• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The usher’s voice rang out, mournful and sinister.

“The citizen public prosecutor versus the citizeness Geneviève Dixmer.”

Maurice shivered from head to toe and sweat pearled over his entire face. The small door through which the accused came in opened and Geneviève appeared. She was dressed in white; her hair was done beautifully, for she had parted it and curled it artfully instead of cutting it off the way many women did.

Maurice saw Geneviève and felt all the strength he had carefully built up for the occasion drain from him at once. But he had, after all, been expecting the blow, since he had not missed a single hearing for twelve days now and three times already the name Geneviève on the public prosecutor’s lips had struck his ear. But certain kinds of despair are so vast and so deep no one can sound their depths.

All those who saw this woman appear, so beautiful, so childlike, so luminously white and wan, uttered a cry: some of fury—there were, at the time, people who hated all forms of superiority, superiority in beauty as much as superiority in wealth, genius, or birth; others of admiration; still others of pity.

Geneviève no doubt recognized one cry out of all the cries, one voice among all the voices, for she turned to where Maurice was while the president flipped through the accused’s file, looking up at her from time to time.

She saw Maurice at a glance, hidden as he was in his great broad-brimmed hat, and turned to face him smiling sweetly; with an even sweeter gesture, she placed her two trembling pink hands to her lips and blew him a kiss that contained her whole soul as well as her breath. The kiss winged its way across the room to the one man in all the crowd who had the right to claim it.

A murmur of interest rippled through the whole chamber. Geneviève was called to the stand and turned back to the jurors; but she stopped midway, her eyes wide with absolute terror, as she fixed on one point of the room.

Maurice stood on the tips of his toes but he could see nothing, or rather, something more important called his attention back to the stage, that is, to the bar. Fouquier-Tinville had begun reading the act of denunciation.

This act held that Geneviève Dixmer was the wife of a committed conspirator who was suspected of having aided the ex–Knight of Maison-Rouge in his successive attempts to save the Queen.

She had, moreover, been caught in the act of kneeling before the Queen, begging her to change clothes with her and offering to die in her place. This stupid fanaticism, said the act of denunciation, might merit the praises of the counterrevolutionaries; but today, the act added, every French citizen owed his life to the nation alone, and sacrificing one’s life to the enemies of France was to commit treason twice over.

Geneviève, asked if she acknowledged having been, as the gendarmes Duchesne and Gilbert claimed, caught at the Queen’s knees, beseeching her to change clothes with her, answered simply:

“Yes!”

“In that case,” said the president, “tell us about your plans, your hopes.”

Geneviève smiled.

“A woman can conceive hope, but no woman can devise a plan of the kind I am a victim of.”

“How is it you found yourself there, then?”

“I had no choice: I was pushed.”

“Who pushed you?” asked the public prosecutor.

“People who threatened to kill me if I didn’t do as I was told.”

With that the angry gaze of the young woman once again fixed on that point of the room Maurice could not see.

“So to escape from the death with which you were threatened, you braved the death that would surely result from any condemnation.”

“I yielded with a knife at my breast, whereas the blade of the guillotine was still a long way from my neck. I buckled under clear and present violence.”

“Why didn’t you seek help? Any good citizen would have defended you.”

“Alas, monsieur!” replied Geneviève in a tone at once so sad and so tender that Maurice’s heart swelled to bursting. “Alas! I had no one near me to turn to.”

Tender sympathy now took over from interest, as interest