commissioner by the Parliament of Toulouse, arrived at Ganges, together
with all the officials required by his commission; but he could not see
the marquise that night, for she had dozed for some hours, and this
sleep had left a sort of torpor upon her mind, which might have impaired
the lucidity of her depositions. The next morning, without asking
anybody's opinion, M. Catalan repaired to the house of M. Desprats, and
in spite of some slight resistance on the part of those who were in
charge of her, made his way to the presence of the marquise. The dying
woman received him with an admirable presence of mind, that made M.
Catalan think there had been an intention the night before to prevent
any meeting between him and the person whom he was sent to interrogate.
At first the marquise would relate nothing that had passed, saying that
she could not at the same time accuse and forgive; but M. Catalan
brought her to see that justice required truth from her before all
things, since, in default of exact information, the law might go astray,
and strike the innocent instead of the guilty. This last argument
decided the marquise, and during the hour and a half that he spent alone
with her she told him all the details of this horrible occurrence. On
the morrow M. Catalan was to see her again; but on the morrow the
marquise was, in truth, much worse. He assured himself of this by his
own eyes, and as he knew almost all that he wished to know, did not
insist further, for fear of fatiguing her.
Indeed, from that day forward, such atrocious sufferings laid hold upon
the marquise, that notwithstanding the firmness which she had always
shown, and which she tried to maintain to the end, she could not prevent
herself from uttering screams mingled with prayers. In this manner she
spent the whole day of the 4th and part of the 5th. At last, on that
day, which was a Sunday, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, she
expired.
The body was immediately opened, and the physicians attested that the
marquise had died solely from the power of the poison, none of the seven
sword cuts which she had received being, mortal. They found the stomach
and bowels burned and the brain blackened. However, in spite of that
infernal draught, which, says the official report, "would have killed a
lioness in a few hours," the marquise struggled for nineteen days, so
much, adds an account from which we have borrowed some of these details,
so much did nature lovingly defend the beautiful body that she had taken
so much trouble to make.
M. Catalan, the very moment he was informed of the marquise's death,
having with him twelve guards belonging to the governor, ten
archers, and a poqueton,--despatched them to the marquis's castle
with orders to seize his person, that of the priest, and those of
all the servants except the groom who had assisted the marquise in
her flight. The officer in command of this little squad found the
marquis walking up and down, melancholy and greatly disturbed, in
the large hall of the castle, and when he signified to him the
order of which he was the bearer, the marquis, without making any
resistance, and as though prepared for what was happening to him,
replied that he was ready to obey, and that moreover he had always
intended to go before the Parliament to accuse the murderers of his
wife. He was asked for the key of his cabinet, which he gave up,
and the order was given to conduct him, with the other persons
accused, to the prisons of Montpellier. As soon as the marquis came
into that town, the report of his arrival spread with incredible
rapidity from street to street. Then, as it was dark, lights came
to all the windows, and people corning out with torches formed a
torchlight procession, by means of which everybody could see him.
He, like the priest, was mounted on a sorry hired horse, and
entirely surrounded by archers, to whom, no doubt, he owed his life
on this occasion; for the indignation against him was so great that
everyone was egging on his neighbours to tear him limb from limb,
which would certainly have come to pass had he not been so
carefully defended and guarded.
Immediately upon receiving news of her daughter's death, Madame de
Rossan took possession of all her property, and, making herself a party
to the case, declared that she would never desist from her suit until
her daughter's death was avenged. M. Catalan began the examination at
once, and the first interrogation to which he submitted the marquis
lasted eleven hours. Then soon afterwards he and the other persons
accused were conveyed from the prisons of Montpellier to those of
Toulouse. A crushing memorial by Madame de Rossan followed them, in
which she demonstrated with absolute clearness that the marquis had
participated in the crime of his two brothers, if not in act, in
thought, desire, and intention.
The marquis's defence was very simple: it was his misfortune to have had
two villains for brothers, who had made attempts first upon the honour
and then upon the life of a wife whom he loved tenderly; they had
destroyed her by a most atrocious death, and to crown his evil fortune,
he, the innocent, was accused of having had a hand in that death. And,
indeed, the examinations in the trial did not succeed in bringing any
evidence against the marquis beyond moral presumptions, which, it
appears, were insufficient to induce his judges to award a sentence of
death.
A verdict was consequently given, upon the 21st of August, 1667, which
sentenced the abbe and the chevalier de Ganges to be broken alive on the
wheel, the Marquis de Ganges to perpetual banishment from the kingdom,
his property to be confiscated to the king, and himself to lose his
nobility and to become incapable of succeeding to the property of his
children. As for the priest Perette, he was sentenced to the galleys for
life, after having previously been degraded from his clerical orders by
the ecclesiastical authorities.
This sentence made as great a stir as the murder had done, and gave
rise, in that period when "extenuating circumstances" had not been
invented, to long and angry discussions. Indeed, the marquis either was
guilty of complicity or was not: if he was not, the punishment was too
cruel; if he was, the sentence was too light. Such was the opinion of
Louis XIV., who remembered the beauty of the Marquis de Ganges; for,
some time afterwards, when he was believed to have forgotten this
unhappy affair, and when he was asked to pardon the Marquis de la Douze,
who was accused of having poisoned his wife, the king answered, "There
is no need for a pardon, since he belongs to the Parliament of Toulouse,
and the Marquis de Ganges did very well without one."
It may easily be supposed that this melancholy event did not pass
without inciting the wits of the day to write a vast number of verses
and bouts-rimes about the catastrophe by which one of the most beautiful
women of the country was carried off. Readers who have a taste for that
sort of literature are referred to the journals and memoirs of the
times.
Now, as our readers, if they have taken any interest at all in the
terrible tale just narrated, will certainly ask what became of the
murderers, we will proceed to follow their course until the moment when
they disappeared, some into the night of death, some into the darkness
of oblivion.
The priest Perette was the first to pay his debt to Heaven: he died at
the oar on the way from Toulouse to Brest.
The chevalier withdrew to Venice, took service in the army of the Most
Serene Republic, then at war with Turkey, and was sent to Candia, which
the Mussulmans had been besieging for twenty years; he had scarcely
arrived there when, as he was walking on the ramparts of the town with
two other officers, a shell burst at their feet, and a fragment of it
killed the chevalier without so much as touching his companions, so that
the event was regarded as a direct act of Providence.
As for the abbe, his story is longer and stranger. He parted from the
chevalier in the neighbourhood of Genoa, and crossing the whole of
Piedmont, part of Switzerland, and a corner of Germany, entered Holland
under the name of Lamartelliere. After many hesitations as to the place
where he would settle, he finally retired to Viane, of which the Count
of Lippe was at that time sovereign; there he made the acquaintance of a
gentleman who presented him to the count as a French religious refugee.
The count, even in this first conversation, found that the foreigner who
had come to seek safety in his dominions possessed not only great
intelligence but a very solid sort of intelligence, and seeing that the
Frenchman was conversant with letters and with learning, proposed that
he should undertake the education of his son, who at that time was nine
years old. Such a proposal was a stroke of fortune for the abbe de
Ganges, and he did not dream of refusing it.
The abbe de Ganges was one of those men who have great mastery over
themselves: from the moment when he saw that his interest, nay, the very
safety of his life required it, he concealed with extreme care whatever
bad passions existed within him, and only allowed his good qualities to
appear. He was a tutor who supervised the heart as sharply as the mind,
and succeeded in making of his pupil a prince so accomplished in both
respects, that the Count of Lippe, making use of such wisdom and such
knowledge, began to consult the tutor upon all matters of State, so that
in course of time the so-called Lamartelliere, without holding any
public office, had become the soul of the little principality.
The countess had a young relation living with her, who though without
fortune was of a great family, and for whom the countess had a deep
affection; it did not escape her notice that her son's tutor had
inspired this poor young girl with warmer feelings than became her high
station, and that the false Lamartelliere, emboldened by his own growing
credit, had done all he could to arouse and keep up these feelings. The
countess sent for her cousin, and having drawn from her a confession of
her love, said that she herself had indeed a great regard for her son's
governor, whom she and her husband intended to reward with pensions and
with posts for the services he had rendered to their family and to the
State, but that it was too lofty an ambition for a man whose name was
Lamartelliere, and who had no relations nor family that could be owned,
to aspire to the hand of a girl who was related to a royal house; and
that though she did not require that the man who married her cousin
should be a Bourbon, a Montmorency, or a Rohan, she did at least desire
that he should be somebody, though it were but a gentleman of Gascony or
Poitou.
The Countess of Lippe's young kinswoman went and repeated this answer,
word for word, to her lover, expecting him to be overwhelmed by it; but,
on the contrary, he replied that if his birth was the only obstacle that
opposed their union, there might be means to remove it. In fact, the
abbe, having spent eight years at the prince's court, amid the strongest
testimonies of confidence and esteem, thought himself sure enough of the
prince's goodwill to venture upon the avowal of his real name.
He therefore asked an audience of the countess, who immediately granted
it. Bowing to her respectfully, he said, "Madame, I had flattered myself
that your Highness honoured me with your esteem, and yet you now oppose
my happiness: your Highness's relative is willing to accept me as a
husband, and the prince your son authorises my wishes and pardons my
boldness; what have I done to you, madame, that you alone should be
against me? and with what can you reproach me during the eight years
that I have had the honour of serving your Highness?"
"I have nothing to reproach you with, monsieur," replied the countess:
"but I do not wish to incur reproach on my own part by permitting such a
marriage: I thought you too sensible and reasonable a man to need
reminding that, while you confined yourself to suitable requests and
moderate ambitions, you had reason to be pleased with our gratitude. Do
you ask that your salary shall be doubled? The thing is easy. Do you
desire important posts? They shall be given you; but do not, sir, so far
forget yourself as to aspire to an alliance that you cannot flatter
yourself with a hope of ever attaining."
"But, madame," returned the petitioner, "who told you that my birth was
so obscure as to debar me from all hope of obtaining your consent?"
"Why, you yourself, monsieur, I think," answered the countess in
astonishment; "or if you did not say so, your name said so for you."
"And if that name is not mine, madame?" said the abbe, growing bolder;
"if unfortunate, terrible, fatal circumstances have compelled me to take
that name in order to hide another that was too unhappily famous, would
your Highness then be so unjust as not to change your mind?"
"Monsieur," replied the countess, "you have said too much now not to go
on to the end. Who are you? Tell me. And if, as you give me to
understand, you are of good birth, I swear to you that want of fortune
shall not stand in the way."
"Alas, madame," cried the abbe, throwing himself at her feet, "my name,
I am sure, is but too familiar to your Highness, and I would willingly
at this moment give half my blood that you had never heard it uttered;
but you have said it, madame, have gone too far to recede. Well, then, I
am that unhappy abbe de Ganges whose crimes are known and of whom I have
more than once heard you speak."
"The abbe de Ganges!" cried the countess in horror,--"the abbe de
Ganges! You are that execrable abbe de Ganges whose very name makes one
shudder? And to you, to a man thus infamous, we have entrusted the
education of our only son? Oh, I hope, for all our sakes, monsieur, that
you are speaking falsely; for if you were speaking the truth I think I
should have you arrested this very instant and taken back to France to
undergo your punishment. The best thing you can do, if what you have
said to me is true, is instantly to leave not only the castle, but the
town and the principality; it will be torment enough for the rest of my
life whenever I think that I have spent seven years under the same roof
with you."
The abbe would have replied; but the countess raised her voice so much,
that the young prince, who had been won over to his tutor's interests
and who was listening at his mother's door, judged that his protege's
business was taking an unfavourable turn; and went in to try and put
things right. He found his mother so much alarmed that she drew him to
her by an instinctive movement, as though to put herself under his
protection, and beg and pray as he might; he could only obtain
permission for his tutor to go away undisturbed to any country of the
world that he might prefer, but with an express prohibition of ever
again entering the presence of the Count or the Countess of Lippe.
The abbe de Ganges withdrew to Amsterdam, where he became a teacher of
languages, and where his lady-love soon after came to him and married
him: his pupil, whom his parents could not induce, even when they told
him the real name of the false Lamartelliere, to share their horror of
him, gave him assistance as long as he needed it; and this state of
things continued until upon his wife attaining her majority he entered
into possession of some property that belonged to her. His regular
conduct and his learning, which had been rendered more solid by long and
serious study, caused him to be admitted into the Protestant consistory;
there, after an exemplary life, he died, and none but God ever knew
whether it was one of hypocrisy or of penitence.
As for the Marquis de Ganges, who had been sentenced, as we have seen,
to banishment and the confiscation of his property, he was conducted to
the frontier of Savoy and there set at liberty. After having spent two
or three years abroad, so that the terrible catastrophe in which he had
been concerned should have time to be hushed up, he came back to France,
and as nobody--Madame de Rossan being now dead--was interested in
prosecuting him, he returned to his castle at Ganges, and remained
there, pretty well hidden. M. de Baville, indeed, the Lieutenant of
Languedoc, learned that the marquis had broken from his exile; but he
was told, at the same time, that the marquis, as a zealous Catholic, was
forcing his vassals to attend mass, whatever their religion might be:
this was the period in which persons of the Reformed Church were being
persecuted, and the zeal of the marquis appeared to M. de Baville to
compensate and more than compensate for the peccadillo of which he had
been accused; consequently, instead of prosecuting him, he entered into
secret communication with him, reassuring him about his stay in France,
and urging on his religious zeal; and in this manner twelve years passed
by.
During this time the marquise's young son, whom we saw at his mother's
deathbed, had reached the age of twenty, and being rich in his father's
possessions--which his uncle had restored to him--and also by his
mother's inheritance, which he had shared with his sister, had married a
girl of good family, named Mademoiselle de Moissac, who was both rich
and beautiful. Being called to serve in the royal army, the count
brought his young wife to the castle of Ganges, and, having fervently
commended her to his father, left her in his charge.
The Marquis de Ganges was forty-two veers old, and scarcely seemed
thirty; he was one of the handsomest men living; he fell in love with
his daughter-in-law and hoped to win her love, and in order to promote
this design, his first care was to separate from her, under the excuse
of religion, a maid who had been with her from childhood and to whom she
was greatly attached.
This measure, the cause of which the young marquise did not know,
distressed her extremely. It was much against her will that she had come
to live at all in this old castle of Ganges, which had so recently been
the scene of the terrible story that we have just told. She inhabited
the suite of rooms in which the murder had been committed; her
bedchamber was the same which had belonged to the late marquise; her bed
was the same; the window by which she had fled was before her eyes; and
everything, down to the smallest article of furniture, recalled to her
the details of that savage tragedy. But even worse was her case when she
found it no longer possible to doubt her father-in-law's intentions;
when she saw herself beloved by one whose very name had again and again
made her childhood turn pale with terror, and when she was left alone at
all hours of the day in the sole company of the man whom public rumour
still pursued as a murderer. Perhaps in any other place the poor lonely
girl might have found some strength in trusting herself to God; but
there, where God had suffered one of the fairest and purest creatures
that ever existed to perish by so cruel a death, she dared not appeal to
Him, for He seemed to have turned away from this family.
She waited, therefore, in growing terror; spending her days, as much as
she could, with the women of rank who lived in the little town of
Ganges, and some of whom, eye-witnesses of her mother-in-law's murder,
increased her terrors by the accounts which they gave of it, and which
she, with the despairing obstinacy of fear, asked to hear again and
again. As to her nights, she spent the greater part of them on her
knees, and fully dressed, trembling at the smallest sound; only
breathing freely as daylight came back, and then venturing to seek her
bed for a few hours' rest.
At last the marquis's attempts became so direct and so pressing, that
the poor young woman resolved to escape at all costs from his hands. Her
first idea was to write to her father, explain to him her position and
ask help; but her father had not long been a Catholic, and had suffered
much on behalf of the Reformed religion, and on these accounts it was
clear that her letter would be opened by the marquis on pretext of
religion, and thus that step, instead of saving, might destroy her. She
had thus but one resource: her husband had always been a Catholic; her
husband was a captain of dragoons, faithful in the service of the king
and faithful in the service of God; there could be no excuse for opening
a letter to him; she resolved to address herself to him, explained the
position in which she found herself, got the address written by another
hand, and sent the letter to Montpellier, where it was posted.
The young marquis was at Metz when he received his wife's missive. At
that instant all his childish memories awoke; he beheld himself at his
dying mother's bedside, vowing never to forget her and to pray daily for
her. The image presented itself of this wife whom he adored, in the same
room, exposed to the same violence, destined perhaps to the same fate;
all this was enough to lead him to take positive action: he flung
himself into a post-chaise, reached Versailles, begged an audience of
the king, cast himself, with his wife's letter in his hand, at the feet
of Louis XIV, and besought him to compel his father to return into
exile, where he swore upon has honour that he would send him everything
he could need in order to live properly.
The king was not aware that the Marquis do Ganges had disobeyed the
sentence of banishment, and the manner in which he learned it was not
such as to make him pardon the contradiction of his laws. In consequence
he immediately ordered that if the Marquis de Ganges were found in
France he should be proceeded against with the utmost rigour.
Happily for the marquis, the Comte de Ganges, the only one of his
brothers who had remained in France, and indeed in favour, learned the
king's decision in time. He took post from Versailles, and making the
greatest haste, went to warn him of the danger that was threatening;
both together immediately left Ganges, and withdrew to Avignon. The
district of Venaissin, still belonging at that time to the pope and
being governed by a vice-legate, was considered as foreign territory.
There he found his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to
induce him to stay with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis
XIV's orders too publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much
in evidence lest evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the
little village of l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain of
Vaucluse; there he was lost sight of; none ever heard him spoken of
again, and when I myself travelled in the south of France in 1835, I
sought in vain any trace of the obscure and forgotten death which closed
so turbulent and stormy an existence.
As, in speaking of the last adventures of the Marquis de Ganges, we have
mentioned the name of Madame d'Urban, his daughter, we cannot exempt
ourselves from following her amid the strange events of her life,
scandalous though they may be; such, indeed, was the fate of this
family, that it was to occupy the attention of France through well-nigh
a century, either by its crimes or by its freaks.
On the death of the marquise, her daughter, who was barely six years
old, had remained in the charge of the dowager Marquise de Ganges, who,
when she had attained her twelfth year, presented to her as her husband
the Marquis de Perrant, formerly a lover of the grandmother herself. The
marquis was seventy years of age, having been born in the reign of Henry
IV; he had seen the court of Louis XIII and that of Louis XIV's youth,
and he had remained one of its most elegant and favoured nobles; he had
the manners of those two periods, the politest that the world has known,
so that the young girl, not knowing as yet the meaning of marriage and
having seen no other man, yielded without repugnance, and thought
herself happy in becoming the Marquise de Perrant.
The marquis, who was very rich, had quarrelled With his younger brother,
and regarded him with such hatred that he was marrying only to deprive
his brother of the inheritance that would rightfully accrue to him,
should the elder die childless. Unfortunately, the marquis soon
perceived that the step which he had taken, however efficacious in the
case of another man, was likely to be fruitless in his own. He did not,
however, despair, and waited two or three years, hoping every day that
Heaven would work a miracle in his favour; but as every day diminished
the chances of this miracle, and his hatred for his brother grew with
the impossibility of taking revenge upon him, he adopted a strange and
altogether antique scheme, and determined, like the ancient Spartans, to
obtain by the help of another what Heaven refused to himself.
The marquis did not need to seek long for the man who should give him
his revenge: he had in his house a young page, some seventeen or
eighteen years old, the son of a friend of his, who, dying without
fortune, had on his deathbed particularly commended the lad to the
marquis. This young man, a year older than his mistress, could not be
continually about her without falling passionately in love with her; and
however much he might endeavour to hide his love, the poor youth was as
yet too little practised in dissimulation to succeed iii concealing it
from the eyes of the marquis, who, after having at first observed its
growth with uneasiness, began on the contrary to rejoice in it, from the
moment when he had decided upon the scheme that we have just mentioned.