neither robbed nor murdered, divide the booty and
dispose of it. What community can tolerate such outrages? The law
itself is scarcely rigorous enough to duly punish them.

It is upon the above facts that this Court of Criminal and Special
Justice is called upon to decide whether the prisoners Herbomez,
Hiley, Cibot, Grenier, Horeau, Cabot, Minard, Melin, Binet,
Laraviniere, Rousseau, the woman Bryond, Leveille, the woman
Bourget, Vauthier, Chaussard the elder, Pannier, the widow
Lechantre, Mallet, all herein named and described, and arraigned
before this court; also Boislaurier, Dubut, Courceuil, Bruce, the
younger Chaussard, Chargegrain, and the girl Godard,--these latter
being absent and fugitives from justice,--are or are not guilty of
the crimes charged in this indictment.

Done at Caen, this 1st of December, 180-.

(Signed) Baron Bourlac, Attorney-General.

X. PRAY FOR THOSE WHO DESPITEFULLY USE YOU AND PERSECUTE YOU

This legal paper, much shorter and more imperative than such indictments
are these days, when they are far more detailed and more precise,
especially as to the antecedent life of accused persons, affected
Godefroid deeply. The dryness of the statement in which the official
pen narrated in red ink the principal details of the affair stirred his
imagination. Concise, abbreviated narratives are to some minds texts
into the hidden meaning of which they love to burrow.

In the middle of the night, aided by the silence, by the darkness, by
the terrible relation intimated by the worthy Alain between the facts
of that document and Madame de la Chanterie, Godefroid applied all the
forces of his intellect to decipher the dreadful theme.

Evidently the name Lechantre stood for la Chanterie; in all probably
the aristocracy of the name was intentionally thus concealed during the
Revolution and under the Empire.

Godefroid saw, in imagination, the landscape and the scenes where this
drama had taken place. The forms and faces of the accomplices passed
before his eyes. He pictured to himself not "one Rifoel" but a Chevalier
du Vissard, a young man something like the Fergus of Walter Scott,
a French Jacobite. He developed the romance of an ardent young girl
grossly deceived by an infamous husband (a style of romance then much
the fashion); loving the young and gallant leader of a rebellion against
the Empire; giving herself, body and soul, like another Diana Vernon, to
the co