Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

To these entreaties the governor demurred for a time, but at last suffered himself to be persuaded to consent to an interview between the husband and wife on the stipulation that it should take place under his own eyes; he even went to the length of inducing Marie-Elizabeth to see Defrêne, although she herself was strongly opposed to such a concession.

When Defrêne found himself once more in her presence, he cast himself grovelling at his wife’s feet, refusing to rise, with a thousand protestations, a thousand vows, of his undying love for her. He had not, he swore, the least ill-design against her in the journey he had undertaken; handing her his sword, he begged that she would either pardon him or else put him out of his sufferings. By all that was holy, he promised he would take her back to France without fail if she would but have faith in him—in short, he would be her slave in all things.

After several repetitions of this comedy, “que Baron[27] n’aurait si bien jouée que lui”—again I quote from the accounts of the time—the Marquis succeeded in winning over the governor to his side, and got him, in spite of Marie-Elizabeth’s protests, to write to the Duke of Savoy for permission to deliver her into Defrêne’s keeping, on condition of his taking her back to France without doing her any further injury, and of his solemnly pledging himself to answer for his good behaviour to the Duke and to the King of France.

At the same time Marie-Elizabeth wrote to the Duke and Duchess of Savoy, telling them the whole story of her husband’s ill-treatment of her, and imploring their protection; this letter was intercepted by the Marquis and destroyed. Soon an answer was returned to the governor’s communication, giving him the requisite permission to deliver Marie-Elizabeth into her husband’s keeping on the conditions already stated, of his answering to his own Sovereign and the Duke of Savoy for his conduct towards her on the journey home. Thus the luckless woman was once more delivered into the hands of her crafty and relentless foe.

For a space all went well with her, so long as they were accompanied by an officer of the Duke of Savoy charged with seeing that Defrêne behaved himself; but no sooner were they once more by themselves than his evil designs came again to light. Having reached the village of Lanslebourg at the northern foot of the Mont Cenis, where the Savoyard officer took his leave of them, Defrêne placed his wife under lock and key in a room in the village inn and applied himself to the problem confronting him—that of how to accomplish the destruction of his wife without rendering himself liable to the law.

And at this point it occurred to him to fall back on a stratagem of which he had already, months earlier, made a beginning, but had abandoned it through impatience and failure.

This stratagem consisted in accusing Marie-Elizabeth of attempting to murder him by means of poison—a crime punishable with death. As he now saw clearly, the main thing needful to the success of such a method was that he should be able to produce some incontrovertible evidence, and that so atrocious, of Marie-Elizabeth’s depravity as to bring her within distance of the scaffold; failing which, it must be at least such as to serve him as an excuse for his attempt to sell her into slavery.

With this amiable purpose Defrêne applied all his talents to the composing of a series of no less than twenty-four letters purporting to be written by his wife to her various lovers and couched in the most abandoned of terms. Having done this, he came with them to Marie-Elizabeth, and ordered her to copy out the vile effusions so that he might have them in her own handwriting as an irrefutable proof of her guilt against him.

For long she refused to obey his commands; until, at length, Defrêne drew a knife and threatened her with it; but even this made no impression upon her resolve to defend her honour.

“Kill me if you will—I would prefer to die rather than to write those horrible letters,” she said. “All I ask is that you will let me have a priest to whom I may first confess myself—let me, at least, die like a Christian!”