Standing behind the long table covered with a green carpet which occupied the whole of the small side of the great gallery of the Trianon palace where the council of war was to sit, the general duc d'Aumale had just dropped these four words and, immediately , a profound silence fell on the crowd, which crowded onto the benches lined up facing the court and crashed into the corners of the large bay windows beyond which the trees showed their foliage beginning to scorch.
There were politicians, journalists, writers, officers, in uniforms or in civilian clothes, who still wore the tapering mustaches and goatee in favor in the Imperial Army.
Women too, many women who came, some - those who showed off their shoulders and swung their crinolines at receptions in the Tuileries and Compiègne - to show themselves and be able to say, in the evening, in the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the neighborhood of the Star:
I was there", the others - those who for years had refused to join the Empire - as a manifestation of their patriotic faith, because they wanted to know in detail the catastrophe in which France had almost perished and from which the Republic was born, this Republic in which they placed all their hopes and, alongside each other, some that grew the only feminine curiosity and whose vanity was pleasantly tickled because they knew that behind the man whose honor and doubtless his life were going to be at stake there was a woman..., a woman for whom this man wanted to rise above e himself and who was no stranger to the faults he had committed.