He leaves this wicked woman
at the moment when (June 21, 1786) she has been publicly flogged and
branded, struggling, scratching, and biting like a wild cat. Her
husband, at about the same time, was in Edinburgh, and had just
escaped from being kidnapped by the French police. In another work
Monsieur Funck-Brentano criticises, with his remarkable learning, the
conclusion of the history of Jeanne de la Motte. Carlyle, in his
well-known essay, _The Diamond Necklace_, leaves Jeanne's later
adventures obscure, and is in doubt as to the particulars of her
death.
Perhaps absolute certainty (except as to the cause of Jeanne's death)
is not to be obtained. How she managed to escape from her prison, the
Salpetriere, later so famous for Charcot's hypnotic experiments on
hysterical female patients, remains a mystery. It was certain that if
she was once at liberty Jeanne would tell the lies against the Queen
which she had told before, and tell some more equally false, popular,
and damaging. Yet escape she did in 1787, the year following that of
her imprisonment at the Salpetriere; she reached England, compiled the
libels which she called her memoirs, and died strangely in 1791.
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