them both.  Beauclair disarms his antagonist and is about to return him his weapon, when Du Lache stabs the Baron in the back.  Vrayment has witnessed the quarrel and summoned assistance.  Beauclair and Du Lache are haled before a magistrate and are about to be condemned equally for the crime, when Vrayment reveals herself as Montamour disguised as a man, and persuades the judge that Beauclair is innocent.  Du Lache and his accomplices are broken on the wheel, the Baroness takes poison, and Beauclair is united to his faithful Montamour.

In the conduct of the story the writer shows no deficiency in expressing the passions, but rather a want of measure, for thrill follows thrill so fast that the reader can hardly realize what is happening.  And as if the lusts and crimes of the Baroness did not furnish enough sensational incidents, the tender romance of Beauclair and Montamour is superadded.  The hero is a common romantic type, easily inconstant, but rewarded above his merits by a faithful mistress.  A woman disguised as a man was a favorite device with Mrs. Haywood as well as with other writers of love stories, but one need read only the brazen Mrs. Charke’s memoirs or Defoe’s realistic “Moll Flanders” to discover that it was a device not unheard of in real life.  The actual occurrence of such disguises, however, made no difference to the female writers of fiction.  Anything soul-stirring, whether from romances or from plays, was equally grist to their mills.

In seeking for the most dramatic denouements sensational romancers were not long in perceiving the suspense that could be produced by involving the chief characters in a trial for their lives.  Mrs. Behn had by that means considerably protracted the interest in “The Fair Jilt:  or, the Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda” (1688), and Mrs. Haywood, following her example, succeeded in giving a last stimulus to the jaded nerves of the readers of “The Force of Nature” and “The Injur’d Husband.”  And finally the title-page of an anonymous work attributed to her indicates that the struggling authoress was not insensible to the popular demand for romances of roguery.  A prospective buyer might have imagined that he was securing a criminal biography in “Memoirs of the Baron de Brosse, Who was Broke on the Wheel in the Reign of Lewis XIV.  Containing, An Account of his Amours.  With Several Particulars relating to the Wars in those Times,” but the promise of the title was unfulfilled, for Mrs. Haywood was no journalist to make capital out of a malefactor’s exit from the world.  The whole book is a chronicle of the Baron’s unsuccessful pursuit of a hard-hearted beauty named Larissa, mingled with little histories of the Baron’s rivals, of a languishing Madam de Monbray, and of Larissa’s mother.  The fair charmer finally marries a count, and her lover, plunged into adequate despair, can barely exert himself to answer a false accusation trumped up by the revengeful Monbray.  With the verdict in his favor the story ends abruptly, and the promised continuation was apparently never written.  We read nothing of the wars, nor of the Baron’s execution on the wheel.