A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes Page A

the Middle East? What the fuck?’ shouted a man still wearing a towelling maple-leaf hat. He was restrained from getting up by his wife. Franklin, who felt the heat from the metal floor of his cage to be unendurable, shuffled his notes together automatically, stepped off the podium without looking at anyone, walked up the aisle, getting blood on his crêpe soles as he stepped past the dead American, ignored the three Arabs, who could shoot him if they wanted to, and went without escort or opposition to his cabin. He locked the door and lay down on his bunk.
    Ten minutes later there came the noise of shooting. From five o’clock to eleven o’clock, punctually on the hour like someterrible parody of a municipal clock, gunfire pealed. Splashes followed, as the bodies were flung over the rail in pairs. Shortly after eleven, twenty-two members of the American Special Forces, who had been trailing the Santa Euphemia for fifteen hours, managed to get on board. In the battle six more passengers, including Mr Talbot, the honorary American citizen from Kidderminster, were shot dead. Out of the eight visitors who had helped load supplies at Rhodes, five were killed, two after they had surrendered.
    Neither the leader nor the second-in-command survived, so there remained no witness to corroborate Franklin Hughes’s story of the bargain he had struck with the Arabs. Tricia Maitland, who had become Irish for a few hours without realizing it, and who in the course of Franklin Hughes’s lecture had returned her ring to the finger where it originally belonged, never spoke to him again.

3

THE WARS OF RELIGION

Source: the Archives Municipales de Besançon (section CG, boîte 377a). The following case, hitherto unpublished, is of particular interest to legal historians in that the procureur pour les insectes was the distinguished jurist Bartholomé Chassenée (also Chassanée and Chasseneux), later first president of the Parlement de Provence. Born in 1480, Chassenée made his name before the ecclesiastical court of Autun defending rats which had been charged with feloniously destroying a crop of barley. The following documents, from the opening pétition des habitans to the final judgment of the court, do not represent the entire proceedings – for instance, the testimony of witnesses, who might be anything from local peasants to distinguished experts on the behavioural patterns of the defendants, has not been recorded – but the legal submissions embody and often specifically refer to the evidence, and thus there is nothing absent from the essential structure and argument of the case. As was normal at the time, the pleas and the conclusions du procureur épiscopal were made in French, while the sentence of the court was solemnly delivered in Latin .
    ( Translator’s note: The manuscript is continuous and all in the same hand. Thus we are not dealing with the original submissions as penned by each lawyer’s clerk, but with the work of a third party, perhaps an official of the court, who may have omitted sections of the pleas. Comparison with the contents of boîtes 371-379 suggests that the case as it exists in this form was perhaps part of a set of exemplary or typical proceedings used in the training of jurists. This conjecture is supported by the fact that only Chassenée among the participants is identified by name, as if students were being directed to examine the instructive dexterity of a distinguished defence counsel, regardless of the result of the case. The handwriting belongs to the first half of the sixteenth century, so that if, as may be, the document is a copy of someone else’s version of the trial, it is still contemporary. I have done my best to render the sometimes extravagant style of pleading – especially of the unnamed procureur des habitans – into a comparable English.)
    Pétition des habitans
    We, the inhabitants of Mamirolle in the diocese of Besançon, being fearful of Almighty God and humbly dutiful