they disappeared, some into the night of death, some into the darkness of
oblivion.

The priest Perette was the first to pay his debt to Heaven: he died at
the oar on the way from Toulouse to Brest.

The chevalier withdrew to Venice, took service in the army of the Most
Serene Republic, then at war with Turkey, and was sent to Candia, which
the Mussulmans had been besieging for twenty years; he had scarcely
arrived there when, as he was walking on the ramparts of the town with
two other officers, a shell burst at their feet, and a fragment of it
killed the chevalier without so much as touching his companions, so that
the event was regarded as a direct act of Providence.

As for the abbe, his story is longer and stranger. He parted from the
chevalier in the neighbourhood of Genoa, and crossing the whole of
Piedmont, part of Switzerland, and a corner of Germany, entered Holland
under the name of Lamartelliere. After many hesitations as to the place
where he would settle, he finally retired to Viane, of which the Count of
Lippe was at that time sovereign; there he made the acquaintance of a
gentleman who presented him to the count as a French religious refugee.

The count, even in this first conversation, found that the foreigner who
had come to seek safety in his dominions possessed not only great
intelligence but a very solid sort of intelligence, and seeing that the
Frenchman was conversant with letters and with learning, proposed that he
should undertake the education of his son, who at that time was nine
years old. Such a proposal was a stroke of fortune for the abbe de
Ganges, and he did not dream of refusing it.