L’Envoi

Had failing sight and other infirmities permitted, the writer wished to have completed a series of examples shewing the grievous dependence and total sacrifice which women might escape by knowing the rights and the protection given to them by the laws of their country. Especially the writer desired to shew the greater dangers they might prevent by undeviating truth. A female who has proved her free-will and courage by marriage, an act which cannot be compelled in any civilized society if she has common sense, ought also to possess sufficient firmness for self-respect, and independence enough to be sincere. If a wife must know the delicate distresses and imprudent secrets of her relatives or friends, they will be less hazarded by the trust she owes her husband than by that childish cowardice or more childish love of mystery which calls itself the “duty of a confidante.”

The incidents connected with Civil and Criminal Law may be found in the trials of D’Argenson and others for extensive fraud, the assassins of Fualdes, L’Affarge, and Rusprecht; the matrimonial cases of Gordon, Dalhousie, and other appellants to Scottish tribunals, and the romantic affair of Lady Grange, long imprisoned on St. Kilda. These remarkable instances of judicial uncertainty are compressed into a few pages added to the domestic narrative, not without reference to its chief purpose.

* * *

Milliors, a magistrate of Lyons, was carried off by a boatman down the Rhine, and not found till his wife received orders to send a sum required as his ransom to a place appointed. (Dec. 1840)

The two brothers of M. Janzé, proprietor of iron-works in the Ariège department of Toulouse, were tried at the assizes of Foix, a town in the Ariège, as accomplices in his assassination and his overseer Roulet’s, for which Dramond and Pendrée, about a year since were tried, but protested innocence. One suffered death, the other sentenced to hard labour for life, confessed and accused the two brothers. (Jan. 2. 1840)

The mysterious death of the Duchess de Praslin and her husband’s suicide in Paris, the child destroyed at the monastery of Fréres Ignorantines in 1848, and the trial of the Mirfield Murderers in 1847, may be added. (August 1847)

The Bachelor of St. Honoré (the Earl of Bridgewater) was often visited before the Orleans emeute, by Count Molé and Prince Polignac. His secretary was resident in Paris and well known in the Rue Vivienne at Galignani’s. (1848)