He was a man about town at that period, and was making love to the demoiselle Jacqueline de la Garde; he had succeeded in gaining her affections, and brought matters to such a point that she no longer refused her favours except on the grounds of her pregnancy and the danger of an indiscretion.  The marquis then offered to introduce to her a matron who could deliver women without the pangs of labour, and who had a very successful practice.  The same Jacqueline de la Garde further gave evidence at the trial that M. de Saint-Maixent had often boasted, as of a scientific intrigue, of having spirited away the son of a governor of a province and grandson of a marshal of France; that he spoke of the Marchioness de Bouille, said that he had made her rich, and that it was to him she owed her great wealth; and further, that one day having taken her to a pretty country seat which belonged to him, she praised its beauty, saying “c’etait un beau lieu”; he replied by a pun on a man’s name, saying that he knew another Baulieu who had enabled him to make a fortune of five hundred thousand crowns.  He also said to Jadelon, sieur de la Barbesange, when posting with him from Paris, that the Countess de Saint-Geran had been delivered of a son who was in his power.

The marquis had not seen Madame de Bouille for a long time; a common danger reunited them.  They had both learned with terror the presence of Henri at the hotel de Saint-Geran.  They consulted about this; the marquis undertook to cut the danger short.  However, he dared put in practice nothing overtly against the child, a matter still more difficult just then, inasmuch as some particulars of his discreditable adventures had leaked out, and the Saint-Geran family received him more than coldly.

Baulieu, who witnessed every day the tenderness of the count and countess for the boy Henri, had been a hundred times on the point of giving himself up and confessing everything.  He was torn to pieces with remorse.  Remarks escaped him which he thought he might make without ulterior consequences; seeing the lapse of time, but they were noted and commented on.  Sometimes he would say that he held in his hand the life and honour of Madame the Marchioness de Bouille; sometimes that the count and countess had more reasons than they knew of for loving Henri.  One day he put a case of conscience to a confessor, thus:  “Whether a man who had been concerned in the abduction of a child could not satisfy his conscience by restoring him to his father and mother without telling them who he was?” What answer the confessor made is not known, but apparently it was not what the major-domo wanted.  He replied to a magistrate of Moulins, who congratulated him on having a nephew whom his masters overburdened with kind treatment, that they ought to love him, since he was nearly related to them.