Vauthier, Chaussard the elder, Pannier, the widow Lechantre, Mallet, all herein named and described, and arraigned before this court; also Boislaurier, Dubut, Courceuil, Bruce, the younger Chaussard, Chargegrain, and the girl Godard,—­these latter being absent and fugitives from justice,—­are or are not guilty of the crimes charged in this indictment.

Done at Caen, this 1st of December, 180-.

(Signed) Baron Bourlac,
Attorney-General.

X

PRAY FOR THOSE WHO DESPITEFULLY USE YOU AND PERSECUTE YOU

This legal paper, much shorter and more imperative than such indictments are these days, when they are far more detailed and more precise, especially as to the antecedent life of accused persons, affected Godefroid deeply.  The dryness of the statement in which the official pen narrated in red ink the principal details of the affair stirred his imagination.  Concise, abbreviated narratives are to some minds texts into the hidden meaning of which they love to burrow.

In the middle of the night, aided by the silence, by the darkness, by the terrible relation intimated by the worthy Alain between the facts of that document and Madame de la Chanterie, Godefroid applied all the forces of his intellect to decipher the dreadful theme.

Evidently the name Lechantre stood for la Chanterie; in all probably the aristocracy of the name was intentionally thus concealed during the Revolution and under the Empire.

Godefroid saw, in imagination, the landscape and the scenes where this drama had taken place.  The forms and faces of the accomplices passed before his eyes.  He pictured to himself not “one Rifoel” but a Chevalier du Vissard, a young man something like the Fergus of Walter Scott, a French Jacobite.  He developed the romance of an ardent young girl grossly deceived by an infamous husband (a style of romance then much the fashion); loving the young and gallant leader of a rebellion against the Empire; giving herself, body and soul, like another Diana Vernon, to the conspiracy, and then, once launched on that fatal incline, unable to stop herself.  Had she rolled to the scaffold?

The young man saw in his own mind a whole world, and he peopled it.  He wandered in the shade of those Norman groves; he saw the Breton hero and Madame Bryond among the gorse and shrubbery; he inhabited the old chateau of Saint-Savin; he shared in the diverse acts of all those many personages, picturing to himself the notary, the merchant, and those bold Chouans.  His mind conceived the state of that wild country where lingered still the memory of the Comtes de Bauvan, de Longuy, the exploits of Marche-a-Terre, the massacre at La Vivetiere, the death of the Marquis de Montauran—­of whose prowess Madame de la Chanterie had told him.

This sort of vision of things, of men, of places was rapid.  When he remembered that this drama must relate to the dignified, noble, deeply religious old woman whose virtue was acting upon him so powerfully as to be upon the point of metamorphosing him, Godefroid was seized with a sort of terror, and turned hastily to the second document which Monsieur Alain had given him.  This was entitled:—­