At a table between the President and the prisoners sat Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor; and finally, on the judges’ right was the open part of the court and the door to the witnesses’ room. Here was a new trial with a great and definite chance of acquittal, a scene the like of which had not been seen for a year, nor would be seen again in that room. The men on the prisoners’ bench had been the masters, one of them the creator, of the court which tried them; they were evidently greater and more powerful than their judges, and had behind them an immense though informal weight of popularity. They were public men of the first rank; their judges and the public prosecutor were known to be merely the creatures of a small committee. More than this, it was common talk that the Convention might yet change its mind, and even among the jury it was certain that discussion would arise. By the evidence of a curious relic we know that the Committee actually feared a decree or a coup-de-main which would have destroyed their power. This note remains in the archives, a memorandum of a decision arrived at in the Committee on the early morning of the 13th or late in the night of the 12th. “_Henriot to be written to, to tell him to issue an order that the President and the Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal are not to be arrested._” Then in another hand: “_Get four members to sign this._” Finally, the memorandum is endorsed in yet another hand: “_13th Germinal.—A policeman took this the same day._”[153] It will thus be seen that the Committee was by no means sure of its ground. It had indeed procured through St. Just the decree preventing Danton from pleading at the bar of the Convention and permitting his trial, but it would require the most careful manœuvring upon their part to carry through such an affair. As we shall see, they just—and only just—succeeded. The whole of the first day (the 13th Germinal, 2nd of April 1794) was passed in the formal questions and in the reading of accusations. Camille, on being asked his age and dwelling, made the blasphemous and striking answer which satisfied the dramatic sense, but was not a true reply to the main question. Danton gave the reply so often quoted: “I am Danton, not unknown among the revolutionaries. I shall be living nowhere soon, but you will find my name in Walhalla.” The other answers, save that of Hérault, attempted no phrases. Yet Guzman would have made more point of his assertion if he had chosen that moment to say, “I am Guzman, a grandee of Spain, who came to France to taste liberty, but was arrested for theft;” while the two Freys missed an historic occasion in not replying, “We are Julius and Emanuel Frey, sometime nobles of the Empire under the title of Von Schönfeld, now plain Jews employed by the Emperor as spies.”