admits, she did go through it.  The far too prevalent idea of those days was that every offence must be followed by an arrest.  This gave a very high idea of the extraordinary sagacity of justice, of its prompt perspicacity, and of the rapidity with which it tracked out crime.  The unfortunate woman was walked off between two gendarmes.  The effect produced by the gendarmes, with their burnished arms and imposing cross-belts, when they made their appearance in a village, was very great.  All the spectators were in tears; the prisoner alone retained her composure, and told them all that she was convinced her innocence would be made clear.

“As a matter of fact, within forty-eight hours it was seen that a blunder had been committed.  Upon the third day, the villagers hardly ventured to speak to one another on the subject, for they all of them had the same idea in their heads, though they did not like to give utterance to it.  The idea seemed to them not less absurd than it was self-evident, viz., that the flax-crusher’s key must have been used for the robbery.  The priest remained within doors so as to avoid having to give utterance to the suspicion which obtruded itself upon him.  He had not as yet examined very closely the linen which had been sent from the manor in place of his own.  His eyes happened to fall upon the initials, and he was too surprised to understand the mysterious allusion of the two letters, being unable to follow the strange hallucinations of an unhappy lunatic.

“While he was immersed in melancholy reflection, the flax-crusher entered the room, with his figure as upright as ever but pale as death.  The old man stood up in front of the priest and burst into tears, exclaiming:  ’It is my miserable girl.  I ought to have kept a closer watch over her and have found out what her thoughts were about, but with her constant melancholy she gave me the slip.’  He then revealed the secret, and within an hour the stolen linen was brought back to the priest’s house.  The delinquent had hoped that the scandal would soon be forgotten, and that she would revel in peace over the success of her little plot, but the arrest of the clerk’s wife and the sensation which it caused spoilt the whole thing.  If her moral sense had not been entirely obliterated, her first thought would have been to get the clerk’s wife set at liberty, but she paid little or no heed to that.  She was plunged in a kind of stupor which had nothing in common with remorse, and what so prostrated her was the evident failure of her attempt to move the feelings of the priest.  Most men would have been touched by the revelation of so ardent a passion, but the priest was unmoved.  He banished all thought of this remarkable event from his mind, and when he was fully convinced of the imprisoned woman’s innocence he went to sleep, celebrated mass the next morning, and recited his breviary just as if nothing had happened.