The examining magistrate, on receipt of this letter, confronted Monsieur Rochette with Monsieur Pichereau, and told the financier the exact terms of Monsieur Pichereau’s claim. Monsieur Pichereau claimed to have bought Nerva Copper Mines of the B series, which proved to be unnegotiable, and he put in nine documents to prove it. Rochette declared that the nine documents proved nothing, that before his arrest an attempt had been made to blackmail him, that these same documents had been offered him on that occasion for £3200, and that he had refused the offer. In proof of this, he stated that copies of Monsieur Pichereau’s nine documents would be found among his (Rochette’s) papers in the private desk in his office. In connexion with these statements, it was proved that a number of attempts _had_ been made to blackmail Rochette, and that he had always refused any advances of the kind. It is needless to say that the arrest of this man and the closing of the banks and shutting down of mines and other enterprises in which he was interested had a disastrous effect on the market. All the money, and there was a great deal of money in Rochette’s safes, had been sequestrated by the legal authorities, and therefore of course no payments could be made. To put one case only, eighteen hundred men and women in the employ of the Syndicat Minier were clamouring for wages which could not be given them. Eventually the court decided that liquidators should be appointed who should pay out money from a reserve fund of £110,000 which the Crédit Minier placed in the liquidator’s hands for this purpose. In July 1908, Rochette was declared a bankrupt. He resisted vigorously, and even now many people are inclined to doubt whether the declaration of his bankruptcy was legally justifiable. But the whole matter of Rochette’s financial position soon became involved in such a tangle of legal procedure that it is quite impossible to say whether Rochette could have got out of his difficulties if he had been left alone, or whether he could not. It is noteworthy at all events that a very large percentage was paid to his creditors. On the other hand, the Rochette enterprises were wildly speculative, and new flotations were frequently used to fill up financial gaps in former enterprises which were unsuccessful. One thing is very certain, and was proved during the parliamentary inquiry into the beginnings of the Rochette affair. A large number of people, Monsieur Gaudrion among them, had been keenly interested in the downfall of Rochette and had sold quantities of the shares in his companies for a fall some time before it came. Most of them had lost money. Gaudrion, on March 16, that is to say a week before Rochette’s arrest, had been severely bitten by a sudden upward jump, or “‘bear’ squeeze,” as it is called, on the Bourse, and was forced by the rapid rise of Rochette’s shares to buy back with a loss of nearly £5000.