It was now dawn and M. Boullee, reassured by the presence of the two gunners, resolved to go out and explore the neighbourhood.  On the road to Luc, about five hundred yards from his house, a peasant hailed him, and showed him, behind a hayrick almost on the edge of the road, the body of a man.  The face had received so many blows as to be almost unrecognisable; the left eye was coming out of the socket; the hair was black, but very grey on the temples, and the beard thin and short.  The man lay on his back, with a loaded pistol on each side, about two feet from the body; the blade and sheath of a sword-cane had rolled a little way off, and near them was the broken butt-end of a double-barrelled gun.  On raising the corpse to search the pockets, the hands were found to be strongly tied behind the back.  No papers were found that could give any clue to his identity, but only a watch, thirty francs in silver, and a little book on the first page of which was written the name “Duquesnay de Montfiquet.”

The growing daylight now made an investigation possible.  Traces of blood were found on the road to Luc from the place where the body lay, to its junction with the road to Bayeux, a distance of about two hundred yards.  It was evident that the murder had been committed at the spot where the two roads met, and that the assassins had carried the corpse to the fields and behind the hayrick to retard discovery of the crime.  The disguised gendarmes whose presence had so disturbed the townsfolk had disappeared.  A horse struck by a ball was lying in a ditch.  It was raised, and though losing a great deal of blood, walked as far as the village of Mathieu, on the road to Caen, where it was stabled.

These facts having been ascertained, M. Boullee’s servants and the peasants whom curiosity had attracted to the spot, escorted the dead body, which had been put on a wheelbarrow, to La Delivrande.  It was laid in a barn near the celebrated chapel of pilgrimages, and there the autopsy took place at five in the afternoon.  It was found that “death was due to a wound made by the blade of the sword-cane; the weapon, furiously turned in the body, had lacerated the intestines.”  Three balls had, besides, struck the victim, and five buckshot had hit him full in the face and broken several teeth; of two balls fired close to the body, one had pierced the chest above the left breast, and the other had broken the left thigh, and one of the murderers had struck the face so violently that his gun had broken against the skull.

The mayor had been occupied with the drawing of lots all day, and only found time to write and inform the prefect of the murder when the doctors had completed their task.  He was in great perplexity, for the villagers unanimously accused the gendarmes of the mysterious crime.  It was said that at dawn that morning the quartermaster Foison and four of his men had gone into an inn at Mathieu, one of them carrying a gun with the butt-end broken.  While breakfasting,