With a fiend’s duplicity he laid his plans of ruin and death.  The Marquise, swayed to his will, received him secretly in the blue room (whose very colour suggests a guilty intrigue), though never, upon the oath of an Abbe, when the key was turned in the lock.  A journey to Switzerland had freed him from the haunting suspicion of the Marquis, and at last he might compel the wife to denounce her husband as a murderer.  The terrified woman drew the indictment at the Abbe’s dictation, and when her husband returned to St. Amand he was instantly thrust into prison.  Nothing remained but to cajole the sons into an expressed hatred of their father, and the last enormity was committed by a masterpiece of cunning.  ‘Your father’s one chance of escape,’ argued this villain in a cassock, ’is to be proved an inhuman ruffian.  Swear that he beat you unmercifully and you will save him from the guillotine.’  All the dupes learned their lesson with a certainty which reflects infinite credit upon the Abbe’s method of instruction.

For once in his life the Abbe had been moved by greed as well as by villainy.  His early exploits had no worse motive than the satisfaction of an inhuman lust for cruelty and destruction.  But the Marquise was rich, and when once her husband’s head were off, might not the Abbe reap his share of the gathered harvest?  The stakes were high, but the game was worth the playing, and Rosselot played it with spirit and energy unto the last card.  His appearance in court is ever memorable, and as his ferret eyes glinted through glass at the President, he seemed the villain of some Middle Age Romance.  His head, poised upon a lean, bony frame, was embellished with a nose thin and sharp as the blade of a knife; his tightly compressed lips were an indication of the rascal’s determination.  ’Long as a day in Lent’—­that is how a spectator described him; and if ever a sinister nature glared through a sinister figure, the Abbe’s character was revealed before he parted his lips in speech.  Unmoved he stood and immovable; he treated the imprecations of the Marquis with a cold disdain; as the burden of proof grew heavy on his back, he shrugged his shoulders in weary indifference.  He told his monstrous story with a cynical contempt, which has scarce its equal in the history of crime; and priest, as he was, he proved that he did not yield to the Marquis himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his vocabulary.  He brought charges against the weird world of Presles with an insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim.  He described the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in a slang which would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer than upon a pious Abbe.  And, his story ended, he leered at the Court with the satisfaction of one who had discharged a fearsome duty.