"A mere trifle," she answered, looking at her glass of wine. "I can't help loving you still, badly as you have treated me. You are a dead man, Poulailler--and I shall not survive you."
The robber started to his feet, and seized a knife on the table.
"No," she replied. "Poison is my vengeance on myself; not my vengeance on _you_. You will rise from this table as you sat down to it. But your evening will be finished in prison; and your life will be ended on the Wheel."
As she spoke the words, the door was burst open by the police, and Poulailler was secured. The same night the poison did its fatal work; and his mistress made atonement with her life for the first, last, act of treachery which had revenged her on the man she loved.
Once safely lodged in the hands of justice, the robber tried to gain time to escape in, by promising to make important disclosures. The manoeuvre availed him nothing. In those days, the Laws of the Land had not yet made acquaintance with the Laws of Humanity. Poulailler was put to the torture--was suffered to recover--was publicly broken on the Wheel--and was taken off it alive, to be cast into a blazing fire. By those murderous means, Society rid itself of a murderous man--and the idlers on the Boulevards took their evening stroll again in recovered security.
Paris had seen the execution of Poulailler--but, if legends are to be trusted, our old friends, the people of the fishing village in Brittany saw the end of him afterwards. On the day and hour when he perished, the heavens darkened, and a terrible storm arose. Once more, and for a moment only, the gleam of the unearthly fire reddened the windows of the old Tower. Thunder pealed and struck the building into fragments. Lightning flashed incessantly over the ruins; and, in the scorching glare of it, the boat which, in former years, had put off to sea whenever the storm rose highest, was seen to shoot out into the raging ocean from the cleft in the rock--and was discovered, on this final occasion, to be doubly manned. The Fiend-Fisherman sat at the helm; his Adopted Son tugged at the oars; and a clamour of diabolical voices, roaring awfully through the roaring storm, wished the pair of them a prosperous voyage.