Why, knowing his mother was no more, had he taken young de Lamotte to
Versailles? What had become of the youth? What had befallen, him? Once
on the track, the cooper with whom he had lodged on the 12th of February
was soon discovered, and an Act of Parliament ordered the exhumation of
the corpse buried under the name of Beaupre, which the cooper identified
by a shirt which he had given for the burial. Derues, confounded by the
evidence, asserted that the youth died of indigestion and venereal
disease. But the doctors again declared the presence of corrosive
sublimate and opium. All this evidence of guilt he met with assumed
resignation, lamenting incessantly for Edouard, whom he declared he had
loved as his own son. “Alas!” he said, “I see that poor boy every night!
But it softens my grief to know that he was not deprived of the last
consolations of religion! God, who sees me, and who knows my innocence,
will enlighten the magistrates, and my honour will be vindicated.”
The evidence being complete, Derues was condemned by sentence of the
Chatelet, pronounced April 30th, and confirmed by Parliament, May 5th.
We give the decree as it is found in the archives:
“This Court having considered the trial held before the Provost of
Paris, or his Deputy-Lieutenant at the Chatelet, for the satisfaction of
the aforesaid Deputy at the aforesaid Chatelet, at the request of the
Deputy of the King’s Attorney General at the aforesaid Court, summoner
and plaintiff, against Antoine-Francois Derues, and Marie-Louise
Nicolais, his wife, defendants and accused, prisoners in the prisons of
the Conciergerie of the Palace at Paris, who have appealed from the
sentence given at the aforesaid trial, the thirtieth day of April 1777,
by which the aforesaid Antoine-Francois Derues has been declared duly
attainted and convicted of attempting unlawfully to appropriate without
payment, the estate of Buissony Souef, belonging to the Sieur and Dame
de Saint Faust de Lamotte, from whom he had bought the said estate by
private contract on the twenty-second day of December 1775, and also of
having unworthily abused the hospitality shown by him since the
sixteenth day of December last towards the aforesaid Dame de Lamotte,
who arrived in Paris on the aforesaid day in order to conclude with him
the bargain agreed on in December 1775, and who, for this purpose, and
at his request, lodged with her son in the house of the said Derues, who
of premeditated design poisoned the said Dame de Lamotte, whether by a
medicine composed and prepared by him on the thirtieth day of January
last, or by the beverages and drinks administered by him after the
aforesaid medicine (he having taken the precaution to send his servant
into the country for two or three days), and to keep away strangers from
the room where the said Dame de Lamotte was lying), from the effects of
which poison the said Dame de Lamotte died on the night of the said
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