Time, perhaps, might bring her some relief.
Once it happened that six weeks went by, and she heard nothing from Chupin. A month and a half! What had become of him? To Mme. Blanche this silence was as ominous as the calm that precedes the storm.
A line in a newspaper solved the mystery.
Chupin was in prison.
The wretch, after drinking more heavily than usual one evening, had quarrelled with his brother, and had killed him by a blow upon the head with a piece of iron.
The blood of the betrayed Lacheneur was visited upon the heads of his murderer’s children.
Tried by the Court of Assizes, Chupin was condemned to twenty years of hard labor, and sent to Brest.
But this sentence afforded the duchess no relief. The culprit had written to her from his Paris prison; he wrote to her from Brest.
But he did not send his letters through the post. He confided them to comrades, whose terms of imprisonment had expired, and who came to the Hotel de Sairmeuse demanding an interview with the duchess.
And she received them. They told all the miseries they had endured “out there;” and usually ended by requesting some slight assistance.