brothers were ill.  From the very first consultation in the lieutenant’s case the doctors entertained no hope.  The symptoms were the same as those to which his father had succumbed, and they supposed it was an unknown disease in the family.  They gave up all hope of recovery.  Indeed, his state grew worse and worse; he felt an unconquerable aversion for every kind of food, and the vomiting was incessant.  The last three days of his life he complained that a fire was burning in his breast, and the flames that burned within seemed to blaze forth at his eyes, the only part of his body that appeared to live, so like a corpse was all the rest of him.  On the 17th of June 1670 he died:  the poison had taken seventy-two days to complete its work.  Suspicion began to dawn:  the lieutenant’s body was opened, and a formal report was drawn up.  The operation was performed in the presence of the surgeons Dupre and Durant, and Gavart, the apothecary, by M. Bachot, the brothers’ private physician.  They found the stomach and duodenum to be black and falling to pieces, the liver burnt and gangrened.  They said that this state of things must have been produced by poison, but as the presence of certain bodily humours sometimes produces similar appearances, they durst not declare that the lieutenant’s death could not have come about by natural causes, and he was buried without further inquiry.

It was as his private physician that Dr. Bachot had asked for the autopsy of his patient’s brother.  For the younger brother seemed to have been attacked by the same complaint, and the doctor hoped to find from the death of the one some means for preserving the life of the other.  The councillor was in a violent fever, agitated unceasingly both in body and mind:  he could not bear any position of any kind for more than a few minutes at a time.  Bed was a place of torture; but if he got up, he cried for it again, at least for a change of suffering.  At the end of three months he died.  His stomach, duodenum, and liver were all in the same corrupt state as his brother’s, and more than that, the surface of his body was burnt away.  This, said the doctors; was no dubious sign of poisoning; although, they added, it sometimes happened that a ‘cacochyme’ produced the same effect.  Lachaussee was so far from being suspected, that the councillor, in recognition of the care he had bestowed on him in his last illness, left him in his will a legacy of a hundred crowns; moreover, he received a thousand francs from Sainte-Croix and the marquise.

So great a disaster in one family, however, was not only sad but alarming.  Death knows no hatred:  death is deaf and blind, nothing more, and astonishment was felt at this ruthless destruction of all who bore one name.  Still nobody suspected the true culprits, search was fruitless, inquiries led nowhere:  the marquise put on mourning for her brothers, Sainte-Croix continued in his path of folly, and all things went