Ere long, however, M. du Tillay contrived to trace the fugitive pair to their hiding-place. It is more than likely that he learned of it through the valet, although upon this point I cannot come at any certainty—for, at the same time, he appears to have learned the atrocious particulars of the sham marriage and to have done all in his power to bring the Marquis to justice for it. In this M. du Tillay had the powerful aid of his brother-in-law, M. Baillieu, a “Président à Mortier.” But their labours were opposed by those of Defrêne’s relatives, who were in terror lest the King should be persuaded, by the two eminent officials, to ask his Brother of England to make him a present of the Marquis, that he might inflict condign punishment upon him for his villainy. It ended in the issuing of a royal decree designed to satisfy both parties; by this decree the marriage was recognised as legal and binding upon both parties—in deference to the sincerity of Mademoiselle du Tillay’s participation in it, its fraudulent character notwithstanding—on condition of the marriage contract’s being duly signed and exchanged between the families of the bride and bridegroom. To this compromise the kindly Du Tillay gave his adhesion, and thus the evil deed of the Marquis Defrêne was righted for the time being. But not for long; soon Defrêne, now accepted as his lawful son-in-law by Du Tillay, began to weary of the bonds of matrimony, and, disappointed in the amount of cash he had hoped to extort from his father-in-law, he decided to try his luck afresh in some more lucrative quarter; to this end he made up his mind to get rid of poor Marie-Elizabeth, that he might be free to take another partner. It should not have been difficult for him, one would think, in the Paris of the later Seventeenth Century, to carry out his iniquitous design, without overmuch caution or expense; there were to be found there means notoriously at the disposal of gentlemen in Defrêne’s predicament, provided only they were able to pay the price of a “succession powder” or of a philtre indistinguishable from the purest water save in its deadly results. And yet Defrêne could not screw up his courage, all at once, to murdering his wife out of hand or of procuring her assassination. Truth to tell, he was deterred from such a course by the salutary severity of the sentence pronounced a few years earlier, in 1667, upon the murderers of the unfortunate Marquise de Gange, who had been poisoned by her brothers-in-law with the tacit approval of her unworthy husband, the latter having been condemned to perpetual banishment with the loss of his estates and to be degraded from the nobility; while the actual assassins were sentenced to be broken alive on the wheel. This wholesome fear, then, so acted upon the mind of the Marquis Defrêne as to compel him to devise a more subtle method of doing away with Marie-Elizabeth; a method as diabolical as any in all the dark records of criminal achievement.