The very first thing Arouet did when he reached Paris on this Christmas Eve of 1713 was exactly what he had told Pimpette he would do. He went straight to his old master, Father Tournemine, at St. Louis-le-Grand, to whom he had already written some of the circumstances, to arrange with the Jesuits for bringing back the lost Protestant sheep to the Roman fold. Arouet did not think it necessary to mention that the lost sheep was, in point of fact, a lamb--charming, and one-and-twenty--or that he had ever seen her. Good Tournemine promised to do his very best to get Pimpette’s father to take her in. In fact the whole scheme was working beautifully when that irascible and dogged old Maître Arouet, who had received not only the ambassador’s version of the affair but the furious Madame Dunoyer’s, positively obtained a _lettre de cachet_ for his scapegrace son, with which to get him arrested and imprisoned. Young Arouet had not been home, which was very prudent of him. His presence would only have further exasperated his father. The _lettre de cachet_ was not put into effect. The lover went on loving, adoring, and writing to his mistress. What was an angry father after all? A necessary rôle in the comedy. What was distance or opposition, what was anything or anybody to Arouet if Pimpette only loved him? Of the two, she was far the more cool and reasonable. She urged him to study law as his father bade him. And for her sake he did even that. A year or two later she became Countess of Winterfeld. Some years later still, he had the pleasure of seeing some of his own love letters to her figuring in a scandalous work of her mother’s called “Lettres Historiques et Galantes.” Even these events did not disturb a certain tender respect for her memory which he bore to the end of his life. When he was imprisoned in the Bastille four years later, he still carried about with him a little, undated, misspelt letter about one of those dear, stolen interviews--half maternal, half tender in tone--the only letter of Pimpette’s which has come down to posterity.