Cour d'assises

He acted as if he were the master.

But the nut's real name, Raoul de Saint-Delmar, had been in famous criminal records some ten years before, when the jury of the Seine Assize Court condemned him to death.

He was a young man of good family, who after squandering his substance had been charged with murdering his employer in order to rob him.

He owed his reprieve to his youth, to his mother, who in her despair died of grief, and to the persistence with which he proclaimed his innocence, in spite of proofs which were seemingly overwhelming.