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258 A FAMOUS NECKLACE.
his
post of grand-almoner, to retire into the country during the King's
pleasure, and to beg their Majesties' most humble pardon — a
sufficiently severe sentence one would suppose for having been made a
fool of by a designing woman. Marie Antoinette heard of the cardinal's
"acquittal," as she called it, with a burst of tearful rage which
transpires through her letters to her sisters at the time. She laments
in them the pass to which the world had come when she could do nothing
but weep over her wrongs and was powerless to avenge them.
The
rest of those concerned were variously dealt with. The Count de la
Motte was condemned to the galleys for life, but he had already
escaped to London, so the sentence did not much matter in his case. The
forger Villette was banished. In his case the decree of the court was
carried out in the old-fashioned way: he was led to the prison gate
with a halter round his neck, where the executioner gave . him a loaf
of bread and a kick and bade him
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