SAVED FROM GUILLOTINE

Evening Star, Issue 19994, 11 October 1928, Page 4

SAVED FROM GUILLOTINE

A WIFE’S ELOQUENCE A REVOLUTION DRAMA. It was a sultry afternoon in the month of July, 1799, that the Array Court was sitting in tho prison fortress of tho Chalet in Paris for tho trial of exiles who had ventured back to France without tho license of tho law. Three of such prisoners had been tried that morning and sent packing to the guillotine. A fourth prisoner was now to be tried, the Count do ia Villirouot, and it seemed that nothing could save him from joining those unhappy four. The spectators passed tho time before the entrance of tho judges, in gazing at tho lonely figure of a girl in a white dress, who was sitting at a table reserved for the defending counsel. This girl was tho prisoner s wire. Victoire and her husband were true lovers —as impassioned as Paolo and Francesca, or as Tristan and Iseult. She was, indeed, no queen of beauty; contemporary accounts say she was small, and pale, and freckled, but she was intensely vivid and alive. She had been noted all her life for a charm, a spirit, and a ready wit, which, with the constant smile on her lips and tho sparkle in her hazel eyes, had made her everybody’s darling. She _ had been in prison, too, together with a crowd of other girls who were innocent of any crime, but that of noble birth. In the dead of winter they had been kept without a spark of fire, and it was Victoire who had proposed that they should dance tho warmth ! into their chilly veins; and forthwith the ancient cloisters of tho convent at Lamballe, where they were im- j prisoned, which had heard so long the sound of prayers and canlcles, began to echo to tho music of cotillions and fandangoes, with the noiso of laughing voices and tho stir of dancing feet. Such was the fascinating little person who now, when her husband stood in peril of his life, resolved that she alono was to bo trusted to defend him. She must, for all her pluck, have been a piteous, a pathetic figure, who did her best to look composed; but in truth she was tormented by anxiety, and half dead with want of sleep, alone, unfriended, and (surrounded by a hostile crowd. A DIFFICULT TASK. Tho judges, seven officers in blazing uniforms, with sabres at their sides, came clanking into court, at their head the president, General Cathol, a hardened veteran, with grim lips under a fierce white moustache. Then her husband was brought in between two warders with fixed bayonets, and seated at the table, a few feet distant from her. Let us try to realise what lay before her; she had no skill in the practised arts of the advocate, she had never made a speech before in her life, but she had the dogged, dauntless resolution to achieve her best as long as she had strength to stand or speak. “ Have yon an advocate? ’ the president demanded. “ Yes,” replied tho count, ” I have —my wife.” , , , The general, turning, asked her in his icy voice; Have you anything to sav ?’ ’ ‘“Yes,” replied the girl. “Citizens, judges, 1 have something ” 1 And she rose to her feet. Her husband, by the law, was guilty, and she had no shadow of a cose. Nor had she, to sustain her, either tho sense of justice of the judges, or the sympathy of tho spectators. Tho judges were men of iron, to whom an exile was a form of vermin, to be exterminated like a rat.

As for the spectators, there was not a man among them, or woman either, hut would have haled Hie rare show of wife and husband in tho death-cart with a roar of cat-calls of delight. At tho sight of a women pleading in a court or justice, tho spectators, stirred by curiosity, stared. But as soon as she began, their faces altered. Wo are told by a French writer that there was something in her voice, a strange appeal, a tense electric thrill of passion, that seemed to lay a spell upon the crowd. Tho chamber by degrees was stilled into utter silonce, silence only broken by a sigh, a murmur, or the deep intaking of a breath. BORNE OUT IN TRIUMPH.

Sho spoke for forty minutes, and when she ended, with a broken cry for pity for the father of her little children, the spectators remained incapable of sound or motion; most ifbnderiid of all, the very judges sat with drooping heads, and eyes that shone with tears. It was in a voice that trembled that tho president announced the verdict: “ Tho judges are unanimous—tho prisoner is freed!” Then, as tho young wife reeled, half fainting, and fell into her husband’s arms, the tension broke. Tho mercurial people, laughing, cheering, went mad with sheer delight; the judges left the bench to shake them by the hand, and the wild mob bore them from tho court in triumph, tho wife and her husband whom by her devoted courage and her eloquence she had rescued from the very jaws of death. All Paris the next morning was-ring-

ing with her name, and the wits remarked that she had wrought a greater miracle than Circe, who had converted men to brutes, whereas she had converted brutes to men. A miracle, indeed, it seemed, and a miracle it seems to-day—one of the strangest kind in history. What magic spell of words could so avail to shake the very souls of those who heard them ?