ugh he did not know what was the
matter. He had a furnace brought round to his house from Glazer's,
and ill as he was, went on with the experiments. Sainte-Croix was then
seeking to make a poison so subtle that the very effluvia might be
fatal. He had heard of the poisoned napkin given to the young dauphin,
elder brother of Charles VII, to wipe his hands on during a game of
tennis, and knew that the contact had caused his death; and the still
discussed tradition had informed him of the gloves of Jeanne d'Albret;
the secret was lost, but Sainte-Croix hoped to recover it. And then
there happened one of those strange accidents which seem to be not the
hand of chance but a punishment from Heaven. At the very moment
when Sainte-Croix was bending over his furnace, watching the fatal
preparation as it became hotter and hotter, the glass mask which he wore
over his face as a protection from any poisonous exhalations that might
rise up from the mixture, suddenly dropped off, and Sainte-Croix dropped
to the ground as though felled by a lightning stroke. At supper-time,
his wife finding that he did not come out from his closet where he was
shut in, knocked at the door, and received no answer; knowing that her
husband was wont to busy himself with dark and mysterious matters, she
feared some disaster had occurred. She called her servants, who broke in
the door. Then she found Sainte-Croix stretched out beside the furnace,
the broken glass lying by his side. It was impossible to deceive the
public as to the circumstances of this strange and sudden death: the
servants had seen the corpse, and they talked. The commissary Picard was
ordered to affix the seals, and all the widow could do was to remove the
furnace and the fragments of the glass mask.

The noise of the event soon spread all over Paris. Sainte-Croix was
extremely well known, and the news that he was about to purchase a post
in the court had made him known even more widely. Lachaussee was one of
the first to learn of his master's death; and hearing that a seal had
been set upon his room, he hastened to put in an objection in these
terms:

"Objection of Lachaussee, who asserts that for seven years he was in the
service of the deceased; that he had given into his charge, two years
earlier, 100 pistoles and 200 white crowns, which should be found in a
cloth bag under the closet window, and in the same a paper stating that
the said sum belonged to him, together with the transf