The Assassin
The guilty man was defended by a very young counsel; it was his first brief, and he spoke as follows:
“The facts, gentlemen of the jury, are undeniable. My client, a respectable man, an employee without a stain on his character, a gentle and timid man, has assassinated his employer in a burst of rage that seems incomprehensible. Will you allow me to explain the psychology of this crime, if I may so call it, extenuating nothing and excusing nothing? You shall judge it after that.
“Jean-Nicholas Lougère is the son of honourable parents, who have brought him up to be a simple-minded and reverent man.
“In that lies his crime: in reverence! It is a feeling, gentlemen, hardly known among us today, its name only seems still to exist, and it has lost all its force. You must find your way into certain retired and modest families to rediscover there this austere tradition, this religious devotion to a thing or a man, to a sentiment or a belief still invested with sacred awe, this faith which tolerates neither doubt nor smile, nor the merest whisper of suspicion.
“A man is not an upright man, a really upright man, in the full sense of the phrase, unless he is a reverent one. The reverent man has his eyes shut. He believes. We others, whose eyes are wide open to the world, who live here, in this palace of justice which is the sewer of society, into which every infamy is emptied, we others in whose ears are poured every tale of shame, who are the devoted defenders of every human villainy, the sustainers, not to say the souteneurs, of every shady character, male and female, from princes to slum vagabonds, we who welcome with indulgent kindness, with complaisance, with smiling benevolence, every guilty creature to defend them before you, we who—if we are truly in love with our profession and measure our legal sympathy by the greatness of the crime—we cannot retain a reverent mind. We see too closely the flood of corruption that runs from the highest in the State to the lowest dregs of society. We know too well how all decays, how all is given away or sold. Places, office, honours, sold blatantly in exchange for a little gold, delicately in exchange for titles or shares in industrial enterprises, or, more simply, bartered for a woman’s kiss. Our duty and our profession force us to be ignorant of nothing, to suspect everyone, for all men are suspect; and we are struck with astonishment when we are confronted by a man who, like the assassin seated here before you, is so possessed by the spirit of reverence that he is willing to become a martyr for it.
“We others, gentlemen, we cherish our honour as we do a desire for cleanliness, from dislike of base actions, from a feeling of personal dignity and pride; but we do not bear in the depths of our hearts a blind, innate, savage faith in it, as does this man.
“Let me tell you the story of his life.
“He was brought up as children used to be brought up, to regard human actions as divisible into two classes, good and evil. Good was set before him with an irresistible authority, that forced him to distinguish it from evil, as he distinguished day from night. His father was not of those superior beings who look out upon life from a lofty pinnacle, see the origin of faith, and recognise the social needs which created these distinctions.
“So he grew up, pious and trusting, fanatic and narrow-minded.
“At the age of twenty-two he married. He was married to a cousin whose upbringing had been like his own, who was as simple-minded and as pure as he was. He had the inestimable good fortune to share his life with an honest woman, truehearted, the rarest of beings and the most worthy of reverence. For his mother he felt the veneration that surrounds the mother in these patriarchal families, the devout worship that is offered only to divinities. He transferred some part of this devotion to his wife, lessened hardly at all by the familiarity of marriage. And he lived absolutely unaware of deceit, in a state of unshakable integrity and tranquil happiness which made him a being apart. Deceiving none, he never suspected that anyone could deceive him, of all people.
“Some time before his marriage he had entered as cashier the firm of M. Langlais, whom he has just assassinated.
“We know, gentlemen of the jury, from the evidence of Mme. Langlais, of her brother, M. Perthuis, her husband’s business associate, from every member of the family and from all the chief employees of the bank, that Lougère was a model employee as regards honesty, obedience, civility and deference to the heads of the business, and regularity of conduct.
“He was treated, moreover, with the consideration due to his exemplary conduct. He was accustomed to this homage and to what was almost the veneration paid to Mme. Lougère, whose praises were in every mouth.
“She died of typhoid fever in a few days.
“There can be no doubt that he felt the deepest grief, but it was the cold quiet grief of a heart unused to emotional excess. Only his pallor and the change in his looks showed how deep the wound had gone.
“Then, gentlemen, a very natural thing happened.
“This man had been married for ten years. For ten years he had become used to the constant presence of a woman. He was accustomed to be cared for by her, to hearing her familiar voice when he came home, to bid her good night and greet her again in the morning, to the gentle swish of her dress, that sound so pleasant in a woman’s ear, to the half-passionate, half-motherly caress that lightens the burden of life, to the beloved presence that makes the hours less slow in their stride. Perhaps he was accustomed, too, to an indulgent care in the matter of his food, to all the unnoticed attentions that become gradually indispensable to us. He could not live alone now. So, to help him through the interminable evenings, he fell into the habit of going to sit in the nearest café. He drank a glass of beer and remained there, stock-still, with an indifferent gaze fixed on the billiard balls chasing after each other under the cloud of smoke, listening uncomprehendingly to the arguments of the players, to his neighbours’ political discussions and to the bursts of merriment provoked by an occasional heavy witticism at the other end of the room. More often than not, he ended by falling asleep from weariness and boredom. But heart of his heart, flesh of his flesh, was the irresistible need of a woman’s heart and a woman’s bodily nearness; and unconsciously he drew a little nearer every evening to the counter where the cashier sat enthroned—a little blonde—drawn to her inevitably just because she was a woman.
“Very soon they began to talk, and he fell into the habit, a pleasant one for him, of spending every evening near her. She was gracious and as obliging as is required in such traffic in smiles, and she amused herself by renewing his drinks as often as possible, which was good for business. But day by day Lougère became more attached to this woman whom he did not know, of whose whole manner of life he was ignorant, and whom he loved solely because she was the only woman he saw.
“The little blonde, who was no fool, realised very quickly that she could make profitable use of this simple creature, and she tried to think what would be the best way of exploiting him. The wisest assuredly was to make him marry her.
“She achieved it without any difficulty.
“Need I tell you, gentlemen of the jury, that the conduct of this girl was most irregular and that marriage, far from checking her escapades, seemed to make them more shameless:
“By a characteristic turn of feminine guile, she seemed to take a pleasure in deceiving this honest man with all the employees in his office. I say, with all. We have the letters, gentlemen. Before long it was a public scandal, of which only the husband, as always, remained in ignorance.
“Finally this depraved woman, prompted by a self-interest easy to understand, seduced the son of the head himself, a young man nineteen years of age, over whose mind and senses she soon had a deplorable influence. When M. Langlais, who up till this time had shut his eyes, from good nature and kindly feeling towards his employee, saw his son in the hands, I might say in the arms, of this dangerous creature, he felt a well-justified resentment.
“He blundered in appealing immediately to Lougère and speaking to him in the heat of his paternal indignation.
“It only remains, gentlemen, for me to read you the account of the crime, as it came from the lips of a dying man and was recorded by the official.
“ ‘I had just learned that my son had only the day before given this woman ten thousand francs, and my anger mastered my reason. Of course, I had never doubted Lougère’s integrity, but blindness is sometimes more dangerous than wrongdoing.
“ ‘I sent for him to come to me, and I told him that I should be obliged to dispense with his services.
“ ‘He stood there in front of me, bewildered, unable to understand. At last he demanded explanations with some vehemence.
“ ‘I refused to give him them, declaring that my reasons were of a quite intimate nature. Then he imagined that I suspected him of bad behaviour and, turning pale, he implored me, ordered me, to explain myself. Obsessed by this thought, he was insistent and he felt entitled to speak freely.
“ ‘When I kept silence, he abused and insulted me, and reached such a pitch of exasperation that I feared we should come to blows.
“ ‘Then, all at once, an offensive word struck me to the heart and I flung the truth in his teeth.
“ ‘For several moments he stood still, looking at me with haggard eyes; then I saw him take from my desk the long scissors which I use to cut the margins of certain registers, then I saw him rush on me with his arm raised, and I felt something enter my throat just above my chest, without any sensation of pain.’
“There, gentlemen of the jury, you have the simple facts of this murder, which is all the defence he needs. He revered his second wife blindly because he had justly revered the first.”
After a brief deliberation, the accused was acquitted.