Page:Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1775).djvu/245

 XIII. The design was not to betray France to an enemy; for the king’s brother, who was the principal author of the plot, could never intend to betray a kingdom to which he was the presumptive heir, there being only between him and the crown a dying brother, and two children in the cradle.

De Thou was neither guilty in the sight of God nor man. One of the agents of the king’s brother, of the Duke of Bouillon, sovereign prince of Sedan, and of the grand Equerry d’Effiat St. Mars, had communicated their intention to de Thou, who immediately went to St. Mars, and endeavoured to dissuade him from the enterprize. If he had informed against him, he had no proof, and must inevitably have fallen a sacrifice to the resentment of the presumptive heir of a sovereign prince, of the king’s favourite, and to public execration. In short, he would have been punished as a malignant calumniator.

The chancellor Seguier was convinced of this in confronting de Thou with the