According to English notions the issue raised was as clear as it is uninteresting:—“Did or did not MM. Gambetta and Roustan conspire to lower the price of Tunisian bonds, with a view to afterwards raising it for their profit by a military expedition against the Regency?” It appears, however, that French procedure ignores relevancy, and gives a premium to hearsay evidence, and that the propriety, good faith, and expediency of the Tunisian expedition and the disinterestedness or otherwise of its authors or reputed authors, could be with perfect propriety inquired into along with the accusation against M. Rochefort and his publisher. An hour after the case commenced it was clear to everybody that the Tunisian question was on its trial, and not M. Rochefort, and this fact alone at once invested the proceedings with all the dignity of a _cause célèbre_. The story of how Muhamed es Sadek unexpectedly found a Nemesis for his enemies in a Parisian jury forms one of the most curious episodes in the judicial annals of modern times. The battle of the _Tribunal de la Seine_ was far more keenly contested, and had much more momentous consequences than either the _chasse aux Khamírs_ or the occupation of Holy Kairwán. It is the conflict _par excellence_ of the last Punic War. When M. Roustan left Tunis ten days before, he was in blissful ignorance of the anomalies of French jurisprudence, or he would certainly have provided himself with all the weapons which the attesting complaisance of the docile Bey or the accommodating adulation of the “French colony” could furnish. As it was, he had only obtained a certificate that he was a stranger to the exile of General Heussein, which in the confusion of the trial does not seem to have been made use of. M. Rochefort’s story of the “Truth about Tunis” may have been to a certain extent apocryphal and wide of the mark, but the latitude allowed to the judicial proceedings which it entailed, converted the trial of the case Roustan versus Rochefort into an impeachment of the originators of the war, and an examination of the _raison d’être_ of the expedition itself.