But, while denouncing his accomplices, he, to the mortification of Richelieu, kept faith with Madame de Chevreuse, and neither before the commission, nor in the private examinations to which he was subjected, could anything compromising to the duchess be extracted from him. His passion for this woman who had lured him to his destruction was as potent as ever, and from his gloomy dungeon he addressed to her letters filled with extravagant expressions of adoration, which the lovers of those days were wont to employ, but which come strangely from a man menaced by a traitor’s death.[43] Madame de Chevreuse, not unnaturally, refused to incriminate herself in writing, and though she sent, on more than one occasion, verbal messages to the prisoner, these do not appear to have reached him. Anyway, Richelieu, who was particularly anxious to secure evidence against the duchess, whom he knew to be one of his most dangerous enemies, contrived to persuade Chalais that she had forgotten her hapless admirer and was occupied with other love-affairs, and that she had not scrupled to save herself at his expense. Exasperated to the last degree against the woman who, he believed, had repaid his devotion by such base ingratitude, and in the delusive hope that further important revelations might induce the Cardinal to spare his life, the wretched Chalais was gradually led to make the gravest accusations against the duchess. It was all useless. So soon as Richelieu judged that he had extracted from the prisoner all the information he could hope, the proceedings were hurried on, and on August 18 the court pronounced the inevitable sentence, and “declared Henri de Talleyrand, Sieur de Chalais, attainted and convicted of the crime of _lèse-majesté_”; for reparation whereof it condemned him to be taken by the executioner of the High Justice, and conducted, with bare head, to the Place de Bouffay of Nantes, and there, on a scaffold which should be erected for that purpose, to have his head struck off and placed on a pike on the Porte de Sauvetour, his body to be quartered and fastened to gibbets at the four principal avenues of the said town, and that, before execution, he should be subjected to torture for the revelation of his accomplices. The court further declared all his property forfeited to the King, his posterity ignoble and _roturière_ and deprived of all the privileges of the nobility, and ordered his residences to be demolished and his woods cut down to within a man’s height of the ground. This barbarous sentence was modified by the King, who, “yielding to the very humble prayer of the Dame de Chalais, mother of the said Chalais, and to several of his faithful and affectionate subjects, to whom the said Chalais was related,” remitted all that was uselessly cruel, and directed that, after decapitation, the body should be given to his mother for burial in holy ground. His Majesty also annulled the attainder.