A little black-martin of a fellow, with long coat-tails and glasses to his eyes, stood up by the notaries’ table and handled a slip of paper. Everywhere the murmur of Tinville’s voice had brought the court to attention. I listened to the _greffier_ with all my ears. “Act of Accusation,” he read out brassily, “against Jean-Louis Sebastien de Crancé, _ci-devant_ Comte de la Muette, and since calling himself the Citizen Jean-Louis Thibaut.” Very well, and very well--I was discovered, then; through whose agency, if not through Jacques Crépin’s, I had no care to learn. The wonder to me was that, known and served as I had been, I should have enjoyed so long an immunity from proscription as an aristocrat. But I accused Crépin--and wrongfully, I believe--in my heart. “Hath rendered himself answerable to the law of the 17th Brumaire,” went on the _greffier_, mechanically, “in that he, an _émigré_, hath ventured himself in the streets of Paris in disguise, and----” The Public Accuser waved him impatiently to a stop. There fell a dumb silence. “One pellet out of a charge is enough to kill a rat,” said he, quietly: then in an instant his voice changed to harsh and terrible, and he bellowed at me-- “What answer to that, Monsieur _r-r-r-rat_, Monsieur _ratatouille_?” The change of manner was so astounding that I jumped as at the shock of a battery. Then a hot flush came to my face, and with it a dreadful impulse to strike this insolent on the mouth. I folded my arms, and gave him back glare for glare. “Simply, monsieur,” I said, “that it is not within reason to accuse me of returning to what I have never quitted.” “Paris?” “The soil of France.” “That shall not avail thee!” he thundered. “What right hast thou to the soil that thou and thine have manured with the sacred blood of the people?” “Oh, monsieur!” I began--“but if you will convert my very refutation----” He over-roared me as I spoke. He was breathing himself, at my expense, for the more serious business of the day. Positively I was being used as a mere punching-bag on which this “bruiser” (_comme on dit à l’Anglaise_) might exercise his muscles. “Silence!” he shouted; “I know of what I speak! thou walk’st on a bog, where to extricate the right foot is to engulf the left. Emigrant art thou--titular at least by force of thy accursed rank; and, if that is not enough, thou hast plotted in prison with others that are known.” I smiled, awaiting details of the absurd accusation. I had formed, it was evident, no proper conception of this court of summary jurisdiction. The President leaned over his desk at the moment and spoke with Tinville, proffering the latter his snuff-box. They exchanged some words, a pantomime of gesticulation to me. As they nodded apart, however, I caught a single wafted sentence: “We will whip her like the Méricourt if she is obstinate.”