This last appeal is dated November 28th, 1665, but there is no record of his ultimate disposal. It is stated in an earlier document that Cardinal Mazarin had been willing to grant a pardon to this prisoner if he would agree to be conveyed to the frontier under escort and sent across it as a common criminal, but the Count had refused to accept this dishonoring condition which he pleaded would cast a stigma upon his family name. He offered, however, to leave France directly he was released and seek any domicile suggested to him where he might be safe from further oppression. Cardinal Mazarin seems to have been mercifully inclined, but died before he could extend clemency to this unhappy victim of arbitrary power.
The Bastile was used sometimes as a sanctuary to withdraw an offender who had outraged the law and could not otherwise be saved from reprisal. A notable case was that of René de l'Hopital, Marquis de Choisy, who lived on his estates like a savage tyrant. In 1659 he was denounced by a curé to the ecclesiastical authorities for his crimes. The marquis with a couple of attendants waylaid the priest on the high road and attacked the curé whom he grievously wounded. The priest commended himself to God and was presently stunned by a murderous blow on the jaw from the butt end of a musket. Then the Marquis, to make sure his victim was really dead, rode his horse over the recumbent body and then stabbed it several times with his sword. But help came and the curé was rescued still alive, and strange to say, recovered, although it was said he had received a hundred and twenty wounds.
The entire religious hierarchy in France espoused the priest's cause. The Marquis was haled before several provincial courts of justice. He would undoubtedly have been convicted of murder and sentenced to death, for Louis XIV would seldom spare the murderer of a priest, but the l'Hopital family had great influence at Court and won a pardon for the criminal. The Parliament of Paris or High Court of Justice boldly resisted the royal decree and the marquis would still have been executed had he not been consigned for safety to the "King's Castle," the Bastile. He passed subsequently to the prison of For-l'Évêque, from which he was released with others on the entry of the King to Paris, at his marriage. Still the vindictive Parliament pursued him and he would hardly have escaped the scaffold had he not fled the country.
