The man in red has been judged, he is completely acquitted; the Comte and the Comtesse de Cagliostro are as well. The Lady La Motte, student of that poor Madame de Boulainvilliers, is condemned to be whipped, branded, shaved only on her head, and she is to be locked up in a hospital; M. de La Motte is also to be whipped and branded, but as he doesn't care [about her], he escaped to safety. Sieur Vilette, their accomplice, is banished from the Kingdom, and Mlle d'Oliva is banished from the court. The following day, the Prince Bishop made the mistake of not sending the King early enough his resignation from his position as Grand Chaplain and from the knighthood of the Holy Ghost that he had only in function of this office, to which is attached the office of the Chaplain of the Order. M. de Breteuil asked him for both of them on behalf of the King, who is exiling the prelate to his abbey de La Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne. M. de Montmorency, Bishop of Metz and future cardinal, it is said, will become Grand Chaplain.

According to customs observed from time immemorial, there are all kinds of random commentaries on the judgement and the orders of the King. For a fairly large number of people illuminated by the most enlightened charity, the cardinal de Rohan has become the most interesting figure. He is endowed with great merit, and a slight hurt on his knee is transformed into a very grave injury, due to his imprisonment, and for which the learned Cagliostro claims that his leg must be amputated at the thigh. These people weep with tenderness and compassion, and they clamor against the severity of the Prince, who is attributed with attitudes and rigors which do not seem to have occurred to him. For others, and these are the hard-hearted, the inhuman, they find it quite surprising that in an affair in which the most severe criticism cannot find the slightest fault in the Queen; in which she and consequently the King are terribly offended; in which the latter ensured that the laws were scrupulously observed; whereas the cardinal, whose former conduct was not irreproachable, has demonstrated and admitted the most unforgivable blundering, carelessness, imprudence, and heedlessness; these people find it quite surprising that the Parliament, instead of at least making the injunction that he should be more careful, have on the contrary acquitted him, that is, made him triumph as much as possible. The same people think that the King might form the harshest impressions of the magistrates and believe that, being so unfair to him, they should be even more so for the people; and that if his spirit, so removed from despotism, does not deter this, he should respond by bringing justice himself or by seeing that justice is done by the odious means of commissions.

Madame de la Motte has just been punished and locked up in the Salpétrière hospital; she fought vigorously to avoid the red-hot iron, so that it is claimed that she is branded in an entirely different place than where the mark is customarily placed.

You will doubtless learn with sorrow of M. de La Motte's death, not the husband of she of whom I just spoke, but he who was in your home, who was mild and honest, and who strongly repented of his foolishness, to not go with you to America.

The King has arrived from his first voyage; he was in Cherbourg to see two cones sunk, then from there to Caen, to Le Havre, to Rouen to dine at the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld's, and to Gaillon to sup and stay the night in the beautiful house where we were so well received, and finally to Versailles. He spent this voyage very pleasantly, and everywhere he passed, he was met with the greatest joy; in all respects he conducted himself so as to make himself loved. It is to be hoped that he will go see the hospital for disabled soldiers presently.

The Duc de la Rochefoucauld, to whom I had communicated the political part of your letter, where you talk about the current state of affairs in America, asked me on behalf of an American to whom he had shown it, that it be published as an extract from one of your letters addressed to me, in response to the English newspapers. Although I saw nothing preventing it, I did not want to agree to it without your permission; please write me if you consent to this, or better yet send me a piece suited to fulfill this purpose.

I was recently loaned an English book entitled Observations on a late publication intituled Thoughts on executive justice to which is added a letter containing remarks on the same. This letter is yours, my dear friend, and it gave me great pleasure. I recognized several questions in it which we had debated together; however, you say that it is better that one thousand guilty men go free than to risk executing one innocent man, and you add that this principle has never been refuted by anyone. Doubtless it has in its favor the first cry of humanity, which is provoked only by the frightful misfortune that it represents, without thinking of those to which it might lead. I do not believe the proposition to be rigorously true; I even think that the slightest examination suffices to show that it would overthrow any kind of criminal justice, without which no society could subsist, for such a system of justice must admit proof, and however convincing these are required to be, they can only be probabilities. In a large number of criminal trials judged by men, probability must necessarily lead them sometimes to error and to the condemnation of an innocent man. It is a problem, a terrible one without doubt, but one which must be included with those which are brought on by society and which we must accept in order to benefit from its advantages. For a thousand guilty men set free will kill, perhaps cruelly, ten honest men, as interesting and as innocent as the one whom you would save. To claim therefore that it is better that a thousand guilty men go free than to risk the death of one innocent is to say that it is better that ten innocent men die than only one. I agree, moreover, with everything else that you wrote; I [aspire?] like any good citizen to a more just proportion of punishments to crimes, and I believe that with a better procedure, not only would fewer innocents perish, but a much larger number of criminals would be punished. This would be especially so if the legislator took fair measures to insulate himself from all the efforts which families make to save the culprits, families who are stigmatized by the most absurd prejudice when one of their members is punished for a crime.

I received from Monsieur your grandson a letter from May 6, which worries me about the fate of several of my own letters. He mentions the receipt of my letter from Jan. 6, without saying a word of the preceding ones, while between that date and the letter of Oct. 9, which his letter mentions, I wrote both of you on Oct. 30 and December 19. The occasions are faulty and quite rare. What a difference between this troublesome way of conversing, and the time when I saw you every day! Adieu, my dear friend, I love you and embrace you with all my heart