Le Chevalier was condemned to death; he left the office of the staff at four o’clock and was thrown into the Abbaye to await execution.  While the preparations were being made he wrote the following letter to Mme. Thiboust who had been three days without news, and it reached the poor woman the next day.

“Saturday, 9 January, 1808.

“I am going to die, my sister, and I bequeath you my son.  I do not doubt that you will show him all a mother’s tenderness and care.  I beg you also to have all the firmness and vigilance that I should have had in forming his character and heart.

“Unfortunately, in leaving you the child that is so dear to me, I cannot also leave you a fortune equal to that which I inherited from my parents.  I reproach myself, more than for any other fault in my life, for having diminished the inheritance they transmitted to me.  Bring him up according to his actual fortune, and make him an artisan, if you must, rather than commit him to the care of strangers.

     “One of my greatest regrets in quitting this life, is leaving it
     without having shown my gratitude to you and your daughter.

     “Good-bye; I shall live, I hope, in your remembrance, and you will
     keep me alive in that of my son.

“Le Chevalier.”

Night had come—­a cold misty winter night—­when the cab that was to take the prisoner to his execution arrived at the door of the Abbaye.  It was a long way from Saint-Germain-des-Pres to the barriers by way of the Rue du Four and Rue de Grenelle, the Avenue de l’Ecole Militaire, and the tortuous way that is now the Rue Dupleix.  The damp fog made the night seem darker; few persons were about, and the scene must have been peculiarly gloomy and forbidding.  The cab stopped in the angle formed by the barrier of Grenelle, and on the bare ground the condemned man stood with his back to the wall of the enclosure.  It was the custom at night executions to place a lighted lantern on the breast of the victim as a target for the men.

It was all over at six o’clock.  While the troop was returning to town the grave-diggers took the corpse which had fallen beneath the wall and carried it to the cemetery of Vaugirard; a neighbouring gardener and an old man of eighty, whom curiosity had led to the corpse of this unknown Chouan, served as witnesses to the death certificate.

The death of Le Chevalier put an end to the prosecution of the affair of Quesnay.  He was one of those prisoners of whom the grand judge said “that they could not be set at liberty, but that the good of the State required that they should not appear before the judges”; and they feared that by pushing the investigations farther they might bring on some great political trial that would agitate the whole west of France, always ready for an insurrection, and shown in the reports to be organised for a new Chouan outburst.  It is certain that d’Ache’s capture would have embarrassed Fouche seriously, and in default of causing him to disappear like Le Chevalier, he would much have preferred to see him escape the pursuit of his agents.  The absence of these two leaders in the plot would enable him to represent the robbery of June 7th, as a simple act of brigandage which had no political significance whatever.