He carried his scruple so far, that,
when he was interrogated on the subject of
any communication that there might be
between the apartments occupied by the Abbé
Poulard and that of Madame Mazel, he
replied only that this question had nothing to
do with the suit against him. Brave old man !

Very different was the behaviour of the
parasite who had already blackened the
character of his patroness, and was, in the next
place, pursuing the old steward to his death,
with a remorseless violence.

Le Brun was condemned to die ; and it was
adjudged that his estate should pay ten
thousand livres as damages to the heirs of Madame
Mazel, as well as the usual amends of a hundred
livres to the church, for the establishment
of prayers for the soul of the deceased.
It was at the same time privately stated that
the judges arrived at this decision, not with a
view to its being finally carried out, but for
the purpose of terrifying the accused, by a
new form of torture, into a full statement of
what he knew. Most of them believed Le
Brun himself to be not guilty ; and as they
all knew that their sentence could be—and
no doubt would be—reversed in a higher
court, they gave false judgment by way of
stratagem, hoping that some good might
accrue from it.

The appeal to the higher tribunal was of
course made by Barbier d'Aucourt, who
repeated all his arguments before new judges
with redoubled energy. A French criminal
tale of this period, founded on mistaken
identity, has recently been dramatised, and
performed in many French and English theatres,
as "The Courier of Lyons," and under other
titles. When the M. Lesurques, who was in
that case the victim of an error, came before
the court to obtain his restoration to society,
his advocate was the same Barbier d'Aucourt
—not only a famous lawyer, but also a member
of the French Academy—who bestirred
himself with so much energy on behalf of Jacques
Le Brun.

Before the upper tribunal D'Aucourt's
arguments tended to direct the attention of
the public in no favourable way towards the
Abbé Poulard. That disgraced ecclesiastic,
consequently, felt it to be right that he should
defend his own character in a pamphlet ; and
a pamphlet, accordingly, was published by
him, in which he called the attention of Parisians
to the forced presumptions upon which
the argument for the defence of Le Brun was
founded, and—quite in accordance with the
humour of the time—criticised the style of
M. d'Aucourt, whom he accused of not forming
his sentences with the grace to be looked
for from a member of the Academy, and
against whom he revived an old joke which
had long done duty in the salons of Paris.
D'Aucourt, at an early stage of his career,
had on one occasion rebuked what he held to
be an indecent use made of their church by
the Jesuits, and doing so in Latin, said
"sacrus," when he ought to have said "sacer."
The holy men were tickled by the blunder,
and D'Aucourt was called " lawyer sacrus"
for a long time after. The Abbé Poulard, in
his pamphlet, made the most of this. The
joke arose over a question of profanity, and
was kept alive over a question of murder.
But, indeed, the murder of a nominative case
was at that time nearly as bad, in the eyes of
dainty speakers as the murder of a woman.
"You tell me that I murdered my patroness,"
cried, in effect, the Abbé Poulard; " well,
sir, and what then, who murdered his own
Latin ?"

The pleadings of D'Aucourt had aroused
public feeling on behalf of the white-headed
steward, who was faithful even in the last
extremity to which he had been brought.
He had been tortured beyond his strength,
and his life was despaired of. Just at that
time official intelligence was sent from Sens
that a man, calling himself Geolet, had
established himself as a horse-dealer in that town ;
that he was the same Berry, discharged from
the service of Madame Mazel, for whom
search had been instituted, and that he was
accordingly arrested. His arrest took place
on the twenty-seventh of March.

The expectation of Barbier d'Aucourt was
then strangely fulfilled, for the capture of
this man set at rest a world of doubt and
terrible suspicion in an altogether
unexpected way. When Berry was taken he
offered to the men who arrested him a purse
full of louis-d'ors for the opportunity of making
his escape, and he was found possessed
of a watch which had been worn by Madame
Mazel on the very last day of her life. He
was sent at once to Paris, where many testified
to having seen him in town at the time
of the assassination ; a woman identified him
as a man whom she saw quitting the hotel
Savonnières on the night of the murder, soon
after midnight. A surgeon deposed that he
had shaved him (those being the days of barber
surgeons), on the morning following,
and noticed that his hands were scratched.
Finally the blood-stained shirt and fragment
of cravat were proved to have belonged to
him. While these facts were being elicited,
on the nineteenth of July the Abbé Poulard
was arrested, and lodged in the Conciergerie.
By confronting him with the real murderer,
no proof of complicity was obtained, and it
was determined by the civil authorities that
he should be handed over to his ecclesiastical
superiors, by whom he was subjected to strict
discipline and meagre diet in a monastery
throughout the remainder of his days,

Isménie Chapelain profited nothing by the
death of Madame Mazel ; for Georges de
Savonnières died during the course of the
subsequent proceedings. The name of Madame
Réné de Savonnières had been carefully kept
out of the inquiry ; but Berry, condemned to
be broken alive upon the wheel, and to pay
eight thousand livres of restitution, was put