all vengeance belonged to the king and to God, and that all cares of the
kind must be left to those two great rulers of heaven and of earth.

On the 3rd of June, M. Catalan, a councillor, appointed as a
commissioner by the Parliament of Toulouse, arrived at Ganges, together
with all the officials required by his commission; but he could not see
the marquise that night, for she had dozed for some hours, and this sleep
had left a sort of torpor upon her mind, which might have impaired the
lucidity of her depositions. The next morning, without asking anybody's
opinion, M. Catalan repaired to the house of M. Desprats, and in spite
of some slight resistance on the part of those who were in charge of her,
made his way to the presence of the marquise. The dying woman received
him with an admirable presence of mind, that made M. Catalan think there
had been an intention the night before to prevent any meeting between him
and the person whom he was sent to interrogate. At first the marquise
would relate nothing that had passed, saying that she could not at the
same time accuse and forgive; but M. Catalan brought her to see that
justice required truth from her before all things, since, in default of
exact information, the law might go astray, and strike the innocent
instead of the guilty. This last argument decided the marquise, and
during the hour and a half that he spent alone with her she told him all
the details of this horrible occurrence. On the morrow M. Catalan was to
see her again; but on the morrow the marquise was, in truth, much worse.
He assured himself of this by his own eyes, and as he knew almost all
that he wished to know, did not insist further, for fear of fatiguing
her.

Indeed, from that day forward, such atrocious sufferings laid hold upon
the marquise, that notwithstanding the firmness which she had always
shown, and which she tried to maintain to the end, she could not prevent