The Thirteenth Juror

A Tale of Mystery

When the criminal, Pierre Granger, escorted by four gendarmes, was place[d] in the dock of the court of [A]ssize, there was a general stir amongst the crowd, which had assembled from every quarter to be present at his trial.

Pierre Granger was not an ordinary culprit, not one of those poor wretches who the court, as a matter of form, furnishes with an advocate, judges in the presence of a heedless auditory, and sends to oblivion in the convict prisons of the state. He had figured at length in the columns of the newspapers; and while M. Lepervier had undertaken his defence—M. Tourangin, the attorney general, was to conduct the prosecution. Now, at the time which I write, the two men stood at the head of their profession.—Whenever it was known that they were to be pitted against each other in any cause, crowds immediately flocked to enjoy their eloquent sentences, sonorous periods, and phrases as round and polished as so many billiard balls. It was a perfect riot of tropes and figures, a delicious confusion of peri-phrases and metaphors. All the figures of rhetoric defiled before the charmed auditory, like Virgil’s playful shepherds. There was a luxury of epithets, passing even that of the Abbe Delille! Every individual substantive was as regularly followed by its attendant adjective, as the great lady of the last century by her train-bearing page. In this pompous diction—a man becomes a mortal; a horse, a courser; the moon was styled a pale Dian. My father and mother were never called so, but invariably the authors of my being; a dream was a vision; a glass a crystal vase; a knife, a sword; a car, a chariot; and a breeze became a whirlwind; all of which tended to produce a style of exceeding sublimity and beauty. Pierre Granger was a clumsily built fellow, five feet ten in height, thirty… Read More