d
within seemed to blaze forth at his eyes, the only part of his body that
appeared to live, so like a corpse was all the rest of him. On the 17th
of June 1670 he died: the poison had taken seventy-two days to complete
its work. Suspicion began to dawn: the lieutenant's body was opened,
and a formal report was drawn up. The operation was performed in the
presence of the surgeons Dupre and Durant, and Gavart, the apothecary,
by M. Bachot, the brothers' private physician. They found the stomach
and duodenum to be black and falling to pieces, the liver burnt and
gangrened. They said that this state of things must have been produced
by poison, but as the presence of certain bodily humours sometimes
produces similar appearances, they durst not declare that the
lieutenant's death could not have come about by natural causes, and he
was buried without further inquiry.

It was as his private physician that Dr. Bachot had asked for the
autopsy of his patient's brother. For the younger brother seemed to have
been attacked by the same complaint, and the doctor hoped to find from
the death of the one some means for preserving the life of the other.
The councillor was in a violent fever, agitated unceasingly both in body
and mind: he could not bear any position of any kind for more than a
few minutes at a time. Bed was a place of torture; but if he got up, he
cried for it again, at least for a change of suffering. At the end of
three months he died. His stomach, duodenum, and liver were all in the
same corrupt state as his brother's, and more than that, the surface of
his body was burnt away. This, said the doctors; was no dubious sign
of poisoning; although, they added, it sometimes happened that a
'cacochyme' produced the same effect. Lachaussee was so far from being
suspected, that the councillor, in recognition of the care he had
bestowed on him in his last illness, left him in his will a legacy of
a hundred crowns; moreover, he received a thousand francs from
Sainte-Croix and the marquise.

So great a disaster in one family, however, was not only sad but
alarming. Death knows no hatred: death is deaf and blind, nothing more,
and astonishment was felt at this ruthless destruction of all who
bore one name. Still nobody suspected the true culprits, search was
fruitless, inquiries led nowhere: the marquise put on mourning for her
brothers, Sainte-Croix continued in his path of folly, and all things
went on as before. Meanwhile Sai