No steps, however, seem to have been taken by La Roche-sur-Yon in the matter until the occurrence of the scandal which we have just related, when, having decided that the moment for action had arrived, he persuaded Maulevrier to draw up and sign a formal information against Isabelle, which he lost no time in laying before the King and the Queen-Mother. In this document, Maulevrier declared that Isabelle had on several occasions said to him: “If I were in your place, I should poison the prince”; that during the journey of the Court she had indulged in the most violent language against his Highness, whom she accused of inspiring all the annoyances which his wife had inflicted upon the Queen’s “maids,” and of having sought to injure her in a matter which closely concerned her honour; that, one evening, she had sent for him, and told him that La Roche-sur-Yon was giving a supper-party the following night, and that it would be the last that he would ever give, warning him, at the same time, not to repeat a word of what she had said, or “he would be found dead in the corner of some ditch”; that, notwithstanding this threat, he had sent warning to the prince, who had begged him to entice Mlle. de Limeuil into further confidences; that, a few days later, the Court being at Vitry, the lady had said to him: “The coup failed; the prince postponed his supper-party, but the opportunity will recur”; with which she drew from an envelope a white powder and gave him part of it, telling him to make his dog take it and he would see that in a short time the animal would be dead; and, finally, that on the morning of a state dinner given at Bar-le-Duc, Mlle. de Limeuil had remarked to him: “It is truly astonishing that the Queen-Mother has not been ill!”[59] It was, of course, impossible for Charles IX. and Catherine to ignore so grave an accusation as that of having planned the poisoning of a Prince of the Blood, backed by evidence drawn up with such minuteness and precision of detail as to give it an air of probability. At the same time, Catherine would perhaps, in ordinary circumstances, have hesitated to accept the unsupported testimony of Maulevrier, who was not a person on whose word much reliance was usually placed. But, as La Roche-sur-Yon had, of course, foreseen, the scandal of which Isabelle had just been the cause was scarcely calculated to incline her to view the matter from a judicial standpoint; and, at her instigation, the King at once signed an order for Isabelle to be arrested and conducted to the Franciscan convent at Auxonne. Her child was taken away from her and given into the charge of a poor woman at Dijon.