e stir, and
several kinsmen of this illustrious family at once went to M. le Duc
d'Orleans to beg for mercy; but the Regent avoided speaking to them as
much as possible, and very rightly ordered full and prompt justice to be
done.

At last, the relatives of Horn penetrated to the Regent: they tried to
make the Count pass for mad, saying even that he had an uncle confined in
an asylum, and begging that he might be confined also. But the reply
was, that madmen who carried their madness to fury could not be got rid
of too quickly. Repulsed in this manner, they represented what an infamy
it would be to their illustrious family, related to nearly all the
sovereigns of Europe, to have one of its members tried and condemned.
M. le Duc d'Orleans replied that the infamy was in the crime, and not in
the punishment. They pressed him upon the honour the family had in being
related to him. "Very well, gentlemen," said he, "I will divide the
shame with you."

The trial was neither long nor difficult. Law and the Abbe Dubois, so
interested in the safety of the stock-jobbers (without whom the paper
must have fallen at once), supported M. le Duc d'Orleans might and main,
in order to render him inexorable, and he, to avoid the persecutions he
unceasingly experienced on the other side, left nothing undone in order
to hurry the Parliament into a decision; the affair, therefore; went full
speed, and it seemed likely that the Comte de Horn would be broken on the
wheel.

The relatives, no longer hoping to save the criminal, thought only of
obtaining a commutation of the sentence. Some of them came to me, asking
me to save them: though I was not related to the Horn family, they
explained to me, that death on the wheel would throw into despair all
that family, and everybody connected with it in the Low Countries,
and in Germany, because in those parts there was a great and important
difference between the punishments of persons of quality who had
committed crimes; that decapitation in no way influenced the family of
the decapitated, but that death on the wheel threw such infamy upon it,
that the uncles, aunts, brothers, and sisters, and the three next
generations, were excluded from entering into any noble chapter, which,
in addition to the shame, was a very injurious deprivation, annihilating
the family's chance of ecclesiastic preferment; this reason touched me,
and I promised to do my best with M. le Duc d'Orleans to obtain a
commu