To witness the last phase of M. Saint-Hilaire’s simplicity, my readers must imagine themselves to be in a dingy hall on the unfashionable side of the Seine, at eleven o’clock on a foggy morning in December. The carefully selected jury with difficulty find their way through the crowded audience to their box, when the President M. Lefebre de Viefville takes his seat on the bench. The chief _dramatis personæ_ are if possible political rather than legal celebrities. M. Rochefort, the observed of all observers at the bar, is the best dressed and most aristocratic-looking man in the court. The space assigned to the legal profession is filled to overflowing with black-robed and black-capped advocates, and the rest of the room is occupied by an attentive audience of ministers, diplomatists, journalists, and deputies. M. Rochefort’s counsel are two prominent members of the French Chamber—Maître Gatineau, who has lately declared war to the knife against M. Gambetta, and M. Delattré, himself a leader of the _extrême gauche_. M. Roustan, nervous and agitated, sat next his advocate, M. Cléry, who had been selected more on account of his pronounced Opportunism than his legal acumen, while that very indiscreet personage, M. le Procureur Général Dauphin, in all the glories of a scarlet gown, looked the majesty of the law itself in the chair of the public prosecutor. At mid-day precisely the jury are sworn in. The accused say nothing, M. Roustan tries to make a speech. He murmurs in a harsh, grating, unsympathetic voice that as an honest Frenchman he has come there to be white-washed by honest Frenchmen, and abruptly sits down. The President at once showed himself to be an adept at running with the hare and the hounds, or, as the French themselves have it, saving both “the goat and the cabbages.” He tried throughout to please all parties, and consequently allowed both sides to do pretty much what they liked. M. De Viefville seemed also to feel no little satisfaction at presiding over so important a case, and even remarked at the outset that the cause “ne s’agissait pas d’un procès ordinaire, mais d’une affaire politique et nationale où la conscience publique était intéressée à ce que la lumière se fit par tous les moyens!” So impatient did he seem to get to the expected disclosures that he began by inverting the usual order of hearing the evidence, and at once called on the defence to produce their witnesses. The first person to enter the box was our old friend, the Baron Sigismund Robert de Billing. He has grown a little grey since he was the pioneer of a Sancy-Ronalds’ policy in Tunis, and now carries a red morocco portfolio, which he says contains his cyphered instructions, but which everybody seemed afraid to ask him to open. After declaring he had never before seen M. Rochefort, M. De Billing said there had been two well-known Stock Exchange jobs in relation to Tunis. The first concerned the