Monsieur Lecoq, Volume II by Emile Gaboriau

Time gradually heals all wounds; and its effacing fingers spare but few traces of events; which in their season may have absorbed the attention of many thousand minds. What remained to attest the reality of that fierce whirlwind of passion which had swept over the peaceful valley of the Oiselle? Only a charred ruin on La Reche, and a grave in the cemetery, on which was inscribed: "Marie-Anne Lacheneur, died at the age of twenty. Pray for her! " Recent as were the events of which that ruin and that grave stone seemed as it were the prologue and the epilogue, they were already relegated to the legendary past. The peasantry of Sairmeuse had other things to think about -- the harvest, the weather, their sheep and cattle, and it was only a few old men, the politicians of the village, who at times turned their attention from agricultural incidents to remember the rising of Montaignac.

Sometimes, during the long winter evenings, when they were gathered together at the local hostelry of the Boeuf Couronne, they would lay down their greasy cards and gravely discuss the events of the past year. And they never failed to remark that almost all the actors in that bloody drama at Montaignac had in common parlance, "come to a bad end. " The victors and the vanquished seemed to encounter the same fate. Lacheneur had been beheaded; Chanlouineau, shot; Marie-Anne, poisoned, and Chupin, the traitor, the Duke de Sairmeuse's spy, stabbed to death. It was true that the Marquis de Courtornieu lived, or rather survived, but death would have seemed a mercy in comparison with such a total annihilation of intelligence.