Towards the year 1670 there was living in Paris a young man of the name of Pierre Hennequin, Marquis Defrêne. Of his antecedents I have no knowledge, but, by all accounts, he was related to many noble and influential families; a personable young man of considerable address, and entirely given over to the fashionable life of his day as he found it—that life of license, bridled only by the fear of a death upon the scaffold; that orgy of dissipation and debt by the encouragement of which Louis XIV, as history tells us, was bent upon sapping the resources of his powerful nobles in order that he might cut their claws and impair their ability ever again to dispute the absolute authority of the throne.
As many another young man of that period, so was the Marquis Defrêne. Resolutely reckless in the gratification of every passing inclination, and the slave of his pleasures, he was nearly at the end of his resources when, as Fate would have it, he was thrown in the path of a young and lovely girl, Marie-Elizabeth Girard du Tillay, the daughter of the President of the Chamber of Accounts. M. du Tillay, having, as a careful father, satisfied himself as to the complete undesirability of the Marquis in the character of a son-in-law, sternly repelled every attempt of the young man to gain possession of Marie-Elizabeth’s affections. All M. du Tillay’s efforts notwithstanding, however, Defrêne succeeded in establishing the tenderest of relations with the girl and, ultimately, in persuading her to elope with him.
But it was necessary for the Marquis to make sure of his prey as quickly as possible, lest Marie-Elizabeth’s scruples and her love for the father upon whom and whose house she was now turning her back, at his invitation, should gain the upper hand of her and so make her return to her home in order to obtain the parental blessing and consent to her union with him. No priest, as Defrêne well knew, would join them in marriage without the consent of the girl’s father. Marie-Elizabeth, however, was in ignorance of this fact; so that she was in no way surprised when her swain informed her that he had a priest in readiness to make them man and wife.
This priest, indeed, was no other than Defrêne’s body-servant, who was to assume the sacerdotal character for the occasion; and thus between the two scoundrels, master and man, Marie-Elizabeth was deceived into going through a bogus ceremony of marriage with the blessing of the rascally valet. Having carried out this piece of villainy to the complete deception of Marie-Elizabeth, who now believed herself a marchioness for better or for worse, Defrêne hastened to put himself beyond the reach of French law by crossing the channel into England, together with his victim, since, in those days, the protection of foreign criminals—poisoners and coiners only excepted—was considered an especial attribute of the majesty of every Sovereign.
Ere long, however, M. du Tillay contrived to trace the fugitive pair to their hiding-place. It is more than likely that he learned of it through the valet, although upon this point I cannot come at any certainty—for, at the same time, he appears to have learned the atrocious particulars of the sham marriage and to have done all in his power to bring the Marquis to justice for it. In this M. du Tillay had the powerful aid of his brother-in-law, M. Baillieu, a “Président à Mortier.” But their labours were opposed by those of Defrêne’s relatives, who were in terror lest the King should be persuaded, by the two eminent officials, to ask his Brother of England to make him a present of the Marquis, that he might inflict condign punishment upon him for his villainy. It ended in the issuing of a royal decree designed to satisfy both parties; by this decree the marriage was recognised as legal and binding upon both parties—in deference to the sincerity of Mademoiselle du Tillay’s participation in it, its fraudulent character notwithstanding—on condition of the marriage contract’s being duly signed and exchanged between the families of the bride and bridegroom. To this compromise the kindly Du Tillay gave his adhesion, and thus the evil deed of the Marquis Defrêne was righted for the time being.
But not for long; soon Defrêne, now accepted as his lawful son-in-law by Du Tillay, began to weary of the bonds of matrimony, and, disappointed in the amount of cash he had hoped to extort from his father-in-law, he decided to try his luck afresh in some more lucrative quarter; to this end he made up his mind to get rid of poor Marie-Elizabeth, that he might be free to take another partner.
It should not have been difficult for him, one would think, in the Paris of the later Seventeenth Century, to carry out his iniquitous design, without overmuch caution or expense; there were to be found there means notoriously at the disposal of gentlemen in Defrêne’s predicament, provided only they were able to pay the price of a “succession powder” or of a philtre indistinguishable from the purest water save in its deadly results. And yet Defrêne could not screw up his courage, all at once, to murdering his wife out of hand or of procuring her assassination. Truth to tell, he was deterred from such a course by the salutary severity of the sentence pronounced a few years earlier, in 1667, upon the murderers of the unfortunate Marquise de Gange, who had been poisoned by her brothers-in-law with the tacit approval of her unworthy husband, the latter having been condemned to perpetual banishment with the loss of his estates and to be degraded from the nobility; while the actual assassins were sentenced to be broken alive on the wheel.
This wholesome fear, then, so acted upon the mind of the Marquis Defrêne as to compel him to devise a more subtle method of doing away with Marie-Elizabeth; a method as diabolical as any in all the dark records of criminal achievement.
His plan was, apparently, simplicity itself; he would voyage abroad with Marie-Elizabeth to Constantinople and would there sell her into slavery or the harem of some wealthy Turk; her beauty would command a substantial price that would reimburse her betrayer for the expenses of his undertaking, and besides he could return in safety to give out that she was dead, and to claim her entire property as her disconsolate widower, her father having recently died.
Having arrived at this decision, he informed his wife that she was to accompany him on a journey that he was obliged to make to some far-distant baths for the sake of his health; and Marie-Elizabeth, ever trustful of his designs, and of his surpassing love for her, consented at once, albeit her husband did not enlighten her as to their actual destination.