by his ill-treatment, forced his sisters into servitude, refusing them even the common necessaries of life.  After upbraiding him for his want of duty, the father desired, according to the law, the restitution of the unsold part of his estates.  On the day fixed for settling the accounts and entering into his rights, Baron de Saurac was arrested as a conspirator and imprisoned in the Temple.  He had been denounced as having served in the army of Conde, and as being a secret agent of Louis XVIII.  To disprove the first part of the charge, he produced certificates from America, where he had passed the time of his emigration, and even upon the rack he denied the latter.  During his arrest, the eldest son discovered that Louis had become the owner of their possessions, by means of the will he had forged in the name of his father; and that it was he who had been unnatural enough to denounce the author of his days.  With the wreck of their fortune in St. Domingo, he procured his father’s release; who, being acquainted with the perversity of his younger son, addressed himself to the department to be reinstated in his property.  This was opposed by Louis, who defended his title to the estate by the revolutionary maxim which had passed into a law, enacting that all emigrants should be considered as politically dead.  Hitherto Baron de Saurac had, from affection, declined to mention the forged will; but shocked by his son’s obduracy, and being reduced to distress, his counsellor produced this document, which not only went to deprive Louis of his property, but exposed him to a criminal prosecution.

This unnatural son, who was not yet twenty-five, had imbibed all the revolutionary morals of his contemporaries, and was well acquainted with the moral characters of his revolutionary countrymen.  He addressed himself, therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte’s Imperial attorney-general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a bribe of fifty thousand livres—­obtained for him, after he had been defeated in every other court, a judgment in his favour, in the tribunal of cassation, under the sophistical conclusion that all emigrants, being, according to law, considered as politically dead, a will in the name of any one of them was merely a pious fraud to preserve the property in the family.

This Merlin is the son of a labourer of Anchin, and was a servant of the Abbey of the same name.  One of the monks, observing in him some application, charitably sent him to be educated at Douai, after having bestowed on him some previous education.  Not satisfied with this generous act, he engaged the other monks, as well as the chapter of Cambray, to subscribe for his expenses of admission as an attorney by the Parliament of Douai, in which situation the Revolution found him.  By his dissimulation and assumed modesty, he continued to dupe his benefactors; who, by their influence, obtained for him the nomination as representative of the people to our First National