been invented, to
long and angry discussions. Indeed, the marquis either was guilty of
complicity or was not: if he was not, the punishment was too cruel; if he
was, the sentence was too light. Such was the opinion of Louis XIV., who
remembered the beauty of the Marquis de Ganges; for, some time
afterwards, when he was believed to have forgotten this unhappy affair,
and when he was asked to pardon the Marquis de la Douze, who was accused
of having poisoned his wife, the king answered, "There is no need for a
pardon, since he belongs to the Parliament of Toulouse, and the Marquis
de Ganges did very well without one."

It may easily be supposed that this melancholy event did not pass without
inciting the wits of the day to write a vast number of verses and
bouts-rimes about the catastrophe by which one of the most beautiful
women of the country was carried off. Readers who have a taste for that
sort of literature are referred to the journals and memoirs of the times.

Now, as our readers, if they have taken any interest at all in the
terrible tale just narrated, will certainly ask what became of the
murderers, we will proceed to follow their course until the moment when
they disappeared, some into the night of death, some into the darkness of
oblivion.

The priest Perette was the first to pay his debt to Heaven: he died at
the oar on the way from Toulouse to Brest.

The chevalier withdrew to Venice, took service in the army of the Most
Serene Republic, then at war with Turkey, and was sent to Candia, which
the Mussulmans had been besieging for twenty years; he had scarcely
arrived there when, as he was walking on the ramparts of the town with
two other officers, a shell burst at their feet, and a fragment of it
killed the chevalier without so much as touching his companions, so that
the event was regarded as a direct act of Providence.

As for the abbe, his story is longer and stranger. He parted from the
chevalier in the neighbourhood of Genoa, and crossing the whole of
Piedmont, part of Switzerland, and a corner of Germany, entered Holland
under the name of Lamartelliere. After many hesitations as to the place
where he would settle, he finally retired to Viane, of which the Count of
Lippe was at that time sovereign; there he made the acquaintance of a
gentleman who presented him to the count as a French religious refugee.

The count, even in this first conversation, found that the foreigner who
had come to s