He barely excused himself for enumerating and insisting upon the rendering of so many services, and reproaching the plaintiff with ingratitude for neglecting them. On the other side they had not scrupled to forget them, or worse still, to make them appear as faults on the part of the accused. What the plaintiff really wanted to do was to build on the pretended guilt of the defendant and overwhelm with one blow the defences of his past; he was unjust enough to deny the accused the right to its protection. Yet the merits of a race constitute a true defence of it until and unless the sum of its demerits weighs it down, unless it wilfully provokes its own downfall. Was there any one who pretended to believe that the sum of the Roquevillards’ demerits had yet borne them down? No, the dead could go moral bail for this last of the Roquevillards, as they had just supplied his material bail in the sacrifice of La Vigie. Even if he had his faults, his judges could not justly declare him guilty in this instance. How indeed could he be guilty now? By what phenomenon could the descendant of so many honest men be suddenly stirred to crime? What definite proof could they furnish of his crime? What weight, in the face of the moral presumptions of his family and surroundings, which flowed round him like the water of a torrent, could they give these miserable presumptions that chance had hatched out and circumstances twisted incriminatingly? The keys of the office--they had passed from hand to hand. The number of the safe’s combination--how could the defendant have hunted it out, guessed its use? And when had the clerk Philippeaux written it in his memorandum book? Did the jurors dwell on his lack of personal resources? He had himself paid all the expenses of the journey, large and small, without exception, either with money that he had taken away with him, as to which the examination of witnesses had given a full account, or with what he had received at Orta. The hotel bills which the defence had recovered and exhibited proved this. What, then, had been done with the stolen one hundred thousand francs, if all his expenses had been defrayed by advances from his family? If he had put it away somewhere, as was insinuated, why had he come back and surrendered himself to the law the moment word came to him of the judgment that had been entered against him by default? Nothing was left of the accusation against him, nothing but the animus of revenge, a spirit of revenge that could not even resist the temptation to make a profit out of its own humiliation. It was a singular affair, indeed, in which the victim carried off the spoils from the pretended thief. Mr. Roquevillard brought his argument to an end in a few words: