CX. L'acte d'accusation.

CX

The Indictment.

The judges took their seats amid the deepest silence; the jurors sat down in their places; M. de Villefort, the object of attention and we might almost say of general admiration, seated himself, covered, in his armchair, casting a tranquil glance around him.

Everyone looked with astonishment at that grave and severe countenance, upon whose impassiveness the sorrows of a father seemed to have no hold, and they gazed with a kind of terror at this man, a stranger to the emotions of humanity.

"Gendarmes!" said the president, "bring in the accused."

At these words the public's attention became more intense, and all eyes fixed upon the door through which Benedetto was to enter.

Soon that door opened and the accused appeared.

The impression was the same on everyone, and no one was mistaken as to the expression of his face.

His features bore not the imprint of that deep emotion which drives the blood back to the heart and pales the brow and cheeks. His hands, gracefully placed, one upon his hat, the other in the opening of his white quilted waistcoat, trembled with no shudder: his eye was calm and even brilliant. Scarcely had he entered the room than the young man's gaze began to travel over all the rows of judges and spectators, and rested longer upon the president and especially upon the king's attorney.

Beside Andrea stood his counsel, a lawyer appointed by the court (for Andrea had not wished to concern himself with these details, to which he had seemed to attach no importance), a young man with faded blond hair, his face reddened by an emotion a hundred times more visible than that of the prisoner.

The president called for the reading of the indictment, drawn up, as we know, by the so able and implacable pen of Villefort.

During this reading, which was long, and which for anyone else would have been crushing, public attention never ceased to be directed toward Andrea, who bore its weight with the lightness of soul of a Spartan.

Never perhaps had Villefort been so concise or so eloquent; the crime was presented in the most vivid colors, the antecedents of the prisoner, his transformation, the sequence of his acts from a rather tender age, were deduced with the talent that the practice of life and the knowledge of the human heart could furnish to a mind as lofty as that of the king's attorney.

With this single preamble, Benedetto was forever lost in public opinion, pending his more material punishment by the law.

Andrea paid not the slightest heed to the successive charges that rose and fell upon him: M. de Villefort, who often examined him and who no doubt continued upon him the psychological studies he had so often had occasion to make upon the accused, M. de Villefort could not once make him lower his eyes, however fixed and deep his gaze.

At length the reading was finished.

"Accused," said the president, "your surname and given names?"

Andrea rose.

"Pardon me, Mr. President," he said in a voice whose tone rang perfectly pure, "but I see that you are about to follow an order of questions which I cannot follow. I have the pretension that it is for me later to justify being an exception to ordinary accused persons. Be so good, then, I pray you, as to permit me to answer in a different order; I shall none the less reply to all."

The president, surprised, looked at the jurors, who looked at the king's attorney.

Great surprise was manifested throughout the assembly. But Andrea appeared in no way moved thereby.

"Your age?" said the president; "will you answer this question?"

"To this question as to the others, I will answer, Mr. President, but in its turn."

"Your age?" repeated the magistrate.

"I am twenty-one years old, or rather I shall be only in a few days, having been born in the night of September 27 to 28, 1817."

M. de Villefort, who was taking notes, raised his head at this date.

"Where were you born?" continued the president.

"At Auteuil, near Paris," replied Benedetto.

M. de Villefort raised his head a second time, looked at Benedetto as he would have looked at the head of Medusa, and turned livid.

As for Benedetto, he gracefully passed the embroidered corner of a fine cambric handkerchief over his lips.

"Your occupation?" asked the president.

"At first I was a forger," said Andrea, as tranquilly as could be; "then I became a thief, and quite recently I have made myself an assassin."

A murmur, or rather a tempest of indignation and surprise, burst from all parts of the hall: the judges themselves looked at one another stupefied, the jurors manifested the greatest disgust for the cynicism so little expected from an elegant man.

M. de Villefort pressed a hand to his brow, which, at first pale, had become red and burning; suddenly he rose, looking around him like a man distraught: he lacked air.

"Are you looking for something, Mr. King's Attorney?" asked Benedetto with his most obliging smile.

M. de Villefort answered nothing, and reseated himself, or rather fell back into his armchair.

"Is it now, prisoner, that you consent to state your name?" asked the president. "The brutal affectation with which you have enumerated your various crimes, which you qualify as professions, the kind of point of honor you attach to them, for which, in the name of morality and of the respect due to humanity, the court must severely blame you, is perhaps the reason that has made you delay naming yourself: you wish to set off that name by the titles that precede it."

"It is incredible, Mr. President," said Benedetto in the most gracious tone of voice and with the most polite manners, "how you have read to the bottom of my thought; it is indeed with that aim that I asked you to invert the order of the questions."

Stupor was at its height; there was in the words of the accused neither bravado nor cynicism; the moved audience foresaw some thunderbolt bursting from the depths of that dark cloud.

"Well, then," said the president, "your name?"

"I cannot tell you my name, for I do not know it; but I know that of my father, and I can tell it to you."

A painful dazzlement blinded Villefort; there were seen falling from his cheeks acrid and hurried drops of sweat upon the papers he turned with a convulsive and distraught hand.

"Then say the name of your father," resumed the president.

Not a breath, not a sigh, disturbed the silence of that immense assembly: everyone waited.

"My father is the king's attorney," answered Andrea tranquilly.

"King's attorney!" said the president with stupefaction, without noticing the upheaval taking place in Villefort's features; "king's attorney!"

"Yes, and since you wish to know his name I am going to tell you: he is named de Villefort!"

The explosion, so long restrained by the respect paid to justice in session, broke forth, like thunder, from the depths of all breasts; the court itself thought not to repress this movement of the multitude. The interjections, the insults addressed to Benedetto, who remained impassive, the energetic gestures, the movement of the gendarmes, the sneering of that foul part which, in every assembly, rises to the surface at moments of trouble and scandal, all this lasted five minutes before the magistrates and ushers had succeeded in reestablishing silence.

Amid all this noise, the voice of the president was heard crying:

"Do you make sport of justice, accused, and would you dare to give your fellow citizens the spectacle of a corruption which, in an age that nevertheless leaves nothing to be desired in that regard, would not yet have had its equal?"

Ten persons hastened to the king's attorney, half crushed in his seat, and offered him consolations, encouragements, protests of zeal and sympathy.

Calm had been reestablished in the hall, with the exception, however, of one spot where a rather numerous group was agitated and whispering.

A woman, it was said, had just fainted; smelling salts had been given her, and she had recovered.

Andrea, during all this tumult, had turned his smiling face toward the assembly; then, finally leaning with one hand on the oak rail of his bench, and that in the most graceful attitude:

"Gentlemen," said he, "God forbid that I should seek to insult the court and to make, in the presence of this honorable assembly, a useless scandal. I am asked my age, I tell it; I am asked where I was born, I answer; I am asked my name, I cannot tell it, since my parents abandoned me. But I can well, without telling my name, since I have none, tell that of my father; now, I repeat, my father is named M. de Villefort, and I am quite ready to prove it."

There was in the young man's accent a certainty, a conviction, an energy which reduced the tumult to silence. Glances were turned for a moment upon the king's attorney, who kept in his seat the immobility of a man whom the thunderbolt has just changed into a corpse.

"Gentlemen," continued Andrea, commanding silence by gesture and voice, "I owe you the proof and the explanation of my words."

"But," cried the irritated president, "you declared in the examination that you were named Benedetto, you said you were an orphan, and you gave Corsica as your native land."

"I said in the examination what it suited me to say in the examination, for I did not wish that one should weaken or arrest, which would not have failed to happen, the solemn resonance I wished to give to my words.

"Now I repeat to you that I was born at Auteuil, in the night of September 27 to 28, 1817, and that I am the son of M. the king's attorney de Villefort. Now, do you wish for details? I am going to give you some.

"I was born on the first floor of the house numbered 28, rue de la Fontaine, in a room hung with red damask. My father took me in his arms saying to my mother that I was dead, wrapped me in a towel marked with an H and an N, and carried me into the garden where he buried me alive."

A shudder ran through all the spectators when they saw the assurance of the prisoner grow with the terror of M. de Villefort.

"But how do you know all these details?" asked the president.

"I am going to tell you, Mr. President. In the garden where my father had just buried me, there had, that very night, introduced himself a man who bore him mortal ill will, and who had long watched for him to accomplish upon him a Corsican vengeance. The man was hidden in a thicket; he saw my father enclose a deposit in the earth, and struck him with a knife-thrust in the very midst of that operation; then, believing that this deposit was some treasure, he opened the grave and found me still living. This man carried me to the Foundling Hospital, where I was registered under number 57. Three months after, his sister made the journey from Rogliano to Paris to come for me, claimed me as her son, and took me away.

"That is how, though born at Auteuil, I was brought up in Corsica."

There was a moment of silence, but a silence so profound, that, without the anxiety that seemed to breathe from a thousand breasts, one would have thought the hall empty.

"Continue," said the voice of the president.

"Certainly," continued Benedetto, "I might have been happy among those brave people who adored me; but my perverse nature prevailed over all the virtues my adoptive mother tried to pour into my heart. I grew up in evil and have arrived at crime. At length, one day when I was cursing God for having made me so wicked and for giving me so hideous a destiny, my adoptive father came to say to me:

"'Do not blaspheme, unhappy one! for God gave you birth without anger! the crime comes from your father and not from you; from your father who vowed you to hell if you died, to misery if a miracle restored you to the light!'

"From that time I ceased to blaspheme God, but I cursed my father; and that is why I have uttered here the words you reproached me with, Mr. President; that is why I have caused the scandal at which this assembly still trembles. If it is a further crime, punish me; but if I have convinced you that from the day of my birth my destiny was fatal, painful, bitter, lamentable, pity me!"

"But your mother?" asked the president.

"My mother believed me dead; my mother is not guilty. I did not wish to know the name of my mother; I do not know her."

At this moment a shrill cry, ending in a sob, rang out amid the group which surrounded, as we have said, a woman.

This woman fell into a violent fit of hysterics and was carried from the courtroom; as she was borne away, the thick veil that hid her face parted, and Mme Danglars was recognized.

Despite the prostration of his unnerved senses, despite the buzzing that trembled in his ear, despite the kind of madness that overthrew his brain, Villefort recognized her and rose.

"The proofs! the proofs!" said the president; "prisoner, remember that this web of horrors needs to be supported by the most striking proofs."

"The proofs?" said Benedetto, laughing; "the proofs, you want them?"

"Yes."

"Well, look at M. de Villefort, and ask me again for the proofs."

Everyone turned toward the king's attorney, who, under the weight of those thousand glances riveted upon him, advanced into the tribunal enclosure, staggering, his hair in disorder and his face blotched from the pressure of his nails.

The whole assembly uttered a long murmur of astonishment.

"I am asked for the proofs, my father," said Benedetto; "do you wish me to give them?"

"No, no," stammered M. de Villefort in a strangled voice; "no, it is useless."

"How, useless?" cried the president; "but what do you mean?"

"I mean," cried the king's attorney, "that I should struggle in vain under the deadly grip that crushes me, gentlemen; I am, I acknowledge it, in the hand of the avenging God. No proofs; there is no need of any; all that this young man has just said is true!"

A silence dark and heavy as that which precedes the catastrophes of nature enveloped in its leaden mantle all the spectators, whose hair stood on end.

"What! M. de Villefort," cried the president, "you do not yield to an hallucination? What! you enjoy the fullness of your faculties? One could understand that so strange, so unforeseen, so terrible an accusation might have troubled your mind? Come, compose yourself."

The king's attorney shook his head. His teeth chattered violently like those of a man devoured by fever, and yet he was of a deathly paleness.

"I enjoy all my faculties, sir," said he; "the body alone suffers, and that is understandable. I acknowledge myself guilty of all that this young man has just articulated against me, and I hold myself at home at the disposal of M. the king's attorney my successor."

And in pronouncing these words in a hollow and almost stifled voice, M. de Villefort directed himself, staggering, toward the door, which the usher on duty opened for him with a mechanical movement.

The whole assembly remained mute and consternated by this revelation and by this confession, which made so terrible a denouement to the various incidents that, for a fortnight, had agitated Parisian high society.

"Well," said Beauchamp, "let anyone come now and say that drama is not in nature!"

"Faith," said Château-Renaud, "I should still rather end like M. de Morcerf: a pistol-shot seems gentle beside such a catastrophe."

"And besides it kills," said Beauchamp.

"And I who had for an instant the idea of marrying his daughter," said Debray. "Did she do well to die, my God, the poor child!"

"The session is adjourned, gentlemen," said the president, "and the case postponed to the next session. The affair must be reinvestigated and entrusted to another magistrate."

As for Andrea, still as tranquil and much more interesting, he left the hall escorted by the gendarmes, who involuntarily showed him deference.

"Well, what do you think of that, my good fellow?" asked Debray of the police sergeant, slipping a louis into his hand.

"There will be extenuating circumstances," replied the latter.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”