of spirit.

During the proceedings that followed some sharp things were said about M. Granier de Ca.s.sagnac, the accused's brother-in-law. Some of them were so bitter that at last he protested.

"Monsieur le President," he exclaimed hotly. "I cannot bear these abominable attacks on myself any longer."

"If you can't bear them, you can always leave the court," was the response.

"This gentleman's indignation does not disturb me in the least," said the public prosecutor. "I have already had experience of it, and I consider it to be artificial."

VI

After all the witnesses had been examined and cross-examined, and bullied and threatened in the approved fas.h.i.+on, Maitre Duval addressed the jury on behalf of the dead man's relatives. In the course of this he delivered a powerful speech, full of pa.s.sion and invective, drawing a parallel between this _affaire d'honneur_ and the historic one between Alceste and Oronte in Moliere's drama. According to him, Dujarier was a s.h.i.+ning exemplar, while de Beauvallon was an unmitigated scoundrel, with a "past" of the worst description imaginable. Having once, years earlier, pledged a watch that did not belong to him, he had "no right to challenge anybody, much less a distinguished man of letters, such as the n.o.ble Dujarier." The various causes of the quarrel were discussed next. Counsel thought very little of them.

De Beauvallon had complained that Dujarier had "cut" him. "Is it an offence," enquired M. Duval, "for one man to avoid another? Upon my word, M. de Beauvallon will have to kill a number of people if he wants to kill all those who decline the honour of his companions.h.i.+p."

As for the gambling quarrel, this was not serious. What, however, was serious was that, on the morning of the encounter, de Beauvallon had gone to a shooting gallery and had some private practice with the very pistols that were afterwards used. This gave him an unfair advantage.

"If," was the advocate's final effort to win a verdict, "M. de Beauvallon is acquitted, the result will be not only a victory for an improperly conducted duel, but the very custom of the duel itself will be dishonoured by such a decision."

Leon Duval having sat down, the President turned to the defendant's counsel.

"The word is with you, M. Berryer," he said.

Maitre Berryer, a master of forensic oratory, began his address by contending that duelling was not prohibited by the law of France. In support he quoted Guizot's dictum: "Where the barbarian murders, the Frenchman seeks honourable combat; legislation on the subject is profitless; and this must be the case, since the duel is the complement of modern civilization."

The judges were unprepared to accept this view off-hand; and, after consulting with the a.s.sessors, the President insisted that, whatever M. Berryer might say, duelling was illegal in France. Although he did not tell him so, it was also quite as illegal in England, where Lord Cardigan had, a little earlier, only just wriggled out of a conviction for taking part in one by a combination of false swearing and the subservience of his brother peers.

Not in the least upset, M. Berryer advanced another point. As might have been expected of so accomplished an advocate, he had little difficulty in demolis.h.i.+ng the elaborate, but specious and unsupported, hypothesis built up by the other side. Hard facts did more with the stolid and unimaginative Rouen jury than did picturesque embroideries.

"Is the accusation true?" demanded the President.

"On my honour and on my conscience, before G.o.d and before man,"

announced the foreman, "the declaration of the jury is that it is not true."

As a result of this finding, de Beauvallon was acquitted of the charge of murder. But he did not escape without penalty, for he was ordered to pay 20,000 francs "compensation" to the mother and Dujarier's relatives.

"He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow." Convinced that there had been a miscarriage of justice and a vast amount of false swearing, the dead man's friends set to work to collect other evidence. By a stroke of luck, they got into touch with a gardener, who said that he had seen de Beauvallon, in company with d'Ecquevillez, having some surrept.i.tious pistol practice on the morning of the duel. Thereupon, the pair of them were rearrested and tried for perjury. Being convicted, d'Ecquevillez was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and de Beauvallon to eight years. But neither couple stopped in durance very long. The revolution of 1848 opened the doors of the Conciergerie and they made good their escape, the one of them to Spain, and the other to his Creole relatives in Guadeloupe.