To this request, it need hardly be said, Defrêne turned a deaf ear.
“Write as I tell you—or die as you are, in your sins!” he cried. “Come, be quick about it——”
At the prospect of going into eternity in that fashion, so frightful to one of her upbringing, Marie-Elizabeth’s courage broke down. Taking the pen that Defrêne held out to her, she began to copy the abominations set before her, the tears rolling down her cheeks, her heart sick and appalled at the thing she was doing.
As she finished copying each letter, Defrêne took his own original draft of it and burned it in the fire—so that all hope seemed gone for Marie-Elizabeth of ever being able to prove her innocence of them. And, all the while, she never ceased from praying Heaven to come to her aid.
Suddenly there was a knock on the locked door of the room in which they were sitting; rising hastily, Defrêne went to the door and let himself out into the corridor, taking care to close and lock the door again behind him. Instantly Marie-Elizabeth saw her chance and took it.
It so happened that, at the moment of Defrêne’s being called away, she had all but come to an end of copying one of the letters; finishing quickly she seized the draft of it in Defrêne’s handwriting and slipped it between the lining of her bodice, that chanced to be torn, and the bodice itself. Then, snatching up a needle and thread, she sewed up the rent over the letter and, resuming her pen, wrote on again for dear life. Providentially, her husband was kept in conversation a considerable time. When he returned to her, she had written out yet another of the unspeakable letters, and Defrêne had lost count of the originals; so that he did not miss the one she had secreted on her person.
Finally, having completed her task, she threw down the pen and covered her face in her hands—as Defrêne triumphantly imagined in consternation at the weapon of which he was now in possession against her; in reality, for fear lest he might see the relief in her expression. For now, indeed, thanks to the letter concealed in her clothing, he was taken in his own snare!
And so it proved when, a few weeks later, the Marquis went the rounds of his acquaintance armed with Marie-Elizabeth’s pretended letters to her lovers; to which she, now safe once more in her mother’s house, replied by making known the circumstances under which they had been written, and by showing to all the world Defrêne’s draft in his own handwriting that she had so fortunately been enabled to secrete in her dress.
The matter ended in her obtaining a judicial separation from the Marquis, who soon became involved in another and even darker iniquity—the case of Madame de Brinvilliers—through his intimacy with the truly diabolical Sainte-Croix; an intimacy that all but obtained him the public services of the executioner.