“I profited by this opportunity to leave my carriage and servants at this spot, with the view that what I was about to do should be more secret, and we proceeded on foot along very bad roads to the place where we were expected. M. Catinat had so well arranged everything that no one but himself appeared; he made us enter a room, and during the conversation I insensibly made Mattioli state what he had avowed to me two days previously, that he possessed all the original papers that concerned our affair, viz.: M. de Mantua’s letter to the King, his Majesty’s answer to him, the full powers of this Prince, the treaty which you had put into writing, the Marquis de Louvois’ memorandum, and two signatures of M. de Mantua; one at the bottom of the treaty so as to serve for the ratification, and the other at the bottom of a sheet of blank paper, on which to write an order to the governor of Casale to receive his Majesty’s troops into his town whenever they might present themselves there; he added that this Prince had since done all that he could to oblige him to return these papers, but that he had never been willing to go and find them, that he had only sent him copies, and had deposited the originals with his wife in a convent of nuns at Bologna, called Saint-Louis; after having invited this confidence towards M. Catinat, I considered that my presence was no longer necessary, and when I had left he was arrested without disturbance. “I returned here with the Abbé de Montesquieu, my cousin-german whom I had taken with me for two reasons, which I trust his Majesty will approve. The first because I could not leave Turin alone without its being believed that I was not going to pay a visit as I had stated two days previously, and because I had already experienced that I had been watched during two or three drives I had expressly taken outside the town, with the view that people should not find it extraordinary when I wished to carry off Mattioli. The second and the strongest was, that all the precautions I had adopted in order to see M. Catinat at the Capucins, whose convent is outside this town, on a mountain where there is no other house but theirs, not having prevented our interview from being known, and the Marquis de Saint-Maurice from speaking of it rather indiscreetly, I thought that I ought not to risk fresh conferences with him, and that it would be still more dangerous if I went to Pignerol; which the Abbé de Montesquieu can do without attracting attention. Nevertheless I should not have made use of the latter, if during a stay of three years that we have made together at Venice, I had not become acquainted with his discretion, his address, and especially his fidelity, sufficiently well to be able to answer for him as for myself; it is this therefore which has obliged me to make him come here. And I have sent him this morning to Pignerol in consequence of the information which M.