‘Considering the actual state of affairs, it is absolutely necessary that the arrangement[217] proposed by you should be at once concluded, and that you should be here without loss of time, say by the 20th of this month. This is the last letter I shall have the honour of writing to you on the subject of the poisoner, the villain Guerchy, who would have been broken alive on the wheel in France, did he meet with his deserts. But, thanks be to God, he will only be hanged in England, as was the case with Count de Sea in Cromwell’s time.... All the intriguing powers of France will not prevail in favour of Guerchy against the power of the laws of England, when their execution is confided to independent arbiters. I give you my word of honour, that very shortly Guerchy will be arrested as he leaves court, and taken to the prison for criminals in the city of London. His friend Praslin will come to deliver him, if he can; it is more likely that the friend to deliver him will be the executioner.’[218] D’Eon was satisfied that his bitter enemy was in his power, and had made up his mind that nothing should induce him to alter his determination to run him to earth. ‘He should either triumph through the evidence in favour of his innocence and the strength of the laws, or know how to bear himself nobly on the scaffold.’ ‘When my good Louis XV. asked me not to hunt his ambassador to death, and that, for the honour of France, he should not be hanged in London, I replied to my august master: “I am ready to obey you in all things but this, for I am bound, before God and man, to have him hanged for the salvation of France, and it would be the duty of a most Christian King to assist me to hook on, and not unhook off, the forked gibbet, a notorious poisoner. If, Sire, you had had the courage to hang those who poisoned the Dauphin and Dauphiness,[219] I should not have been poisoned in London, nor would many others have been poisoned at Versailles, Paris, and elsewhere.”’[220] Writing to his son, in allusion to the subject that was engrossing the mind of the public throughout the kingdom, the Earl of Chesterfield[221] says:—