This was done; and we have seen with what a mystery and with what an abundance of precautions and minute cares Villebois was charged to guard him at Pignerol, after Saint-Mars’ departure for Exiles. Villebois never once left his prisoner. On March 22, 1682,[597] actuated by a scruple similar to those which had often possessed Saint-Mars, Villebois asked the Minister, to whom he was to confide the care of his prisoners if he should fall ill? Louvois replied, “To the one in whom you have most confidence.” “The King approves,” wrote the Minister, April 13, 1682, “of your lending the prisoners with whose care you are charged the books of devotion which they ask of you, taking all due precautions that these may not serve to give them intelligence of any kind.”[598] “With reference to the priest whom the prisoners ask for,” we read in a despatch of December 11, 1683, “I have to tell you that they should only be allowed to confess once a year.”[599] “I have received your letter of the 14th of last month,” writes Louvois, May 1, 1684, “from which I perceive the rage of the Sieur Matthioly’s servant (_valet_)[600] towards you, and the manner in which you have punished him, which must certainly be approved of, and you ought always to act in the same manner on a like occasion.” On November 26, 1689, Louvois learns “that some one had come by night to a door of the bastion of Pignerol, where the apartments of the prisoners are situated, with the intention of getting in,” and he orders Villebois “to omit nothing to endeavour to discover those who have done so.”[601] On July 28, 1692, when the Sieur de Laprade is about to assume the governorship, left vacant by Villebois’ death, Barbézieux writes to him “that he cannot take too many precautions for the security of the prisoners with whose care he is charged.” The same instructions are addressed to him on October 31 following.[602] Despite these incessant precautions, and the vigilance of which he was the object, Matthioly still endeavoured to give tidings of himself, but it was only on the linings of his pockets that he managed to write a few words. He was discovered, and the Minister writes to Laprade, December 27, 1693, “You have merely to burn what remains of the little pieces of the pockets on which Matthioly and his man have written, and which you have found in the lining of their coats, where they had hidden them.”[603]