This dock has no door leading into the body of the court. The only entrance to it or exit from it is a door leading out to a room and the passage which conducts to the stairway leading down to the depôt or prison in the Palace of Justice. To the witness’s left is the box with the jury, and on a level with the judge’s bench and with the jury’s box is the desk occupied by the Public Prosecutor, who wears the same imposing red, ermine-trimmed robes as those worn by the judges, and who prosecutes on behalf of the Government of France. As a matter of fact, however, in every French criminal trial there are two prosecutors. The French criminal system considers this right, but to any foreigner who has been present at a trial in France it must appear anything but that. For the presiding judge in a French trial is really a prosecutor as well. Before the case comes into court he has spent many hours over the opinion provided for him, in a lengthy document with countless appendices of evidence, by the examining magistrate, and from the very start of the trial the presiding judge takes the lead in the examination of the prisoner. I was present in the Paris Court of Assizes throughout the Steinheil trial, and I shall always remember the painful impression which was made on me then by the judge’s methods. I remember now the picture I saw of the eager little woman, dressed in black, pleading, protesting, discussing, admitting and contradicting by turn, and of the man in his judge’s robes who argued hotly with her, told her, downright, time after time that she was guilty of the crime for which she was on trial, thundered out accusations, tried to wheedle her into damaging admissions, and thundered out the statement that she was not telling the truth. The judge in a French trial is not only a prosecuting counsel—he is rather a brutal one at that. Any impartial onlooker, if he be not a Frenchman, and be not therefore accustomed to the methods of the French court, cannot help realizing that the judge uses his power and his prestige as Brennus used his sword, and frequently hurls it into the scales of justice to the detriment of the prisoner. On the other hand, a French judge, who is enjoined by law on his honour and his conscience to use his best efforts to bring out truth at the trial, undoubtedly does so within the limits of human possibility.