“Ah, well! the jury is for us,” responded M. de Jussat. He was no longer the broken down monomaniac whom Greslon had so bitterly mocked in his memoir. His eyes were brilliant and there was youth in his voice and gestures. The passion for vengeance, instead of breaking him down, sustained him. He had forgotten his hypochondria, and his speech was quick, impetuous, and clear. “They were drawn this morning. Among the twelve jurors, there are three farmers, two retired officers, a physician, two shopkeepers, two proprietors, a manufacturer, and a professor, all good men, men of family, and who would wish to make an example. The procureur-général is sure of a conviction. Ah! the scoundrel! but I was happy, the only time in three months, when I saw him between two gendarmes! But what audacity! He looked around the hall. I was on the first bench. He saw me. Would you believe it, he did not turn away his eyes? He looked at me fixedly as if he wished to brave me. Ah! we must have his head, and we will have it.” The old man had spoken with a savage accent and he had not noticed the painful expression that his words had brought to the face of the count. This last, at the picture of his enemy, thus conquered by public force, seized by the gendarmes, as if caught in the gear of that anonymous and invincible machine of justice, trembled with a chill of shame, the shame of a man who has employed bravos in a work of death. These gendarmes, and these magistrates, were really the bravos employed in doing what he would so much have liked to do himself, with his own hands and upon his own responsibility. Decidedly, it was cowardly not to have spoken. Then the look thrown by Greslon at the Marquis de Jussat, what did it mean? Did he know that Charlotte had written her letter of confession the evening before her suicide? And if he knew it, what did he think? The idea alone that this young man could suspect the truth and despise them for their silence lighted a fever in the blood of the count. “No,” said he to himself when the marquis had gone back for the afternoon session after a dinner eaten in haste, “I cannot keep silent. I will speak, or I will write.” He seated himself and began to trace mechanically these words at the head of a sheet: “Monsieur the President:” The night fell while this unhappy man was still in the same place, his brow in his hand, and not having written the first line of this letter. He waited for the news of the second session, and it was with a shock that he heard his father recount the details of it.