Mme. Acquet, pale and impassive, seemed oblivious of what was going on around her.  When she heard sentence of death pronounced against her, she turned towards her defender, and Chauveau-Lagarde, rising, asked for a reprieve for his client.  Although she had been in prison for fourteen months, she was, he said, “in an interesting condition.”  There was a murmur of astonishment in the hall, and while, during the excitement caused by this declaration, the court deliberated on the reprieve, one of the condemned, Le Hericey, leapt over the bar, fell with all his weight on the first rows of spectators, and by kicks and blows, aided by the general bewilderment, made a path for himself through the crowd, and amid shouts and shoves had already reached the door when a gendarme nabbed him in passing and threw him back into the hall, where, trampled on and overcome with blows, he was pushed behind the bar and taken away with the other condemned prisoners.  The reprieve asked for Mme. Acquet was pronounced in the midst of the tumult, the crush at the door of the great hall being so great that many were injured.

The verdict, which soon became known all over the town, was in general ill received.  If the masses showed a dull satisfaction in the punishment of the Combray ladies, saying “that neither rank nor riches had counted, and that, guilty like the others, they were treated like the others,” the bourgeois population of Rouen, still very indulgent to the royalists, disapproved of the condemnation of the two women, who had only been convicted of a crime by which neither of them had profited.  The reprieve granted to Mme. Acquet, “whose declaration had deceived no one,” seemed a good omen, indicating a commutation of her sentence.  The nine “brigands” condemned to death received no pity.  Lefebre was not known in Rouen, and his attitude during the trial had aroused no sympathy; the others were but vulgar actors in the drama, and only interested the populace hungry for a spectacle on the scaffold.  The executions would take place immediately, the judgments pronounced by the special court being without appeal, like those of the former revolutionary tribunals.

The nine condemned men were taken to the conciergerie.  It was night when their “toilet” was begun.  The high-executioner, Charles-Andre Ferey, of an old Norman family of executioners, had called on his cousins Joanne and Desmarets to help him, and while the scaffold was being hastily erected on the Place du Vieux-Marche, they made preparations in the prison.  In the anguish of this last hour on earth Flierle’s courage weakened.  He sent a gaoler to the imperial procurer to ask “if a reprieve would be granted to any one who would make important revelations.”  On receiving a negative reply the German seemed to resign himself to his fate.  “Since that is the case,” he said, “I will carry my secret to the tomb with me.”