Arnold de Tilh, the impostor, was carried back to Artigues for the execution of his sentence, and there made a full confession.  He said that the crime had been accidentally suggested to his mind; that on his way home from the camp in Picardy he was constantly mistaken for Martin Guerre by Martin’s friends; that from them he learned many circumstances respecting the family and the doings of the man himself; and that, having previously been an intimate and confidential comrade of Guerre in the army, he was able to maintain his imposture.  His sentence was carried out in all its severity in 1560.

PIERRE MEGE—­THE FICTITIOUS DE CAILLE.

Scipio Le Brun, of Castellane, a Provencal gentleman, and lord of the manors of Caille and of Rougon, in 1655 married a young lady called Judith le Gouche.  As is common in France, and also in certain parts of Britain, this local squire was best known by the name of his estates, and was commonly termed the Sieur de Caille.  Both he and his wife belonged to the strictest sect of the Calvinists, who were by no means favourites in the country.  Their usual residence was at Manosque, a little village in Provence, and there five children were born to them, of whom three were sons and two were daughters.  The two youngest sons died at an early age, and Isaac, the eldest, after living to the age of thirty-two, died also.

When this Isaac, who has just been mentioned, was a lad of fifteen, his mother died, and in her will constituted him her heir, at the same time bequeathing legacies to her daughters, and granting the life interest of all her property to her husband.  The King having revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Sieur de Caille quitted the kingdom with his family, which then consisted of his mother, his son Isaac, and his two daughters.  The fugitives made their home in Lausanne, in Switzerland.  In 1689 the French king, in the zeal of his Catholicism, issued a decree, by which he bestowed the property of the Calvinist fugitives upon their relations.  The possessions of the Sieur de Caille were therefore divided between Anne de Gouche, his wife’s sister, who had married M. Rolland, the Avocat-General of the Supreme Court of Dauphine, and Madame Tardivi, a relation on his own side.

Meantime Isaac, the son of the Sieur de Caille, who was by courtesy styled the Sieur de Rougon, assiduously applied himself to his studies, and, as the result of over-work, fell into a consumption, of which he died at Vevay on the 15th of February 1696.

In March 1699, Pierre Mege, a marine, presented himself before M. de Vauvray, the intendant of marines at Toulon, and informed him that he was the son of M. de Caille, at the same time telling the following story.  He said that he had had the misfortune to be an object of aversion to his father because of his dislike to study, and because of his ill-concealed attachment to the Catholic religion; that his father