No sooner had the count and countess seen the successive proofs of the procedure, than tenderness and natural feelings accomplished the rest.  They no longer doubted that their page was their son; they stripped him at once of his livery and gave him his rank and prerogatives, under the title of the Count de la Palice.

Meanwhile, a private person named Sequeville informed the countess that he had made a very important discovery; that a child had been baptized in 1642 at St. Jean-en-Greve, and that a woman named Marie Pigoreau had taken a leading part in the affair.  Thereupon inquiries were made, and it was discovered that this child had been nursed in the village of Torcy.  The count obtained a warrant which enabled him to get evidence before the judge of Torcy; nothing was left undone to elicit the whole truth; he also obtained a warrant through which he obtained more information, and published a monitory.  The elder of the Quinet girls on this told the Marquis de Canillac that the count was searching at a distance for things very near him.  The truth shone out with great lustre through these new facts which gushed from all this fresh information.  The child, exhibited in the presence of a legal commissary to the nurses and witnesses of Torcy, was identified, as much by the scars left by the midwife’s nails on his head, as by his fair hair and blue eyes.  This ineffaceable vestige of the woman’s cruelty was the principal proof; the witnesses testified that la Pigoreau, when she visited this child with a man who appeared to be of condition, always asserted that he was the son of a great nobleman who had been entrusted to her care, and that she hoped he would make her fortune and that of those who had reared him.

The child’s godfather, Paul Marmiou, a common labourer; the grocer Raguenet, who had charge of the two thousand livres; the servant of la Pigoreau, who had heard her say that the count was obliged to take this child; the witnesses who proved that la Pigoreau had told them that the child was too well born to wear a page’s livery, all furnished convincing proofs; but others were forthcoming.

It was at la Pigoreau’s that the Marquis de Saint-Maixent, living then at the hotel de Saint-Geran, went to see the child, kept in her house as if it were hers; Prudent Berger, the marquis’s page, perfectly well remembered la Pigoreau, and also the child, whom he had seen at her house and whose history the marquis had related to him.  Finally, many other witnesses heard in the course of the case, both before the three chambers of nobles, clergy, and the tiers etat, and before the judges of Torcy, Cusset, and other local magistrates, made the facts so clear and conclusive in favour of the legitimacy of the young count, that it was impossible to avoid impeaching the guilty parties.  The count ordered the summons in person of la Pigoreau, who had not been compromised in the original preliminary proceedings.  This drastic measure threw the intriguing woman on her beam ends, but she strove hard to right herself.