MORIN (Jeanne-Marie-Victoire Tarin, veuve), accused of trying to obtain money by forging signatures to promissory-notes, also of the attempted assassination of Sieur Ragoulleau; condemned by the Court of Assizes at Paris on January 11, 1812, to twenty years hard labor.  The elder Poiret, a man who never thought independently, was a witness for the defence, and often thought of the trial.  The widow Morin, born at Pont-sur-Seine, Aube, was a fellow-countrywoman of Poiret, who was born at Troyes. [Father Goriot.] Many extracts have been taken from the items published about this criminal case.

MORISSON, an inventor of purgative pills, which were imitated by Doctor Poulain, physician to Pons and the Cibots, when, as a beginner, he wished to make his fortune rapidly. [Cousin Pons.]

MORTSAUF (Comte de), head of a Touraine family, which owed to an ancestor of Louis XI.’s reign—­a man who had escaped the gibbet—­its fortune, coat-of-arms and position.  The count was the incarnation of the “refugee.”  Exiled, either willingly or unwillingly, his banishment made him weak of mind and body.  He married Blanche-Henriette de Lenoncourt, by whom he had two children, Jacques and Madeleine.  On the accession of the Bourbons he was breveted field-marshal, but did not leave Clochegourde, a castle brought to him in his wife’s dowry and situated on the banks of the Indre and the Cher. [The Lily of the Valley.]

MORTSAUF (Comtesse de),[*] wife of the preceding; born Blanche-Henriette de Lenoncourt, of the “house of Lenoncourt-Givry, fast becoming extinct,” towards the first years of the Restoration; was born after the death of three brothers, and thus had a sorrowful childhood and youth; found a good foster-mother in her aunt, a Blamont-Chauvry; and when married found her chief pleasure in the care of her children.  This feeling gave her the power to repress the love which she felt for Felix de Vandenesse, but the effort which this hard struggle caused her brought on a severe stomach disease of which she died in 1820. [The Lily of the Valley.]

[*] Beauplan and Barriere presented a play at the Comedie-Francaise,
    having for a heroine Madame de Mortsauf, June 14, 1853.

MORTSAUF (Jacques de), elder child of the preceding couple, pupil of Dominis, most delicate member of the family, died prematurely.  With his death the line of Lenoncourt-Givrys proper passed away, for he would have been their heir. [The Lily of the Valley.]

MORTSAUF (Madeleine de), sister of the preceding; after her mother’s death she would not receive Felix de Vandenesse, who had been Madame de Mortsauf’s lover.  She became in time Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Givry (See that name). [The Lily of the Valley.]

MOUCHE, born in 1811, illegitimate son of one of Fourchon’s natural daughters and a soldier who died in Russia; was given a home, when an orphan, by his maternal grandfather, whom he aided sometimes as ropemaker’s apprentice.  About 1823, in the district of Ville-aux-Fayes, Bourgogne, he profited by the credulity of the strangers whom he was supposed to teach the art of hunting otter.  Mouche’s attitude and conversation, as he came in the autumn of 1823 to the Aigues, scandalized the Montcornets and their guests. [The Peasantry.]