"Here then stood I at this swift and bloody bar, where the best help was to be without all help, and where no resources of the mind were of avail that had not truth to rest upon. "'Your name, your calling?' said the President, and one of the judges added: 'The smallest lie undoes you.' "'My name,' I answered, 'is Journiac Saint-Méard; I served twenty-five years as an officer in the army. I stand before you with the confidence of a man who has nothing to reproach himself with, and who is therefore not likely to utter falsehoods.' "'It will be for us to judge of that,' responded the man in grey." The trial proceeded. Saint-Méard was accused of having edited the anti-revolutionary journal, _De la cour et de la ville_, but showed satisfactorily that he had not done so. Accused next of recruiting for the emigrants, at which there was an ominous murmur, "Gentlemen, gentlemen," pleaded the prisoner, "the word is with me at present, and I beg the President to maintain it for me,—I never needed it so sorely!" "That's true enough!" laughed the judges, and the court began to shew itself more sympathetic. Saint-Méard, though, was not yet off the gridiron. "You tell us continually," said one impatient judge, "that you are not this and you are not that! Be good enough then to tell us what you are."—"I was once frankly a Royalist." Another and louder murmur; but the President put in: "We are not here to sit in judgment on opinions, but on their results"; words of precious augury for the prisoner, who went on to say that he was well aware the old régime was done with, that there was no longer a Royalist cause, and that never had he been concerned in plots or Royalist conspiracies, for he had never in his life been concerned in public affairs of any kind. He was a Frenchman who loved his country above all things. The questioning and cross-questioning came to an end, and the President removed his hat. "I can find nothing to suspect in Monsieur. What do you say; shall I release him?" and the voice of the judges was for liberty. Thus finished, at two o'clock in the morning, the "thirty-eight hours' agony" of Journiac Saint-Méard. He survived it some twenty years. Alas for the hundreds upon hundreds whose agony of yet longer duration finished under the arch of pikes!