at Evreux seven prisoners against whom the evidence was so well concocted that five at least were in danger of losing their heads.  But when the imperial Procurator arrived at the place, instead of accepting the work as completed, he carefully examined the papers referring to the inquiry.  Disgusted at the means used to drag confessions from the accused, and indignant that his name should have been associated with so repulsive a comedy, he asked for explanations.  Licquet attempted to brazen it out, but was scornfully told to hold his peace.  Wounded to the quick, he began a campaign of recriminations, raillery and invective against the magistrates of Eure, which was only ended by the unanimous acquittal of the seven innocent persons whom he had delivered over to justice, and whose release the Procurator himself generously demanded.

The blow fell all the heavier on Licquet as he was at the time deeply compromised in the frauds of his friend Branzon, a collector at Rouen, whose malversations had caused the ruin of Savoye-Rollin.  The prefect’s innocence was firmly established, but Branzon, who had already been imprisoned as a Chouan in the Temple, and whose history must have been a very varied one, was condemned to twelve years’ imprisonment in chains.

This also was a blow to Licquet.  Realising, during the early days of the Restoration, that the game he had played had brought him more enemies than friends, he thought it wise to leave Rouen, and like so many others lose himself among the police in Paris.  Doubtless he was not idle while he was there, and if the fire of 1871 had not destroyed the archives of the prefecture, it would have been interesting to search for traces of him.  We seem to recognise his methods in the strangely dubious affair of the false dauphin, Mathurin Bruneau.  This obscure intrigue was connected with Rouen; his friend Branzon, who was detained at Bicetre, was the manager of it.  A certain Joseph Paulin figured in it—­a strange person, who boasted of having received the son of Louis XVI at the door of the temple and, for this reason, was a partisan of two dauphins.  Joseph Paulin was, in my opinion, a very cunning detective, who was, moreover, charged with the surveillance of the believers, sincere or otherwise, in the survival of Louis XVII.  In order the better to gain their confidence, he pretended to have had a hand in the young King’s flight.  With the exception of a few plausible allegations, the accounts he gave of his wonderful adventures do not bear investigation.  What makes us think that he was Licquet’s pupil, or that at least he had some connection with the police of Rouen, is that in 1817, at the time of the Bruneau intrigue, we find him marrying the woman, Delaitre, aged forty-six, and living on an allowance from the parish and a sum left him “by a person who had died at Bicetre.”  The woman Delaitre seemed to be identical with the spy whom Licquet had so cleverly utilised.