The case came on for trial before the Civil Tribunal of St. Fargeau, where the commissary of the Republic stated it fully, and with a strong bias against the claimant. As he put it: "One side asked for the restitution of a name, a fortune, of which she had been despoiled with a cruelty that greatly added to the alleged crime; the other charged the claimant with being an impostor seeking a position to which she had no right whatever." Between these two alternatives the court must decide, and either way a crime must be laid bare. Was it all a fraud? The defence set up was certainly strong. It rested first on the death of the Marquise. This was supported by the certificates of the doctors who attended her in her last illness, documents attested by the municipality of Orleans, which bore witness to both illness and death. Another document testified that extreme unction had been administered, and that the burial had been carried out in the presence of many relatives. The family went into mourning, and the memory of the Marquise was revered among the honoured dead. There was next the suspicious commencement of the claim: a letter addressed by the claimant to the curé of Champignelles, two years and a half after the death above recorded, asking for a baptismal certificate and another of marriage. This letter was full of faults of spelling and grammar, and was signed Anne Louis Adelaide, formerly Marquise de Grainville, names that were not exact. It was asserted that the real Marquise was a lady of great intelligence, cultured, highly educated as became her situation, knowing several languages, and a good musician, and especially that she was well able to write prettily and correctly. Then for the identity of the claimant with Anne Buirette there was seemingly conclusive evidence, the strongest part of it being her own statement of the date on which she was received at the Salpêtrière. All the story of her release through the appeal to the Duchess of Polignac was declared to be untrue. The past life of this Anne Buirette was raked up, and it was demonstrated that she was a swindler who had been sent to gaol for an ingenious fraud which may be narrated here. When in 1785, on the occasion of the birth of a royal prince, the queen wished charitably to redeem a number of the pledges in the Mont de Piété, the woman Buirette, being unauthorised, drove round in a carriage, calling herself a royal attendant, to collect pawn tickets from poor people. She recovered the sums necessary to redeem the pledges and applied the money to her own use. For this she was sent to the Salpêtrière, from which she was released in October, 1789, and not, as she stated, on the day of the barricades.