Simone Paris de la BollardiΘre's hands trembled as she took the witness stand. "I didn't sleep last night," the 79-year-old army general's widow told the judge apologetically.
Her late husband "had brains and a conscience - so it's amazing the French army kept him so long," Madame de la BollardiΘre said. "Jacques Paris de la BollardiΘre was thrown out of the army for saying that torture was pointless and counter-productive."
He was the only French officer ever punished for actions in the 1954-1962 Algerian war, serving two months in a military fort for writing a letter denouncing torture.
The French governor-general in Algiers "told my husband to stop causing problems and let Massu's paras do their work".
Gen Paul Aussaresses, the one-eyed retired officer who sat in the dock near Mme de la BollardiΘre, was one of Gen Massu's paras.
In Algiers in the 1950s, Aussaresses, now 83, interrogated, tortured and murdered prisoners. Safe in the knowledge that his crimes were pardoned by amnesty laws of 1962 and 1968, Aussaresses published Special Services, Algeria 1955-1957 in May.
Anti-racist and human-rights groups and torture victims filed seven lawsuits for crimes against humanity but a French judge decided that Aussaresses's misdeeds were "merely" war crimes and pardoned him.
So the first French officer to stand trial in connection with the Algerian war is doing so for what he wrote, not what he did. Aussaresses and his publisher are charged with "apologising for war crimes". They risk Ffr 300,000 (€45,735) fines and up to five years in prison.
"We put electrodes on the ears or testicles of prisoners," Aussaresses wrote. "Then we turned on the current, with varying intensity . . . The summary executions were an integral part of our task of maintaining order. No one ever asked me openly to execute someone - it went without saying." Aussaresses recounted ordering the slaughter of 60 prisoners at one point, 100 others a week later.
Gen Aussarresses cheerfully admits killing 24 men with his own hands - murders covered by amnesty laws.
But he scrupulously avoids talking about the killing of the young communist maths professor Maurice Audin, arrested by French paras in his Algier s apartment in June 1957.
Because Audin's body was never found, those responsible for his disappearance could be prosecuted.
In two days, three witnesses addressed themselves directly to Aussaresses in the courtroom.
"You know that you know," the historian Mr Pierre Vidal Naquet, author of l'Affaire Audin, said.
"Maurice Audin was my close friend," Mr Henri Alleg (80) the former editor of Alger Republicain newspaper, also tortured by Massu's paras, added yesterday.
"He was tortured in the house where Aussaresses was commander - the idea that he doesn't know is an unbearable lie. Aussaresses knows very well who killed Maurice Audin and how."
But it was the stately Mme de la BollardiΘre who attacked Aussaresses most forcefully. "Where is Maurice Audin?" She demanded, holding her hands towards him. "Who killed him? I see Josette Audin often; for 40 years she's been a knot of suffering.
"A woman needs to know who killed her husband. Where did you take him? Where did you put him? Are you protecting Jean-Marie Le Pen?" French journalists have repeatedly accused the leader of the extreme right-wing National Front of torturing prisoners in Algeria.
Gen Aussaresses - who is deaf when it suits him - told Mme de la BollardiΘre how much he admired her husband, who was his commanding officer in Indochina. "Your opinion of my husband is the least of my concerns," she snapped back.
"I don't know what happened to Maurice Audin," he said then. "At the time, the FLN was setting off a lot of bombs. Communists were not my priority." Asked whether he wrote the book to relieve his conscience, the impenitent general said he was at peace. "I have never needed to assuage my conscience."
Aussaresses claims he saved lives by torturing Algerian rebels until they talked. "We were fighting terrorists; torture was useful and necessary," he claimed.
Gen Maurice Schmitt, chief of staff of the French army from 1987 until 1991, served in Algeria as a lieutenant. He has dismissed allegations by three former FLN fighters that he too committed torture as "total fabrications".
"Imagine it's the 10th of September 2001," Gen Schmitt told the courtroom. "You have a suspect who knows everything about the planned attacks - you know that he knows. What would you do? . . . In 1956, bombs exploded in Algiers every day. . . You can do without torture, except in extreme cases."
