It is now time to state how Pierre Mège,
alias Sans-Regret, conceived the strange idea
of personating young De Caille.

One day he happened to be sipping his
chopine of wine in a dark comer of a public-house
in Toulon, when there entered three men whose
patois told him. they were natives of Upper
Provence—that they came from Forcalquier
and Manosque. One of them, who had only
just come from home to sell little alabaster
images in Toulon, treated the others to gossip
about their relations and friends. The De
Cailles, before the Revocation of the Edict,
had been the great folk of the neighbourhood.
Once so rich and powerful, now poor and in
exile, their misfortunes furnished an endless
theme. They talked of the ancient château of
the De Cailles, a seigneurial residence falling to
ruins; of the death of Isaac, the last surviving
son; of the deed of gift made by the Dame
Rolland to the Charité of Manosque; and of
the considerable fortune which must one day
revert to the Le Gouches and the Rollands at
the death of the last of the Lausanne exiles.

When the trio rose to depart, Mège accosted
them and said, "You were speaking just now
of Isaac de Caille, who seems to have died in
Switzerland. Have any of you seen him?
Would you know him again?"

"No," replied a Manoscain; "but we have
at Toulon the carpenter, La Violette, from the
same place, who knew the whole family well,
and who certainly would know young De Caille
again, if by chance he were not dead."

"Much obliged, messieurs. When you see
La Violette, tell him to favour me with a call.
If he ask in the port for Sans-Regret, the
Marine, he will have no difficulty in finding me
out. I may, perhaps, be able to communicate
something that will be to his profit as well as to
his pleasure."

A few days afterwards, the carpenter went to
see Sans-Regret, who (according to his own
subsequent account), received him with, "How are
you, La Violette? Don't you recollect me?"

To which the carpenter replied, "You are the
son of my former master."

What really passed between the two men
cannot be told with any certainty; neither of
them had an interest in confessing the truth.
But what is certain is, that shortly afterwards
the Marine, Pierre Mège, alias Sans-Regret, the
carpenter La Violette, and De Muges the
trustee's relation, made common cause; that
La Violette assisted the Marine in his first
advances to M. de Vauvray; and that their
testimony was the first that was given in proof of
the Marine's identity with Isaac de Caille.

When the Marine, during his examination,
was charged with being Pierre Mège in reality,
he was not disconcerted in the least; frankly
avowing at once that he had borne that name,
which, however, was not his own. He
explained that it had happened thus:

After the Nice adventure, he was obliged to
live somehow, while waiting for a favourable
opportunity of claiming his real name, De Caille.
The militia having been disbanded, he betook
himself to Marseilles with an empty purse. No
sooner had he arrived there, than he fell in with
a certain Honorade Venelle, the wife of one
Pierre Mège, who was living with her mother
and her two sisters-in-law. The husband was
absent; the wife remiss in her conjugal duties.
All those women, moreover, had been brought
up in the reformed religion, which they had
abjured only through fear and constraint. It
was a further tie between them and the Marine.
He confessed to them the secret of his birth, and
his desire to regain his rightful position; they
advised him to conceal his name and his faith a
little longer; and, to make things pleasant,
Honorade consented that he should pass for her
absent husband—for Pierre Mège.

This tale was a calumny on poor Honorade,
who was not unfaithful to an absent spouse, seeing
that the Marine, then present, was the
injured husband, Pierre Mège himself in the flesh.

To continue our worthy hero's story. He
enlisted, under this borrowed name, in 1693, on
board the galley La Fidèle; he served in it
three years, and was then discharged. Re-
turned to Marseilles, he tried to maintain
himself by selling a certain balm, which, he
declared, his grandmother, the Dame de Caille,
had taught him to make. As this speculation
scarcely kept the pot boiling, there was no help
for it but to enlist again, which he did, in 1697,
at Toulon, still under the pseudonym of Pierre
Mège, to which he added the soubriquet of
Sans-Regret.

Such was his account of himself. On the
other hand, out of twenty witnesses brought
forward by the Sieur Rolland, several who had
pursued their studies together with young De
Caille declared that this person was not he;
several others recognised in him Pierre Mège,
who had been in the Marines ever since 1676.
To all this the Marine, never losing his presence
of mind, opposed the most peremptory denial;
he even attacked his adversaries, whenever there
was an opportunity. He demanded to be
confronted with M. Rolland, in the presence of the
judges. He then maintained, with unflinching
eye and unwavering voice, that he had seen him
at Geneva; that, since his own abjuration, he
(Rolland), a magistrate and professed Catholic,
had secretly partaken of the Lord's Supper in the
grand "temple" there, as the French call
Protestant places of worship. He minutely
described M. Rolland's dress, the horse he rode,
and the whole of his equipage. After this piece
of barefaced impudence, intended to work on
popular prejudices, he succeeded in obtaining
an order to have further litigation transferred
to Aix.

Meanwhile, M. de Caille, the father, on the
1st of January, 1700, sent his power of attorney
to the Procureur of the Parlement of Provence,
with full instructions to prosecute the impostor,
who, if guilty, would be liable to capital punishment.
To these he added a full judicial report,
drawn up at Lausanne and Vevay, respecting
the life, the illness, and the death, of his son.