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Updated: May 1, 2025
It is scarcely necessary to add, that he was not in a state to speak at the trial, and that all his oratorical preparations were thrown away. Many days passed before the recollection of that terrible night faded from the memory of the deputy-prosecutor many days before he could bear to be alone or in the dark without terror.
Misfortunes never come alone: while seeking for a cloth about the chamber, he struck the lamp with his forehead, and extinguished it. Meanwhile the night was advancing; already the window of the chamber began to glimmer with the coming day. Furious with the obstacles which heaven and earth seemed to set in his way, the deputy-prosecutor determined to solve the mystery.
After a careful search, and considerable raking in corners with the bar of steel, finding himself at length master of the field of battle, the deputy-prosecutor returned to the bed. The bride was still miraculously asleep; and, to his horror, he perceived, on lifting the coverlet, that she was lying in a pool of blood, left no doubt by the bleeding head.
Casting his eyes, while the barrister continued to talk to him, upon the seats which his wife and her ladies of honour had occupied during the whole evening, he perceived that they were empty; whereupon the grave deputy-prosecutor cutting short, as most men would have done under the circumstances, the argument of the barrister, advanced by a clever series of manoeuvres towards the door of the apartment; and at the moment when some domestics entered bearing refreshments, glided out, in the fond and mistaken belief that no one had remarked him.
The same morning, upon a warrant from the procureur-general, M. Desalleux was conducted to the criminal prison of Orleans; and it has since been remarked, as a singular coincidence, that his cell was the same that had been occupied by Peter Leroux up to the day of his execution. The end of the deputy-prosecutor, however, was a little less tragic.
With regard, however, to the tragic event which we have last described, M. Troisétoiles will simply relate what is known to the world on the subject namely, that the deputy-prosecutor, being injured in mind by overstudy and application to business, knocked out his wife's brains on her wedding-night.
Perhaps, on any other occasion, the deputy-prosecutor, on finding himself a second time visited by this horrible vision, would have suspected that he had been guilty of some wicked action, for which he was doomed to this persecution: his conscience, if he had taken the trouble to cross-examine it, would have very soon told him what was his crime, in which case, being a good Catholic, he would perhaps have gone out and locked the door of the haunted room until morning, when he would have immediately ordered a mass for the repose of the soul of Peter Leroux; by means of this, and of some contributions to the fund for poor prisoners of justice, he might, perhaps, have regained his tranquillity of mind, and escaped for ever from the annoyance to which he had been subjected.
His system of indictment was nearly completed, when the deposition of a witness which he had not examined, suddenly presented itself, with such an aspect as threatened to overturn all the edifice of his logic. He hesitated for some moments; but, as we have already seen, M. Desalleux, in his functions of deputy-prosecutor, consulted his vanity at least as often as his conscience.
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