He had fled to Edinburgh, where he lived
with an aged Italian teacher of languages. This worthy man offered to
sell him for 10,000_l._, and a pretty plot was arranged by the French
ambassador to drug La Motte, put him on board a collier at South
Shields and carry him to France. But the old Italian lost heart, and,
after getting 1,000_l._ out of the French Government in advance,
deemed it more prudent to share the money with the Count. Perhaps the
Count invented the whole stratagem; it was worthy of the husband and
pupil of Jeanne de Valois. That poor lady's cause was lost when
Villette and Gay d'Oliva were brought back across the frontier,
confessed, and corroborated each other's stories. Yet she made a
wonderfully good fight, changing her whole defence into another as
plausible and futile, before the very eyes of the Court, and doing her
best to ruin Rohan as a thief, and Cagliostro as the forger of the
Queen's guarantee. The bold Neapolitan was acquitted, but compelled to
leave the country, and attempt England, where the phlegmatic islanders
trusted him no more than they trusted Madame Humbert. We expended our
main capital of credulity on Titus Oates and Bedloe, and the
warming-pan lie--our imaginative innocence being most accessible in
the region of religion.
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