Mysteries of Police and Crime, Vol. 1 (of 3)Griffiths, Arthur
History
Mysteries of Police and Crime, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Griffiths, Arthur
Crime; Police
Next morning, however, the Comte de Montgomerie discovered that he had
been the victim of a great robbery. His strong box had been opened by a
false key, and thirteen bags of silver, amounting to 13,000 francs, and
11,000 francs in gold, had been abstracted, also a hundred louis d'or
coined in a new pattern, and a valuable pearl necklace. The police were
summoned, and their chief, the Lieutenant-General, declared that someone
resident in the house must be the thief. Suspicion seems to have
attached at once to the D'Anglades, although they readily offered to
allow their premises to be searched. The search was forthwith made, and
the whole of their boxes, the beds and cupboards, and all receptacles in
the rooms they occupied, were thoroughly ransacked. Only the garrets
remained, and D'Anglade willingly accompanied the officers thither. His
wife, being ill and weak, remained downstairs.
Here, in the garret, the searchers came upon seventy-five louis d'or of
the kind above mentioned, wrapped in a scrap of printed paper part of a
genealogical table, which Montgomerie at once identified as his. The
police now wished to fix the robbery on the D'Anglades, and their
suspicions were strengthened by the poor man's confusion when desired,
as a test, to count out the money before them all. He was trembling, a
further symptom of guilt. However, when the basement was next examined,
the part occupied by the Montgomerie servants, evidence much more
incriminatory was obtained against the latter. In the room where they
slept, five of the missing bags of silver were found, all full, and a
sixth nearly so. None of these servants was questioned, yet they were as
likely to be guilty as the accused, more so indeed. But the police
thought only of arresting the D'Anglades, one of whom was imprisoned in
the Châtelet, the other in the Fors l'Evêque prison.
The prosecution was of the most rancorous and pitiless kind. Those who
sat in the seat of justice prejudiced the case in D'Anglade's disfavour,
and, as he still protested his innocence, ordered him to suffer torture
so as to extort confession. He remained obdurate to the last, was
presently found guilty, although on this incomplete evidence, and was
sentenced to the galleys for life, and his wife to be banished from
Paris, with other penalties and disabilities. D'Anglade was condemned to
join the _chaîne_, the gang of convicts drafted to Toulon, and, having
suffered inconceivably on the road, he died of exhaustion at Marseilles.
His wife was consigned to an underground dungeon, where she was confined
of a girl, and both would have succumbed to the rigours of their
imprisonment, when suddenly the truth came out, and they were released
in time to escape death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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