In June 1667 the authorities of Beja received an answer from the new King, Don Pedro, to the complaint which they had made of ‘the oppression which the French cavalry continued to exercise on this people.’[8] Already, on account of similar complaints, Schomberg had been ordered to move his cavalry from the town and district, but he had disobeyed these orders for strategic reasons. Now, we have already seen that it was between 1665 and 1667 that Chamilly carried on his intrigue with Marianna, and it is just in 1667 that the scandal must have attained greater proportions, coinciding with and ending, not in the withdrawal of the French cavalry, but in the sudden retirement of Chamilly to France. But what, it may be asked, was the reason for the King’s order, and what could those ‘oppressions’ have been in an important city where presumably there was a regular and well-appointed police administration? Has it not a relation, asks Cordeiro, with the incident in the ‘Letters,’ which would both afflict and irritate the influential family of the nun and the good burgesses of Beja? The special situation of the French captain, on the other hand--his interest in not aggravating the scandal, and the peril for the religious herself in the adoption of violent means, would all naturally counsel the withdrawal of Chamilly.[9] The danger of remaining longer in Beja was not in the nature of those which the French colonel could confront with his recognised courage. If he were surprised in the convent, if he were denounced as its violator and as the seducer of a nun, the daughter of a well-known family, and one, too, which was on excellent terms with the new sovereign, neither his own position nor the protection of Schomberg would avail him, since both the one and the other began to lose their importance with the approach of peace.[10] However this may be, certain it is that Chamilly’s own excuses for departure, referred to in the ‘Letters,’ were merely empty pretexts, and a reference to the history of the time will show this. If Louis XIV. needed his presence so much for the invasion of Franche Comté, why not, it may be asked, for the important campaign in Flanders in 1667? He seems to have left Portugal, too, a little clandestinely, for no notice is to be met with, as in the case of other French officers, of his asking and obtaining leave from the Portuguese Government, and he probably did not even embark in Lisbon. Already, in the beginning of February 1668, we find him with Louis XIV. in Dijon, so that he must have quitted Beja and the seat of war quite at the end of the preceding year.