A change in M. de Valles on the third day of the trial. Respecting her tears, refraining from shrugging his shoulders at her repeated protestations of innocence, the judge treated the “Tragic Widow” as a human being; even with courtesy and compassion. This metamorphosis was due, I believe, to a hint received from high quarters, where (so I have since been assured) the strong protests of the Paris correspondents of the English and American newspapers against the French judicial system, had made an impression. But in the opinion of Henri Rochefort, Madame Steinheil’s savage assailant in the columns of the Nationalist _Patrie_, the “judge had been bought.” With his gaunt, yellow face, tumbled white hair, angry grey eyes, the ruthless old journalist and agitator was the most conspicuous figure in the press-box. To his colleagues and to the barristers around him, he also accused Madame Steinheil of having murdered the late Félix Faure. “She was in the pay of the Dreyfusards,” he said, in his hoarse voice, “and the Dreyfusards knew that so long as Faure lived there would be no revision. So they commissioned the woman Steinheil, his mistress, to assassinate him.” After which he sucked lozenges (fierce old Rochefort is always and always sucking lozenges in order to ease the hoarseness in his throat), and next proceeded to begin his article for the _Patrie_, in which he referred to Madame Steinheil as the “Black Panther”! I fancy, too, that it was Rochefort’s bold design to magnetise—even to mesmerise—the jury! At all events, when not writing or accusing, he kept his angry grey eyes fixed hard on the foreman. A good thing the “Tragic Widow” could not see him from her seat in the dock. Henri Rochefort’s gaunt yellow face, when lit up luridly with hatred and vindictiveness, is enough to make anyone falter and quail. But as M. de Valles was calm, Madame Steinheil felt more at ease; and, apart from occasional tears and comparatively few outbursts, the “Tragic Widow” remained composed during the six long, stifling afternoons occupied by the evidence of the eighty-seven witnesses. Of these, of course, I can take only the most important. Let us begin with Mr Burlingham, an American painter and journalist, aged twenty-eight.