an English vessel on the high seas
after peace had been declared on both sides of the Channel, and was
condemned to two years' banishment. At the end of this time he
returned to Harfleur to recover some twenty thousand livres (the
produce of former piracies in the English Channel) which he had left
in the keeping of Mademoiselle de Commare.

But the lady had returned to her own family and carried off his money
with her. When he followed to her house, she offered him only ten
crowns, so he stayed in the village near by until he could devise a
plan to get back his treasure. The lady called her friends and
relations, and they tried to arrest De la Rue one morning in the
market, with the result that several of them were badly wounded. At
last a larger force managed to secure him, and threw him into a prison
at Rouen on the capital charge of abduction. While there it was proved
that he had stabbed a man to death in Harfleur in a quarrel about a
woman; that at Janval, near Arques, he had punished a fellow called
Bonnetot for insulting a comrade, by running him through with a
rapier, from which Bonnetot died; and that in a quarrel about another
woman he had dangerously wounded a naval officer with his dagger; and
in these little escapades no mention is made of the countless acts of
piracy on the high seas, which can seldom have been accomplished
without considerable loss of life.

But this record is nothing to the second and last example which I
shall take from the prisoners of the "Fierte." In 1541 a young
gentleman named Francois de Fontenay, Sieur de Saint-Remy, aged
twenty-nine, was pardoned by the canons after a career which I can
only sketch in the roughest outlines. When he was only fifteen, he got
some friends to help him and killed a sergeant who had displeased him
by carrying stories of his behaviour to his mother. When a little
older, in a village of the Cotentin, at the request of a young lady he
professed to love, he laid an ambush with some friends for a Monsieur
des Mostiers, but only succeeded in wounding him severely, and barely
escaped the execution that punished one of his comrades in the same
affair. Developing rapidly into a bravo of the first water, he
attacked a man "at the request of le sieur de Danmesnil," and wounded
him mortally with his rapier in the thigh. Being at a house in
Montgardon with his mother and brother, he held it against forty armed
men who had come in the name of the law to arrest t