The accusation hanging over the head of Maitre Quennebert was a very
serious one, threatening his life, if proved. But he was not uneasy; he
knew himself in possession of facts which would enable him to refute it
triumphantly.
The platonic love of Angelique de Guerchi for the handsome Chevalier de
Moranges had resulted, as we have seen, in no practical wrong to the Duc
de Vitry. After her reconciliation with her lover, brought about by the
eminently satisfactory explanations she was able to give of her conduct,
which we have already laid before our readers, she did not consider it
advisable to shut her heart to his pleadings much longer, and the
consequence was that at the end of a year she found herself in a
condition which it was necessary to conceal from everyone. To Angelique
herself, it is true, the position was not new, and she felt neither
grief nor shame, regarding the coming event as a means of making her
future more secure by forging a new link in the chain which bound the
duke to her. But he, sure that but for himself Angelique would never
have strayed from virtue's path, could not endure the thought of her
losing her reputation and becoming an object for scandal to point her
finger at; so that Angelique, who could not well seem less careful of
her good name than he, was obliged to turn his song of woe into a duet,
and consent to certain measures being taken.
One evening, therefore, shortly before Maitre Quennebert's marriage, the
fair lady set out, ostensibly on a journey which was to last a fortnight
or three weeks. In reality she only made a circle in a post-chaise round
Paris, which she re-entered at one of the barriers, where the duke
awaited her with a sedan-chair. In this she was carried to the very
house to which de Jars had brought his pretended nephew after the duel.
Angelique, who had to pay dearly for her errors, remained there only
twenty-four hours, and then left in her coffin, which was hidden in a
cellar under the palace of the Prince de Conde, the body being covered
with quicklime. Two days after this dreadful death, Commander de Jars
presented himself at the fatal house, and engaged a room in which he
installed the chevalier.
This house, which we are about to ask the reader to enter with us, stood
at the corner of the rue de la Tixeranderie and the rue Deux-Portes.
There was nothing in the exterior of it to distinguish it from any
other, unless perhaps two brass plates, one of which bore the words
MARIE LEROUX-CONSTANTIN, WIDOW, CERTIFIED MIDWIFE, and the other CLAUDE
PERREGAUD, SURGEON. These plates were affixed to the blank wall in the
rue de la Tixeranderie, the windows of the rooms on that side looking
into the courtyard. The house door, which opened directly on the first
steps of a narrow winding stair, was on the other side, just beyond the
low arcade under whose vaulted roof access was gained to that end of the
rue des Deux-Portes. This house, though dirty, mean, and out of repair,
received many wealthy visitors, whose brilliant equipages waited for
them in the neighbouring streets. Often in the night great ladies
crossed its threshold under assumed names and remained there for several
days, during which La Constantin and Claude Perregaud, by an infamous
use of their professional knowledge, restored their clients to an
outward appearance of honour, and enabled them to maintain their
reputation for virtue. The first and second floors contained a dozen
rooms in which these abominable mysteries were practised. The large
apartment, which served as waiting and consultation room, was oddly
furnished, being crowded with objects of strange and unfamiliar form. It
resembled at once the operating-room of a surgeon, the laboratory of a
chemist and alchemist, and the den of a sorcerer. There, mixed up
together in the greatest confusion, lay instruments of all sorts,
caldrons and retorts, as well as books containing the most absurd
ravings of the human mind. There were the twenty folio volumes of
Albertus Magnus; the works of his disciple, Thomas de Cantopre, of
Alchindus, of Averroes, of Avicenna, of Alchabitius, of David de
Plaine-Campy, called L'Edelphe, surgeon to Louis XIII and author of the
celebrated book The Morbific Hydra Exterminated by the Chemical
Hercules. Beside a bronze head, such as the monk Roger Bacon possessed,
which answered all the questions that were addressed to it and foretold
the future by means of a magic mirror and the combination of the rules
of perspective, lay an eggshell, the same which had been used by Caret,
as d'Aubigne tells us, when making men out of germs, mandrakes, and
crimson silk, over a slow fire. In the presses, which had sliding-doors
fastening with secret springs, stood Jars filled with noxious drugs, the
power of which was but too efficacious; in prominent positions, facing
each other, hung two portraits, one representing Hierophilos, a Greek
physician, and the other Agnodice his pupil, the first Athenian midwife.
For several years already La Constantin and Claude Perregaud had carried
on their criminal practices without interference. A number of persons
were of course in the secret, but their interests kept them silent, and
the two accomplices had at last persuaded themselves that they were
perfectly safe. One evening, however, Perregaud came home, his face
distorted by terror and trembling in every limb. He had been warned
while out that the suspicions of the authorities had been aroused in
regard to him and La Constantin. It seemed that some little time ago,
the Vicars-General had sent a deputation to the president of the chief
court of justice, having heard from their priests that in one year alone
six hundred women had avowed in the confessional that they had taken
drugs to prevent their having children. This had been sufficient to
arouse the vigilance of the police, who had set a watch on Perregaud's
house, with the result that that very night a raid was to be made on it.
The two criminals took hasty counsel together, but, as usual under such
circumstances, arrived at no practical conclusions. It was only when the
danger was upon them that they recovered their presence of mind. In the
dead of night loud knocking at the street door was heard, followed by
the command to open in the name of the king.
"We can yet save ourselves!" exclaimed surgeon, with a sudden flash of
inspiration.
Rushing into the room where the pretended chevalier was lying, he called
out--
"The police are coming up! If they discover your sex you are lost, and
so am I. Do as I tell you."
At a sign from him, La Constantin went down and opened the door. While
the rooms on the first floor were being searched, Perregaud made with a
lancet a superficial incision in the chevalier's right arm, which gave
very little pain, and bore a close resemblance to a sword-cut. Surgery
and medicine were at that time so inextricably involved, required such
apparatus, and bristled with such scientific absurdities, that no
astonishment was excited by the extraordinary collection of instruments
which loaded the tables and covered the floors below: even the titles of
certain treatises which there had been no time to destroy, awoke no
suspicion.
Fortunately for the surgeon and his accomplice, they had only one
patient--the chevalier--in their house when the descent was made. When
the chevalier's room was reached, the first thing which the officers of
the law remarked were the hat, spurred boots, and sword of the patient.
Claude Perregaud hardly looked up as the room was invaded; he only made
a sign to those--who came in to be quiet, and went on dressing the
wound. Completely taken in, the officer in command merely asked the name
of the patient and the cause of the wound. La Constantin replied that
it' was the young Chevalier de Moranges, nephew of Commander de Jars,
who had had an affair of honour that same night, and being sightly
wounded had been brought thither by his uncle hardly an hour before.
These questions and the apparently trustworthy replies elicited by them
being duly taken down, the uninvited visitors retired, having discovered
nothing to justify their visit.
All might have been well had there been nothing the matter but the wound
on the chevalier's sword-arm. But at the moment when Perregaud gave it
to him the poisonous nostrums employed by La Constantin were already
working in his blood. Violent fever ensued, and in three days the
chevalier was dead. It was his funeral which had met Quennebert's
wedding party at the church door.
Everything turned out as Quennebert had anticipated. Madame Quennebert,
furious at the deceit which had been practised on her, refused to listen
to her husband's justification, and Trumeau, not letting the grass grow
under his feet, hastened the next day to launch an accusation of bigamy
against the notary; for the paper which had been found in the nuptial
camber was nothing less than an attested copy of a contract of marriage
concluded between Quennebert and Josephine-Charlotte Boullenois. It was
by the merest chance that Trumeau had come on the record of the
marriage, and he now challenged his rival to produce a certificate of
the death of his first wife. Charlotte Boullenois, after two years of
marriage, had demanded a deed of separation, which demand Quennebert had
opposed. While the case was going on she had retired to the convent of
La Raquette, where her intrigue with de Jars began. The commander easily
induced her to let herself be carried off by force. He then concealed
his conquest by causing her to adopt male attire, a mode of dress which
accorded marvellously well with her peculiar tastes and rather masculine
frame. At first Quennebert had instituted an active but fruitless search
for his missing wife, but soon became habituated to his state of
enforced single blessedness, enjoying to the full the liberty it brought
with it. But his business had thereby suffered, and once having made the
acquaintance of Madame Rapally, he cultivated it assiduously, knowing
her fortune would be sufficient to set him straight again with the
world, though he was obliged to exercise the utmost caution and reserve
in has intercourse with her, as she on her side displayed none of these
qualities. At last, however, matters came to such a pass that he must
either go to prison or run the risk of a second marriage. So he
reluctantly named a day for the ceremony, resolving to leave Paris with
Madame Rapally as soon as he had settled with his creditors.
In the short interval which ensued, and while Trumeau was hugging the
knowledge of the discovery he had made, a stroke of luck had brought the
pretended chevalier to La Constantin. As Quennebert had kept an eye on
de Jars and was acquainted with all his movements, he was aware of
everything that happened at Perregaud's, and as Charlotte's death
preceded his second marriage by one day, he knew that no serious
consequences would ensue from the legal proceedings taken against him.
He produced the declarations made by Mademoiselle de Guerchi and the
commander, and had the body exhumed. Extraordinary and improbable as his
defence appeared at first to be, the exhumation proved the truth of his
assertions. These revelations, however, drew the eye of justice again on
Perregaud and his partner in crime, and this time their guilt was
brought home to them. They were condemned by parliamentary decree to "be
hanged by the neck till they were dead, on a gallows erected for that
purpose at the cross roads of the Croix-du-Trahoir; their bodies to
remain there for twenty-four hours, then to be cut down and brought back
to Paris, where they were to be exposed an a gibbet," etc., etc.
It was proved that they had amassed immense fortunes in the exercise of
their infamous calling. The entries in the books seized at their house,
though sparse, would have led, if made public, to scandals, involving
many in high places; it was therefore judged best to limit the
accusation to the two deaths by blood-poisoning of Angelique de Querchi
and Charlotte Boullenois.
----