The Judge said "bring in the accused" and a tall man with thinning, snowy white hair stepped into the cramped, stuffy courtroom. "State your name and occupation," the judge in the red robe ordered. "Papon, Maurice, retired," came the answer in a surprisingly strong voice for a man of 87.
From the opposite end of the courtroom, all eyes were fixed on the former secretary general of the Bordeaux prefecture, whose trial for crimes against humanity began here yesterday. These were the civil plaintiffs, Jews whose relatives were deported under Mr Papon's orders. Between 1942 and 1944, he had 1,560 people arrested and interred at the Merignac Camp, from where they were taken to the Saint Jean train station for transfer to Drancy. From there they went on to Auschwitz where they were gassed.
Mr Papon's trial is the first - and last - trial of the Vichy collaborationist regime. It marks the culmination of a process that began in the 1970s with the film, Le Chagrin et la Pitie, and the American historian Robert Paxton's book Vichy and the Jews. For more than a generation after the second World War, the French preferred to believe Gen de Gaulle's maxim that Vichy was "null and void", that it had been an aberration, a parenthesis in French history. Mr Papon's trial is painful for France because it proves that many Frenchmen actively supported their Nazi occupiers.
Georges Gheldman, aged 66, sat next to me in the courtroom yesterday. On July 16th, 1942, French police, acting on Mr Papon's orders, took his mother to the Merignac Camp, then sent her on to Drancy and Auschwitz. Fifty-five years later, a gentle smile still crosses Mr Gheldman's face and tears come to his eyes when he utters the words "my mother". He says he remembers her exactly as she was then, aged 35, "a real beauty, and so lively".
When he finally saw the man who sent his mother on her journey to the crematorium yesterday, Mr Gheldman was most impressed by what he called Mr Papon's "incredible sang-froid". For him, Mr Papon's trial is not about vengeance, but justice.
Mr Papon looked neither at the jurors nor at the crowd in the courtroom. His eyes wandered vaguely around the room, and he sometimes rested his chin in his hand.
That this man signed dozens of arrest and deportation orders is not disputed: they were discovered in 1981. The only thing in question is how the jury will interpret his actions. Was he merely a loyal civil servant obeying orders? Or as a cog in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, does he share responsibility for the holocaust?
During the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the historian Hannah Arendt described the Nazi mastermind of the genocide against the Jews as the embodiment of the banality of evil. Maurice Papon is also banal; in his pale shirt, dark suit and tie, he looked like any other retired French civil servant.
The fact that he was several steps removed from the gas chamber raises the more difficult question of the ambiguity of evil: can a mere civil servant be compared to Klaus Barbie, the Lyon Gestapo chief condemned to life in prison in 1987, or the fascist Lyon militia leader, Paul Touvier, who in 1994 received the same sentence? Both men died in prison. If the jury chosen yesterday finds Mr Papon guilty as charged, he too will die in prison.
Most of yesterday's hearing was taken up with Mr Papon's request that he be freed for the duration of the three-month trial. His lawyer, Mr Jean-Marc Varaut, argued that his client is too old and ill to defend himself if he is jailed. He had spent the previous night in Gradignan prison, as the law required.
"Other prisoners shouted `Death to Papon' when he arrived, and it went on until 11 at night," Mr Varaut complained.
No special provisions had been made for Mr Papon's poor health - he underwent triple by-pass surgery last year. "His cell is 10 square metres. There is one wobbly chair and not even a bell for him to ring if he feels unwell. The prison lights went on three times. He had trouble breathing and slept only three hours."
How the mighty are fallen. After the war, Mr Papon climbed the ladder of the civil service to become the Paris prefect of police, a member of parliament and minister of the budget. President Francois Mitterrand - himself a former Vichy official - intervened to delay proceedings against Mr Papon, the main reason it took 16 years to bring him to trial. Yet Mr Varaut yesterday alleged that his client had been deprived of his right to a rapid trial by the Jewish plaintiffs. All those who might have testified in Mr Papon's favour were now dead, he complained. "I am going to plead his case in a cemetery of witnesses, because of the delays."
A rumble of indignation ran through the courtroom. "My mother is in the cemetery of witnesses," Georges Gheldman muttered.