[583] The following words are here erased:--“beat them severely, and.” [584] Unpublished despatch from Louvois to Saint-Mars:--Archives of the Ministry of War. [585] _Ibid._:--_Ibid._ [586] Manuscripts of the Imperial Library, _Papiers d’Estrades_. This letter and several others in the same collection are a proof of the friendship which subsisted between Saint-Mars and the Abbé d’Estrades. “On the first of next month, Monsieur de Catinat,” we read in a letter from Saint-Mars to the Abbé d’Estrades, September 27, 1681, “will be the governor of the citadel which you have brought into the King’s possession.” He refers to Casale, and these words would suffice to prove, what is already attested by the active part played by Saint-Mars with Catinat in 1679, viz., that Saint-Mars had been kept informed of all the details of the two negotiations. Consequently, as we have already shown in the preceding chapter, the famous sentence of Louvois’ despatch to Saint-Mars, August 13, 1681--“The King having ordered Monsieur de Catinat to proceed as soon as possible to Pignerol _on the same business which took him there at the commencement of the year 1679_”--has and can have only one meaning, that is to say, the taking possession of Casale, and not the arrest of a new prisoner. But M. Loiseleur brings forward another argument in order to attempt to prove that an obscure spy was arrested by Catinat in 1681. This is the following letter from Louvois to Saint-Mars, September 20, 1681:--“The King does not disapprove of your going from time to time to see the last prisoner whom you have in charge, when he is settled in his new prison, and has left that in which you are keeping him. His Majesty desires that you shall execute the order which he has sent you,” &c. And the same critic concludes, from a despatch from Saint-Mars to Louvois, March 11, 1682, which again mentions two prisoners, that, between September 20, 1681, and March 11, 1682, a new prisoner was confided to Saint-Mars.