Vive la Difference
By LEIGH VANCE
THE case before mine was about a forged cheque. Ted Willis and John Lemont, who had come with me from London to testify to my various qualities, stood on either side of me at the back of the high panelled room, facing the raised dais on which sat the youngish, in- telligent-looking President and his two aides. Somewhere over to our right among the crowd was Madame Jeanine Becus—the woman whose uncorroborated statement twenty-one months before, that a man wearing only a towel had outraged her sense of decency, had brought us all to this Palais de Justice just outside Paris. I could not see her, but I had a fine view of her husband, who, apart from his winter pallor, was an almost exact image of the man she had described in her accusation.
At 2.35 it was my turn. After acknowledging my identity I was directed to a seat in front of the press box, out of which French and British journalists spilled half-way down one side of the crowded courtroom. A lady appointed by the court to . be the official interpreter sat beside me. The sympathetic faces of Mr. Harold Braham, the British Consul-General, and Mr. Hickey, the Embassy's legal adviser, who had come along to give me moral support, were comfortingly on the edge of my vision.
The witnesses had been taken out. Now, as Madame Becus's name was called the crowd in the court stirred with an interest I fully shared. A stocky little woman in a green dress under a white raincoat, she swung into the wit- ness stand with a confident air, flinging me a look of challenging contempt as she passed. Her features were small and regular and even girlishly pretty. This girlishness was fostered by the long hair which hung a la Bardot down her back, and a certain jaunty sway.
Answering questions, she said she was thirty- seven, married, with two children, and she worked as a clerk for Air France at Orly Air- port. She then recounted her story of what happened at 6.15 p.m. on July 7, 1959. A man driving a Simca Aronde had looked at her as he drove by. Some ten yards from her he stopped the car and got out. She saw that he was wearing only a towel, which he raised as she approached.
Were you shocked? asked the President. Very shocked, said Madame Becus, adding--I had never seen anything like it before. This raised something of a guffaw -but perhaps we all mis- understood her exact meaning. In the French style, Maitre Sev, my lawyer, could only question her through the President, which somewhat muffled his impact. However: why had she not screamed, shouted for help, run into the house three yards from the place on the pavement where the aggressor was standing, or into any of the other houses in the built-up street? She didn't know. Well, why had she not reported the offence for twenty-four hours? She had to go to work. And so on.
She was now obviously nervoul and under great strain. But as somebody said, to make what one might think a perfectly adequate sort of accusation against an unknown man in 1959 and suddenly find it ballooning into an inter- national incident in 1961, with your name plas- tered all over the papers, would be something of a shock to anyone.
At important moments in her testimony she . stared down at me, no doubt hoping I would break out in a guilty flush or be unable to face her accusing gaze. But Maitre Sev kept on and on. In her original statement she had described the man she said she saw as being shortish, between twenty-five and thirty, and deeply tanned, with a heavy black moustache. Does Mr. Vance look like that? No-o. Neverthe- less, he was the satyr she saw, perhaps a trifle older than she had thought at the time, but . . .
My witnesses both stated that I had been clean-shaven to their knowledge for over ten years; that I was certainly so in July, 1959, and that neither was I tanned at that time. On top of which, there I was in the flesh, plainly all of my thirty-eight years and standing five foot eleven and a bit in my buckle-over brown suede shoes. I also have an unmistakably hairy chest she hadn't noticed. What about all that, then? A quick, worried concession. Ah, well—perhaps I was mistaken about the moustache. . . .
At this the spectators drew in their collective breath and even the bored-looking Nord-Afriqtre sitting glumly opposite me between two gen- darmes awaiting his own trial, came out of his lethargy to cock me an eye and make a meaning grimace.
Now the Public Prosecutor addressed the court. He was anxious to explain that once Madame Becus had laid her complaint there was no alternative to prosecution. (There was, but no matter.) As to the strange business of the identi- fication from my passport picture, there was a good answer to any doubts about that, too. And up strode the police inspector from Madame Becus's village, pulling from his pocket some dozen pictures, including mine which Scotland Yard had sent to France in direct contradiction of their own advice to me.
So to Maitre Sev. The sonorous baritone which, the previous night, had been thundering out nostalgic Russian melodies at us across the &rut Stroganall, now rolled implacably through the various anomalies and discrepancies in the prosecution's case, concluding with damning logic that the woman had invented the whole story. Madame Becus flushed and sobbed. The judges withdrew for contemplation. Madame skipped to the back of the court to join her husband, where she was also comforted by the local inspector solicitously patting her hand.
Fifteen minutes later the judges came back. It was all over--at least for me. Outside in the still-hot sun the Becuses were in full flight, pursued by photographers. In victory, remem- bering those hot and desperate eyes, one could not suppress a certain illogical sympathy. How do you feel about French justice now? a voice said. Well, it's the verdict that counts in the long run, I suppose.
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