If there was insufficient evidence, the case would be dismissed. If the examining magistrate felt that there was a case to be answered, it would be forwarded for trial by jury in an open court (cour d’assises).15Camy-Lamotte is able to intervene in the process of law at the stage of the preliminary inquiry, before the case is sent for public trial. He is able to bring direct pressure to bear on the man responsible for conducting the inquiry and does so both by exercising his authority and by a mixture of flattery and enticement. Initially Monsieur Denizet, the examining magistrate, is simply ordered not to reach any decision until he has received instructions from the ministry. His continued compliance is secured by a vague promise of a better-paid position in Paris and by the offer of a decoration. Denizet is only allowed to forward the case to a public trial when Camy-Lamotte is confident that scandal can be averted. Camy-Lamotte, having made inquiries of his own, knows full well that the eventual trial is based on a completely erroneous case for prosecution and that the accused will be wrongly convicted. This is of little concern to him and he is happy to withhold and finally destroy the evidence he has in his possession which would prove how false the indictments against the accused are. In doing this, Camy-Lamotte himself commits a criminal offence. If Camy-Lamotte is able to manipulate Denizet in this way, it is because Denizet, unlike most others in the legal profession (Camy-Lamotte himself included), has not had the advantage of inherited wealth or influential friends to help him on his way. The judiciary is represented as a hive of nepotism and venality, where nonentities such as Grandmorin’s son-in-law, Lachesnaye, and the young protégés of Grandmorin’s sister, Madame Bonnehon, rise quickly to positions of importance, whilst the efforts of capable and deserving men such as Denizet go unrewarded. Camy-Lamotte, being in charge of all official appointments, is able to exploit Denizet’s long-frustrated desire for recognition and promotion, and his fear that one mistake on his part in dealing with such a sensitive case might spell the end of his career. Although Denizet is a pawn in Camy-Lamotte’s political game, he himself is also partly to blame for the final miscarriage of justice. He is initially presented as a conscientious, hard-working lawyer, dedicated to the cause of justice. His weakness, however, is that he has a conceited and exaggerated sense of his own abilities. What starts out as a single-minded concern to establish the truth is quickly overtaken by a desire to demonstrate his superior gifts of intelligence and perspicacity. Zola presents Denizet’s misguided investigation in a series of sustained and carefully contrived ironies. Denizet describes the exact manner of Grandmorin’s murder and instantly dismisses it on the grounds of sheer impossibility. His belief that it was Cabuche who murdered Grandmorin is confirmed by Roubaud’s patently fictitious description of the murderer, a description which simultaneously convinces Jacques that the murderer was Roubaud. Denizet allows himself to be persuaded by intuition and instinct rather than proof. He ‘knows’ that Cabuche is a murderer because he displays the murderer’s characteristic appearance and manner of behaviour, and is all the more convinced because, as he puts it in a piece of curiously convoluted logic, ‘if we can’t prove it was him, we can’t prove it was anybody’ (V). His final reconstruction of events is described as ‘a work of art’, a piece of creative inventiveness besides which the truth itself ‘would have appeared ... more far-fetched and even fantastical’ (XII). To the general public, the unassailable logic of Denizet’s conclusions stands out with ‘blinding’ certainty. Zola ensures, however, that the reader is supplied with enough of the truth to be able to see at every step in Denizet’s inquiry how close he comes to it, how quickly he loses sight of it and how readily he embraces his own fictions. For the reader, the court-room drama consists not in seeing a crime exposed and a criminal brought to book, but in seeing justice itself being systematically abused. Having wrongly condemned those it has brought to trial, it is the judiciary itself that stands accused. Grandmorin, Camy-Lamotte, Denizet, Roubaud, Séverine, Jacques and Cabuche are all fictional characters. The murders in the novel are also fictional. But the novel’s representation of the judicial inquiry and trial by jury are accurate reflections of Second Empire practice and procedure.