fort was made
towards her release, she began to evince symptoms of impatience, and of
regret at the act into which she had been betrayed) to assure her that
an extorted oath, however solemn, was not valid; and to impress upon her
that she was not justified before her Maker in depriving herself of that
liberty of action which had been His gift; a pious sophism which could
not but prove palatable to his persecuted mistress. Together with this
consoling conviction, she soon perceived, moreover, that she had at
least derived one benefit from her imprudence, as the Court party,
confiding in her word, made no attempt to prevent the realization of the
design which she had affected of a devotional pilgrimage; and which was
sanctioned by the letter of the King.

Anxious, however, to destroy any latent hope in which she might still
indulge of a return to power, De Luynes resolved to effect the ruin of
all who had evinced any anxiety for her restoration; and there was
suddenly a commission given to the Council, "to bring to trial the
authors of the cabals and factions, having for their object the recall
of the Queen-mother, the deliverance of the Prince de Conde, and the
overthrow of the State." The first victims of this sweeping accusation
were the Baron de Persan, the brother-in-law of De Vitry, and De
Bournonville his brother, who were entrusted with the safe keeping of
Barbin in the Bastille, and by whom he had been indirectly permitted to
maintain a correspondence with his exiled mistress; together with the
brothers Siti, of Florence, and Durand, the composer of the King's
ballets. The result of the trial proved the virulence of the
prosecutors, but at the same time revealed their actual weakness, as
they feared to execute the sentence pronounced against the three
principal offenders; and were compelled to satiate their vengeance upon
the more insignificant and less guilty of the accused parties.

M. de Persan was simply exiled from the Court; De Bournonville was
sentenced to death, but not executed; while Barbin only escaped the
scaffold by a single vote, and was condemned to banishment; a sentence
which the King subsequently aggravated by changing it to perpetual
imprisonment. The three pamphleteers, for such were in reality the
brothers Siti and Marie Durand, whose only crime appeared to have been
that they had written a diatribe against De Luynes,[23] did not,
however, escape so easily, as the two former were broken on t