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The Green Bag
Immediately the judge sends for the hus band, who is brought in again by the two gendarmes. She begs him to tell the truth to his honor, the judge. He says it is of no use trying, that the judge wishes to find him guilty. She urges him for their children's sake to try to defend himself, and she goes so far as to
suggested in a broken-hearted way the very story which the judge invented as a trap for them both. But she breaks down while try ing this invention, and cries out, "I don't know anything about it, you know, but his honor, the judge, promised me just now that in that case you would not be punished, or only a very little. My God, what must you say? What ought you to do?" “Then you, too, believe me guilty?" asks the prisoner of his wife.
"You, too?’I
“I don't know anything more about it," she says. Then the prisoner turns on the judge sav agely and tells him that this torture is his invention. And he turns to his wife with a sudden inspiration and says, “You know that with all my faults, I believe in God. Now, I pray God to kill my beloved children if I am a criminal.” His wife with the greatest fervor cries out, “He is innocent!" “If is he innocent,” says the judge, “why has he lied all this time?" “It is you who have lied," says the prisoner. "You told me that you had witnesses who saw me go out of our house and you have not." "Even if I had none, then, I have one now," says the judge. "That is your own wife. She says you did go out." “You?" says the prisoner to his wife. The judge looks in his papers for her statement. She gazes first at her husband, then at the
judge. She seems to be considering what to say, and at last looks firmly resolved. “There," says the judge. "Your wife has told us that you went out at ten o'clock and did not return until five o'clock in the morn ing." “It is not true.
I did not say that,” says
the wife, very sharply. “But it is written here," says the judge. “You can write what you like," she says. “You will have to pay me for this," says the judge angrily, and he orders his assistant to prepare a certificate for her immediate arrest as an accomplice. He sends for the
gendarmes and tells them to take away the husband and to come back for the wife. Then the wife startles the judge and his assistant by a grand burst of virtuous indig nation. "So you are furious, are you,’ she cries, "to miss your aim. . . . You pretend to be good. You speak softly. You want to make me send my husband to the scaffold. It is your trade to furnish heads to cut ofi. You must have men guilty at any price." The gendarmes return. "Take her away," says the judge. The gendarmes seize her. She breaks away from them by a powerful wrench, rushes up to the judge's desk, and says, "You take a savage pleasure in all this, and call it justice. You are a brute." “Take her away. What? Can't you two men relieve me of this lunatic?" says the judge. The gendarmes wrestle with her, she ex claiming, “Coward! Judas! No pity, and the poorer the people you deal with the falser and more cruel you are.” The gendarmes drag her along the floor out of the room. The third act opens in the ofiice of the prose cuting officers. The assistant of the sporting judge is there awaiting the result of the trial of the husband, which has reached the argu ments. The old retiring judge comes in and wishes to shake hands. The assistant assures him that this is doing him too much honor. "Oh," says the old judge, "since this morning I am a judge no more. My dignity no longer requires me to be impolite to my interiors." Then he asks who the old woman is who is waiting in the ante-room, and learns that
she is the mother of the prisoner on trial. She has no anxiety about that case because she is sure that her son is innocent, and that
the jury will be convinced of it. But she wishes to get her son to come out as soon as he is acquitted because his business has been ruined. A rich neighbor has turned poisonous stuff from his factory into the stream where their cattle drank, and the laborers would not work because he was not on hand to pay them. She wants legal aid. The judge tells her some of the details that delay the progress of justice and of the expense. The old woman says she thought that justice was gratuitous in France. “Ah," says the judge, "yes, but the means of reaching it are not." It appears by the conversation that the case
