From the Presidial Court he was brought before the Duke of Berwick, who addressed several questions to him, which Catinat answered; he then told the duke he had something of importance to impart to him and to him alone.  The duke was not very anxious for a tete-a-tete with Catinat; however, having ordered his hands to be securely bound, and telling Sandricourt not to go away, he consented to hear what the prisoner had to say.

Catinat then, in the presence of the duke and Sandricourt, proposed that an exchange of prisoners should be made, the Marechal de Tallard, who was a prisoner of war in England, being accepted in his place.  Catinat added that if this offer was not accepted, the marechal would meet the same treatment from the English as might be meted out to him, Catinat, in France.  The duke, full of the aristocratic ideas to which he was born, found the proposal insolent, and said, “If that is all you have to propose, I can assure you that your hours are numbered.”

Thereupon Catinat was promptly sent back to the palace, where truly his trial did not occupy much time.  That of the three others was already finished, and soon his was also at an end, and it only remained to pronounce sentence on all four.  Catinat and Ravanel, as the most guilty, were condemned to be burnt at the stake.  Some of the councillors thought Catinat should have been torn apart by four horses, but the majority were for the stake, the agony lasting longer, being more violent and more exquisite than in the of other case.

Villars and Jonquet were sentenced to be broken on the wheel alive—­the only difference between them being that Jonquet was to be to taken while still living and thrown into the fire lit round Catinat and Ravael.  It was also ordered that the four condemned men before their execution should be put to the torture ordinary and extraordinary.  Catinat, whose temper was fierce, suffered with courage, but cursed his torturers.  Ravanel bore all the torments that could be inflicted on him with a fortitude that was more than human, so that the torturers were exhausted before he was.  Jonquet spoke little, and the revelations he made were of slight importance.  Villas confessed that the conspirators had the intention of carrying off the duke and M. de Baville when they were out walking or driving, and he added that this plot had been hatched at the house of a certain Boeton de Saint-Laurent-d’Aigozre, at Milhaud, in Rouergue.

Meanwhile all this torturing and questioning had taken so much time that when the stake and the scaffold were ready it was almost dark, so that the duke put off the executions until the next day, instead of carrying them out by torchlight.  Brueys says that this was done in order that the most disaffected amongst the fanatics should not be able to say that it was not really Catinat, Ravanel, Villas, and Jonquet who had been executed but some other unknown men; but it is more probable that the duke and Baville were afraid of riots, as was proved by their ordering the scaffold and the stake to be erected at the end of the Cours and opposite the glacis of the fortress, so that the garrison might be at hand in case of any disturbance.