"I thought that I had been jolly clever to look at the maker's name and address, but I thought I'd keep that for the last, so I said that I had bought it from a chap who had bought it from another chap. 'But,' I added, 'to show you that it's my knife and no mistake, I can tell you, sir, that it comes from Lebrun, rue de l'Arbre Sec.' "The judge smiled in a way I didn't like, and, calling his clerk, he showed him the knife. 'Do you know that knife?' he said. 'Of course, sir,' replied the clerk; 'it is the knife you always keep on your desk!' "The judge looked at me smiling, and did not say a word, but his silence went bang through me. "I had put my foot in it, right up to the knee, so I pretended to gaze out of the window. "'Chambardeau,' then said the judge, after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, 'and you, _fille_[30] Robinson, you have both tried to obstruct the course of justice and to defeat its aim, but truth cannot be hidden from it.' He went on like that for ten minutes, old chap, and then he said to Chambardeau that, as there was nothing against him, he would be released, and then he went for me, calling me a sanguinary ruffian, one of those men who are a disgrace to society, and all sorts of tommy rot of the same kind. He concluded his little speech by saying that I would be sent for trial before the _Tribunal Correctionnel_,[31] where he hoped I would be made an example of, and then he dismissed us. "Chambardeau and myself were taken back to gaol with the _tourniquet_[32] on, held by a _Garde municipal_, and Mimi had just time to tell me that she would see about getting a good barrister to defend me. I told her to try and get a fellow called Lehautier, who had already got me off once: he could speak, that man, something grand. The last time he defended me, he told the judges that if I was before them it was because I was an orphan who had had no mother to look after my youth--the old lady was at the time doing five years under an _alias_!--and he talked them round so well that he actually drew tears from them, and I was acquitted.