This is all that we can glean of the manner in which Mme. Acquet’s mother and brothers learned of her execution on October 6th.  Mme. de Combray at least displayed a good deal of energy, if not great calmness.  After the winter began, the letters she wrote Timoleon regained their natural tone.  The great sorrow seems to have been forgotten; they all were leagued together against Acquet, who still reigned triumphant at Donnay, and threatened to absorb the fortune of the whole family.  The trial had cost an enormous sum.  Besides the money stolen in the woods at Quesnay, which the Marquise had to refund, she had been obliged to spend money freely in order to “corrupt Licquet,” for Chauveau-Lagarde’s fee, for her advocate Maitre Gady de la Vigne, and for Ducolombier’s journeys to Paris and Vienna with the little girls,—­the whole outlay amounting to nearly 125,000 francs; and as the farms at Tournebut were tenantless, while Acquet retained all the estates in lower Normandy and would not allow them anything, the Marquise and her sons found their income reduced to almost nothing.  There remained not a single crown of the 25,000 francs deposited in August, 1807, with Legrand.  All had been spent on “necessaries for the prisoners, or in their interests.”

Acquet was intractable.  When the time for settling up came, he refused insolently to pay his share of the lawsuit or for his children’s education.  “Mme. de Combray, in order to carry out her own frenzied plots,” he stated, “had foolishly used her daughter’s money in paying her accomplices, and now she came and complained that Mme. Acquet lacked bread and that she supported her, besides paying for the children’s schooling....  Mme. Acquet left her husband’s house on the advice of her mother who wished to make an accomplice of her.  They took away the children, their father did not even know the place of their retreat, and the very persons who had abducted them came and asked him for the cost of their maintenance.”

This was his plea; to which the Combrays replied:  “The fee of Mme. Acquet’s lawyer, the expenses of the journey to Vienna and of the little girls’ stay in Paris that they might beg for their mother’s pardon, devolved, if not on the prisoner’s husband, at least on her young children as her heirs; and in any case Acquet ought to pay the bill.”  But the latter, who was placed in a very strong position by the services he had rendered Real and by the protection of Pontecoulant, with whom he had associated himself, replied that Chauveau-Lagarde, while pretending to plead for Mme. Acquet, had in reality only defended Mme. de Combray:  “All Rouen who heard the counsel’s speech bears witness that the daughter was sacrificed to save the mother....  The real object of their solicitude had been the Marquise.  Certainly they took very little interest in their sister, and the moment her eyes were closed in death, were base enough to ask for her funeral expenses in court, and hastened to denounce her children to the Minister of Public Affairs in order that they might be forced to pay for the sentence pronounced against their mother.”