1. In the first place, there are four bills, payable to order, for a hundred thousand crowns, drawn with perfect regularity by an officer otherwise deeply involved in debt; they are payable for the benefit of a woman of the name of Verron, who called herself the widow of a banker. They are presented by her grandson, Du Jonquay, her heir, recently admitted a doctor of laws, although he is ignorant even of orthography. Is this enough? Yes, in an ordinary case it would be so; but if, in this very extraordinary case, there is an extreme probability, that the doctor of laws never did and never could carry the money which he pretends to have delivered in his grandmother's name; if the grandmother, who maintained herself with difficulty in a garret, by the miserable occupation of pawnbroking, never could have been in the possession of the hundred thousand crowns; if, in short, the grandson and his mother have spontaneously confessed, and attested the written confession by their actual signatures, that they attempted to rob the general, and that he never received more than twelve hundred francs instead of three hundred thousand livres;--in this case, is not the cause sufficiently cleared up? Is not the public sufficiently able to judge from these preliminaries? 2. I appeal to yourself, sir, whether it is probable that the poor widow of a person unknown in society, who is said to have been a petty stock-jobber, and not a banker, could be in possession of so considerable a sum to lend, at an extreme risk, to an officer notoriously in debt? The general, in short, contends, that this jobber, the husband of the woman in question, died insolvent; that even his inventory was never paid for; that this pretended banker was originally a baker's boy in the household of the duke of Saint-Agnan, the French ambassador in Spain; that he afterwards took up the profession of a broker at Paris; and that he was compelled by M. Héraut, lieutenant of police, to restore certain promissory notes, or bills of exchange, which he had obtained from some young man by extortion;--such the fatality impending over this wretched family from bills of exchange! Should all these statements be proved, do you conceive it at all probable that this family lent a hundred thousand crowns to an involved officer with whom they were upon no terms of friendship or acquaintance?