The public prosecutor read the indictment. First at great length Amar’s report on the India Company. The details of the accusations which cost Fabre his life need not be entered into here. Suffice it to say that it was an indictment for corruption, for having suppressed or altered for money the decree of the Convention in the autumn before, and being accomplice in the extra gains which this had made possible—one of those wretched businesses with which Panama and South Africa have deluged modern France and England. It is an example of the methods of the tribunal that Fouquier managed to drag in Desmoulins’s name because he had once said, “People complain of not being able to make money now, yet I make it easily enough.” The second group, the Freys, Guzman, the unfrocked priest D’Espagnac, and Diederichsen the Dane, were accused of being foreigners working against the success of the French armies, and at the same time lining their pockets. In the case of three of them the accusation was probably true. It was the more readily believed from the foreign origins of the accused, for France was full of spies, while the name of a certain contumacious Baron de Bartz made this list sound the more probable. Finally, the small group at which they were really aiming (whose members they had already mixed up with the thieves) was indicted on nothing more particular than the report of St. Just—virtually, that is, on Robespierre’s notes. Danton had served the King, had drawn the people into the place where they were massacred in July 1791, did not do his duty on the 10th of August, and so forth—a vapid useless summary of impossible things in which no one but perhaps St. Just and a group of fanatics believed. With that the day ended, and they were taken back to prison. On the next day, the 14th Germinal (3rd of April 1794), Westermann, who, though already arrested, had only been voted upon in Parliament the day before, appeared on the prisoners’ bench, and sat at the end after Emanuel Frey. He was the last and not the least noble of the Dantonists, with his great stature, his clumsy intellect, and his loyal Teutonic blood. “Who are you?” they said. “I am Westermann. Show me to the people. I was a soldier at sixteen, and have been a councillor of Strasbourg. I have seven wounds in front, and I was never stabbed in the back till now.” This was the man who had led the 10th of August, and who had dared, in his bluff nature, to parley with the Swiss who spoke his language. It was after some little time passed in the interrogation of the prisoners who had been arrested for fraud, especially of D’Espagnac, that the judge turned to Danton.