This decree becoming known, there was a tremendous crowd to see the old fellow led to the gallows.  There was a line drawn up as if for a ducal entry, and in it many more bonnets than hats.  Vieux par-Chemins was saved by a lady curious to see how this precious violator would finish his career.  She told the duke that religion demanded that he should have a fair chance.  And she dressed herself as if for a ball; she brought intentionally into evidence two hillocks of such snowy whiteness that the whitest linen neckerchief would have paled before them; indeed, these fruits of love stood out, without a wrinkle, over her corset, like two beautiful apples, and made one’s mouth water, so exquisite were they.  This noble lady, who was one of those who rouse one’s manhood, had a smile ready on her lips for the old fellow.  Vieux par-Chemins, dressed in garments of coarse cloth, more certain of being in the desired state after hanging than before it, came along between the officers of justice with a sad countenance, glancing now here and there, and seeing nothing but head-dresses; and he would he declared, have given a hundred crowns for a girl tucked up as was the cowherdess, whose charms, though they had been his ruin, he still remembered, and they might still have saved him; but, as he was old, the remembrance was not sufficiently recent.  But when, at the foot of the ladder, he saw the twin charms of the lady, and the pretty delta that their confluent rotundities produced, the sight so much excited him that his emotion was patent to the spectators.

“Make haste and see that the required conditions are fulfilled,” said he to the officers.  “I have gained my pardon but I cannot answer for my saviour.”

The lady was well pleased with this homage, which, she said, was greater than his offence.  The guards, whose business it was to proceed to a verification, believed the culprit to be the devil, because never in their wits had they seen an “I” so perpendicular as was the old man.  He was marched in triumph through the town to the palace of the duke, to whom the guards and others stated the facts.  In that period of ignorance, this affair was thought so much of that the town voted the erection of a column on the spot where the old fellow gained his pardon, and he was portrayed thereon in stone in the attitude he assumed at the sight of that honest and virtuous lady.  The statue was still to be seen when Rouen was taken by the English, and the writers of the period have included this history among the notable events of the reign.

As the town offered to supply the old man with all he required, and see to his sustenance, clothing, and amusements, the good duke arranged matters by giving the injured maiden a thousand crowns and marrying her to her seducer, who then lost his name of Vieux par-Chemins.  He was named by the duke the Sieur de Bonne-C------.  This wife was confined nine months afterwards of a perfectly formed male child,