One of the members of the Commission, Monsieur Jules Delahaye, who throughout the inquiry acted very much like a counsel for the prosecution of every political man who was mixed up in the Rochette affair, pointed out this unsavoury resemblance. “I consider Monsieur Rochette to be a great corrupter of public morals,” he said. “I am not at all content with his explanations. They do not satisfy me. There are matters of far greater gravity behind his methods than he would have us suppose, and I would ask my colleagues to concentrate their attention on the items of Rochette’s expenditure for publicity with the same intensity as the attention of the Parliamentary Commission had at the time to be concentrated, with the results which you remember, on the publicity accounts of the Panama Canal. In this case, as in the case of Panama, public morals have been corrupted. Millions (“of francs” is meant, of course) have been employed, not only to buy publicity in the newspapers, but, as the Prefect of Police has told us, to corrupt the moral and financial rectitude of people of all ranks and all stations in Paris, in the provinces, all over France. I will go so far as to say that the taint actually extended to the Church. That is a characteristic of the affair.” (Page 547 of the official shorthand reports of the Parliamentary Commission.) Rochette paid, in many ways, on the plea of publicity. He was in the habit, when he wanted to pay and to preserve secrecy for the payment, of sending a note down to the cashier of the Crédit Minier with his initials “H.R.” and a little cross marked on it next to the amount. These little crosses were used in the books, it is suggested, to signify that the amounts entered against certain names were not the real amounts paid, which were much larger. The payments were made directly from hand to hand by Monsieur Rochette to his political friends and helpers, and no receipts passed. I do not propose to go very much into detail on this uncomfortable question. The evidence of Monsieur Duret, who acted as Rochette’s private secretary, and that of Monsieur Yenck, a clerk in the Crédit Minier, leaves a very uncomfortable taste in the mouth. Monsieur Yenck declared that Monsieur Duret’s sole business was to act as intermediary between political men and Rochette. He used to speak in very familiar terms of many well-known politicians, and was on the friendliest terms with Rochette himself. He always called Rochette by his first name, “Henri,” and was in the habit of alluding to Monsieur Rabier as “Rab.” It was Duret who, according to Yenck, secured, by political influence, the decoration of the Legion of Honour for Henri Rochette. Yenck declared that Duret had on one occasion made erasures in the private books of the Crédit Minier, so as to avoid scandal. He told the Commission that Duret, whom he had seen with a scratcher in his hand, and one of the Crédit Minier’s private books in front of him, had explained what he was