"In the _residenz_, the Princess von Rosenthurm started the hypothesis, that the pretended Herr von Krczinski, from Kwicziczwo, had been really the Count Victorin; and was the more inclined to this belief, on account of the resemblance that she had found between this pretender and Francesco, of whose guilt no one now entertained any doubt. The story of the Prince's forester, describing a maniac, who had wandered about in this forest, and afterwards lived in his house, almost sanctioned the hypothesis. The madman had been recognized as Medardus. Victorin, in order to possess himself of his tunic, had cast him down into the abyss below the Devil's Chair. Here, by some chance or other, he had not been killed in the fall, but only wounded on the head. The pain of his wound, with hunger and thirst, made him delirious; and he ran about, perhaps obtaining a morsel of food now and then from some compassionate countryman, and half clothed with miserable rags, till he was kindly received into the house of the forester. "Two things, however, remained here inexplicable, namely, how this Medardus could have run away to such a distance out of the mountains without being arrested, and how, even in his lucid intervals, he should confess to the judges and the physician crimes which he had never committed. Hereupon some individuals insisted that these lucid intervals were delusive--that he never had been free from his madness, and that as there are no limits to the varieties of that malady, it was possible that he had, by the force of his own perverted imagination, invented all the circumstances which he related, and that the belief of them was the one, fixed, and obstinate idea, (the characteristic of insanity,) which never left him. "The judge of the criminal court, on the other hand, (whose wisdom was held in great reverence,) declared that the pretended Herr von Krczinski was not only no Pole, but also no count, and certainly not the Count Victorin. Moreover, that the monk assuredly was, and continued mad on every occasion, on which account the Court had intended that his sentence should be that of constant imprisonment, in order that he might be prevented from committing more crimes; but the Prince, who was much shocked by the calamities brought on the family of the Baron von F----, changed this decision into that of execution on the scaffold.