XXIV

I was immediately thrown into prison at La Chatre. The public prosecutor
for the district of Issoudun took in hand this case of the attempted
murder of Mademoiselle de Mauprat, and obtained permission to have
a monitory published on the morrow. He went to the village of
Sainte-Severe, and then to the farms in the neighbourhood of the Curat
woods, where the event had happened, and took the depositions of more
than thirty witnesses. Then, eight days after I had been arrested, the
writ of arrest was issued. If my mind had been less distracted, or if
some one had interested himself in me, this breach of the law and
many others that occurred during the trial might have been adduced as
powerful arguments in my favour. They would at least have shown that the
proceedings were inspired by some secret hatred. In the whole course of
the affair an invisible hand directed everything with pitiless haste and
severity.

The first examination had produced but a single indictment against me;
this came from Mademoiselle Leblanc. The men who had taken part in the
hunt declared that they knew nothing, and had no reason to regard the
occurrence as a deliberate attempt at murder. Mademoiselle Leblanc,
however, who had an old grudge against me for certain jokes I had
ventured to make at her expense, and who, moreover, had been suborned,
as I learned afterward, declared that Edmee, on recovering from her
first swoon, at a time when she was quite calm and in full possession of
her reason, had confided to her, under a pledge of secrecy, that she had
been insulted, threatened, dragged from her horse, and finally shot by
me. This wicked old maid, putting together the various revelations
that Edmee had made in her delirium, had, cleverly enough, composed a