François evidently imagined this to be a hint that a bribe might not be unsuccessful, and admitted that his crime must have been discovered, but by what miracle he could not understand, for he had been alone at the time. However, when he was asked to swear to this, he withdrew hastily, recognising his mistake. The officer then remanded him, and searched for further evidence. Bigot meanwhile had been making inquiries all along the road from Rouen to Paris, until at Argenteuil he found a Bailly who had held an inquest over a dead body found among the vineyards. While Bigot was taking a copy of the minutes of this inquest, a blind man came up to the hotel where he was lodged asking for alms, and, as he listened to their conversation, asserted that he had heard a man crying out on the slopes above Argenteuil, and that when he had tried to find out what was happening, a second voice had told him it was a sick man in pain, and he had therefore gone on his way thinking no more about it.
Bigot took him back to Rouen forthwith, and made him give the same story on oath before a justice, with the addition that he would certainly be able to recognise the second of the two voices he had heard. The new shopkeeper, François, was then brought into Court, and after twenty other men had spoken, the blind man picked out his voice among them all, as that which had spoken to him on the slopes above Argenteuil. The test was repeated again and again, and invariably the blind man picked out the same voice. François, who had weakened visibly as each test proved successful, at last fell on his knees and confessed that he had murdered his master and taken the papers to Paris; and the Court immediately condemned him to be broken on the wheel.
I have been able to suggest but a very few of the thoughts which the Palais de Justice of Rouen should arouse in you; and of many points in its history I have no space to tell; as of the "Clercs de l'Échiquier" called the "Basoche," a merry company established in 1430, and enlivening the records of the law for many centuries afterwards, as you will see at the visit of Henri II. But after all, the main impression is a very sombre one. The bitter sarcasms of Rabelais are but too well founded. Mediæval justice was almost as terrible as mediæval crime, and both were followed only too frequently by death. For these old judges let no money go, however prodigal they were of life and suffering; they scarcely ever let a prisoner go who had once got into the grim machinery of their courts; and any miserable victim who was once cast into one of their many dungeons must have welcomed his release from lingering agony in death.