The _lettre de cachet_ was granted on September 3; but it was not the Marshal's intention to allow it to be executed at once. Three days later, the police-agent, Meusnier, acting under his instructions, conducted the unconscious instrument of his employer's villainy to a café adjoining the Comédie-Italienne, where Justine was at that moment performing. Here, having been well primed with his favourite vintage, the wretched old man proceeded to regale all whom he could persuade to listen to him with a harrowing account of his daughter's wickedness and the terrible things he had suffered at her hands. Finally, he succeeded in working himself into such a frenzy of indignation that he could with difficulty be dissuaded from rushing into the theatre and making a public demonstration against her. "This manœuvre," writes Meusnier cynically, "was merely intended to induce the public to believe that the Marshal had no share in the coup which he was planning, namely, to cause the Chantilly to be shut up." Next day, accompanied by a priest, who was well known as a frequenter of the Jesuit College in the Rue Saint-Jacques, M. Duronceray called upon the leading members of the Comédie-Italienne, to whom he related his sad experiences. Mlle. Coraline, Justine's rival in the affections of the public, was so touched by his account of her colleague's perfidy that she could not restrain her emotion, whereupon all who were present followed her example, and the room resounded with lamentations. Justine would not appear to have been greatly disconcerted by the manœuvres of M. Duronceray and his sympathisers; secure in the favour of a public always very indulgent towards the moral shortcomings of its idols, she probably felt that she could afford to ignore the gossip of the _coulisses_. The Marshal, however, pretending to have forgiven her for her recent rebuff, now sent to warn her that her father was endeavouring to obtain a _lettre de cachet_ to have her shut up, and advised her to leave Paris until the storm had blown over. His object was to induce her to rejoin her husband, when he intended to have them both arrested. In this, as we shall see, he was only partially successful.