SAVED FROM GUILLOTINE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20522, 25 September 1928, Page 15

SAVED FROM GUILLOTINE.

A REVOLUTION DRAMA. It. was a sultry afternoon in the month of July, 1790, 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. Three of such prisoners had been tried morning and sent packing to the guillotine. A fourth prisoner was now to be tried, the Count de la Villirouet, and it seemed that nothing could save him from joining those unhappy four. The spectators passed the time before the entrance of the judges in gazing at the lonely figure of a girl in a white dress who was sitting at a table reserved for the defending counsel. The girl was the prisoner’s wife. 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 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 the convent at Lamballe, where they were imprisoned, which had heard so long the sound of prayers and canticles, began £o echo to the music of cotillions and fandangoes, with the noise of laughing voices and the 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 was to be 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, 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 you an advocate ?” the president demanded. “ Yes,” replied the count, “ I have—my wife.” The general, turning, asked her in his icy voice; “ Have you anything to say? “ Yes,” replied the girl, “ citizen judges, I have something ” And she rose to her feet. Her husband, by the law, 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 of the spectators. The 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, 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 in a court of justice, the spectators, stirred by curiosity, stared. But as soon as she began, their faces altered. We 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. The chamber, by degrees, was stilled into utter silence, silence only broken by a sigh, a murmur, or the deep intaking of a breath. BORNE OUT IN TRIUMPH. She spoke for 40 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!” Then, as the young wife reeled, half fainting, and well 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, the 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, 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?