CHAPTER VIII

Account of the proceedings relative to the abstraction of the jewels of the Queen of Westphalia by the Sieur de Maubreuil--Chamber of the Court of Appeal--The sitting of 17 April, 1817

Enter the Sieur de Maubreuil. Placed at the prisoner's bar, he looked fixedly at M. de Vatimesnil, the king's counsel, and spoke to him as follows:--

"_M. le procureur du roi_," he said, "you have called me an appropriator of treasure, it is false. I have never been an appropriator of treasure. The journalists have made use of your last speech to spread an odious interpretation on my trial; but I am above their reproaches."

They endeavoured to silence the Sieur de Maubreuil, but he went on with renewed pertinacity:--

"I appeal to all Frenchmen here present, I place my honour in your safe keeping. To-morrow I may be poisoned or assassinated."

The warders laid hands on M. de Maubreuil; but he shook himself free of them, and went on:--

"Yes, I quite expect it. They may shoot me in my cell; the police may carry me off and make away with me, as happened to my cousin, M. de Brosse, who, in the month of February, presented a petition to the Chamber in my favour; but I place my honour in the custody of the Frenchmen who are here present. Hear what I have to say to you."

Here the prisoner raised his voice.

"I accepted the commission to murder the emperor, but I accepted it only in order to save him and his family. Yes, my countrymen, I am not a miserable thief, as they are trying to make out. Frenchmen! I call you all to my aid. No, I am not a thief! No, lam not an assassin! On the contrary, I accepted a commission to save Napoleon and his family. It is true that, during the first outburst of my royalist enthusiasm, I did, along with several other people, attach a rope to the neck of Napoleon's statue, on the 31st of March, to pull it down from its pedestal in the place Vendôme; but I here acknowledge publicly that I served a thankless cause. Though I did insult Napoleon's statue, I have done good to him in the flesh. No, I am not an assassin! Frenchmen, my honour is in your hands. You will not be deaf to my entreaties."

Again they tried to stop M. de Maubreuil's mouth, but the harder they tried to silence him the louder he spoke.

"I accepted," he continued, "a commission to save Napoleon, his son and his family; I admit that, bribed, deluded and entangled by the Provisional Government to do it, I was foolish enough to tie the cross of the Legion of Honour to my horse's tail; I bitterly repent of doing so. I have donned that cross of heroes again now: see, here it is on my breast; I won it in Spain in fair fight."

Here the Sieur de Maubreuil succumbed to the efforts they made to drown his voice. The whole time he had been speaking, the president and the judges had been fruitlessly endeavouring to enforce silence. In vain did the president shout, "Warders, take him away, take him away! Do your duty, warders!" Maubreuil writhed, clutching hold of the bar, and, nearly strangled by the warders, he still went on:--

"_M. le président_, my respect for you is unbounded, but your acts and words are useless: they wished to assassinate the emperor, and I only accepted the commission which has brought me here in order to save him."

There was a tremendous noise, an uproar and shouts among the audience. Many Vendéens were present, relatives and friends of the prisoner, who was related to the family of la Roche-jaquelein. Before the prisoner was brought in, these had tried to influence public opinion in his favour, by talking of the mystery which enshrouded his mission, and by pointing out his unblemished devotion to the royal cause. Picture to yourself, then, their dismay when they saw the line of defence he adopted; their confusion when they heard their client speak so diametrically opposite to their expectations; their astonishment when they heard the name of Napoleon pronounced with respect by the prisoner, at a time when the conqueror of the Pyramids and of Marengo was only spoken of as Buonaparte; at the title of Emperor given to a man whom King Louis XVIII., dating the beginning of his reign from 1795, declared never to have reigned!

Me. Couture, M. de Maubreuil's counsel, was then allowed to speak. We will not report his speech, which was very long. He pleaded more on a legal technicality than on the matter of the charge. He spoke in the first instance of the injustice of Maubreuil being the only one arraigned, while d'Asies, Cotteville, and others who had acted in concert with him, were in full enjoyment of their liberty. He added that the trunks having been deposited without verification at M. de Vanteaux's, it could not be established who had abstracted the eighty-four thousand francs in gold. He referred to the marvellous manner in which some of the jewels that had been thrown by an unknown hand into the Seine had been recovered by a man named Huet, an ex-employé of the police, who, when fishing, had drawn up two diamond combs caught in his hooked line. Me. Couture went on to assert that the prisoner, to whom a mission of the gravest importance had been entrusted, ought not to be tried by an ordinary Court, and to prove his point, Me. Couture read the five different orders which had authorised M. de Maubreuil to call into requisition all the officials of the kingdom. The tenor of these orders was as follows:--

The first, signed by General Dupont, War Minister, authorised M. de Maubreuil to make use of the army, which was to obey all his demands, and commanded the authorities to furnish him with all the troops he might require, as he was charged with a mission of the highest importance. The second, signed by Anglès, Minister of Police, ordered all the police force throughout the kingdom of France to lend assistance to M. de Maubreuil to the same end. The third, signed by Bourrienne, Director-General of the Posts, ordered all post-masters to supply him with whatever horses he should require, and to consider themselves personally responsible for the least delay they might occasion him. The fourth, signed by General Sacken, Governor of Paris, enjoined the Allied troops to assist M. de Maubreuil. Finally, the fifth, which was in Russian, was addressed to those officers who did not understand French and who could not therefore have obeyed the preceding orders. From these documents Me. Couture argued that the king's council alone must have had cognisance of M. de Maubreuil's mission, and alone ought to decide the case.

After having replied to Me. Couture's pleading, the king's procurator set forth his reasons for regarding the _tribunal correctionnel_ as incompetent in the present case, since the charges brought against the Sieur de Maubreuil constituted a crime, and were not those of a simple misdemeanour; that it was a question of a robbery under arms committed on the highway, and not merely a case of breach of confidence. For it was vain, he said, to try to allege the unlimited power with which the prisoner was vested; no power could authorise a citizen to run counter to existing laws; for if such a contention could be maintained it could be pursued to its logical conclusion and, in that case, it might be excusable to commit a murder or burn down a village. "As a matter of fact," continued M. de Vatimesnil, "we are advised that Maubreuil, acting as a Government agent, was endowed on that very count with a far graver responsibility, and the law ought to be set in force against him with the greater severity. No mission could excuse a man for having ill-treated a person travelling on the highways with a passport, and his crime assumed still graver proportions when that person happened to be an august princess, sprung from an illustrious house, allied to all the crowned heads of Europe, and travelling under the protection of a passport from her illustrious cousin, the Emperor of Russia, a princess who was entitled to double respect, both from her rank and because of the reverses of fortune she had recently experienced." "And," exclaimed the king's counsel, "with what indignation ought we to be seized, when we hear the accused uttering such libellous fables to avoid the course of justice! Who are those Frenchmen he addresses, whom he invokes to his aid? What faith could be put in such an unlikely story, as that he had received a mission against a person travelling under the safeguard of the most solemn treaties, signed by all the allied sovereigns? and if he did accept such a mission, was it not doubly mean to have accepted money for carrying it out, and then to have deceived those whom he pretended had given it him? Should he not be regarded henceforth as one of those hateful creatures known of all men, who, under pressure of an accusation, hatches conspiracies, and denounces unknown fellow-citizens, to the sole end of arresting or diverting justice?"

The Sieur de Maubreuil had listened to all this tirade with fiery impatience, and his solicitor had only been able to pacify him by allowing him the pen and paper which he demanded. When M. de Vatimesnil's speech was over, Maubreuil passed what he had just written to the president, then rose and said:--"_M. le président_, as a man who expects to be assassinated at any moment, I place this political deposition in your hands. Frenchmen, it is my honour I am bequeathing to all you who are here present. As a man on the brink of appearing before God, I swear that it was M. de Talleyrand who, by means of M. Laborie, sent me; that the prince forced me to sit down in his own arm-chair; that he offered me two hundred thousand livres income and the title of duke, if I accomplished my mission satisfactorily;[1] furthermore, the Emperor Alexander offered me his own horses; but, I repeat, if I accepted the mission I am blamed for, it was to save the emperor and his family."

Here they again compelled Maubreuil to stop speaking, and the warders, taking hold of him by his shoulders, forced him down into his seat.

Then his lawyer, Me. Couture, rose, addressed the king's counsel once more, and begged for pity's sake that no notice should be taken of his client's mad words.

"Alas!" he cried, "the man whom you see before you, monsieur, is no longer M. de Maubreuil, but only the remains, the shade of M. de Maubreuil. A detention of _three years,_ three hundred and ninety days of which has been spent in solitary confinement without communication with a soul, _without even seeing his own counsel_, has deranged his reason. He is now nothing but the ruins of a man. For the love of humanity, do not take account of a speech which can only tell against him!" The judges, greatly embarrassed by what they had just heard, although their business was but to decide on the simple question of the competence or incompetence of their tribunal, deferred sentence until the following Tuesday, 22 April.

Probably the delay was arranged, so those in court thought, in order to receive instructions from the château, and to act in accordance with those instructions.

THE SITTING OF 22 APRIL

Maubreuil was led in. He had scarcely entered the prisoner's dock before he violently pushed away the guard and cried out, "You have no right to maltreat me like this, warders; you have made me suffer quite enough the three years I have been in prison. It is a dastardly wicked thing! We are here before justice and not before the police! Let me rather be shot immediately than delivered over longer to the tortures of which I have been the victim for three years! No, never was greater cruelty exercised in the Prussian fortresses, in the dungeons of the Inquisition under the foundations of Venice! I am cut off from the world; my complaints are hushed up; my lawyer is forbidden to print and distribute my defence. I here express before all, my gratitude for his zeal and his devotion; but I am in despair that he has not based his defence on the information I have given him: he has not dared to do so."

Here silence was again imposed on the prisoner. The president then read the sentence, pronouncing that the _tribunal de police correctionnelle_ declared its incompetence, and sent the prisoner to the assizes, on the ground that if the facts which had been laid bare were proved, they constituted a crime, and not a simple misdemeanour.

When the prisoner heard the sentence of incompetence to deal with the case pronounced he sighed deeply, and his face, changed by a long captivity, expressed dejection and despair. But he rallied his strength and cried--

"The blood of twenty-nine of my relations was shed for the Bourbons in Vendée and at Quiberon! I too am to be sacrificed to them in my turn! They wish to destroy me, my groans are to be stifled. I am to be made out a madman! It is a diabolical plot! No, I am not mad; no, I was not mad when my services were required by them! Frenchmen, I repeat to you what I told you at the last sitting: they asked me to take the life of Napoleon! Write to Vienna, to Munich, to St. Petersburg. Yes, yes,"--pushing away the warders, who sought to impose silence upon him,--"yes, they demanded of me the blood of Napoleon.... _M. le président_, they have handled me with violence! _M. le président_, they will maltreat me! _M. le président_, they will put my feet in irons! But, come what may, to the last moment I will proclaim it: they asked me to take Napoleon's life! the Bourbons are assassins!..."

These last words were pronounced by the accused as he struggled with the police, while they led him away by force.

Here the shorthand report concludes: I have not altered a word of the statement, a certified copy of which is under my eyes.

On the 18th of the following December, Maubreuil was arraigned to appear before the Court of Assizes at Douai, and succeeded in escaping before the trial. On 6 May 1818, judgment was issued, condemning him to five years' imprisonment by default and to pay five hundred francs fine, for being a dishonest trustee.

Maubreuil, having taken refuge in England, returned on purpose to deal M. de Talleyrand the terrible blow which struck him down, on the steps of the church of Saint-Denis, during the funeral procession of Louis XVIII.

"Oh! what a cuff!" exclaimed the prince, as he picked himself up.

How can people deny M. de Talleyrand's presence of mind after that! M. Dupin could not have done better.

This obscure, strange, mysterious Maubreuil affair did the Bourbons of the Restoration the greatest possible harm. To the Count d'Artois and M. de Talleyrand it was what the affair of the necklace was to Marie-Antoinette and the Cardinal de Rohan--that is to say, one of those hidden springs from which revolutions derive power for the future; one of those weapons the more dangerous and terrible and deadly for being dipped so long in the poison of calumny.

[1] We see by this that, according to Maubreuil, it was M. de Talleyrand himself with whom he had had to deal. We have not wished to endorse the accusation blindly and, in our account, we have accepted the intermediate agency of Roux-Laborie.