officers, whom,
as befitted so great a man, he treated with the utmost insolence,
overwhelming them with abuse when they came to enforce an execution.
Such scandals had several times aroused the curiosity of his neighbours,
and did not redound to his credit. His landlord, wearied of all this
clamour, and most especially weary of never getting any rent without
a fight for it, gave him notice to quit. Derues removed to the rue
Beaubourg, where he continued to act as commission agent under the name
of Cyrano Derues de Bury.

And now we will concern ourselves no more with the unravelling of this
tissue of imposition; we will wander no longer in this labyrinth
of fraud, of low and vile intrigue, of dark crime of which the clue
disappears in the night, and of which the trace is lost in a doubtful
mixture of blood and mire; we will listen no longer to the cry of the
widow and her four children reduced to beggary, to the groans of obscure
victims, to the cries of terror and the death-groan which echoed one
night through the vaults of a country house near Beauvais. Behold
other victims whose cries are yet louder, behold yet other crimes and a
punishment which equals them in terror! Let these nameless ghosts,
these silent spectres, lose themselves in the clear daylight which now
appears, and make room for other phantoms which rend their shrouds and
issue from the tomb demanding vengeance.

Derues was now soon to have a chance of obtaining immortality. Hitherto
his blows had been struck by chance, henceforth he uses all the
resources of his infernal imagination; he concentrates all his strength
on one point--conceives and executes his crowning piece of wickedness.
He employs for two years all his science as cheat, forger, and poisoner
in extending the net which was to entangle a whole family; and, taken
in his own snare, he struggles in vain; in vain does he seek to gnaw
through the meshes which confine him. The foot placed on the last rung
of this ladder of crime, stands also on the first step by which he
mounts the scaffold.

About a mile from Villeneuve-le-Roi-les-Sens, there stood in 1775 a
handsome house, overlooking the windings of the Yonne on one side, and
on the other a garden and park belonging to the estate of Buisson-Souef.
It was a large property, admirably situated, and containing productive
fields, wood, and water; but not everywhere kept in good order, and
showing something of the embarrassed fortune of its own