The relatives of D'Horn were now reduced to the last extremity.
The Prince de Robec Montmorency, despairing of other methods, found
means to penetrate into the dungeon of the criminal, and offering him
a cup of poison, implored him to save them from disgrace. The Count
d'Horn turned away his head, and refused to take it. Montmorency
pressed him once more, and losing all patience at his continued
refusal, turned on his heel, and exclaiming, "Die, then, as thou wilt,
mean-spirited wretch! thou art fit only to perish by the hands of the
hangman!" left him to his fate.

D'Horn himself petitioned the Regent that he might be beheaded,
but Law, who exercised more influence over his mind than any other
person, with the exception of the notorious Abbe Dubois, his tutor,
insisted that he could not in justice succumb to the self-interested
views of the D'Horns. The Regent had from the first been of the same
opinion, and within six days after the commission of their crime,
D'Horn and Mille were broken on the wheel in the Place de Greve. The
other assassin, Lestang, was never apprehended.

This prompt and severe justice was highly pleasing to the populace
of Paris; even M. de Quincampoix, as they called Law, came in for a
share of their approbation for having induced the Regent to show no
favour to a patrician. But the number of robberies and assassinations
did not diminish. No sympathy was shown for rich jobbers when they
were plundered: the general laxity of public morals, conspicuous
enough before, was rendered still more so by its rapid pervasion of
the middle classes, who had hitherto remained comparatively pure,
between the open vices of the class above and the hidden crimes of the
class below them. The pernicious love of gambling diffused itself