urac, who together with his eldest son had
emigrated, forged a will in the name of his parent, whom he pretended to
be dead, which left him the sole heir of all the disposable property, to
the exclusion of two sisters. After the nation had shared its part as
heir of all emigrants, Louis took possession of the remainder. In 1802,
both his father and brother accepted the general amnesty, and returned to
France. To their great surprise, they heard that this Louis had, by his
ill-treatment, forced his sisters into servitude, refusing them even the
common necessaries of life. After upbraiding him for his want of duty,
the father desired, according to the law, the restitution of the unsold
part of his estates. On the day fixed for settling the accounts and
entering into his rights, Baron de Saurac was arrested as a conspirator
and imprisoned in the Temple. He had been denounced as having served in
the army of Conde, and as being a secret agent of Louis XVIII. To
disprove the first part of the charge, he produced certificates from
America, where he had passed the time of his emigration, and even upon
the rack he denied the latter. During his arrest, the eldest son
discovered that Louis had become the owner of their possessions, by means
of the will he had forged in the name of his father; and that it was he
who had been unnatural enough to denounce the author of his days. With
the wreck of their fortune in St. Domingo, he procured his father's
release; who, being acquainted with the perversity of his younger son,
addressed himself to the department to be reinstated in his property.
This was opposed by Louis, who defended his title to the estate by the
revolutionary maxim which had passed into a law, enacting that all
emigrants should be considered as politically dead. Hitherto Baron de
Saurac had, from affection, declined to mention the forged will; but
shocked by his son's obduracy, and being reduced to distress, his
counsellor produced this document, which not only went to deprive Louis
of his property, but exposed him to a criminal prosecution.

This unnatural son, who was not yet twenty-five, had imbibed all the
revolutionary morals of his contemporaries, and was well acquainted with
the moral characters of his revolutionary countrymen. He addressed
himself, therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte's Imperial
attorney-general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a bribe
of fifty thousand livres--obtained for him,