Only a few, the oldest men and the politicians of the village, forgot their solicitude in regard to the crops to remember this episode. Sometimes, during the long winter evenings, when they had gathered at the Boeuf Couronne, they laid down their greasy cards and gravely discussed the events of the past years. They never failed to remark that almost all the actors in that bloody drama at Montaignac had, in common parlance, “come to a bad end.” Victors and vanquished seemed to be pursued by the same inexorable fatality. Look at the names already upon the fatal list! Lacheneur, beheaded. Chanlouineau, shot. Marie-Anne, poisoned. Chupin, the traitor, assassinated. The Marquis de Courtornieu lived, or rather survived, but death would have seemed a mercy in comparison with such total annihilation of intelligence. He had fallen below the level of the brute, which is, at least, endowed with instinct. Since the departure of his daughter he had been cared for by two servants, who did not allow him to give them much trouble, and when they desired to go out they shut him up, not in his chamber, but in the cellar, to prevent his ravings and shrieks from being heard from without. If people supposed for awhile that the Sairmeuse would escape the fate of the others, they were mistaken. It was not long before the curse fell upon them. One fine morning in the month of December, the duke left the chateau to take part in a wolf-hunt in the neighborhood. At nightfall, his horse returned, panting, covered with foam, and riderless. What had become of its master? A search was instituted at once, and all night long twenty men, bearing torches, wandered through the woods, shouting and calling at the top of their voices. Five days went by, and the search for the missing man was almost abandoned, when a shepherd lad, pale with fear, came to the chateau one morning to tell them that he had discovered, at the base of a precipice, the bloody and mangled body of the Duc de Sairmeuse. It seemed strange that such an excellent rider should have met with such a fate. There might have been some doubt as to its being an accident, had it not been for the explanation given by the grooms. “The duke was riding an exceedingly vicious beast,” said these men. “She was always taking fright and shying at everything.” The following week Jean Lacheneur left the neighborhood. The conduct of this singular man had caused much comment. When Marie-Anne died, he at first refused his inheritance. “I wish nothing that came to her through Chanlouineau!” he said everywhere, thus calumniating the memory of his sister as he had calumniated her when alive. Then, after a short absence, and without any apparent reason, he suddenly changed his mind.