On March 5 he left Paris again.

On the evening of March 7 a gentleman, M. Desportes of Paris, hired a
room at the Hotel Blanc in Lyons. On the following day he went out early
in the morning, leaving word that, should a lady whom he was expecting,
call to see him, she was to be shown up to his room. The same morning a
gentleman, resembling M. Desportes of Paris, bought two lady's dresses
at a shop in Lyons.

The same afternoon a lady dressed in black silk, with a hood well drawn
over her eyes, called at the office of M. Pourra, a notary.

The latter was not greatly attracted by his visitor, whose nose struck
him as large for a woman. She said that she had spent her youth in
Lyons, but her accent was distinctly Parisian. The lady gave her name as
Madame de Lamotte, and asked for a power of attorney by which she could
give her husband the interest due to her on a sum of 30,000 livres,
part of the purchase-money of the estate of Buisson-Souef, which she
had recently sold. As Mme. de Lamotte represented herself as having been
sent to M. Pourra by a respectable merchant for whom he was in the
habit of doing business, he agreed to draw up the necessary document,
accepting her statement that she and her husband had separate estates.
Mme. de Lamotte said that she would not have time to wait until the
power of attorney was ready, and therefore asked M. Pourra to send it
to the parish priest at Villeneuvele-Roi; this he promised to do. Mme.
de-Lamotte had called twice during the day at the Hotel Blanc and asked
for M. Desportes of Paris, but he was not at home. While Derues, alias
Desportes, alias Mme. de Lamotte, was masquerading in Lyons, events had
been moving swiftly and unfavourably in Paris. Sick with misgiving and
anxiety, M. de Lamotte had come there to find, if possible, his wife and
child. By a strange coincidence he alighted at an inn in the Rue de la
Mortellerie, only a few yards from the wine-cellar in which the corpse
of his ill-fated wife lay buried. He lost no time in putting his case
before the Lieutenant of Police, who placed the affair in the hands
of one of the magistrates of the Chatelet, then the criminal court of
Paris. At first the magistrate believed that the case was one of fraud
and that Mme. de Lamotte and her son were being kept somewhere in
concealment by Derues. But as he investigated the circumstances further,
the evidence of the illness of the mother and son, the date of the
disappearance of Mm