required to do. Lemaire, he said, reached Courtrai, with several travellers, whom he did not know, and had only met on the road, when they were surrounded by a body of gendarmes, who summoned them to surrender. The strangers stood on the defensive, and pistol shots were exchanged, and Lemaire, who, with his clerk, had remained neuter on the field of battle, had been seized without making any effort to escape, feeling a consciousness of innocence, and that he had nothing to fear. But very serious charges had been produced against him; he was unable to give a very precise account of his business in the district, because, said the assumed countryman, he was then smuggling; besides, they had found in a bush two pair of pistols, which it was asserted had been thrown there by himself and clerk, at the moment they were apprehended, and finally, a woman swore that she had seen him the week before on the road to Ghent, with the identical travellers, whom he said he had not met before the morning of the engagement with the gendarmes.
"'Under these circumstances,' added my peasant interlocutor, 'we must find means of proving—
"'1st. That Lemaire has only left Lille three days, and that he had then been there for the entire month previously.
"'2nd. That he never carries pistols.
"'3rd. That before starting he received sixty louis from some person.'
"This confidence ought to have opened my eyes as to the nature of the steps required of me; but, intoxicated with Josephine's caresses, I drove away all thoughts, and compelled myself not to think of what might be the results. We all three sat out the same night for Lille, and on arriving I ran about all day making the necessary arrangements, and by evening all my witnesses were ready.[1] Their depositions had no
- ↑ This may appear surprising, but astonishment will cease when we learn by how many testimonies of such a nature
