her servants, who broke in the door.  Then she found Sainte-Croix stretched out beside the furnace, the broken glass lying by his side.  It was impossible to deceive the public as to the circumstances of this strange and sudden death:  the servants had seen the corpse, and they talked.  The commissary Picard was ordered to affix the seals, and all the widow could do was to remove the furnace and the fragments of the glass mask.

The noise of the event soon spread all over Paris.  Sainte-Croix was extremely well known, and the, news that he was about to purchase a post in the court had made him known even more widely.  Lachaussee was one of the first to learn of his master’s death; and hearing that a seal had been set upon his room, he hastened to put in an objection in these terms: 

“Objection of Lachaussee, who asserts that for seven years he was in the service of the deceased; that he had given into his charge, two years earlier, 100 pistoles and 200 white crowns, which should be found in a cloth bag under the closet window, and in the same a paper stating that the said sum belonged to him, together with the transfer of 300 livres owed to him by the late M. d’Aubray, councillor; the said transfer made by him at Laserre, together with three receipts from his master of apprenticeship, 100 livres each:  these moneys and papers he claims.”

To Lachaussee the reply was given that he must wait till the day when the seals were broken, and then if all was as he said, his property would be returned.

But Lachaussee was not the only person who was agitated about the death of Sainte-Croix.  The, marquise, who was familiar with all the secrets of this fatal closet, had hurried to the commissary as 2496 soon as she heard of the event, and although it was ten o’clock at night had demanded to speak with him.  But he had replied by his head clerk, Pierre Frater, that he was in bed; the marquise insisted, begging them to rouse him up, for she wanted a box that she could not allow to have opened.  The clerk then went up to the Sieur Picard’s bedroom, but came back saying that what the marquise demanded was for the time being an impossibility, for the commissary was asleep.  She saw that it was idle to insist, and went away, saying that she should send a man the next morning to fetch the box.  In the morning the man came, offering fifty Louis to the commissary on behalf of the marquise, if he would give her the box.  But he replied that the box was in the sealed room, that it would have to be opened, and that if the objects claimed by the marquise were really hers, they would be safely handed over to her.  This reply struck the marquise like a thunderbolt.  There was no time to be lost:  hastily she removed from the rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, where her town house was, to Picpus, her country place.  Thence she posted the same evening to Liege, arriving the next morning, and retired to a convent.