"If bribery is unavailing, use force; stop at nothing; violence, fire, murder will be overlooked. "Description: tall, brown eye, hooked nose. If in doubt, ask him this question:-- _"'Are you Nanon's brother?'"_ "Above all things _haste_ there is not a moment to lose." The messenger set out and was at Bordeaux within three hours. He went to a farm-house, exchanged his coat for a peasant's smock-frock, and entered the city driving a load of meal. Lavie received the letter quarter of an hour after the decision of the court-martial. He went at once to the fortress, talked with the jailer-in-chief, offered him twenty thousand livres,--which he refused, then thirty thousand, which he also refused, and finally forty thousand, which he accepted. We know how Cauvignac, misled by the question which Monsieur d'Épernon relied upon as a safeguard against mistake, "Are you Nanon's brother?" yielded to what was perhaps the only generous impulse he had ever felt during his life, and answered, "Yes," and thus, to his unbounded amazement, regained his freedom. A swift horse bore him to the village of Saint-Loubes, which was in the hands of the royalists. There they found a messenger from the duke, come to meet the fugitive on the duke's own horse, a Spanish mare of inestimable value. "Is he saved?" he demanded of the leader of Cauvignac's escort. "Yes," was the reply, "we have him here." That was all that the messenger sought to learn; he turned his horse about, and darted away like a flash in the direction of Libourne. An hour and a half later, the horse fell exhausted at the city gate, and sent his rider headlong to the ground at the feet of Monsieur d'Épernon, who was fuming with impatience to hear the one word, "yes." The messenger, half-dead as he was, had sufficient strength to pronounce that word which cost so dear, and the duke hurried away, without losing a second, to Nanon's lodgings, where she lay upon her bed, gazing wildly at the door, which was surrounded by servants. "Yes!" cried D'Épernon; "yes, he is saved, dear love; he is at my heels, you will see him in a moment." Nanon fairly leaped for joy; these few words removed from her breast the weight that was stifling her. She raised her hands to heaven, and, with her face wet with the tears this unhoped for happiness drew from her eyes, which despair had made dry, cried in an indescribable tone:-- "Oh! my God, my God! I thank thee!" As she brought her eyes back to earth, she saw at her side the Duc d'Épernon, so happy in her happiness that one would have said his interest in the dear prisoner was no less deep than hers. Not until then did this disturbing thought come to her mind:-- "How will the duke be recompensed for his kindness, his solicitude, when he sees the stranger in the brother's place, an almost adulterous passion substituted for the pure sentiment of sisterly affection?" Her reply to her own question was short and to the point.