The evening came:  both waited with the same impatience, but with very different hopes.  The marquise found Desgrais at the appointed spot:  he gave her his arm then holding her hand in his own, he gave a sign, the archers appeared, the lover threw off his mask, Desgrais was confessed, and the marquise was his prisoner.  Desgrais left her in the hands of his men, and hastily made his way to the convent.  Then, and not before, he produced his order from the Sixty, by means of which he opened the marquise’s room.  Under her bed he found a box, which he seized and sealed; then he went back to her, and gave the order to start.

When the marquise saw the box in the hands of Desgrais, she at first appeared stunned; quickly recovering, she claimed a paper inside it which contained her confession.  Desgrais refused, and as he turned round for the carriage to come forward, she tried to choke herself by swallowing a pin.  One of the archers, called Claude, Rolla, perceiving her intention, contrived to get the pin out of her mouth.  After this, Desgrais commanded that she should be doubly watched.

They stopped for supper.  An archer called Antoine Barbier was present at the meal, and watched so that no knife or fork should be put on the table, or any instrument with which she could wound or kill herself.  The marquise, as she put her glass to her mouth as though to drink, broke a little bit off with her teeth; but the archer saw it in time, and forced her to put it out on her plate.  Then she promised him, if he would save her, that she would make his fortune.  He asked what he would have to do for that.  She proposed that he should cut Desgrais’ throat; but he refused, saying that he was at her service in any other way.  So she asked him for pen and paper, and wrote this letter: 

“Dear Theria,—­I am in the hands of Desgrais, who is taking me by road from Liege to Paris.  Come quickly and save me.”

Antoine Barbier took the letter, promising to deliver it at the right address; but he gave it to Desgrais instead.  The next day, finding that this letter had not been pressing enough, she wrote him another, saying that the escort was only eight men, who could be easily overcome by four or five determined assailants, and she counted on him to strike this bald stroke.  But, uneasy when she got no answer and no result from her letters, she despatched a third missive to Theria.  In this she implored him by his own salvation, if he were not strong enough to attack her escort and save her, at least to kill two of the four horses by which she was conveyed, and to profit by the moment of confusion to seize the chest and throw it into the fire; otherwise, she declared, she was lost.  Though Theria received none of these letters, which were one by one handed over by Barbier to Desgrais, he all the same did go to Maestricht, where the marquise was to pass, of his own accord.  There he tried to bribe the archers, offering much as 10,000 livres,