Among his other employments of a delicate kind, Blassemare had charge of all arrangements affecting this person, of whom, for every reason, Le Prun hated even to hear. He paid, therefore, whatever was demanded on this account, with the sole proviso that her name should never be mentioned. On her removal, about a year since, from the country-house where she had been for so long a scarcely unwilling prisoner, to the vast and melancholy Hotel St. Maurice, which had lately fallen into the hands of M. Le Prun, an accident to the carriage obliged them to arrest their progress for an hour at the village of Charrebourg. She was brought into the park meanwhile, and there met with Gabriel, and subsequently, as the reader may recollect, with Lucille. Her she had armed with the hateful relic of her husband's uncompleted crime, conscious that its exhibition would sow between her and Le Prun suspicion, fear, and enmity enough to embitter their lives. She had at first intended declaring all the truth, but feared the explosion of Le Prun's fury, and doubted, too, whether the girl would believe her. The rest the reader knows. As there was no reason to doubt Blassemare's statement, and no actual suspicion attached to him, he was merely examined as witness. Le Prun is, we need scarcely remind the student of old French criminal cases, a celebrated name in the annals of guilt. Suspicion, by a strange coincidence, fell upon the servant whom we have mentioned, and this man having been, according to the atrocious practice of the civil law, put to the torture confessed his having, at the instigation of Le Prun, murdered the unfortunate Marie Guadin, so contriving as to make it appear that the house had been entered and plundered by thieves. A full confession, after condemnation, was extorted by the question, that dreadful ordeal, from Le Prun, who ultimately suffered the extreme penalty of the law, as every body knows, upon the Place de Greve. That portion of Le Prun's immense property which was not appropriated by the crown, went, of course, to Gabriel, the peasant boy of Charrebourg. He purchased an estate near it, and was ultimately ennobled. His grandson, the Count de St. M----, distinguished himself in the Austrian service, and after the Restoration, obtained a distinguished position in the court of Louis XVIII. The king remitted a large portion of the line in favor of Julie and of Lucille. As, however, some grave suspicions were entertained by the advisers of his majesty both as to Lucille's avowed, and, as we know, _real_ ignorance of the existence of Le Prun's first wife when she consented to marry him, and also as to her subsequent conduct in relation to De Secqville, the remission in her favor was coupled with a condition that she should take the veil. This was in effect a command; and Lucille entered a convent with a cheerful acquiescence in this condition which astonished all who knew the facts of her story.