Saved from Guillotine

Gisborne Times, Volume LXVIII, Issue 10724, 23 October 1928, Page 9

Saved from Guillotine

BY WIFE'S ELOQUENCE,

A REVOLUTION DRAMA

BEASTS' TURNED TO MEN.

It w-as a sultry afternoon in the month of July, 1769, that the Army Court was sitting in the prison fortress of the Chalet in Paris for the trial of exiles who had ventured back to France without the license of the law. Throe of such prisoners had been tried that morning and sent packing to the guillotine. A fourth prisoner was now to be tried, the Count de la Villirouot, and it seemed that nothing could save him from pbining those unhappy trio. The spectators passed the time before the entrance of the judges, in gazing at the lonoly figure of a girl in a. white dress, who was sitting at a table reserved for the defending counsel. ,

This girl was the prisoner’s wife, Victoire and her husband were true lovers —as impassionel as Paolo and Francesca, or as Tristan and Iscult. She was, indeed, no queen of beauty, contemporary accounts say she was smtll and pale, and freckled, but she was intensely vivid and alive She had been noted all lier life for a charm, a spirit and a ready wit which, with the constant smile on her lips and the 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 the warmth into their chilly veins; and, forthwith the ancient cloisters of flic convent at Lamballe, where they were imprisoned, which had heard so long the sound of prayers and. • canticles, began to echo to the music of cotillions and fandangoes, with the noise of laughing voices and tiie stir of dancing feet. ‘

Such was the fascinating little person who now, , when her husband stood in peril of his life, resolved that she alone ivas to he 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.

'The judges, seven officers in blazing uniforms, . with sabres at their , sides, came clanking into Court, at their head the president, Geqeral Cathol, a hardened veteran, ' with trim lips- under a fierce white mousache. Then her husband was brought rixi 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 practical arts of the advocate, she had never made a speech before in ,hcr life, but she had the dogged, dauntless resolution to achieve her best as long, as she had strength to stand) to speak. “Have you an advocate?” the president demanded. “Yes,” /replied the count, “I have —myr •wife.” ; / . Tiie general; turning, asked her in his icy voice: “Have you anything to. say?” . “Yes,”., replied the girl,* “citizen judges, I have something——” Her husband, Py the Jaw,, /was guilty, and she had no shadow of a case. Nor had she,; to sustain ./her,

either the sense of justice- of the judges, or the sympathy o'r the 'Spectators. The judges were men or 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, but would have haled the rare show of wife and husband in the death-cart with a roar of cat-calls of delight. At" the sight of a woman pleading m a Court of Justice, the spectators, stirred by curiosity, stared. But as soon as she began; their faces altered. We are told by a Trench writer that there was '.something in her voice, a strange appeal, a tense electric thrill of passion, that seemed to lay a spell upon ihc crowd. T,he chamber, by degrees, was stilled into utter silence, sitonco only broken by a sigh, a murmur, or the deep intaking of a breath. BORNE OUT IN TRIUMPH■ She '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 wonderful of all, the very judges sat with drooping heads, -and eyes that, shone with tears. It was in a voice that trembled that the president announced- the verdict: “The judges are unanimous—the prisoner is freed 1” v Then, as the young wife reeled, half fainting, and fell into her husband’s arms, the tension broke. The 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 the Court in triumph, tbo, 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 ringing with her name, r.iul the wits remarked that she had ' "'-ought a greater miracle than Circe, vlio 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 1 in history. It hat magic spell of words could so avail to shake the very souls '-f those who heard them?