du Four and Rue de Grenelle, the Avenue de l'Ecole Militaire, and the
tortuous way that is now the Rue Dupleix. The damp fog made the night
seem darker; few persons were about, and the scene must have been
peculiarly gloomy and forbidding. The cab stopped in the angle formed
by the barrier of Grenelle, and on the bare ground the condemned man
stood with his back to the wall of the enclosure. It was the custom at
night executions to place a lighted lantern on the breast of the victim
as a target for the men.

It was all over at six o'clock. While the troop was returning to town
the grave-diggers took the corpse which had fallen beneath the wall and
carried it to the cemetery of Vaugirard; a neighbouring gardener and an
old man of eighty, whom curiosity had led to the corpse of this unknown
Chouan, served as witnesses to the death certificate.

The death of Le Chevalier put an end to the prosecution of the affair of
Quesnay. He was one of those prisoners of whom the grand judge said
"that they could not be set at liberty, but that the good of the State
required that they should not appear before the judges"; and they feared
that by pushing the investigations farther they might bring on some
great political trial that would agitate the whole west of France,
always ready for an insurrection, and shown in the reports to be
organised for a new Chouan outburst. It is certain that d'Ache's capture
would have embarrassed Fouche seriously, and in default of causing him
to disappear like Le Chevalier, he would much have preferred to see him
escape the pursuit of his agents. The absence of these two leaders in
the plot would enable him to represent the robbery of June 7th, as a
simple act of brigandage which had no political significance whatever.

They therefore imposed silence on the gabblings of Lefebre, who had
become a prey to such incontinence of denunciations that he only stopped
them to lament his fate and curse those who had drawn him into the
adventure; they moderated Licquet's zeal, and the prefect confided to
him the drawing up of the general report of the affair, a task of which
he acquitted himself so well that his voluminous work seemed to Fouche
"sufficiently luminous and circumstantial to be submitted as it was to
his Majesty."

Then they began, but in no haste, to concern themselves with the trial
of the other prisoners. It was necessary, according to custom, to
interrogate and confront the forty-seven persons