This circumstance Laurentini had discovered,
soon after her arrival in France, and had made ample use of it in
assisting her designs upon the Marquis, to whom she adduced such
seeming proof of his wife’s infidelity, that, in the frantic rage of
wounded honour, he consented to destroy his wife. A slow poison was
administered, and she fell a victim to the jealousy and subtlety of
Laurentini and to the guilty weakness of her husband. But the moment of Laurentini’s triumph, the moment, to which she had
looked forward for the completion of all her wishes, proved only the
commencement of a suffering, that never left her to her dying hour. The passion of revenge, which had in part stimulated her to the
commission of this atrocious deed, died, even at the moment when it was
gratified, and left her to the horrors of unavailing pity and remorse,
which would probably have empoisoned all the years she had promised
herself with the Marquis de Villeroi, had her expectations of an
alliance with him been realised. But he, too, had found the moment of
his revenge to be that of remorse, as to himself, and detestation, as
to the partner of his crime; the feeling, which he had mistaken for
conviction, was no more; and he stood astonished, and aghast, that no
proof remained of his wife’s infidelity, now that she had suffered the
punishment of guilt. Even when he was informed, that she was dying, he
had felt suddenly and unaccountably reassured of her innocence, nor was
the solemn assurance she made him in her last hour, capable of
affording him a stronger conviction of her blameless conduct. In the first horrors of remorse and despair, he felt inclined to
deliver up himself and the woman, who had plunged him into this abyss
of guilt, into the hands of justice; but, when the paroxysm of his
suffering was over, his intention changed. Laurentini, however, he saw
only once afterwards, and that was, to curse her as the instigator of
his crime, and to say, that he spared her life only on condition, that
she passed the rest of her days in prayer and penance. Overwhelmed with
disappointment, on receiving contempt and abhorrence from the man, for
whose sake she had not scrupled to stain her conscience with human
blood, and, touched with horror of the unavailing crime she had
committed, she renounced the world, and retired to the monastery of St.
Claire, a dreadful victim to unresisted passion. The Marquis, immediately after the death of his wife, quitted
Château-le-Blanc, to which he never returned, and endeavoured to lose
the sense of his crime amidst the tumult of war, or the dissipations of
a capital; but his efforts were vain; a deep dejection hung over him
ever after, for which his most intimate friend could not account, and
he, at length, died, with a degree of horror nearly equal to that,
which Laurentini had suffered. The physician, who had observed the
singular appearance of the unfortunate Marchioness, after death, had
been bribed to silence; and, as the surmises of a few of the servants
had proceeded no further than a whisper, the affair had never been
investigated. Whether this whisper ever reached the father of the
Marchioness, and, if it did, whether the difficulty of obtaining proof
deterred him from prosecuting the Marquis de Villeroi, is uncertain;
but her death was deeply lamented by some part of her family, and
particularly by her brother, M. St. Aubert; for that was the degree of
relationship, which had existed between Emily’s father and the
Marchioness; and there is no doubt, that he suspected the manner of her
death. Many letters passed between the Marquis and him, soon after the
decease of his beloved sister, the subject of which was not known, but
there is reason to believe, that they related to the cause of her
death; and these were the papers, together with some letters of the
Marchioness, who had confided to her brother the occasion of her
unhappiness, which St. Aubert had so solemnly enjoined his daughter to
destroy: and anxiety for her peace had probably made him forbid her to
enquire into the melancholy story, to which they alluded. Such, indeed,
had been his affliction, on the premature death of this his favourite
sister, whose unhappy marriage had from the first excited his tenderest
pity, that he never could hear her named, or mention her himself after
her death, except to Madame St. Aubert. From Emily, whose sensibility
he feared to awaken, he had so carefully concealed her history and
name, that she was ignorant, till now, that she ever had such a
relative as the Marchioness de Villeroi; and from this motive he had
enjoined silence to his only surviving sister, Madame Cheron, who had
scrupulously observed his request. It was over some of the last pathetic letters of the Marchioness, that
St. Aubert was weeping, when he was observed by Emily, on the eve of
her departure from La Vallée, and it was her picture, which he had so
tenderly caressed. Her disastrous death may account for the emotion he
had betrayed, on hearing her named by La Voisin, and for his request to
be interred near the monument of the Villerois, where her remains were
deposited, but not those of her husband, who was buried, where he died,
in the north of France. The confessor, who attended St. Aubert in his last moments, recollected
him to be the brother of the late Marchioness, when St. Aubert, from
tenderness to Emily, had conjured him to conceal the circumstance, and
to request that the abbess, to whose care he particularly recommended
her, would do the same; a request, which had been exactly observed. Laurentini, on her arrival in France, had carefully concealed her name
and family, and, the better to disguise her real history, had, on
entering the convent, caused the story to be circulated, which had
imposed on sister Frances, and it is probable, that the abbess, who did
not preside in the convent, at the time of her noviciation, was also
entirely ignorant of the truth. The deep remorse, that seized on the
mind of Laurentini, together with the sufferings of disappointed
passion, for she still loved the Marquis, again unsettled her
intellects, and, after the first paroxysms of despair were passed, a
heavy and silent melancholy had settled upon her spirits, which
suffered few interruptions from fits of frenzy, till the time of her
death. During many years, it had been her only amusement to walk in the
woods near the monastery, in the solitary hours of night, and to play
upon a favourite instrument, to which she sometimes joined the
delightful melody of her voice, in the most solemn and melancholy airs
of her native country, modulated by all the energetic feeling, that
dwelt in her heart.