As for the ambush in which he was supposed to have watched for his enemy, he said he was merely making his rounds in his park; the senator and Monsieur Grevin might perhaps have been alarmed at the sight of his gun and have thought his intentions hostile when they were really inoffensive.

He called attention to the fact that in the dusk a man who was not in the habit of hunting might easily fancy a gun was pointed at him, whereas, in point of fact, it was held in his hand at half-cock.

To explain the condition of his clothes when arrested, he said he had slipped and fallen in the breach on his way home.

"I could scarcely see my way," he said, "and the loose stones slipped from under me as I climbed the bank." As for the plaster which Gothard was bringing him, he replied as he had done in all previous examinations, that he wanted it to secure one of the stone posts of the covered way.
The public prosecutor and the president asked him to explain how he could have been at the top of the covered way engaged in mending a stone post and at the same time in the breach of the moat leading to the chateau; more especially as the justice of peace, the gendarmes and the forester all declared they had heard him approach them from the lower road.

To this Michu replied that Monsieur d'Hauteserre had blamed him for not having mended the post,--which he was anxious to have finished because there were difficulties about that road with the township,--and he had therefore gone up to the chateau to report that the work was done.
Monsieur d'Hauteserre had, in fact, put up a fence above the covered way to prevent the township from taking possession of it.