hanged. The matron lodged an appeal against this sentence, and the case
was referred to the Conciergerie.

No sooner had the count and countess seen the successive proofs of the
procedure, than tenderness and natural feelings accomplished the rest.
They no longer doubted that their page was their son; they stripped him
at once of his livery and gave him his rank and prerogatives, under the
title of the Count de la Palice.

Meanwhile, a private person named Sequeville informed the countess that
he had made a very important discovery; that a child had been baptized
in 1642 at St. Jean-en-Greve, and that a woman named Marie Pigoreau had
taken a leading part in the affair. Thereupon inquiries were made, and
it was discovered that this child had been nursed in the village of
Torcy. The count obtained a warrant which enabled him to get evidence
before the judge of Torcy; nothing was left undone to elicit the
whole truth; he also obtained a warrant through which he obtained more
information, and published a monitory. The elder of the Quinet girls
on this told the Marquis de Canillac that the count was searching at a
distance for things very near him. The truth shone out with great lustre
through these new facts which gushed from all this fresh information.
The child, exhibited in the presence of a legal commissary to the nurses
and witnesses of Torcy, was identified, as much by the scars left by
the midwife's nails on his head, as by his fair hair and blue eyes. This
ineffaceable vestige of the woman's cruelty was the principal proof; the
witnesses testified that la Pigoreau, when she visited this child with a
man who appeared to be of condition, always asserted that he was the
son of a great nobleman who had been entrusted to her care, and that she
hoped he would make her fortune and that of those who had reared him.