The will to live (Les Roquevillard)

THE girls entered. It was a little more than half-past two o’clock: Mr. Porterieux, venomous and insolent, was finishing his argument. In the galleries and on the floor the public was crowded; people of fashion and from the lower ranks confused together, eager to seize upon the warm quarry of which this lawyer, like an expert and cruel hunter, was laying bare for them the palpitating heart. People noticed the presence of the young girls, who hesitated to come further forward, once inside the door.

“They are on the lookout for husbands,” explained the lawyer Coulanges, who, assisted by Mr. Paillet in the first row of the balcony, did the honours of the trial to several ladies of society. It was an occasion on which he believed that a certain show of wit was expected of him.

“Dear me!” cried one of the ladies, choking with indignation. “Just look at that brazen girl.”

While Margaret was approaching her father and handing him Hubert’s letter, her companion, Jeanne, with a quiet boldness, had the satisfaction of defying the whole town by turning ostentatiously toward Maurice Roquevillard, in his seat of shame, and waving her hand to him with the most gracious smile.

She was immediately rewarded for her courage by the look of gratitude that lighted up the young man’s face, a face that had grown thin and drawn and as if contracted by the impassiveness which he had forced himself to wear under his injuries and calumnies. The little incident was over in a moment, but already excited the commentaries of the entire room. Margaret, with her head bent, had no suspicion of it. She, too, had saluted her brother, but more discreetly, and now murmured in her friend’s ear:

“Let’s go.”

“Oh, no, I’m going to stay,” replied the latter, only too eager to be present and hear the speeches.

Mr. Roquevillard, with a brief gesture, indicated some empty places on the witness bench for them. The sun came in through the windows, leaving the jurors, who were seated facing the light, in shadow, but it lit up especially the court, the advocate-general, the lawyers and the prisoner, as if it were a light thrown on the stage during some performance in a theatre. Mr. Porterieux appeared in a full blaze as he was summing up and condensing in a final charge the various items of his argument. He repeated and reaffirmed the list of his accumulated presumptions, and still another time paraded as indisputable avowals the silence of the accused as to Mrs. Frasne and the payment of the one hundred thousand francs. Finally he called loudly, as if it were some right due him, for a severe and withering sentence on this young man who practised such a utilitarian love, who, like a new Cherubino in a practical epoch, did not hesitate to make off at one and the same time with the husband’s funds and the wife’s honour. His peroration, delivered with a complete semblance of anger and indignation, provoked a numerous and mysterious murmur in the room as he sat down, coming from the lips of all the crowd, without anything to show where it had begun, like the sound of waves. His argument had been a perfect volley of poisoned arrows, following each other directly and incessantly. One would even have said that across the son he aimed at the father, too, whom he represented as driven by shame to make his restitution; that through the son and father he sought to attaint the whole race and sink it in the mire with the unhappy Maurice. He had shown himself more incensed against his victims than was necessary, a too implacable enemy, ready to trample their dead bodies under foot. Of a verity the notary had chosen his spokesman well. He could not have desired more gall and venom in a single mouth. Mr. Roquevillard, now and then during this speech, when the worst thrusts were delivered, turned quietly toward his son or son-in-law, reassuring them by his calm and even countenance, and showing that his soul was not distressed by this tempest that waged about him.

“I call upon the advocate-general to speak,” articulated the presiding judge, in a mournful voice, as much as to say, What use is there in a second charge?

Mr. Vallerois, attracted by curiosity, had come into court and seated himself behind the advocate-general, Mr. Barré, who was in the section reserved for the public minister. He bent forward to address some words to his colleague on the floor. But the latter seemed to scorn his advice as importunate, and confined his remarks to saying that he relied upon the good sense of the jurors to find for the plaintiff, the case being already adjudged against the defendant by default.

“I call upon the defence,” began the president more briskly, evidently pleased to have escaped a long harangue.

“Are you ready?” asked Mr. Hamel of Mr. Roquevillard, who was seated by his side.

“Yes, of course. Why?”

“Then you speak first. If necessary, I’ll supplement you.”

Mr. Roquevillard saw that the old gentleman was still reeling beneath an attack whose methods, according to his old-time traditions, were inadmissible, and proposed to reserve his efforts in case his colleague should be overcome by emotion in his speech or his argument be inferior or incomplete.

During these special conferences, bits of conversation broke out again here and there among the audience, rising and spreading like dust in the wake of a procession.

“The Roquevillards,” remarked the lawyer Coulanges, who ranged himself on Mr. Frasne’s side, “will never raise their heads again after such a drubbing.”

“Oh, well, now,” objected Mr. Paillet, who was always in a good humour, “wait till you hear the father’s reply, and then look out for Mr. Porterieux.”

A man of the people, a frequenter of court trials, overheard him.

“Yes, the old man is tough,” he commented more racily.

And Mr. Paillet laughed and insisted:

“You’ll see whether he knows how to bite yet, and if his teeth are sharp.”

“He looks very tired,” murmured a lady compassionately.

“Say, rather, he looks quite broken up,” replied Mr. Coulanges, tidying some small matter about his clothes. “Two old men aren’t worth one young one,” he added, with a manner that was as much as to say, “especially with women.” Then he pointed down to the two lawyers, who were exchanging their observations not far from where Mr. Battard sat, with his fingers in his beard, watching to see the defence’s final downfall.

Mr. Roquevillard took off his lawyer’s cap and stood up. He glanced in turn, quite deliberately, at his daughter and his son, and gathered hope and confidence from the sight of them. Silence fell on the room immediately, a silence deep and throbbing with expectation, that made people hold their breath and their hearts stand still. This man with the almost white hair, this old man with his record of more than sixty years of probity and talent and upright living, who stood forth as the sole representative of so many generations of honourable and patriotic men, uttered, by the mere act of rising to his feet, an eloquent protest against the calumnies and defamation with which the long argument for the plaintiff had tried to overwhelm his race. Had they not insinuated even that La Vigie had been sold to pay back money that had not all been squandered by the thief? It was a protest made before a word was spoken, and one that all the Battards in the world could not have impressed more forcefully upon the audience.

The court-room clock marked the hour of three. The old lawyer had risen slowly to his feet, and now drew himself to his full height; his head, erect, showed clearly in the broad band of light marked out by the rays of the pale sun, too pale now to inconvenience those on whom it fell. His high, bare forehead, his finely accentuated features, dulled by age, but nevertheless still full of pride, his stiffly curled moustache, made up a fighter’s face, a leader’s, that one could not behold without an impression of forcefulness and keen and eager living. But the flame that dwelt habitually in his deep eyes, once so sharply imperious, now shone with complete serenity rather than with any lust of conquest.

“Broken down, do you say? Just look at him,” protested the lady under Mr. Coulanges’s escort.

“And yet I don’t recognise him any more,” observed Mr. Paillet.

Margaret and Mr. Hamel, on the contrary, all attention, and quite vibrating with anxiety, recognised in him the same superhuman exaltation that he had brought back from that strange walk to La Vigie the night before. He began his remarks in a voice that was rather low, a fact which inspired Mr. Battard, not without some satisfaction, it must be confessed, to remark that: “His fine organ isn’t what it was.”

Then, abruptly, as a curtain is drawn apart, his voice opened up clearly, sounded the rallying call, the summons to the dead, who last evening on the icy shadowed slopes of the hills had made up his phantom army. There was a living silence in the room, heavy and storm-laden, and he plowed through it like a vessel through the sea.

To pass judgment on the prisoner, he said, it was incumbent on the jurors to know him, and to know him they must go back to what he came from. For it was the uncertain destiny of man, born in such and such a corner of the earth, of such and such a race, to follow a predestined course, and by his own force of will to work his way through to efficiency and his destined end.

“You who come from lines of honest forefathers, and yourselves have founded families, must listen to this history of a family that I shall tell you, before you decide upon your verdict....”

To the peasants from the plains and mountains, of whom the jury was composed, who, by nature and reflection, could not but be sensible to this actual human chronicle, the truthfulness and example of it striking true to their honest minds, he then told the long story of successive Roquevillards: the first ancestor of them all, who had laid the first stone of the old house, planting the roots of his tree of life in his native soil, the struggle of successive generations adding their efforts, one to another, clearing the ground by the sweat of their brows, showing their doggedness with the stubborn soil, or in the face of intemperate or hurtful seasons, the chance destruction of crops by hail or frost, their sobriety and content with a few things, their thrift, which, at the expense of their personal enjoyment, made provision for the future—a thrift at once disinterested and in itself an act of faith in the coming generations. Thus the beautiful estate of La Vigie, whose vines and woods and fields and orchards produced so abundantly, laughing in the sunlight, in the time of harvest, represented the economy and endurance of a whole race, straight as a line of tall and growing poplars. For land that is cultivated by man assumes a human face, and when we behold our properties we are gazing on the countenances of our ancestors. And yet to what end had all this collective labour of the Roquevillards been reduced? To-day their domain belonged to the plaintiff, their adversary, who had gotten it for nothing. Had the Roquevillards laboured for five hundred years to make this present to him? No, but with their patrimony which they had patiently and painfully built up they were ransoming this last Roquevillard of them all. Who, then, had been despoiled, and which was the thief? For one hundred thousand francs paid down Mr. Frasne was receiving, accepting, a property worth almost twice that sum. Who was getting rich, then? Who was being ruined? In the name of the dead who paid this ransom, the accused must be acquitted.

But was not a family just a great material force, visibly expressed in the continuity of its patrimony, by its mutual obligations permitting the payment of the debts of some by the fruits of others’ toil? Was it not indeed something else, too, less palpable but more sacred—a solid chain of traditions, a common heritage of honour, probity and courage? What use was it to transmit life if you were not to supply it with a worthy setting, support and comfort from the past, opportunity for a well-stored future? For to transmit life was to admit life’s immortality.

And he recited the public services of the Roquevillards, all the outward ways of existence, useful and sometimes illustrious even, that their forefathers had followed. This one, the county magistrate, had died at his post during an epidemic in the town, which he had been the foremost in resisting. Another, later, in a period of troubles and disorders, had administered the finances of Chambéry and restored order in its involved affairs. Whole-hearted magistrates of the Savoyan Senate, soldiers killed by the enemy in the great wars, they had worn, beneath toga or uniform alike, the same bold, brave hearts that had beat beneath the peasant blouses of the first forefathers of them all. The last of them all, Hubert, dying for his country, alone in a strange land, far from all who were dear to him, under a fierce and hostile sun, had given voice to the final vow of his race when he had written: “I offer my life as a sacrifice for the honour of our name and my brother’s safety.”

Could the gentlemen of the jury reject this offering? As well forget all the victims for centuries past that had signalised the constantly renewing virtues of this family, like the fires which cleansed their fields at evening of the withered herbage. He threw the weight of accumulated merits in the balance and made the scales tip.

The entire army of the dead, who had come down from La Vigie the evening before, to leap across the valley in the dark and join their chief as he stood erect at the foot of the old tree on the Saint Cassin plain, filed by in a long parade.

To the merits of the dead he added the virtues of the living. This was not a time to be modest and defer to reticence. He would give all honour to Felicie in the hospital at Hanoi, and again to his sisters, who had made themselves poor in order to suppress even the suspicion of fraud on their brother’s part. For the payment delivered into Mr. Frasne’s hands had not, and could not be, in the eyes of the culprit’s family or of the jurors, either a restitution or an admission, but a definite rejection of all complicity in the theft, even an unknowing or involuntary one.

He barely excused himself for enumerating and insisting upon the rendering of so many services, and reproaching the plaintiff with ingratitude for neglecting them. On the other side they had not scrupled to forget them, or worse still, to make them appear as faults on the part of the accused. What the plaintiff really wanted to do was to build on the pretended guilt of the defendant and overwhelm with one blow the defences of his past; he was unjust enough to deny the accused the right to its protection. Yet the merits of a race constitute a true defence of it until and unless the sum of its demerits weighs it down, unless it wilfully provokes its own downfall. Was there any one who pretended to believe that the sum of the Roquevillards’ demerits had yet borne them down? No, the dead could go moral bail for this last of the Roquevillards, as they had just supplied his material bail in the sacrifice of La Vigie. Even if he had his faults, his judges could not justly declare him guilty in this instance.

How indeed could he be guilty now? By what phenomenon could the descendant of so many honest men be suddenly stirred to crime? What definite proof could they furnish of his crime? What weight, in the face of the moral presumptions of his family and surroundings, which flowed round him like the water of a torrent, could they give these miserable presumptions that chance had hatched out and circumstances twisted incriminatingly? The keys of the office—they had passed from hand to hand. The number of the safe’s combination—how could the defendant have hunted it out, guessed its use? And when had the clerk Philippeaux written it in his memorandum book? Did the jurors dwell on his lack of personal resources? He had himself paid all the expenses of the journey, large and small, without exception, either with money that he had taken away with him, as to which the examination of witnesses had given a full account, or with what he had received at Orta. The hotel bills which the defence had recovered and exhibited proved this. What, then, had been done with the stolen one hundred thousand francs, if all his expenses had been defrayed by advances from his family? If he had put it away somewhere, as was insinuated, why had he come back and surrendered himself to the law the moment word came to him of the judgment that had been entered against him by default?

Nothing was left of the accusation against him, nothing but the animus of revenge, a spirit of revenge that could not even resist the temptation to make a profit out of its own humiliation. It was a singular affair, indeed, in which the victim carried off the spoils from the pretended thief.

Mr. Roquevillard brought his argument to an end in a few words:

“Gentlemen of the jury, I have finished. In the name of all our families’ dead, whose long line makes up our everliving honour, in the name of our land slowly acquired and laboriously cultivated by succeeding generations, but given up to-day and fully sacrificed to consolidate our honour, I ask you to restore to me my son. Give him back to me, not for pity’s sake, but in justice; not as a favour, but with all your hearts. All his race and I myself will answer to you for his innocence....”

He sat down. He had spoken only an hour. When his voice, which had been calm and sonorous, always under control, rising and swelling like the grave notes of a hymn, ceased speaking, there was a prolonged silence in the room for some moments, the solemn and religious silence that one hears in church. People had heard, not the explosion of wrath and bitterness that they had expected as their due from this redoubtable old lawyer in answer to the hateful violence of Mr. Porterieux: not the scandal of a lover’s recriminations against his mistress that they had counted on; but a proud defence that disdained invective, confident in its authoritative, moral force, admirable and moving along its straight and simple lines, like the proportions of those serene and motionless statues that purify desire and stir the spirit. And the name of Mrs. Frasne had not once been uttered.

All of a sudden a cry rang out:

“Hurrah for the Roquevillards!”

It came from Mother Fauchois, and she threw her whole heart into it. The crowd in the court-room had been overborne, dominated and conquered; it broke into long applause. While the presiding judge rapped on his desk to check this demonstration, which nevertheless had put the irritated Mr. Battard to flight, Mr. Vallerois leaned forward once more to Mr. Barré. The latter now asked leave to speak, as Mr. Hamel had declined, excusing himself from availing himself of his right to speak in rebuttal after having neglected to use his right to sum up.

“I have heard, like you,” Mr. Barré said in substance, addressing the jurors, “the plea made by Mr. Roquevillard. No, the guilty party is not this young man here. And since the accused has had the generosity not to designate any one, I’ll not myself indicate things any further. I will denounce, however, the too clever machinations of this plaintiff, who disarms our sympathy by having used his private sorrows to build up a fortune. Make haste and bring in a verdict of acquittal for Maurice Roquevillard; restore him to his father, who is an honour to our bar. If the young man has been reprehensible in his private life, he need not nevertheless be retained any longer on this charge of abuse of confidence.”

The day was waning, leaving the whole room filled with the evening light. The jury retired to its deliberations, and brought in immediately a unanimous verdict of acquittal.

“Bravo!” cried Jeanne Sassenay approvingly, in a loud voice.

“Father,” murmured Margaret softly, “mamma would be so happy.”

And the spectators, turning and going out, exchanged their comments on the way. Mr. Latache, winding up his remarks before a little group, shook his head sententiously.

“It’s a good rap over the knuckles for Mr. Frasne,” he said. “After being publicly reprimanded by the public minister, he ought to shut up his offices and leave the country.”

“He’ll sell La Vigie again,” declared Mr. Paillet.

The lady whom Mr. Coulanges was seeing home expressed her delight at the way things had turned out, to take her cavalier down a peg or two, a pastime in which she seemed to find great pleasure.

“And the little Sassenay girl will buy it back. She has a big dot. Did you notice the look she gave the young prisoner, the triumphant Maurice? She’s going to marry him.”

“Yes, that will be the way of it,” said Mr. Coulanges, gloomily summing things up; “the Roquevillards have always been lucky.”