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in a pit of loneliness. You alone can remember thewoman I used to be. I am ashamed, desperately ashamed, but I want to have the courage to ask your help, you and only you, because you once loved me …
    ‘This letter was stamped and addressed to you in Switzerland, but it was never posted.’
    ‘And I deeply regret that,’ Beauchamp said quietly.
    ‘I wish the defendant to tell me if she wrote this with the intention of confiding in her relative.’
    She stood up with difficulty and nodded. ‘Yes …’
    ‘Did you wish to tell him about Bernard Martin? Share your concerns with him over this relationship? Ask his advice? It is regrettable that you did not follow through with your initial plan …’
    ‘Perhaps,’ she replied, slowly shrugging her shoulders.
    ‘Will the witness please tell us whether the accused wrote him any letters in recent months?’
    ‘Never. The last letter I received from her was the one she wrote telling me of her daughter’s death.’
    ‘In your opinion, was the defendant capable of an act of violence?’
    ‘No, Your Honour.’
    ‘Very well. Thank you.’
    He left. Other witnesses were shown into the box. Gladys looked up now and again, as if she were trying to find the face of a friend in the crowd. The very people whose curiosity had been so painful to her a few hours earlier now looked away; they were already weary, morose, indifferent. The crowd was beginning to feel the excitement and tiredness that comes at the end of a trial. Through abadly closed door, waves of noise from the corridor occasionally reached the courtroom, like the sea washing against a little island. The members of the public coldly examined the trembling, pale, haggard face of the accused, like people looking at a wild animal, imprisoned behind the bars of its cage: savage but confined, its teeth and nails pulled out, panting, half dead …
    There were sniggers, shrugs of the shoulder, muffled exclamations. Everyone was whispering: ‘How disappointing … People said she was so beautiful but she looks like an old woman …’
    ‘Come on, be fair. I’d like to see what you’d look like after being held in custody for months, wearing no make-up at all, not to mention the remorse she must be feeling …’
    ‘Thanks very much!’
    ‘She’s attractive; that’s undeniable … She’s slim … Look at how beautiful her hands are … Hands that committed murder …’
    ‘Still, it isn’t very common for rich people to commit murder.’
    ‘She’s proof …’
    In the very back row of the standing gallery a woman sighed. ‘Imagine cheating on a lover like Count Monti …’
    The witnesses now being heard were people who had known Bernard Martin, but the indifferent crowd was barely listening any more. In this trial, only the accused woman was exciting; the victim was no more than a vague ghost. The apathetic public learned that Bernard Martin was born in Beix (Alpes-Maritimes) on 13 April 1915,and that the names of his mother and father were not known. Later in his life he had been legally acknowledged as the son of Martial Martin, a butler, who cohabited with Berthe Souprosse, a cook. Both had been in the service of the Dukes de Joux, who had provided them with an income until they died, Martial Martin in 1919 and Berthe Souprosse in 1932. Berthe seemed genuinely to have loved little Bernard. She had raised him attentively and in a manner that was quite above her station. The boy had been awarded a scholarship to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
    A statement from one of Bernard Martin’s former teachers was read out to the court: ‘ “A gloomy, bitter, silent character. Exceptionally intelligent, with some indication of a genius in the making, or at least the kind of tenacity and deep, insightful patience which, when focused on a specific topic, appears as genius.”
    ‘This is an extract from my personal notes that date from the time when the poor child was reaching adolescence. I can add, now that I