E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Paul Ereaut,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(https://www.pgdp.net/)

The House of the Combrays

By G. LE NOTRE

Translated from the French by

Mrs. JOSEPH B. GILDER

New York
Dodd, Mead, & Company
1902

Contents

PREFACE

AN OLD TOWER

One evening in the winter of 1868 or 1869, my father-in-law, Moisson, with whom I was chatting after dinner, took up a book that was lying on the table, open at the page where I had stopped reading, and said:

"Ah! you are reading Mme. de la Chanterie?"

"Yes," I replied. "A fine book; do you know it?"

"Of course! I even know the heroine."

"Mme. de la Chanterie!"

"—— By her real name Mme. de Combray. I lived three months in her house."

"Rue Chanoinesse?"

"No, not in the Rue Chanoinesse, where she did not live, any more than she was the saintly woman of Balzac's novel;—but at her Château of Tournebut d'Aubevoye near Gaillon!"

"Gracious, Moisson, tell me about it;" and without further solicitation, Moisson told me the following story:

"My mother was a Brécourt, whose ancestor was a bastard of Gaston d'Orleans, and she was on this account a royalist, and very proud of her nobility. The Brécourts, who were fighting people, had never become rich, and the Revolution ruined them completely. During the Terror my mother married Moisson, my father, a painter and engraver, a plebeian but also an ardent royalist, participating in all the plots for the deliverance of the royal family. This explains the mésalliance. She hoped, besides, that the monarchy, of whose reestablishment she had no doubt, would recognise my father's services by ennobling him and reviving the name of Brécourt, which was now represented only in the female line. She always called herself Moisson de Brécourt, and bore me a grudge for using only my father's name.

"In 1804, when I was eight years old, we were living on the island of Saint-Louis, and I remember very well the excitement in the quarter, and above all in our house, caused by the arrest of Georges Cadoudal. I can see my mother anxiously sending our faithful servant for news; my father came home less and less often; and at last, one night, he woke me up suddenly, kissed me, kissed my mother hastily, and I can still hear the noise of the street door closing behind him. We never saw him again!"

"Arrested?"

"No, we should have known that, but probably killed in flight, or dead of fatigue and want, or drowned in crossing some river—like many other fugitives, whose names I used to know. He was to have sent us news as soon as he was in safety. After a month's waiting, my mother's despair became alarming. She seemed mad, committed the most compromising acts, spoke aloud and with so little reserve about Bonaparte, that each time the bell rang, our servant and I expected to see the police.

"A very different kind of visitor appeared one fine morning. He was, he said, the business man of Mme. de Combray, a worthy woman who lived in her Château of Tournebut d'Aubevoye near Gaillon. She was a fervent royalist, and had heard through common friends of my father's disappearance, and compassionating our misfortune placed a house near her own at the disposal of my mother, who would there find the safety and peace that she needed, after her cruel sorrows. As my mother hesitated, Mme. de Combray's messenger urged the benefit to my health, the exercise and the good air indispensable at my age, and finally she consented. Having obtained all necessary information, my mother, the servant and I took the boat two days after, at Saint-Germain, and arrived by sunset the same evening at Roule, near Aubevoye. A gardener was waiting with a cart for us and our luggage. A few moments later we entered the court of the château.

"Mme. de Combray received us in a large room overlooking the Seine. She had one of her sons with her, and two intimate friends, who welcomed my mother with the consideration due to the widow of one who had served the good cause. Supper was served; I was drooping with sleep, and the only remembrance I have of this meal is the voice of my mother, passionate and excitable as ever. Next morning, after breakfast, the gardener appeared with his cart, to take us to the house we were to occupy; the road was so steep and rough that my mother preferred to go on foot, leading her horse by the bridle. We were in a thick wood, climbing all the time, and surprised at having to go so far and so high to reach the habitation that had been offered to us near the château. We came to a clearing in the wood, and the gardener cried, 'Here we are!' and pointed to our dwelling. 'Oh!' cried my mother, 'it is a donjon!' It was an old round tower, surmounted by a platform and with no opening but the door and some loop-holes that served as windows.

"The situation itself was not displeasing. A plateau cleared in the woods, surrounded by large trees with a vista towards the Seine, and a fine view extending some distance. The gardener had a little hut near by, and there was a small kitchen-garden for our use. In fact one would have been easily satisfied with this solitude, after the misfortunes of the Isle Saint-Louis, if the tower had been less forbidding. To enter it one had to cross a little moat, over which were thrown two planks, which served as a bridge. By means of a cord and pulley this could be drawn up from the inside, against the entrance door, thus making it doubly secure. 'And this is the drawbridge!' said my mother, mockingly.

"The ground floor consisted of a circular chamber, with a table, chairs, a sideboard, etc. Opposite the door, in an embrasure of the wall, about two yards in thickness, a barred window lighted this room, which was to serve as sitting-room, kitchen and dining-room at the same time; but lighted it so imperfectly that to see plainly even in the daytime one had to leave the door open. On one side was the fireplace, and on the other the wooden staircase that led to the upper floors; under the staircase was a trap-door firmly closed by a large lock.

"'It is the cellar,' said the gardener, 'but it is dangerous, as it is full of rubbish. I have a place where you can keep your drink.' 'And our food?' said the servant.

"The gardener explained that he often went down to the château in his cart and that the cook would have every facility for doing her marketing at Aubevoye. As for my mother, Mme. de Combray, thinking that the journey up and down hill would be too much for her, would send a donkey which would do for her to ride when we went to the château in the afternoon or evening. On the first floor were two rooms separated by a partition; one for my mother and me, the other for the servant, both lighted only by loop-holes. It was cold and sinister.

"'This is a prison!' cried my mother.

"The gardener remarked that we should only sleep there; and seeing my mother about to go up to the next floor, he stopped her, indicating the dilapidated condition of the stairs. 'This floor is abandoned,' he said; 'the platform above is in a very bad state, and the staircase impracticable and dangerous. Mme. de Combray begs that you will never go above the first landing, for fear of an accident.' After which he went to get our luggage.

"My mother then gave way to her feelings. It was a mockery to lodge us in this rat-hole. She talked of going straight back to Paris; but our servant was so happy at having no longer to fear the police; I had found so much pleasure gathering flowers in the wood and running after butterflies; my mother herself enjoyed the great calm and silence so much that the decision was put off till the next day. And the next day we renounced all idea of going.

"Our life for the next two months was untroubled. We were at the longest days of the year. Once a week we were invited to supper at the château, and we came home through the woods at night in perfect security. Sometimes in the afternoon my mother went to visit Mme. de Combray, and always found her playing at cards or tric-trac with friends staying at the château or passing through, but oftenest with a stout man, her lawyer. No existence could be more commonplace or peaceful. Although they talked politics freely (but with more restraint than my mother), she told me later that she never for one moment suspected that she was in a nest of conspirators. Once or twice only Mme. de Combray, touched by the sincerity and ardour of her loyalty, seemed to be on the point of confiding in her. She even forgot herself so far as to say:—'Oh! if you were not so hot-headed, one would tell you certain things!'—but as if already regretting that she had said so much, she stopped abruptly.

"One night, when my mother could not sleep, her attention was attracted by a dull noise down-stairs, as if some one were shutting a trap-door clumsily. She lay awake all night uneasily, listening, but in vain. Next morning we found the room down-stairs in its usual condition; but my mother would not admit that she had been dreaming, and the same day spoke to Mme. de Combray, who joked her about it, and sent her to the gardener. The latter said he had made the noise. Passing the tower he had imagined that the door was not firmly closed, and had pushed against it to make sure. The incident did not occur again; but several days later there was a new, and this time more serious, alarm.

"I had noticed on top of the tower a blackbird's nest, which could easily be reached from the platform, but, faithful to orders, I had never gone up there. This time, however, the temptation was too strong. I watched until my mother and the servant were in our little garden, and then climbed nimbly up to take the nest. On the landing of the second floor, curious to get a peep at the uninhabited rooms, I pushed open the door, and saw distinctly behind the glass door in the partition that separated the two rooms, a green curtain drawn quickly. In a great fright I rushed down-stairs head over heels, and ran into the garden, calling my mother and shouting, 'There is some one up-stairs in the room!' She did not believe it and scolded me. As I insisted she followed me up-stairs with the servant. From the landing my mother cried, 'Is any one there?' Silence. She pushed open the glass door. No one to be seen—only a folding-bed, unmade. She touched it; it was warm! Some one had been there, asleep,—dressed, no doubt. Where was he? On the platform? We went up. No one was there! He had no doubt escaped when I ran to the garden!

"We went down again quickly and our servant called the gardener. He had disappeared. We saddled the donkey, and my mother went hurry-scurry to the château. She found the lawyer at the eternal tric-trac with Mme. de Combray, who frowned at the first word, not even interrupting her game.

"'More dreams! The room is unoccupied! No one sleeps there!'

"'But the curtain!'

"'Well, what of the curtain? Your child made a draught by opening the door, and the curtain swung.'

"'But the bed, still warm!'

"'The gardener has some cats that must have been lying there, and ran away when the door was opened, and that's all about it!'

"'And yet—'

"'Well, have you found this ghost?'

"'No.'

"'Well then?' And she shook her dice rather roughly without paying any more attention to my mother, who after exchanging a curt good-night with the Marquise, returned to the tower, so little convinced of the presence of the cats that she took two screw-rings from one of our boxes, fixed them on to the trap-door, closed them with a padlock, took the key and said, 'Now we will see if any one comes in that way.' And for greater security she decided to lift the drawbridge after supper. We all three took hold of the rope that moved with difficulty on the rusty pulley. It was hard; we made three attempts. At last it moved, the bridge shook, lifted, came right up. It was done! And that evening, beside my bed, my mother said:

"'We will not grow old in her Bastille!'

"Which was true, for eight days later we were awakened in the middle of the night by a terrible hubbub on the ground floor. From our landing we heard several voices, swearing and raging under the trap-door which they were trying to raise, to which the padlock offered but feeble resistance, for a strong push broke it off and the door opened with a great noise. My mother and the servant rushed to the bureau, pushed and dragged it to the door, whilst some men came out of the cellar, walked to the door, grumbling, opened it, saw the drawbridge up, unfastened the rope and let it fall down with a loud bang, and then the voices grew fainter till they disappeared in the wood. But go to sleep after all that! We stayed there waiting for the dawn, and though all danger was over, not daring to speak aloud!

"At last the day broke. We moved the bureau, and my mother, brave as ever, went down first, carrying a candle. The yawning trap-door exposed the black hole of a cellar, the entrance door was wide open and the bridge down. We called the gardener, who did not answer, and whose hut was empty. My mother did not wait till afternoon this time, but jumped on her donkey and went down to the château.

"Mme. de Combray was dressing. She expected my mother and knew her object in coming so well that without waiting for her to tell her story, she flew out like most people, who, having no good reason to give, resort to angry words, and cried as soon as she entered the room:

"'You are mad; mad enough to be shut up! You take my house for a resort of bandits and counterfeiters! I am sorry enough that I ever brought you here!'

"'And I that I ever came!'

"'Very well, then—go!'

"'I am going to-morrow. I came to tell you so.'

"'A safe return to you!' On which Mme. de Combray turned her back, and my mother retraced her steps to the tower in a state of exasperation, fully determined to take the boat for Paris without further delay.

"Early next morning we made ready. The gardener was at the door with his cart, coming and going for our luggage, while the servant put the soup on the table. My mother took only two or three spoonfuls and I did the same, as I hate soup. The servant alone emptied her plate! We went down to Roule where the gardener had scarcely left us when the servant was seized with frightful vomiting. My mother and I were also slightly nauseated, but the poor girl retained nothing, happily for her, for we returned to Paris convinced that the gardener, being left alone for a moment, had thrown some poison into the soup."

"And did nothing happen afterwards?"

"Nothing."

"And you heard nothing more from Tournebut?"

"Nothing, until 1808, when we learned that the mail had been attacked and robbed near Falaise by a band of armed men commanded by Mme. de Combray's daughter, Mme. Acquet de Férolles, disguised as a hussar! Then, that Mme. Acquet had been arrested as well as her lover (Le Chevalier), her husband, her mother, her lawyer and servants and those of Mme. de Combray at Tournebut; and finally that Mme. de Combray had been condemned to imprisonment and the pillory, Mme. Acquet, her lover, the lawyer (Lefebre) and several others, to death."

"And the husband?"

"Released; he was a spy."

"Was your mother called as a witness?"

"No, happily, they knew nothing about us. Besides, what would she have said?"

"Nothing, except that the people who frightened you so much, must surely have belonged to the band; that they had forced the trap-door, after a nocturnal expedition, on which they had been pursued as far as a subterranean entrance, which without doubt led to the cellar."

After we had chatted a while on this subject Moisson wished me good-night, and I took up Balzac's chef d'œuvre and resumed my reading. But I only read a few lines; my imagination was wandering elsewhere. It was a long distance from Balzac's idealism to the realism of Moisson, which awakened in me memories of the stories and melodramas of Ducray-Duminil, of Guilbert de Pixérecourt—"Alexis, ou la Maisonette dans les Bois," "Victor, ou l'Enfant de la Forêt,"—and many others of the same date and style so much discredited nowadays. And I thought that what caused the discredit now, accounted for their vogue formerly; that they had a substratum of truth under a mass of absurdity; that these stories of brigands in their traditional haunts, forests, caverns and subterranean passages, charmed by their likelihood the readers of those times to whom an attack on a coach by highwaymen with blackened faces was as natural an occurrence as a railway accident is to us, and that in what seems pure extravaganza to us they only saw a scarcely exaggerated picture of things that were continually happening under their eyes. In the reports published by M. Félix Rocquain we can learn the state of France during the Directory and the early years of the Commune. The roads, abandoned since 1792, were worn into such deep ruts, that to avoid them the waggoners made long circuits in ploughed land, and the post-chaises would slip and sink into the muddy bogs from which it was impossible to drag them except with oxen. At every step through the country one came to a deserted hamlet, a roofless house, a burned farm, a château in ruins. Under the indifferent eyes of a police that cared only for politics, and of gendarmes recruited in such a fashion that a criminal often recognised an old comrade in the one who arrested him, bands of vagabonds and scamps of all kinds had been formed; deserters, refractories, fugitives from the pretended revolutionary army, and terrorists without employment, "the scum," said François de Nantes, "of the Revolution and the war; 'lanterneurs' of '91, 'guillotineurs' of '93, 'sabreurs' of the year III, 'assommeurs' of the year IV, 'fusilleurs' of the year V." All this canaille lived only by rapine and murder, camped in the forests, ruins and deserted quarries like that at Gueudreville, an underground passage one hundred feet long by thirty broad, the headquarters of the band of Orgères, a thoroughly organised company of bandits—chiefs, subchiefs, storekeepers, spies, couriers, barbers, surgeons, dressmakers, cooks, preceptors for the "gosses," and curé!

And this brigandage was rampant everywhere. There was so little safety in the Midi from Marseilles to Toulon and Toulouse that one could not travel without an escort. In the Var, the Bouches-du-Rhône, Vaucluse, from Digne and Draguignan, to Avignon and Aix, one had to pay ransom. A placard placed along the roads informed the traveller that unless he paid a hundred francs in advance, he risked being killed. The receipt given to the driver served as a passport. Theft by violence was so much the custom that certain villages in the Lower Alps were openly known as the abode of those who had no other occupation. On the banks of the Rhône travellers were charitably warned not to put up at certain solitary inns for fear of not reappearing therefrom. On the Italian frontier they were the "barbets"; in the North the "garroteurs"; in the Ardèche the "bande noire"; in the Centre the "Chiffoniers"; in Artois, Picardie, the Somme, Seine-Inférieure, the Chartrain country, the Orléanais, Loire-Inférieure, Orne, Sarthe, Mayenne, Ille-et-Vilaine, etc., and Ile-de-France to the very gates of Paris, but above all in Calvados, Finistère and La Manche where royalism served as their flag, the "chauffeurs" and the bands of "Grands Gars" and "Coupe et Tranche," which under pretence of being Chouans attacked farms or isolated dwellings, and inspired such terror that if one of them were arrested neither witness nor jury could be found to condemn him. Politics evidently had nothing to do with these exploits; it was a private war. And the Chouans professed to wage it only against the government. So long as they limited themselves to fighting the gendarmes or national guards in bands of five or six hundred, to invading defenceless places in order to cut down the trees of liberty, burn the municipal papers, and pillage the coffers of the receivers and school-teachers—(the State funds having the right to return to their legitimate owner, the King), they could be distinguished from professional malefactors. But when they stopped coaches, extorted ransom from travellers and shot constitutional priests and purchasers of the national property, the distinction became too subtle. There was no longer any room for it in the year VIII and IX when, vigorous measures having almost cleared the country of the bands of "chauffeurs" and other bandits who infested it, the greater number of those who had escaped being shot or guillotined joined what remained of the royalist army, last refuge of brigandage.

In such a time Moisson's adventure was not at all extraordinary. We can only accuse it of being too simple. It was the mildest scene of a huge melodrama in which he and his mother had played the part of supers. But slight as was the episode, it had all the attraction of the unknown for me. Of Tournebut and its owners I knew nothing. Who, in reality, was this Mme. de Combray, sanctified by Balzac? A fanatic, or an intriguer?—And her daughter Mme. Acquet? A heroine or a lunatic?—and the lover? A hero or an adventurer?—And the husband, the lawyer and the friends of the house? Mme. Acquet more than all piqued my curiosity. The daughter of a good house disguised as a hussar to stop the mail like Choppart! This was not at all commonplace! Was she young and pretty? Moisson knew nothing about it; he had never seen her or her lover or husband, Mme. de Combray having quarrelled with all of them.

I was most anxious to learn more, but to do that it would be necessary to consult the report of the trial in the record office at Rouen. I never had time. I mentioned it to M. Gustave Bord, to Frédéric Masson and M. de la Sicotière, and thought no more about it even after the interesting article published in the Temps, by M. Ernest Daudet, until walking one day with Lenôtre in the little that is left of old Paris of the Cité, the house in the Rue Chanoinesse, where Balzac lodged Mme. de la Chanterie, reminded me of Moisson, whose adventure I narrated to Lenôtre, at that time finishing his "Conspiration de la Rouërie." That was sufficient to give him the idea of studying the records of the affair of 1807, which no one had consulted before him. A short time after he told me that the tower of Tournebut was still in existence, and that he was anxious for us to visit it, the son-in-law of the owner of the Château of Aubevoye, M. Constantin, having kindly offered to conduct us.

On a fine autumn morning the train left us at the station that served the little village of Aubevoye, whose name has twice been heard in the Courts of Justice, once in the trial of Mme. de Combray and once in that of Mme. de Jeufosse. Those who have no taste for these sorts of excursions cannot understand their charm. Whether it be a little historical question to be solved, an unknown or badly authenticated fact to be elucidated, this document hunt with its deceptions and surprises is the most amusing kind of chase, especially in company with a delver like Lenôtre, endowed with an admirable flair that always puts him on the right track. There was, moreover, a particular attraction in this old forgotten tower, in which we alone were interested, and in examining into Moisson's story!

Of the château that had been built by the Marechal de Marillac, and considerably enlarged by Mme. de Combray, nothing, unhappily, remains but the out-buildings, a terrace overlooking the Seine, the court of honour turned into a lawn, an avenue of old limes and the ancient fence. A new building replaced the old one fifty years ago. The little château, "Gros-Mesnil," near the large one has recently been restored.

But the general effect is the same as in 1804. Seeing the great woods that hug the outer wall so closely, one realises how well they lent themselves to the mysterious comings and goings, to the secret councils, to the rôle destined for it by Mme. de Combray, preparing the finest room for the arrival of the King or the Comte d'Artois, and in both the great and little château, arranging hiding-places, one of which alone could accommodate forty armed men.

The tower is still there, far from the château, at the summit of a wooded hill in the centre of a clearing, which commands the river valley. It is a squat, massive construction, of forbidding aspect, such as Moisson described, with thick walls, and windows so narrow that they look more like loopholes. It seems as if it might originally have been one of the guard-houses or watch-towers erected on the heights from Nantes to Paris, like the tower of Montjoye whose ditch is recognisable in the Forest of Marly, or those of Montaigu and Hennemont, whose ruins were still visible in the last century. Some of these towers were converted into mills or pigeon-houses. Ours, whose upper story and pointed roof had been demolished and replaced by a platform at an uncertain date, was flanked by a wooden mill, burnt before the Revolution, for it is not to be found in Cassini's chart which shows all in the region. The tower and its approaches are still known as the "burnt mill."

There remains no trace of the excavation which was in front of the entrance in 1804, and which must have been the last vestige of an old moat. The threshold crossed, we are in the circular chamber; at the end facing the door is the window, the bars of which have been taken down; on the left a modern chimneypiece replaces the old one, and on the right is the staircase, in good condition. The trap-door has disappeared from under it, the cellar being abandoned as useless. On the first floor as on the second, where the partitions have been removed, there are still traces of them, with fragments of wall-paper. The very little daylight that filters through the windows justifies Mme. Moisson's exclamation, "It is a prison!" The platform, from which the view is very fine, has been renewed, like the staircase. But from top to bottom all corresponds with Moisson's description.

All that remained now was to find out how one could get into the cellar from outside. We had two excellent guides; our kind host, M. Constantin, and M. l'Abbé Drouin, the curé of Aubevoye, who knew all the local traditions. They mentioned the "Grotto of the Hermit!" O Ducray-Duminil!—Thou again!

The grotto is an old quarry in the side of the hill towards the Seine, below the tower and having no apparent communication with it, but so situated that an underground passage of a few yards would unite them. The grotto being now almost filled up, the entrance to this passage has disappeared. Looking at it, so innocent in appearance now under the brush and brambles, I seemed to see some Chouan by star-light, eye and ear alert, throw himself into it like a rabbit into its hole, and creep through to the tower, to sleep fully dressed on the pallet on the second floor. Evidently this tower, planned as were all Mme. de Combray's abodes, was one of the many refuges arranged by the Chouans from the coast of Normandy to Paris and known only to themselves.

But why was Mme. Moisson accommodated there without being taken into her hostess's confidence? If Mme. de Combray wished to avert suspicion by having two women and a child there, she might have told them so; and if she thought Mme. Moisson too excitable to hear such a confession, she should not have exposed her to nocturnal mysteries that could only tend to increase her excitement! When Phélippeaux was questioned, during the trial of Georges Cadoudal, about Moisson's father, who had disappeared, he replied that he lived in the street and island of Saint-Louis near the new bridge; that he was an engraver and manager of a button factory; that Mme. Moisson had a servant named R. Petit-Jean, married to a municipal guard. Was it through fear of this woman's writing indiscreetly to her husband that Mme. de Combray remained silent? But in any case, why the tower?

However this may be, the exactness of Moisson's reminiscences was proved. But the trap-door had not been forced, as he believed, by Chouans fleeing after some nocturnal expedition. This point was already decided by the first documents that Lenôtre had collected for this present work. There was no expedition of the sort in the neighbourhood of Tournebut during the summer of 1804. They would not have risked attracting attention to the château where was hidden the only man whom the Chouans of Normandy judged capable of succeeding Georges, and whom they called "Le Grand Alexandre"—the Vicomte Robert d'Aché. Hunted through Paris like all the royalists denounced by Querelle, he had managed to escape the searchers, to go out in one of his habitual disguises when the gates were reopened, to get to Normandy by the left bank of the Seine and take refuge with his old friend at Tournebut, where he lived for fourteen months under the name of Deslorières, his presence there never being suspected by the police.

He was certainly, as well as Bonnœil, Mme. de Combray's eldest son, one of the three guests with whom Moisson took supper on the evening of his arrival. The one who was always playing cards or tric-trac with the Marquise, and whom she called her lawyer, might well have been d'Aché himself. As to the stealthy visitors at the tower, given the presence of d'Aché at Tournebut, it is highly probable that they were only passing by there to confer with him, taking his orders secretly in the woods without even appearing at the château, and then disappearing as mysteriously as they had come.

For d'Aché in his retreat still plotted and made an effort to resume, with the English minister, the intrigue that had just failed so miserably, Moreau having withdrawn at the last minute. The royalist party was less intimidated than exasperated at the deaths of the Duke d'Enghien, Georges and Pichegru, and did not consider itself beaten even by the proclamation of the Empire, which had not excited in the provinces—above all in the country—the enthusiasm announced in the official reports.

In reality it had been accepted by the majority of the population as a government of expediency, which would provisionally secure threatened interests, but whose duration was anything but certain. It was too evident that the Empire was Napoleon, as the Consulate had been Bonaparte—that everything rested on the head of one man. If an infernal machine removed him, royalty would have a good opportunity. His life was not the only stake; his luck itself was very hazardous. Founded on victory, the Empire was condemned to be always victorious. War could undo what war had done. And this uneasiness is manifest in contemporary memoirs and correspondence. More of the courtiers of the new régime than one imagines were as sceptical as Mme. Mère, economising her revenues and saying to her mocking daughters, "You will perhaps be very glad of them, some day!" In view of a possible catastrophe many of these kept open a door for retreat towards the Bourbons, and vaguely encouraged hopes of assistance that could only be depended on in case of their success, but which the royalists believed in as positive and immediate. As to the disaster which might bring it about, they hoped for its early coming, and promised it to the impatient Chouans—the disembarkation of an Anglo-Russian army—the rising of the West—the entrance of Louis XVIII into his good town of Paris—and the return of the Corsican to his island! Predictions that were not so wild after all. Ten years later it was an accomplished fact in almost all its details. And what are ten years in politics? Frotté, Georges, Pichegru, d'Aché, would only have had to fold their arms. They would have seen the Empire crumble by its own weight.

We made these reflections on returning to the château while looking at the terrace in the setting sun, at the peaceful winding of the Seine and the lovely autumn landscape that Mme. de Combray and d'Aché had so often looked at, at the same place and hour, little foreseeing the sad fate the future had in store for them.

The misfortunes of the unhappy woman—the deplorable affair of Quesnay where the coach with state funds was attacked by Mme. Acquet's men, for the profit of the royalist exchequer and of Le Chevalier; the assassination of d'Aché, sold to the imperial police by La Vaubadon, his mistress, and the cowardly Doulcet de Pontécoulant, who does not boast of it in his "Mémoires,"—have been the themes of several tales, romances and novels, wherein fancy plays too great a part, and whose misinformed authors, Hippolyte Bonnelier, Comtesse de Mirabeau, Chennevières, etc., have taken great advantage of the liberty used in works of imagination. There is only one reproach to be made—that they did not have the genius of Balzac. But we may criticise more severely the so-called historical writings about Mme. de Combray, her family and residences, and the Château of Tournebut which M. Homberg shows us flanked by four feudal towers, and which MM. Le Prévost and Bourdon say was demolished in 1807.

Mme. d'Abrantès, with her usual veracity, describes the luxurious furniture and huge lamps in the "labyrinths of Tournebut, of which one must, as it were, have a plan, so as not to lose one's way." She shows us Le Chevalier, crucifix in hand, haranguing the assailants in the wood of Quesnay (although he was in Paris that day to prove an alibi), and gravely adds, "I know some one who was in the coach and who alone survived, the seven other travellers having been massacred and their bodies left on the road." Now there was neither coach nor travellers, and no one was killed!

M. de la Sicotière's mistakes are still stranger. At the time that he was preparing his great work on "Frotté and the Norman Insurrections," he learned from M. Gustave Bord that I had some special facts concerning Mme. de Combray, and wrote to ask me about them. I sent him a résumé of Moisson's story, and asked him to verify its correctness. And on that he went finely astray.

Mme. de Combray had two residences besides her house at Rouen; one at Aubevoye, where she had lived for a long while, the other thirty leagues away, at Donnay, in the department of Orne, where she no longer went, as her son-in-law had settled himself there. Two towers have the same name of Tournebut; the one at Aubevoye is ours; the other, some distance from Donnay, did not belong to Mme. de Combray.

Convinced solely by the assertions of MM. Le Prévost and Bourdon that in 1804 the Château of Aubevoye and its tower no longer existed, and that Mme. de Combray occupied Donnay at that date, M. de la Sicotière naturally mistook one Tournebut for the other, did not understand a single word of Moisson's story, which he treated as a chimera, and in his book acknowledges my communications in this disdainful note:

"Confusion has arisen in many minds between the two Tournebuts, so different, however, and at such a distance from each other, and has given birth to many strange and romantic legends; inaccessible retreats arranged for outlaws and bandits in the old tower, nocturnal apparitions, innocent victims paying with their lives the misfortune of having surprised the secrets of these terrible guests...."

It is pleasant to see M. de la Sicotière point out the confusion he alone experienced. But there is better to come! Here is a writer who gives us in two large volumes the history of Norman Chouannerie. There is little else spoken of in his book than disguises, false names, false papers, ambushes, kidnappings, attacks on coaches, subterranean passages, prisons, escapes, child spies and female captains! He states himself that the affair of the Forest of Quesnay was "tragic, strange and mysterious!" And at the same time he condemns as "strange" and "romantic" the simplest of all these adventures—that of Moisson! He scoffs at his hiding-places in the roofs of the old château, and it is precisely in the roofs of the old château that the police found the famous refuge which could hold forty men with ease. He calls the retreats arranged for the outlaws and bandits "legendary," at the same time that he gives two pages to the enumeration of the holes, vaults, wells, pits, grottoes and caverns in which these same bandits and outlaws found safety! So that M. de la Sicotière seems to be laughing at himself!

I should reproach myself if I did not mention, as a curiosity, the biography of M. and Mme. de Combray, united in one person in the "Dictionaire Historique" (!!!) of Larousse. It is unique of its kind. Names, places and facts are all wrong. And the crowning absurdity is that, borne out by these fancies, fragments are given of the supposed Mémoires that Félicie (!) de Combray wrote after the Restoration—forgetting that she was guillotined under the Empire!

With M. Ernest Daudet we return to history. No one had seriously studied the crime of Quesnay before him. Some years ago he gave the correct story of it in Le Temps and we could not complain of its being only what he meant it to be—a faithful and rapid résumé. Besides, M. Daudet had only at his disposal the portfolios 8,170, 8,171, and 8,172 of the Series F7 of the National Archives, and the reports sent to Réal by Savoye-Rollin and Licquet, this cunning detective beside whom Balzac's Corentin seems a mere schoolboy. Consequently the family drama escapes M. Daudet, who, for that matter, did not have to concern himself with it. It would not have been possible to do better than he did with the documents within his reach.

Lenôtre has pushed his researches further. He has not limited himself to studying, bit by bit, the voluminous report of the trial of 1808, which fills a whole cupboard; to comparing and opposing the testimony of the witnesses one against the other, examining the reports and enquiries, disentangling the real names from the false, truth from error—in a word, investigating the whole affair, a formidable task of which he only gives us the substance here. Aided by his wonderful instinct and the persistency of the investigator, he has managed to obtain access to family papers, some of which were buried in old trunks relegated to the attics, and in these papers has found precious documents which clear up the depths of this affair of Quesnay where the mad passion of one poor woman plays the greatest part.

And let no one imagine that he is going to read a romance in these pages. It is an historical study in the severest meaning of the word. Lenôtre mentions no fact that he cannot prove. He risks no hypothesis without giving it as such, and admits no fancy in the slightest detail. If he describes one of Mme. Acquet's toilettes, it is because it is given in some interrogation. I have seen him so scrupulous on this point, as to suppress all picturesqueness that could be put down to his imagination. In no cause celèbre has justice shown more exactitude in exposing the facts. In short, here will be found all the qualities that ensured the success of his "Conspiration de la Rouërie," the chivalrous beginning of the Chouannerie that he now shows us in its decline, reduced to highway robbery!

As for me, if I have lingered too long by this old tower, it is because it suggested this book; and we owe some gratitude to these mute witnesses of a past which they keep in our remembrance.

Victorien Sardou.

The House of the Combrays

CHAPTER I

THE TREACHERY OF JEAN-PIERRE QUERELLE

Late at night on January the 25th, 1804, the First Consul, who, as it often happened, had arisen in order to work till daylight, was looking over the latest police reports that had been placed on his desk.

His death was talked of everywhere. It had already been announced positively in London, Germany and Holland. "To assassinate Bonaparte" was a sort of game, in which the English were specially active. From their shores, well-equipped and plentifully supplied with money, sailed many who were desirous of gaining the great stake,—obdurate Chouans and fanatical royalists who regarded as an act of piety the crime that would rid France of the usurper. What gave most cause for alarm in these reports, usually unworthy of much attention, was the fact that all of them were agreed on one point—Georges Cadoudal had disappeared. Since this man, formidable by reason of his courage and tenacity of purpose, had declared war without mercy on the First Consul, the police had never lost sight of him. It was known that he was staying in England, and he was under surveillance there; but if it was true that he had escaped this espionage, the danger was imminent, and the predicted "earthquake" at hand.

Bonaparte, more irritated than uneasy at these tales, wished to remove all doubt about the matter. He mistrusted Fouché, whose devotion he had reason to suspect, and who besides had not at this time—officially at least—the superintendence of the police; and he had attached to himself a dangerous spy, the Belgian Réal. It was on this man that Bonaparte, on certain occasions, preferred to rely. Réal was a typical detective. The friend of Danton, he had in former days, organised the great popular manifestations that were to intimidate the Convention. He had penetrated the terrible depths of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the Committee of Public Safety. He knew and understood how to make use of what remained of the old committees of sections, of "septembriseurs" without occupation, lacqueys, perfumers, dentists, dancing masters without pupils, all the refuse of the revolution, the women of the Palais-Royal: such was the army he commanded, having as his lieutenants Desmarets, an unfrocked priest, and Veyrat, formerly a Genevese convict, who had been branded and whipped by the public executioner. Réal and these two subalterns were the principal actors in the drama that we are about to relate.

On this night Bonaparte sent in haste for Réal. In his usual manner, by brief questions he soon learned the number of royalists confined in the tower of the Temple or at Bicêtre, their names, and on what suspicions they had been arrested. Quickly satisfied on all these points he ordered that before daylight four of the most deeply implicated of the prisoners should be taken before a military commission; if they revealed nothing they were to be shot in twenty-four hours. Aroused at five o'clock in the morning, Desmarets was told to prepare the list, and the first two names indicated were those of Picot and Lebourgeois. Picot was one of Frotté's old officers, and during the wars of the Chouannerie had been commander-in-chief of the Auge division. He had earned the surname of "Egorge-Bleus" and was a Chevalier of St. Louis. Lebourgeois, keeper of a coffee-house at Rouen, had been accused about the year 1800 of taking part in an attack on a stage-coach, was acquitted, and like his friend Picot, had emigrated to England. Both of these men had been denounced by a professional instigator as having "been heard to say" that they had come to attempt the life of the First Consul. They had been arrested at Pont-Audemer as soon as they returned to France, and had now been imprisoned in the Temple for nearly a year.

To these two victims Desmarets added another Chouan, Piogé, nicknamed "Without Pity" or "Strike-to-Death," and Desol de Grisolles, an old companion of Georges and "a very dangerous royalist." And then, to show his zeal, he added a fifth name to the list, that of Querelle, ex-surgeon of marine, arrested four months previously, under slight suspicion, but described in the report as a poor-spirited creature of whom "something might be expected."

"This one," said Bonaparte on reading the name of Querelle, and the accompanying note, "is more of an intriguer than a fanatic; he will speak."

The same day the five, accused of enticing away soldiers and corresponding with the enemies of the Republic, were led before a military commission over which General Duplessis presided; Desol and Piogé were acquitted, returned to the hands of the government and immediately reincarcerated. Picot, Lebourgeois and Querelle, condemned to death, were transferred to the Abbaye there to await their execution on the following day.

"There must be no delay, you understand," said Bonaparte, "I will not have it."

But nevertheless it was necessary to give a little time for the courage of the prisoners to fail, and for the police to aid in bringing this about.

There was nothing to be expected of Picot or Lebourgeois; they knew nothing of the conspiracy and were resigned to their fate; but their deaths could be used to intimidate Querelle who was less firm, and the authorities did not fail to make the most of the opportunity. He was allowed to be present during all the preparations; he witnessed the arrival of the soldiers who were to shoot his companions; he saw them depart and was immediately told that it was "now his turn." Then to prolong his agony he was left alone in the gloomy chamber where Maillard's tribunal had formerly sat. This tragic room was lighted by a small, strongly-barred window looking out on the square. From this window the doomed man saw the soldiers who were to take him to the plain of Grenelle drawn up in the narrow square and perceived the crowd indulging in rude jokes while they waited for him to come out. One of the soldiers had dismounted and tied his horse to the bars of the window; while within the prison the noise of quick footsteps was heard, doors opening and shutting heavily, all indicating the last preparations....

Querelle remained silent for a long time, crouched up in a corner. Suddenly, as if fear had driven him mad, he began to call desperately, crying that he did not want to die, that he would tell all he knew, imploring his gaolers to fly to the First Consul and obtain his pardon, at the same time calling with sobs upon General Murat, Governor of Paris, swearing that he would make a complete avowal if only he would command the soldiers to return to their quarters. Although Murat could see nothing in these ravings but a pretext for gaining a few hours of life, he felt it his duty to refer the matter to the First Consul, who sent word of it to Réal. All this had taken some time and meanwhile the unfortunate Querelle, seeing the soldiers still under his window and the impatient crowd clamouring for his appearance, was in the last paroxysm of despair. When Réal opened the door he saw, cowering on the flags and shaking with fear, a little man with a pockmarked face, black hair, a thin and pointed nose and grey eyes continually contracted by a nervous affection.

"You have announced your intention of making some revelations," said Réal; "I have come to hear them."

But the miserable creature could scarcely articulate. Réal was obliged to reassure him, to have him carried into another room, and to hold out hopes of mercy if his confessions were sufficiently important. At last, still trembling, and in broken words, with great effort the prisoner confessed that he had been in Paris for six months, having come from London with Georges Cadoudal and six of his most faithful officers; they had been joined there by a great many more from Bretagne or England; there were now more than one hundred of them hidden in Paris, waiting for an opportunity to carry off Bonaparte, or to assassinate him. He added more details as he grew calmer. A boat from the English navy had landed them at Biville near Dieppe; there a man from Eu or Tréport had met them and conducted them a little way from the shore to a farm of which Querelle did not know the name. They left again in the night, and in this way, from farm to farm, they journeyed to Paris where they did not meet until Georges called them together; they received their pay in a manner agreed upon. His own share was deposited under a stone in the Champs Elysées every week, and he fetched it from there. A "gentleman" had come to meet them at the last stage of their journey, near the village of Saint-Leu-Taverny, to prepare for their entry into Paris and help them to pass the barrier.

One point stood out boldly in all these revelations: Georges was in Paris! Réal, whose account we have followed, left Querelle and hastened to the Tuileries. The First Consul was in the hands of Constant, his valet, when the detective was announced. Noticing his pallor, Bonaparte supposed he had just come from the execution of the three condemned men.

"It is over, isn't it?" he said.

"No, General," replied Réal.

And seeing his hesitation the Consul continued: "You may speak before Constant."

"Well then,—Georges and his band are in Paris."

On hearing the name of the only man he feared Bonaparte turned round quickly, made the sign of the cross, and taking Réal by the sleeve led him into the adjoining room.

So the First Consul's police, so numerous, so careful, and so active, the police who according to the Moniteur "had eyes everywhere," had been at fault for six months! A hundred reports were daily piled up on Réal's table, and not one of them had mentioned the goings and comings of Georges, who travelled with his Chouans from Dieppe to Paris, supported a little army, and planned his operations with as much liberty as if he were in London. These revelations were so alarming that they preferred not to believe them. Querelle must have invented this absurd story as a last resource for prolonging his life. To set at rest all doubt on this subject he must be convinced of the imposture. If it was true that he had accompanied the "brigands" from the sea to Paris, he could, on travelling over the route, show their different halting-places. If he could do this his life was to be spared.

From the 27th January, when he made his first declarations, Querelle was visited every night by Réal or Desmarets who questioned him minutely. The unfortunate creature had sustained such a shock, that, even while maintaining his avowals, he would be seized with fits of madness, and beating his breast, would fall on his knees and call on those whom fear of death had caused him to denounce, imploring their pardon. When he learned what was expected of him he appeared to be overwhelmed, not at the number of victims he was going to betray, but because he was aghast at the idea of leading the detectives over a road that he had traversed only at night, and that he feared he might not remember. The expedition set out on February 3d. Réal had taken the precaution to have an escort of gendarmes for the prisoner whom Georges and his followers might try to rescue. The detachment was commanded by a zealous and intelligent officer, Lieutenant Manginot, assisted by a giant called Pasque, an astute man celebrated for the sureness of his attack. They left Paris at dawn by the Saint-Denis gate and took the road to l'Isle-Adam.

The first day's search was without result. Querelle thought he remembered that a house in the village of Taverny had sheltered the Chouans the night before their entry into Paris; but at the time he had not paid any attention to localities, and in spite of his efforts, he could be positive of nothing. The next day they took the Pontoise road from Pierrelaye to Franconville,—with no more success. They returned towards Taverny by Ermont, le Plessis-Bouchard and the Château de Boissy. Querelle, who knew that his life was at stake, showed a feverish eagerness which was not shared by Pasque nor Manginot, who were now fully persuaded that the prisoner had only wanted to gain time, or some chance of escape. They thought of abandoning the search and returning to Paris, but Querelle begged so vehemently for twenty-four hours' reprieve that Manginot weakened. The third day, therefore, they explored the environs of Taverny and the borders of the forest as far as Bessancourt. Querelle now led them by chance, thinking he recognised a group of trees, a turn of the road, even imagining he had found a farm "by the particular manner in which the dog barked."

At last, worn out, the little band were returning to Paris when, on passing through the village of Saint-Leu, Querelle gave a triumphant cry! He had just recognised the long-looked for house, and he gave so exact a description of it and its inhabitants that Pasque did not hesitate to interrogate the proprietor, a vine-dresser named Denis Lamotte. He laid great stress on the fact that he had a son in the service of an officer of the Consul's guard; his other son, Vincent Lamotte, lived with him. The worthy man appeared very much surprised at the invasion of his house, but his peasant cunning could not long withstand the professional cleverness of the detective, and after a few minutes he gave up.

He admitted that at the beginning of July last he had received a person calling himself Houvel, or Saint-Vincent, who under pretence of buying some wine, had proposed to him to lodge seven or eight persons for a night. Lamotte had accepted. On the evening of the 30th August Houvel had reappeared and told him that the men would arrive that night. He went to fetch them in the neighbourhood of l'Isle-Adam, and his son Vincent accompanied him to serve as guide to the travellers, whom he met on the borders of the wood of La Muette. They numbered seven, one of whom, very stout and covered with sweat, stopped in the wood to change his shirt. They all appeared to be very tired, and only two of them were on horseback. They arrived at Lamotte's house at Saint-Leu about two o'clock in the morning; the horses were stabled and the men stretched themselves out on the straw in one of the rooms of the house. Lamotte noticed that each of them carried two pistols. They slept long and had dinner about twelve o'clock. Two individuals, who had driven from Paris and left their cabriolets, one at the "White Cross" the other at the "Crown," talked with the travellers who, about seven o'clock, resumed their journey to the capital. Each of the "individuals" took one in his cab; two went on horseback and the others awaited the phaeton which ran between Taverny and Paris.

This account tallied so well with Querelle's declarations that there was no longer any room for doubt. The band of seven was composed of Georges and his staff; the "stout man" was Georges himself, and Querelle gave the names of the others, all skilful and formidable Chouans. Lamotte, on his part, did not hesitate to name the one who had conducted the "brigands" to the wood of La Muette. He was called Nicolas Massignon, a farmer of Jouy-le-Comte. Pasque set out with his gendarmes, and Massignon admitted that he had brought the travellers from across the Oise to the Avenue de Nesles, his brother, Jean-Baptiste Massignon, a farmer of Saint-Lubin, having conducted them thither. Pasque immediately took the road to Saint-Lubin and marched all night. At four o'clock in the morning he arrived at the house of Jean-Baptiste, who, surprised in jumping out of bed, remembered that he had put up some men that his brother-in-law, Quentin-Rigaud, a cultivator at Auteuil, had brought there. Pasque now held four links of the chain, and Manginot started for the country to follow the track of the conspirators to the sea. Savary had preceded him in order to surprise a new disembarkation announced by Querelle. Arrived at the coast he perceived, at some distance, an English brig tacking, but in spite of all their precautions to prevent her taking alarm, the vessel did not come in. They saw her depart on a signal given on shore by a young man on horseback, whom Savary's gendarmes pursued as far as the forest of Eu, where he disappeared.

In twelve days, always accompanied by Querelle, Manginot had ended his quest, and put into the hands of Réal such a mass of depositions that it was possible, as we shall show, to reconstruct the voyage of Georges and his companions to Paris from the sea.

On the night of August 23, 1803, the English cutter "Vincejo," commanded by Captain Wright, had landed the conspirators at the foot of the cliffs of Biville, a steep wall of rocks and clay three hundred and twenty feet high. From time immemorial, in the place called the hollow of Parfonval there had existed an "estamperche," a long cord fixed to some piles, which was used by the country people for descending to the beach. It was necessary to pull oneself up this long rope by the arms, a most painful proceeding for a man as corpulent as Georges. At last the seven Chouans were gathered at the top of the cliff, and under the guidance of Troche, son of the former procureur of the commune of Eu, and one of the most faithful adherents of the party, they arrived at the farm of La Poterie, near the hamlet of Heudelimont, about two leagues from the coast. Whilst the farmer, Detrimont, was serving them drinks, a mysterious personage, who called himself M. Beaumont, came to consult with them. He was a tall man, with the figure of a Hercules, a swarthy complexion, a high forehead and black eyebrows and hair. He disappeared in the early morning.

Georges and his companions spent the whole of the 24th at La Poterie. They left the farm in the night and marched five leagues to Preuseville, where a M. Loisel sheltered them. The route was cleverly planned not to leave the vast forest of Eu, which provided shaded roads, and in case of alarm, almost impenetrable hiding-places. On the night of the 26th they again covered five leagues, through the forest of Eu, arriving at Aumale at two o'clock in the morning, and lodging with a man called Monnier, who occupied the ancient convent of the Dominican Nuns. "The stout man" rode a black horse which Monnier, for want of a stable, hid in a corridor in the house, the halter tied to the key of the door. As for the men, they threw themselves pell-mell on some straw, and did not go out during the day. M. Beaumont had reappeared at Aumale. He arrived on horseback and, after passing an hour with the conspirators, had left in the direction of Quincampoix. They had seen him again with Boniface Colliaux, called Boni, at their next stage, Feuquières, four leagues off, which they reached on the night of the 27th. They passed the 28th with Leclerc, five leagues further on, at the farm of Monceaux which belonged to the Count d'Hardivilliers, situated in the commune of Saint-Omer-en-Chaussée. From there, avoiding Beauvais, the son of Leclerc had guided them to the house of Quentin-Rigaud at Auteuil, and on the 29th he had taken them to Massignon, the farmer of Saint-Lubin, who in turn had passed them on, the next day, to his brother Nicolas, charged, as we have seen, to help them cross the Oise and direct them to the wood of La Muette, where Denis Lamotte, the vine-dresser of Saint-Leu, had come to fetch them.

Such was the result of Manginot's enquiries. He had reconstructed Georges' itinerary with most remarkable perspicacity and this was the more important as the chain of stations from the sea to Paris necessitated long and careful organisation, and as the conspirators used the route frequently. Thus, two men mentioned in the disembarkation of August 23d had returned to Biville in mid-September. On October 2d Georges and three of his officers, coming from Paris, had again presented themselves before Lamotte, who had conducted them to the wood of La Muette, where Massignon was waiting for them. It was proved that their journeys had been made with perfect regularity; the same guides, the same night marches, the same hiding-places by day. The house of Boniface Colliaux at Feuquières, that of Monnier at Aumale, and the farm of La Poterie seemed to be the principal meeting-places. Another passage took place in the second fortnight of November, and another in December, corresponding to a new disembarkation. In January, 1804, Georges made the journey for the fourth time, to await at Biville the English corvette bringing Pichegru, the Marquis de Rivière and four other conspirators. A fisherman called Étienne Horné gave some valuable details of this arrival. He had noticed particularly the man who appeared to be the leader—"a fat man, with a full, rather hard face, round-shouldered, and with a slight trouble in his arms."

"These gentlemen," he added, "usually arrived at night, and left about midnight; they were satisfied with our humble fare, and always kept together in a corner, talking."

When the tide was full Horné went down to the beach to watch for the sloop. The password was "Jacques," to which the men in the boat replied "Thomas."

Manginot, as may well be imagined, arrested all who in any way had assisted the conspirators, and hurried them off to Paris. The tower of the Temple became crowded with peasants, with women in Normandy caps, and fishermen of Dieppe, dumbfounded at finding themselves in the famous place where the monarchy had suffered its last torments. But these were only the small fry of the conspiracy, and the First Consul, who liked to pose as the victim exposed to the blows of an entire party, could not with decency take these inoffensive peasants before a high court of justice. While waiting for chance or more treachery to reveal the refuge of Georges Cadoudal, the discovery of the organisers of the plot was most important, and this seemed well-nigh impossible, although Manginot had reason to think that the centre of the conspiracy was near Aumale or Feuquières.

His attention had been attracted by a deposition mentioning the black horse that Georges had ridden from Preuseville to Aumale—the one that the school-master Monnier had hidden in a corridor of his house. With this slight clue he started for the country. There he learned that a workman called Saint-Aubin, who lived in the hamlet of Coppegueule, had been ordered to take the horse to an address on a letter which Monnier had given him. This man, when called upon to appear, remembered that he had led the horse "to a fine house in the environs of Gournay." When he arrived there a servant had taken the animal to the stables, and a lady had come out and asked for the letter, but he denied all knowledge of the lady's name or the situation of the house.

Manginot resolved to search the country in company with Saint-Aubin, but he was either stupid or pretended to be so, and refused to give any assistance. He led the gendarmes six leagues, as far as Aumale, and said, at first, that he recognised the Château de Mercatet-sur-Villers, but on looking carefully at the avenues and the arrangement of the buildings, he declared he had never been there. The same thing happened at Beaulevrier and at Mothois; but on approaching Gournay his memory returned, and he led Manginot to a house in the hamlet of Saint-Clair which he asserted was the one to which Monnier had sent him. On entering the courtyard he recognised the servant to whom he had given the horse six months before, a groom named Joseph Planchon. Manginot instantly arrested the man, and then began his search.

The house belonged to an ex-officer of marine, François Robert d'Aché, who rarely occupied it, being an ardent sportsman and preferring his estates near Neufchâtel-en-Bray, where there was more game. Saint-Clair was occupied by Mme. d'Aché, an invalid who rarely left her room, and her two daughters, Louise and Alexandrine, as well as d'Aché's mother, a bedridden octogenarian, and a young man named Caqueray, who was also called the Chevalier de Lorme, who farmed the lands of M. and Mme. d'Aché, whose property had recently been separated by law. Caqueray looked upon himself as one of the family, and Louise, the eldest girl, was betrothed to him.

Nothing could have been less suspicious than the members of this patriarchal household, who seemed to know nothing of politics, and whose tranquil lives were apparently unaffected by revolutions. The absence of the head of so united a family was the only astonishing thing about it. But Mme. d'Aché and her daughters explained that he was bored at Saint-Clair and usually lived in Rouen, that he hunted a great deal, and spent his time between his relatives who lived near Gaillon and friends at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. They could not say where he was at present, having had no news of him for two months.

But on questioning the servants Manginot learned some facts that changed the aspect of affairs. Lambert, the gardener, had recently been shot at Evreux, convicted of having taken part with a band of Chouans in an attack on the stage-coach, Caqueray's brother had just been executed for the same cause at Rouen. Constant Prévot, a farm hand, accused of having killed a gendarme, had been acquitted, but died soon after his return to Saint-Clair. Manginot had unearthed a nest of Chouans, and only when he learned that the description of d'Aché was singularly like that of the mysterious Beaumont who had been seen with Georges at La Poterie, Aumale and Feuquières, did he understand the importance of his discovery. After a rapid and minute inquiry, he took it upon himself to arrest every one at Saint-Clair, and sent an express to Réal, informing him of the affair, and asking for further instructions.

It had been the custom for several years, when a person was denounced to the police as an enemy of the government, or a simple malcontent, to have his name put up in Desmarets' office, and to add to it, in proportion to the denunciations, every bit of information that could help to make a complete portrait of the individual. That of d'Aché was consulted. There were found annotations of this sort: "By reason of his audacity he is one of the most important of the royalists," "Last December he took a passport at Rouen for Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he was called by business," "His host at Saint-Germain, Brandin de Saint-Laurent, declares that he did not sleep there regularly, sometimes two, sometimes three days at a time." At last a letter was intercepted addressed to Mme. d'Aché, containing this phrase, which they recognised as Georges' style: "Tell M. Durand that things are taking a good turn,... his presence is necessary.... He will have news of me at the Hôtel de Bordeaux, rue de Grenelle, Saint-Honoré, where he will ask for Houvel." Now Houvel was the unknown man who, first of all, had gone to the vine-dresser of Saint-Leu to persuade him to aid the "brigands." Thus d'Aché's route was traced from Biville to Paris and the conclusion drawn that, knowing all the country about Bray, where he owned estates, he had been chosen to arrange the itinerary of the conspirators and to organise their journeys. He had accompanied them from La Poterie to Feuquières, sometimes going before them, sometimes staying with them in the farms where he had found for them places of refuge.

In default of Georges, then, d'Aché was the next best person to seize, and the First Consul appreciated this fact so keenly that he organised two brigades of picked soldiers and fifty dragoons. But they only served to escort poor sick Mme. d'Aché, her daughter Louise and their friend Caqueray, who were immediately locked up—the last named in the Tower of the Temple, and the two women in the Madelonnettes. The infirm old grandmother remained at Saint-Clair, while Alexandrine wished to follow her mother and sister, and was left quite at liberty. But d'Aché could not be found. Manginot's army had searched the whole country, from Beauvais to Tréport, without success; they had sought him at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he was said to be hidden, at Saint-Denis-de-Monts, at Saint-Romain, at Rouen. The prefects of Eure and Seine-Inférieure were ordered to set all their police on his track. The result of this campaign was pitiable, and they only succeeded in arresting d'Aché's younger brother, an inoffensive fellow of feeble mind, appropriately named "Placide," who was nicknamed "Tourlour," on account of his lack of wit and his rotundity. His greatest fear was of being mistaken for his brother, which frequently happened. As the elder d'Aché could never be caught, Placide, who loved tranquillity and hardly ever went away from home, was invariably taken in his stead. It happened again this time, and Manginot seized him, thinking he had done a fine thing. But the first interview undeceived him. However, he sent word of his capture to Réal, who, in his zeal to execute the First Consul's orders, took upon himself to determine that Placide d'Aché was as dangerous a royalist "brigand" as his brother. He ordered the prisoner to be brought under a strong escort to Paris, determining to interrogate him himself. But as soon as he had seen "Tourlour," and had asked him a few questions, including one as to his behaviour during the Terror, and received for answer, "I hid myself with mamma," Réal understood that such a man could not be brought before a tribunal as a rival to Bonaparte. He kept him, however, in prison, so that the name of d'Aché could appear on the gaol-book of the Temple.

In the meantime, on the 9th of March 1804, at the hour when Placide d'Aché was being interrogated, an event occurred, which transformed the drama and hastened its tragic dénouement.

CHAPTER II

THE CAPTURE OF GEORGES CADOUDAL

Georges had arrived in Paris on September 1, 1803, in a yellow cabriolet driven by the Marquis d'Hozier dressed as a coachman. D'Hozier, who was formerly page to the King and had for several months been established as a livery-stable keeper in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, conducted Georges to the Hôtel de Bordeaux, kept by the widow Dathy, in the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré.

The task of finding hiding-places in Paris for the conspirators, had been given to Houvel, called Saint-Vincent, whom we have already seen at Saint-Leu. Houvel's real name was Raoul Gaillard. A perfect type of the incorrigible Chouan, he was a fine-looking man of thirty, fresh-complexioned, with white teeth and a ready smile, and dressed in the prevailing fashion. He was a close companion of d'Aché, and it was even said that they had the same mistress at Rouen. The speciality of Raoul and his brother Armand was attacking coaches which carried government money. Their takings served to pay recruits to the royalist cause. For the past six months Raoul Gaillard had been in Paris looking for safe lodging-places. He was assisted in this delicate task by Bouvet de Lozier, another of d'Aché's intimate friends, who like him, had served in the navy before the Revolution.

Georges went first to Raoul Gaillard at the Hôtel de Bordeaux, but he left in the evening and slept with Denaud at the "Cloche d'Or," at the corner of the Rue du Bac, and the Rue de Varenne. He was joined there by his faithful servant Louis Picot, who had arrived in Paris the same day. The "Cloche d'Or" was a sort of headquarters for the conspirators; they filled the house, and Denaud was entirely at their service. He was devoted to the cause, and not at all timid. He had placed Georges' cab in the stable of Senator François de Neufchâteau, whose house was next door.

Six weeks before, Bouvet de Lozier had taken, through Mme. Costard de Saint-Léger, his mistress, an isolated house at Chaillot near the Seine. He had put there as concierge, a man named Daniel and his wife, both of whom he knew to be devoted to him. A porch with fourteen steps led to the front hall of the house. This served as dining-room. It was lighted by four windows and paved with squares of black and white marble; a walnut table with eight covers, cane-seated chairs, the door-panels representing the games of children, and striped India muslin curtains completed the decoration of this room. The next room had also four windows, and contained an ottoman and six chairs covered with blue and white Utrecht velvet, two armchairs of brocaded silk, and two mahogany tables with marble tops. Then came the bedroom with a four-post bed, consoles and mirrors. On the first floor was an apartment of three rooms, and in an adjoining building, a large hall which could be used as an assembly-room. The whole was surrounded by a large garden, closed on the side towards the river-bank by strong double gates.

If we have lingered over this description, it is because it seems to say so much. Who would have imagined that this elegant little house had been rented by Georges to shelter himself and his companions? These men, whose disinterestedness and tenacity we cannot but admire, who for ten years had fought with heroic fortitude for the royal cause, enduring the hardest privations, braving tempests, sleeping on straw and marching at night; these men whose bodies were hardened by exposure and fatigue, retained a purity of mind and sincerity really touching. They never ceased to believe that "the Prince" for whom they fought would one day come and share their danger. It had been so often announced and so often put off that a little mistrust might have been forgiven them, but they had faith, and that inspired them with a thought which seemed quite simple to them but which was really sublime. While they were lodging in holes, living on a pittance parsimoniously taken from the party's funds, they kept a comfortable and secure retreat ready, where "their prince"—who was never to come—could wait at his ease, until at the price of their lives, they had assured the success of his cause. If the history of our bloody feuds has always an epic quality, it is because it abounds in examples of blind devotion, so impossible nowadays that they seem to us improbable exaggerations.

After six days at the "Cloche d'Or," Georges took possession of the house at Chaillot, but he did not stay there long, for about the 25th of September he was at 21 Rue Carême-Prenant in the Faubourg du Temple. Hozier had rented an entresol there, and had employed a man called Spain, who had an aptitude for this sort of work, to make a secret place in it. Spain, under pretence of indispensable repairs, had shut himself up with his tools in the apartment, and had made a cleverly-concealed trap-door, by means of which, in case of alarm, the tenants could descend to the ground floor and go out by an unoccupied shop whose door opened under the porch of the house. Spain took a sort of pride in his strange talent; he was very proud of a hiding-place he had made in the lodging of a friend, the tailor Michelot, in the Rue de Bussy, which Michelot himself did not suspect. The tailor was obliged to be absent often, and four of the conspirators had successively lodged there. When he was away his lodgers "limbered up" in this apartment, but as soon as they heard his step on the stairs, they reentered their cell, and the worthy Michelot, who vaguely surmised that there was some mystery about his house, only solved the enigma when he was cited to appear before the tribunal as an accomplice in the royalist plot of which he had never even heard the name.

Georges started for his first journey to Biville from the Rue Carême-Prenant. On January 23d he returned finally to Paris, bringing with him Pichegru, Jules de Polignac and the Marquis de Rivière, whom he had gone to the farm of La Poterie to receive. He lodged Pichegru with an employé of the finance department, named Verdet, who had given the Chouans the second floor of his house in the Rue du Puits-de-l'Hermite. They stayed there three days. On the 27th, Georges took the general to the house at Chaillot "where they only slept a few nights." At the very moment that they went there Querelle signed his first declarations before Réal.

It is not necessary to follow the movements of Pichegru, nor to relate his interviews with Moreau. The organisation of the plot is what interests us, by reason of the part taken in it by d'Aché. No one has ever explained what might have resulted politically from the combination of Moreau's embittered ambition, the insouciance of Pichegru, and the fanatical ardour of Georges. Of this ill-assorted trio the latter alone had decided on action, although he was handicapped by the obstinacy of the princes in refusing to come to the fore until the throne was reestablished. He told the truth when he affirmed before the judges, later on, that he had only come to France to attempt a restoration, the means for which were never decided on, for they had not agreed on the manner in which they should act towards Bonaparte. A strange plan had at first been suggested. The Comte d'Artois, at the head of a band of royalists equal in number to the Consul's escort, was to meet him on the road to Malmaison, and provoke him to single combat, but the presence of the Prince was necessary for this revival of the Combat of Thirty, and as he refused to appear, this project of rather antiquated chivalry had to be abandoned. Their next idea was to kidnap Bonaparte. Some determined men—as all of Georges' companions were—undertook to get into the park at Malmaison at night, seize Bonaparte and throw him into a carriage which thirty Chouans, dressed as dragoons, would escort as far as the coast. They actually began to put this theatrical "coup" into execution. Mention is made of it in the Memoirs of the valet Constant, and certain details of the investigation confirm these assertions. Raoul Gaillard, who still lived at the Hôtel de Bordeaux, and entertained his friends Denis Lamotte, the vine-dresser of Saint-Leu and Massignon, farmer of Saint-Lubin there, had discovered that Massignon leased some land from Macheret, the First Consul's coachman, and had determined at all hazards to make this man's acquaintance. He even had the audacity to show himself at the Château of Saint-Cloud in the hope of meeting him. Besides this, Genty, a tailor in the Palais-Royal, had delivered four chasseur uniforms, ordered by Raoul Gaillard, and Debausseaux, a tailor at Aumale, during one of their journeys had measured some of Monnier's guests for cloaks and breeches of green cloth, which only needed metal buttons to be transformed into dragoon uniforms.

Querelle's denunciations put a stop to all these preparations. Nothing remained but to run to earth again. A great many of the conspirators succeeded in doing this, but all were not so fortunate. The first one seized by Réal's men was Louis Picot, Georges' servant. He was a coarse, rough man, entirely devoted to his master, under whose orders he had served in the Veudée. He was taken to the Prefecture and promised immediate liberty in exchange for one word that would put the police on the track of Georges. He was offered 1,500 louis d'or, which they took care to count out before him, and on his refusal to betray his master, Réal had him put to the torture. Bertrand, the concierge of the depôt, undertook the task. The unfortunate Picot's fingers were crushed by means of an old gun and a screw-driver, his feet were burned in the presence of the officers of the guard. He revealed nothing. "He has borne everything with criminal resignation," the judge-inquisitor, Thuriot, wrote to Réal; "he is a fanatic, hardened by crime. I have now left him to solitude and suffering; I will begin again to-morrow; he knows where Georges is hidden and must be made to reveal it."

The next day the torture was continued, and this time agony wrung the address of the Chaillot house from Picot. They hastened there—only to find it empty. But the day had not been wasted, for the police, on an anonymous accusation, had seized Bouvet de Lozier as he was entering the house of his mistress, Mme. de Saint-Léger, in the Rue Saint-Sauveur. He was interrogated and denied everything. Thrown into the Temple, he hanged himself in the night, by tying his necktie to the bars of his cell. A gaoler hearing his death-rattle, opened the door and took him down; but Bouvet, three-quarters dead, as soon as they had brought him to, was seized with convulsive tremblings, and in his delirium he spoke.

This attempted suicide, to tell the truth, was only half believed in, and many people, having heard of the things that were done in the Temple and the Prefecture, believed that Bouvet had been assisted in his strangling, just as they had put Picot's feet to the fire. What gave colour to these suspicions was the fact that Bouvet's hands "were horribly swollen" when he appeared before Réal the next day, and also the strange form of the declaration which he was reputed to have dictated at midnight, just as he was restored to life. "A man who comes from the gates of the tomb, still covered with the shadows of death, demands vengeance on those who, by their perfidy," etc. Many were agreed in thinking that that was not the style of a suicide, with the death-rattle still in his throat, but that Réal's agents must have lent their eloquence to this half-dead creature.

However it may have been, the government now knew enough to order the most rigorous measures to be taken against the "last royalists." Bouvet had, like Picot, only been able to mention the house at Chaillot, and the lodging in the Rue Carême-Prenant, and Georges' retreat was still undiscovered. The revelations that fear or torture had drawn from his associates only served to make the figure of this extraordinary man loom greater, by showing the power of his ascendancy over his companions, and the mystery that surrounded all his actions. A legend grew around his name, and the communications published by Le Moniteur, contributed not a little towards making him a sort of fantastic personage, whom one expected to see arise suddenly, and by one grand theatrical stroke put an end to the Revolution.

Paris lived in a fever of excitement during the first days of March, 1804, anxiously following this duel to the death, between the First Consul and this phantom-man who, shut up in the town and constantly seen about, still remained uncaught. The barriers were closed as in the darkest days of the Terror. Patrols, detectives and gendarmes held all the streets; the soldiers of the garrison had departed, with loaded arms, to the boulevards outside the walls. White placards announced that "Those who concealed the brigands would be classed with the brigands themselves"; the penalty of death attached to any one who should shelter one of them, even for twenty-four hours, without denouncing him to the police. The description of Georges and his accomplices was inserted in all the papers, distributed in leaflets, and posted on the walls. Their last domicile was mentioned, as well as anything that could help to identify them. The clerks at the barriers were ordered to search barrels, washerwomen's carts, baskets, and, as the cemeteries were outside the walls, to look carefully into all the hearses that carried the dead to them.

On leaving Chaillot, Georges had returned to Verdet, in the Rue du Puits-de-l'Hermite. As he did not go out and his friends dared not come to see him, Mme. Verdet had instituted herself commissioner for the conspiracy.

One evening she did not return. Armed with a letter for Bouvet de Lozier, she had arrived at the Rue Saint-Sauveur just as they were taking him to the Temple, and had been arrested with him. Thus the circle was narrowing around Georges. He was obliged to leave the Rue du Puits-de-l'Hermite in haste, for fear that torture would wring the secret of his asylum from Mme. Verdet. But where could he go? The house at Chaillot, the Hôtel of the Cloche d'Or, the Rue Carême-Prenant were now known to the police. Charles d'Hozier, on being consulted, showed him a retreat that he had kept for himself, which had been arranged for him by Mlle. Hisay, a poor deformed girl, who served the conspirators with tireless zeal, taking all sorts of disguises and vying in address and activity with Réal's men. She had rented from a fruitseller named Lemoine, a little shop with a room above it, intending "to use it for some of her acquaintances."

It was there that she conducted Georges on the night of February 17. The next day two of his officers, Burban and Joyaut, joined him there, and all three lived at the woman Lemoine's for twenty days. They occupied the room above, leaving the shop untenanted save by Mlle. Hisay and a little girl of Lemoine's, who kept watch there. At night both of them went up to the room, and slept there, separated by a curtain from the beds occupied by Georges and his accomplices. The fruiterer and her daughter were entirely ignorant of the standing of their guests, Mlle. Hisay having introduced them as three shop-keepers who were unfortunately obliged to hide from their creditors.

This incognito occasioned some rather amusing incidents. One day Mme. Lemoine, on returning from market where the neighbours had been discussing the plot that was agitating all Paris, said to her tenants, "Goodness me! You don't know about it? Why, they say that that miserable Georges would like to destroy us all; if I knew where he was, I'd soon have him caught."

Another time the little girl brought news that Georges had left Paris disguised as an aide-de-camp of the First Consul. Some days later, when Georges asked her what the latest news was, she answered, "They say the rascal has escaped in a coffin."

"I should like to go out the same way," hinted Burban.

However, the police had lost track of the conspirator. It was generally supposed that he had passed the fortifications, when on the 8th of March, Petit, who had known Léridant, one of the Chouans, for a long time, saw him talking with a woman on the Boulevard Saint-Antoine. He followed him, and a little further off, saw him go up to a man who struck him as bearing a great likeness to Joyaut, whose description had been posted on all the walls.

It was indeed Joyaut, who had left Mme. Lemoine's for the purpose of looking for a lodging for Georges where he would be less at the mercy of chance than in the fruitseller's attic. Léridant told him that the house of a perfumer named Caron, in the Rue Four-Saint-Germain, was the safest retreat in Paris. For some years Caron, a militant royalist, had sheltered distressed Chouans, in the face of the police. He had hidden Hyde de Neuville for several weeks; his house was well provided with secret places, and for extreme cases he had made a place in his sign-post overhanging the street, where a man could lie perdu at ease, while the house was being searched. Léridant had obtained Caron's consent, and it was agreed that Léridant should come in a cab at seven o'clock the next evening to take Georges from Sainte-Geneviève to the Rue du Four.

When he had seen the termination of the interview of which his detective's instinct showed him the importance, Petit, who had remained at a distance, followed Joyaut, and did not lose sight of him till he arrived at the Place Maubert. Suspecting that Georges was in the neighbourhood he posted policemen at the Place du Panthéon, and at the narrow streets leading to it; then he returned to watch Léridant, who lodged with a young man called Goujon, in the cul-de-sac of the Corderie, behind the old Jacobins Club. The next day, March 9th, Petit learned through his spies that Goujon had hired out a cab, No. 53, for the entire day. He hastened to the Prefecture and informed his colleague, Destavigny, who, with a party of inspectors took up his position on the Place Maubert. If, as Petit supposed, Georges was hidden near there, if the cab was intended for him, it would be obliged to cross the place where the principal streets of the quarter converged. The order was given to let it pass if it contained only one person, but to follow it with most extreme care.

The night had arrived, and nothing had happened to confirm the hypotheses of Petit, when, a little before seven o'clock, a cab appeared on the Place, coming from the Rue Galande. Only one man was on it, holding the reins. The spies in different costumes, who hung about the fountain, recognised him as Léridant. The cab was numbered 53, and had only the lantern at the left alight. It went slowly up the steep Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève; the police, hugging the walls, followed it far off. Petit, the Inspector Caniolle, and the officer of the peace, Destavigny, kept nearer to it, expecting to see it stop before one of the houses in the street, when they would only have to take Georges on the threshold. But to their great disappointment the cab turned to the right, into the narrow Rue des Amandiers, and stopped at a porte cocherè near the old Collège des Grassins. As the lantern shed a very brilliant light, the three detectives concealed themselves in the lanes near by. They saw Léridant descend from the cab. He went through a door, came out, went in again and stayed for a quarter of an hour. Then he turned his horse round, and got up on the seat again.

The cab turned again into the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, and went slowly down it; it went across the Place Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, following the houses. Caniolle walked behind it, Petit and Destavigny followed at a distance. Just as the carriage arrived at the corner of the Rue des Sept-Voies, four individuals came out from the shadow. One of them seized the apron, and helping himself up by the step, flung himself into the cab, which had not stopped, and went off at full speed....

The police had recognised Georges, disguised as a market-porter. Caniolle, who was nearest, rushed forward; the three men who had remained on the spot, and who were no other than Joyaut, Burban and Raoul Gaillard, tried to stop him. Caniolle threw them off, and chased the cab which had disappeared in the Rue Saint-Etienne-des-Grès. He caught up to it, just as it was entering the Passage des Jacobins. Seizing the springs, he was carried along with it. The two officers of the peace, less agile, followed crying, "Stop! Stop!"

Georges, seated on the right of Léridant, who held the reins, had turned to the back of the carriage and tried to follow the fortunes of the pursuit through the glass. The moment that he had jumped into the carriage, he had seen the detectives, and said to Léridant: "Whip him, whip him hard!"

"To go where?" asked the other.

"I do not know, but we must fly!"

And the horse, tingling with blows, galloped off.

At the end of the Passage des Jacobins, which at a sharp angle ended in the Rue de la Harpe, Léridant was obliged to slow up in order to turn on the Place Saint-Michel, and not miss the entrance to the Rue des Fossés-Monsieur-le-Prince. He turned towards the Rue du Four, hoping, thanks to the steepness of the Rue des Fossés, to distance the detectives and arrive at Caron's before they caught up with the carriage.

From where he was Georges could not, through the little window, see Caniolle crouched behind the hood. But he saw others running with all their might. Destavigny and Petit had indeed continued the pursuit, and their cries brought out all the spies posted in the quarter. Just as Léridant wildly dashed into the Rue des Fossés, a whole pack of policemen rushed upon him.

At the approach of this whirlwind the frightened passers-by shrank into the shelter of the doorways. Their minds were so haunted by one idea that at the sight of this cab flying past in the dark with the noise of whips, shouts, oaths, and the resonant clang of the horse's hoofs on the pavement, a single cry broke forth, "Georges! Georges! it is Georges!" Anxious faces appeared at the windows, and from every door people came out, who began to run without knowing it, drawn along as by a waterspout. Did Georges see in this a last hope of safety? Did he believe he could escape in the crowd? However that may be, at the top of the Rue Voltaire he jumped out into the street. Caniolle, at the same moment, left the back of the cab—which Petit, and another policeman called Buffet, had at last succeeded in outrunning,—threw himself on the reins, and allowing himself to be dragged along, mastered the horse, which stopped, exhausted. Buffet took one step towards Georges, who stretched him dead with a pistol shot; with a second ball the Chouan rid himself, for a moment at least, of Caniolle. He still thought, probably, that he could hide himself in the crowd; and perhaps he would have succeeded, for Destavigny, who had run up, "saw him before him, standing with all the tranquillity of a man who has nothing to fear, and three or four people near him appeared not to be thinking more about Georges than anything else." He was going to turn the corner of the Rue de l'Observance when Caniolle, who was only wounded, struck him with his club. In an instant Georges was surrounded, thrown down, searched and bound. The next morning more than forty individuals, among them several women, made themselves known to the judge as being each "the principal author" of the arrest of the "brigand" chief.

By way of the Carrefour de la Comédie, the Rues des Fossés Saint-Germain and Dauphine, Georges, tied with cords, was taken to the Prefecture. A growing mob escorted him, more out of curiosity than anger, and one can imagine the excitement at police headquarters when they heard far off on the Quai des Orfèvres, the increasing tumult announcing the event, and when suddenly, from the corps de garde in the salons of the Prefect Dubois the news came, "Georges is taken!"

A minute later the vanquished outlaw was pushed into the office of Dubois, who was still at dinner. In spite of his bonds he still showed so much pride and coolness that the all-powerful functionary was almost afraid of him. Desmaret, who was present, could not himself escape this feeling.

"Georges, whom I saw for the first time," he said, "had always been to me a sort of Old Man of the Mountain, sending his assassins far and near, against the powers. I found, on the contrary, an open face, bright eyes, fresh complexion, and a look firm but gentle, as was also his voice. Although stout, his movements and manner were easy; his head quite round, with short curly hair, no whiskers, and nothing to indicate the chief of a mortal conspiracy, who had long dominated the landes of Brittany. I was present when Comte Dubois, the prefect of police, questioned him. His ease amidst all the hubbub, his answers, firm, frank, cautious and couched in well-chosen language, contrasted greatly with my ideas about him.

"Indeed his first replies showed a disconcerting calm. One may be quoted. When Dubois, not knowing where to begin, rather foolishly reproached him with the death of Buffet, 'the father of a family,' Georges smilingly gave him this advice:—'Next time, then, have me arrested by bachelors.'"

His courageous pride did not fail him either in the interrogations he had to submit to, or before the court of justice. His replies to the President are superb in disdain and abnegation. He assumed all responsibility for the plot, and denied knowledge of any of his friends. He carried his generosity so far as to behave with courteous dignity even to those who had betrayed him; he even tried to excuse the indifference of the princes whose selfish inertia had been his ruin. He remained great until he reached the scaffold; eleven faithful Chouans died with him, among the number being Louis Picot, Joyaut and Burban, whose names have appeared in this story.

Thus ended the conspiracy. Bonaparte came out of it emperor. Fouché, minister of police, and his assistants were not going to be useless, for if in the eyes of the public, Georges' death seemed the climax, it was in reality but one incident in a desperate struggle. The depths sounded by the investigation had revealed the existence of an incurable evil. The whole west of France was cankered with Chouannerie. From Rouen to Nantes, from Cherbourg to Poitiers, thousands of peasants, bourgeois and country gentlemen remained faithful to the old order, and if they were not all willing to take up arms in its cause, they could at least do much to upset the equilibrium of the new government. And could not another try to do what Georges Cadoudal had attempted? If some one with more influence over the princes than he possessed should persuade one of them to cross the Channel, what would the glory of the parvenu count for, balanced against the ancient prestige of the name of Bourbon, magnified and as it were sanctified by the tragedies of the Revolution? This fear haunted Bonaparte; the knowledge that in France these Bourbons, exiled, without soldiers or money, were still more the masters then he, exasperated him. He felt that he was in their home, and their nonchalance, contrasted with his incessant agitation, indicated both insolence and disdain.

The police, as a matter of fact, had unearthed only a few of the conspirators. Many who, like Raoul Gaillard, had played an important part in the plot, had succeeded in escaping all pursuit; they were evidently the cleverest, therefore the most dangerous, and among them might be found a man ambitious of succeeding Cadoudal. The capture to which Fouché and Réal attached the most importance was that of d'Aché, whose presence at Biville and Saint-Leu had been proved. For three months, in Paris even, wherever the police had worked, they had struck the trail of this same d'Aché, who appeared to have presided over the whole organisation of the plot. Thus, he had been seen at Verdet's in the Rue du Puits-de-l'Hermite, while Georges was there; he had met Raoul Gaillard several times; in making an inventory of the papers of a young lady called Margeot, with whom Pichegru had dined, two rather enigmatical notes had been found, in which d'Aché's name appeared.

Mme. d'Aché and her eldest daughter had been since February in the Madelonnettes prison; the second girl, Alexandrine, had been left at liberty in the hope that in Paris, where she was a stranger, she would be guilty of some imprudence that would deliver her father to the police. She had taken lodgings in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré, at the Hôtel des Treize-Cantons, and Réal had immediately set two spies upon her, but their reports were monotonously melancholy. "Very well behaved, very quiet—she lives, and is daily with the master and mistress of the hotel, people of mature age. She sees no one, and is spoken of in the highest terms." From this side, also, all hope of catching d'Aché had to be abandoned.

Another way was thought of, and on March 22d the order to open all the gates was given. Fouché foresaw that in their anxiety to leave Paris all of Georges' accomplices who had not been caught would hasten to return to Normandy, and thanks to the watchfulness exercised, a clean sweep might be made of them. The cleverly conceived idea had some result. On the 25th a peasant called Jacques Pluquet of Meriel, near l'Isle-Adam, when working in his field on the border of the wood of La Muette, saw four men in hats pulled down over cotton caps, and with strong knotted clubs, coming towards him. They asked him if they could cross the Oise at Meriel. Pluquet replied that it was easy to do so, "but there were gendarmes to examine all who passed." At that they hesitated. They described themselves as conscript deserters coming from Valenciennes who wished to get back to their homes. Pluquet's account is so picturesque as to be worth quoting:

"I asked them where they belonged; they replied in Alençon. I remarked that they would have trouble in getting there without being arrested. One of them said: 'That is true, for after what had just happened in Paris, everywhere is guarded.' Then, allowing the three others to go on ahead, he said to me, 'But if they arrest us, what will they do to us?' I replied: 'They will take you back to your corps, from brigade to brigade.' On that he said, 'If they catch us, they will make us do ten thousand leagues.' And he left me to regain his comrades, the youngest of whom might have been twenty-two years old and seemed very sad and tired."

The next morning some people at Auvers found a little log cabin in a wood in which the four men had spent the night. They were seen on the following days, wandering in the forest of l'Isle-Adam. At last, on April 1st they went to the ferryman of Meriel, Eloi Cousin, who was sheltering two gendarmes. While they were begging the ferryman to take them in his boat, the gendarmes appeared, and the men fled. A pistol shot struck one of them, and a second, who stopped to assist his comrade, was also taken. The two others escaped to the woods.

The wounded man was put in a boat and taken to the hospital at Pontoise, where he died the next day. Réal, who was immediately informed of it, immediately sent Querelle, whom he was carefully keeping in prison to use in case of need, and he at once recognised the corpse to be that of Raoul Gaillard, called Houvel, or Saint-Vincent, the friend of d'Aché, the principal advance-agent of Georges. The other prisoner was his brother Armand, who was immediately taken to Paris and thrown into the Temple.

The commune of Meriel had deserved well of the country, and the First Consul showed his satisfaction in a dazzling manner. He expressed a desire to make the acquaintance of this population so devoted to his person, and on the 8th of April, the sous-prefet of Pontoise presented himself at the Tuileries at the head of all the men of the village. Bonaparte congratulated them personally, and as a more substantial proof of his gratitude, distributed among them a sum of 11,000 francs, found in Raoul Gaillard's belt.

This was certainly a glorious event for the peasants of Meriel, but it had an unexpected result. When they returned the next day they learned that a stranger, "well dressed, well armed and mounted on a fine horse," profiting by their absence, had gone to the village, and, "after many questions addressed to the women and children, had gone to the place where Raoul Gaillard was wounded, trying to find out if they had not found a case, to which he seemed to attach great importance." This incident reminded them that, in the boat that took him to Pontoise, Raoul Gaillard, then dying, had anxiously asked if a razor-case had been found among his things. On receiving a negative reply, "he had appeared to be very much put out, and was heard to murmur that the fortune of the man who would discover this case was made."

The visits of this stranger—since seen, "in the country, on the heights and near the woods,"—his threats of vengeance, and this mysterious case, provided matter for a report that perplexed Réal. Was this not d'Aché? A great hunt was organised in the forest of Carnelle, but it brought no result. Four days later they explored the forest of Montmorency, where some signs of the "brigands'" occupation were seen, but of d'Aché no trace at all, and in spite of the fierceness that Réal's men, incited by the promise of large rewards, brought to this chase of the Chouans, after weeks and months of research, of enquiries, tricks, false trails followed, and traps uselessly laid, it had to be admitted that the police had lost the scent, and that Georges' clever accomplice had long since disappeared.

CHAPTER III

THE COMBRAYS

At the period of our story there existed in the department of the Eure, on the left bank of the Seine, beyond Gaillon, a large old manor-house, backed by the hill that extended as far as Andelys; it was called the Château de Tournebut. Although its peaked roofs could be seen from the river above a thicket of low trees, Tournebut was off the main route of travel, whether by land or water, from Rouen to Paris. Some fairly large woods separated it from the highroad which runs from Gaillon to Saint-Cyr-de-Vaudreuil, while the barges usually touched at the hamlet of Roule, where hacks were hired to take passengers and goods to the ferry of Muids, thereby saving them the long détour made by the Seine. Tournebut was thus isolated between these two much-travelled roads. Its principal façade, facing east, towards the river, consisted of two heavy turrets, one against the other, built of brick and stone in the style of Louis XIII, with great slate roofs and high dormer windows. After these came a lower and more modern building, ending with the chapel. In front of the château was an old square bastion forming a terrace, whose mossy walls were bathed by the waters of a large stagnant marsh. The west front which was plainer, was separated by only a few feet of level ground from the abrupt, wooded hill by which Tournebut was sheltered. A wall with several doors opening on the woods enclosed the château, the farm and the lower part of the park, and a wide morass, stretching from the foot of the terrace to the Seine, rendered access impossible from that side.

By the marriage of Geneviève de Bois-l'Evêque, Lady of Tournebut, this mansion had passed to the family of Marillac, early in the seventeenth century. The Marshal Louis de Marillac—uncle of Mme. Legras, collaborator of St. Vincent de Paul—had owned it from 1613 to 1631, and tradition asserted that during his struggle against Cardinal Richelieu he had established there a plant for counterfeiting money. To him was due the construction of the brick wing which remained unfinished, his condemnation to death for peculation having put a stop to the embellishments he had intended to make.

There are very few châteaux left in France like this romantic manor of a dead and gone past, whose stones have endured all the crises of our history, and to which each century has added a tower, or a legend. Tournebut, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was a perfect type of these old dwellings, where there were so many great halls and so few living rooms, and whose high slate roofs covered intricacies of framework forming lofts vast as cathedrals. It was said that its thick walls were pierced by secret passages and contained hiding-places that Louis de Marillac had formerly used.

In 1804 Tournebut was inhabited by the Marquise de Combray, born Geneviève de Brunelles, daughter of a President of the Cour des Comptes of Normandy. Her husband, Jean-Louis-Armand-Emmanuel Hélie de Combray, had died in 1784, leaving her with two sons and two daughters, and a great deal of property in the environs of Falaise, in the parishes of Donnay, Combray, Bonnœil and other places. Madame de Combray had inherited Tournebut from her mother, Madeleine Hubert, herself a daughter of a councillor in the Parliament of Normandy. Besides the château and the farm, which were surrounded by a park well-wooded with old trees, the domain included the woods that covered the hillside, at the extremity of which was an old tower, formerly a wind-mill, built over deep quarries, and called the "Tower of the Burned Mill," or "The Hermitage." It figures in the ancient plans of the country under the latter name, which it owes to the memory of an old hermit who lived in the quarries for many years and died there towards the close of the reign of Louis XV, leaving a great local reputation for holiness.

Mme. de Combray was of a "haughty and imperious nature; her soul was strong and full of energy; she knew how to brave danger and public opinion; the boldest projects did not frighten her, and her ambition was unbounded." Such is the picture that one of her most irreconcilable enemies has drawn of her, and we shall see that the principal traits were faithfully described. But to complete the resemblance one must first of all plead an extenuating circumstance: Madame de Combray was a fanatical royalist. Even that, however, would not make her story intelligible, if one did not make allowance for the Calvary that the faithful royalists travelled through so many years, each station of which was marked by disillusions and failures. Since the war on the nobles had begun in 1789, all their efforts at resistance, disdainful at first, stubborn later on, blundering always, had been pitifully abortive. Their rebuffs could no longer be counted, and there was some justification in that for the scornful hatred on the part of the new order towards a caste which for so many centuries had believed themselves to be possessed of all the talents. Many of them, it is true, had resigned themselves to defeat, but the Intransigeants continued to struggle obstinately; and to say truth, this tenacious attachment to the ghost of monarchy was not without grandeur.

From the very beginning of the Revolution the Marquise de Combray had numbered herself among the unchangeable royalists. Her husband, a timorous and quiet man, who employed in reading the hours that he did not consecrate to sleep, had long since abandoned to her the direction of the household and the management of his fortune. Widowhood had but strengthened the authority of the Marquise, who reigned over a little world of small farmers, peasants and servants, more timid, perhaps, than devoted.

She exacted complete obedience from her children. The eldest son, called the Chevalier de Bonnœil, after a property near the Château of Donnay, in the environs of Falaise, supported the maternal yoke patiently; he was an officer in the Royal Dragoons at the time of the Revolution. His younger brother, Timoléon de Combray, was of a less docile nature. On leaving the military school, as his father was just dead he solicited from M. de Vergennes a mission in an uncivilised country and set sail for Morocco. Timoléon was a liberal-minded man, of high intellectual culture, and a philosophical scepticism that fitted ill with the Marquise's authoritative temper; although a devoted and respectful man, it was to get away from his mother's tutelage that he expatriated himself. "Our diversity of opinion," he said later on, "has kept me from spending two consecutive months with her in seventeen years." From Morocco he went to Algiers and thence to Tunis and Egypt. He was about to penetrate to Tartary when he heard of the outbreak of the Revolution; and immediately started for France where he arrived at the beginning of 1791.

Of Mme. de Combray's two daughters the eldest had married, in 1787, at the age of twenty-two, Jacques-Philippe-Henri d'Houël; the youngest Caroline-Madeleine-Louise-Geneviève, was born in 1773, and consequently was only eleven years old when her father died. This child is the heroine of the drama we are about to relate.

In August, 1791, Mme. de Combray inscribed herself and her two sons on the list of the hostages of Louis XVI which the journalist Durosay had conceived. It was a courageous act, for it was easy to foresee that the six hundred and eleven names on "this golden book of fidelity," would soon all be suspected. While hope remained for the monarchy the two brothers struggled bravely. Timoléon stayed near the King till August 10, and only went to England after he had taken part in the defence of the Tuileries; Bonnœil had emigrated the preceding year, and served in the army of the Princes. Mme. de Combray, left alone with her two daughters—the husband of the elder had also emigrated,—left Tournebut in 1793, and settled in Rouen, where, although she owned much real estate in the town, she rented in the Rue de Valasse, Faubourg Bouvreuil, "an isolated, unnumbered house, with an entrance towards the country." She gave her desire to finish the education of her younger daughter who was entering her twentieth year as a reason for her retreat.

Caroline de Combray was very small,—"as large as a dog sitting," they said,—but charming; her complexion was delicately pure, her black hair of extraordinary length and abundance. She was loving and sensible, very romantic, full of frankness and vivacity; the great attraction of her small person was the result of a piquant combination of energy and gentleness. She had been brought up in the convent of the Nouvelles Catholiques de Caen, where she stayed six years, receiving lessons from "masters of all sorts of accomplishments, and of different languages." She was a musician and played the harp, and as soon as they were settled in Rouen her mother engaged Boiëldieu as her accompanist, "to whom she long paid six silver francs per lesson," a sum that seemed fabulous in that period of paper-money, and territorial mandates.

Madame de Combray, besides, was much straightened. As both her sons had emigrated, all the property that they inherited from their father was sequestrated. Of the income of 50,000 francs possessed by the family before the Revolution, scarcely fifty remained at her disposal, and she had been obliged to borrow to sustain the heavy expenses of her house in Rouen.

Besides her two daughters and the servants, she housed half a dozen nuns and two or three Chartreux, among them a recusant friar called Lemercier, who soon gained great influence in the household. By reason of his refractoriness Père Lemercier was doomed, if discovered, to death, or at least to deportation, and it will be understood that he sympathised but feebly with the Revolution that consigned him, against his will, to martyrdom. He called down the vengeance of heaven on the miscreants, and not daring to show himself, with unquenchable ardour preached the holy crusade to the women who surrounded him.

Mme. de Combray's royalist enthusiasm did not need this inspiration; a wise man would have counselled resignation, or at least patience, but unhappily, she was surrounded only by those whose fanaticism encouraged and excused her own. Enthusiastic frenzy had become the habitual state of these people, whose overheated imaginations were nourished on legendary tales, and foolish hopes of imminent reprisals. They welcomed with unfailing credulity the wildest prophecies, announcing terrible impending massacres, to which the miraculous return of the Bourbon lilies would put an end, and as illusions of this kind are strengthened by their own deceptions, the house in the Rue de Valasse soon heard mysterious voices, and became the scene "of celestial apparitions," which, on the invitation of Père Lemercier predicted the approaching destruction of the blues and the restoration of the monarchy.

On a certain day in the summer of 1795, a stranger presented himself to Père Lemercier, armed with a password, and a very warm recommendation from a refractory priest, who was in hiding at Caen. He was a Chouan chief, bearing the name and title of General Lebret; of medium stature, with red hair and beard, and cold steel-coloured eyes. Introduced to Mme. de Combray by Lemercier, he admitted that his real name was Louis Acquet d'Hauteporte, Chevalier de Férolles. He had come to Rouen, he said, to transmit the orders of the Princes to Mallet de Créçy, who commanded for the King in Upper Normandy.

We can judge of the welcome the Chevalier received. Mme. de Combray, her daughters, the nuns and the Chartreux friars used all their ingenuity to satisfy the slightest wish of this man, who modestly called himself "the agent general of His Majesty." They arranged a hiding-place for him in the safest part of the house, and Père Lemercier blessed it. Acquet stayed there part of the day, and in the evening joined in the usual pursuits of the household, and related the story of his adventures by way of entertainment.

According to him, he possessed large estates in the environs of the Sables-d'Olonne, of which place he was a native. An officer in the regiment of Brie infantry before the Revolution, being at Lille in 1791 he had taken advantage of his nearness to the frontier to incite his regiment to insurrection and emigrate to Belgium. He had then put himself at the disposal of the Princes, and had enlisted men for the royal army in Veudée, Poitou and Normandy, helping priests to emigrate, and saving whole villages from the fury of the blues. He named Charette, Frotté and Puisaye as his most intimate friends, and these names recalled the chivalrous times of the wars in the west in which he had taken a glorious part. Sometimes he disappeared for several days, and on his return from these mysterious absences, would let it be known that he had just accomplished some great deed, or brought a dangerous mission to a successful termination. In this way the Chevalier Acquet de Férolles had become the idol of the little group of naïve royalists among whom he had found refuge. He had bravely served the cause; he plumed himself on having merited the surname of "toutou of the Princes," and in Mme. de Combray's dazzled eyes this was equal to any number of references.

Acquet was in reality an adventurer. If we were to take account here of all the evil deeds he is credited with, we should be suspected of wantonly blackening the character of this melodramatic figure. A few facts gathered by the Combrays will serve to describe him. As an officer at Lille he was about to be imprisoned as the result of an odious accusation, but deserted and escaped to Belgium, not daring to join the army of the émigrés. He stopped at Mons, then went to the west of France, and became a Chouan, but politics had nothing to do with this act. He associated himself with some bravos of his stripe, and plundered travellers, and levied contributions on the purchasers of national property. In the Eure, where he usually pursued his operations, he assassinated with his own hand two defenceless gamekeepers whom his little band had encountered.

He delighted in taking the funds of the country school-teachers, and to give a colour of royalism to the deed, he would nightly tear down the trees of liberty in the villages in which he operated. Tired at last of "an occupation where there was nothing but blows to receive, and his head to lose," he went to seek his fortune in Rouen; and before he presented himself to Mme. de Combray, had without doubt made enquiries. He knew he would find a rich heiress, whose two brothers, emigrated, would probably never return, and from the first he set to work to flatter the royalist hobby of the mother, and the romantic imagination of the young girl. Père Lemercier was himself conquered; Acquet, to catch him, pretended the greatest piety and most scrupulous devotion.

A note of Bonnœil's informs us of the way this tragic intrigue ended. "Acquet employed every means of seduction to attain his end. The young girl, fearing to remain long unmarried because of the unhappy times, listened to him, in spite of the many reasons for waiting and for refusing the proposals of a man whose name, country and fortune were unknown to them. The mother's advice was unfortunately not heeded, and she found herself obliged to consent to the marriage, the laws of that period giving the daughters full liberty, and authorising them to shake off the salutary parental yoke."

The dates of certain papers complete the discreet periphrases of Bonnœil. The truth is that Acquet "declared his passion" to Mlle. de Combray and as she, a little doubtful though well-disposed to allow herself to be loved, still hesitated, the Chevalier signed a sort of mystic engagement dated January 1, 1796, where, "in sight of the Holy Church and at the pleasure of God," he pledged himself to marry her on demand. She carefully locked up this precious paper, and a little less than ten months later, the 17th October, the municipal agent of Aubevoye, in which is situated the Château of Tournebut, inscribed the birth of a daughter, born to the citizeness Louise-Charlotte de Combray, "wife of the citizen Louis Acquet." Here, then, is the reason that the Marquise "found herself obliged to consent to the marriage," which did not take place until the following year, mention of it not being made in the registry of Rouen until the date 17th June, 1797.

Acquet had thus attained his wish; he had seduced Mlle. de Combray to make the marriage inevitable, and this accomplished, under pretext of preventing their sale, he caused the estates of the Combrays situated at Donnay near Falaise, and sequestrated by the emigration of Bonnœil, to be conveyed to him. Scarcely was this done when he began to pillage the property, turning everything into money, cutting down woods, and sparing neither thickets nor hedges. "The domain of Donnay became a sort of desert in his hands." Stopped in his depredations by a complaint of his two brothers-in-law he tried to attack the will of the Marquis de Combray, pretending that his wife, a minor at the time of her father's death, had been injured in the division of property. This was to declare open war on the family he had entered, and to compel his wife to espouse his cause he beat her unmercifully. A second daughter was born of this unhappy union, and even the children did not escape the brutality of their father. A note on this subject, written by Mme. Acquet, is of heart-breaking eloquence:

"M. Acquet beat the children cruelly every day; he ill-treated me also unceasingly: he often chastised them with sticks, which he always used when he made the children read; they were continually black and blue with the blows they received. He gave me such a severe blow one day that blood gushed from my nose and mouth, and I was unconscious for some moments.... He went to get his pistols to blow out my brains, which he would certainly have done if people had not been present.... He was always armed with a dagger."

In January, 1804, Mme. Acquet resolved to escape from this hell. Profiting by her husband's absence in La Veudée she wrote to him that she refused to live with him longer, and hastened to Falaise to ask a shelter from her brother Timoléon, who had lately returned to France. Timoléon, in order to prevent a scandal, persuaded his sister to return to her husband's house. She took this wise advice, but refused to see M. Acquet, who, returning in haste and finding her barricaded in the château, called the justice of the peace of the canton of Harcourt, aided by his clerk and two gendarmes, to witness that his wife refused to receive him. Having, one fine morning, "found her desk forced and all her papers taken," she returned to Falaise, obtained a judgment authorising her to live with her brother, and lodged a petition for separation.

Things were at this point when the trial of Georges Cadoudal was in progress. Acquet, exasperated at the resistance to his projects, swore that he would have signal vengeance on his wife and all the Combrays. They were, unhappily, to give his hatred too good an opportunity of showing itself.

After passing three years in Rouen, Mme. de Combray returned to Tournebut in the spring of 1796, with her royalist passions and illusions as strong as ever. She had declared war on the Revolution, and believed that victory was assured at no distant period. It is a not uncommon effect of political passion to blind its subjects to the point of believing that their desires and hopes are imminent realities. Mme. de Combray anticipated the return of the King so impatiently that one of her reasons for returning to the château was to prepare apartments for the Princes and their suite in case the debarkation should take place on the coast of Normandy. Once before, in 1792, Gaillon had been designated as a stopping-place for Louis XVI in case he should again make the attempt that had been frustrated at Varennes. The Château de Gaillon was no longer habitable in 1796, but Tournebut, in the opinion of the Marquise, offered the same advantages, being about midway between the coast and Paris. Its isolation also permitted the reception of passing guests without awakening suspicion, while the vast secret rooms where sixty to eighty persons could hide at one time, were well suited for holding secret councils. To make things still safer, Mme. de Combray now acquired a large house, situated about two hundred yards from the walls of Tournebut, and called "Gros-Mesnil" or "Le Petit Château." It was a two-story building with a high slate roof; the court in front was surrounded by huts and offices; a high wall enclosed the property on all sides, and a pathway led from it to one of the doors in the wall surrounding Tournebut.

As soon as she was in possession of the Petit Château, Mme. de Combray had some large secret places constructed in it. For this work she employed a man called Soyer who combined the functions of intendant, maître d'hôtel and valet-de-chambre at Tournebut. Soyer was born at Combray, one of the Marquise's estates in Lower Normandy, and entered her service in 1791, at the age of sixteen, in the capacity of scullion. He had gone with his mistress to Rouen during the Terror, and since the return to Tournebut she had given the administration of the estate into his hands. In this way he had authority over the domestics at the château, who numbered six, and among whom the chambermaid Querey and the gardener Châtel deserve special mention. Each year, about Easter, Mme. de Combray went to Rouen, where under pretext of purchases to make and rents to collect, she remained a month. Only Soyer and Mlle. Querey accompanied her. Besides her patrimonial house in the Rue Saint-Amand, she had retained the quiet house in the Faubourg Bouvreuil which still served as a refuge for the exiles sought by the police of the Directory, and as a depôt for the refractories who were sure of finding supplies there and means of rejoining the royalist army. Tournebut itself, admirably situated between Upper and Lower Normandy, became the refuge for all the partisans whom a particularly bold stroke had brought to the attention of the authorities on either bank of the river, totally separated at this time by the slowness and infrequency of communication, and also by the centralisation of the police which prevented direct intercourse between the different departmental authorities. It was in this way that Mme. de Combray, having become from 1796 to 1804, the chief of the party with the advantage of being known as such only to the party itself, sheltered the most compromised of the chiefs of Norman Chouannerie, those strange heroes whose mad bravery has brought them a legendary fame, and whose names are scarcely to be found, doubtfully spelled, in the accounts of historians.

Among those who sojourned at Tournebut was Charles de Margadel, one of Frotté's officers, who had organised a royalist police even in Paris. Thence he had escaped to deal some blows in the Eure under the orders of Hingant de Saint-Maur, another habitué of Tournebut who was preparing there his astonishing expedition of Pacy-sur-Eure. Besides Margadel and Hingant, Mme. de Combray had oftenest sheltered Armand Gaillard, and his brother Raoul, whose death we have related. Deville, called "Tamerlan"; the brothers Tellier; Le Bienvenu du Buc, one of the officers of Hingant; also another, hidden under the name of Collin, called "Cupidon"; a German bravo named Flierlé, called "Le Marchand," whom we shall meet again, were also her guests, without counting "Sauve-la-Graisse," "Sans-Quartier," "Blondel," "Perce-Pataud"—actors in the drama, without name or history, who were always sure of finding in the "cachettes" of the great château or the Tour de l'Ermitage, refuge and help.

These were compromising tenants, and it is quite easy to imagine what amusements at Tournebut served to fill the leisure of these men so long unaccustomed to regular occupation, and to whom strife and danger had become absolute necessaries. Some statistics, rather hard to prove, will furnish hints on this point. In September, 1800, the two coaches from Caen to Paris were stopped between Evreux and Pacy, at a place called Riquiqui, by two hundred armed brigands, and 48,000 livres belonging to the State taken. Again, in 1800, the coach from Rouen to Pont-Audemer was attacked by twenty Chouans and a part of the funds carried off. In 1801 a coach was robbed near Evreux; some days later the mail from Caen to Paris was plundered by six brigands. On the highroad on the right bank of the Seine attacks on coaches were frequent near Saint-Gervais, d'Authevernes, and the old mill of Mouflaines. It was only a good deal later, when the château of Tournebut was known as an avowed retreat of the Chouans, that it occurred to the authorities that "by its position at an equal distance from the two roads to Paris by Vernon and by Magny-en-Vexin, where the mail had so often been stopped," it might well have served as a centre of operations, and as the authors of these outrages remained undiscovered, they credited them all to Mme. de Combray's inspiration, and this accusation without proof is none too bold. The theft of state funds was a bagatelle to people whom ten years of implacable warfare had rendered blasé about all brigandage. Moreover, it was easily conceivable that the snare laid by Bonaparte for Frotté, who was so popular in Normandy, the summary execution of the General and his six officers, the assassination of the Duc d'Enghien, the death of Georges Cadoudal (almost a god to the Chouans) and of his brave companions, following so many imprisonments without trial, acts of police treachery, traps and denunciations paid for and rewarded, had exasperated the vanquished royalists, and envenomed their hatred to the point of believing any expedient justifiable. Such was the state of mind of Mme. de Combray in the middle of 1804, at which date we have stopped the recital of the marital misfortunes of Mme. Acquet de Férolles, and it justified Bonald's saying: "Foolish deeds done by clever men, extravagances uttered by men of intellect, crimes committed by honest people—such is the story of the revolution."

D'Aché had taken refuge at Tournebut. He had left Paris as soon as the gates were opened, and whether he had escaped surveillance more cleverly than the brothers Gaillard, whether he had been able to get immediately to Saint-Germain where he had a refuge, and from there, without risking the passage of a ferry or a bridge, without stopping at any inn, had succeeded in covering in one day the fifteen leagues that separated him from Gaillon, he arrived without mishap at Tournebut where Mme. de Combray immediately shut the door of one of the hiding-places upon him.

Tournebut was familiar ground to d'Aché. He was related to Mme. de Combray, and before the Revolution, when he was on furlough, he had made long visits there while "grandmère Brunelle" was still alive. He had been back since then and had spent there part of the autumn of 1803. There had been a grand reunion at the château then, to celebrate the marriage of M. du Hasey, proprietor of a château near Gaillon. Du Hasey was aide-de-camp to Guérin de Bruslard, the famous Chouan whom Frotté had designated as his successor to the command of the royal army, and who had only had to disband it. This reunion, which is often mentioned in the reports, by the nature and quality of the guests, was more important than an ordinary wedding-feast.

D'Aché learned at Tournebut of the proclamation of the Empire and the death of Georges. He looked upon it as a death-blow to the royalist hopes; where-ever one might turn there was no resource—no chiefs, no money, no men. If many royalists remained in the Orne and the Manche, it was impossible to group them or pay them. The government gained strength and authority daily; at the slightest movement France felt the iron grasp in which she was held tightened around her, and such was the prestige of the extraordinary hero who personified the whole régime, that even those he had vanquished did not disguise their admiration. The King of Spain—a Bourbon—sent him the insignia of the Golden Fleece. The world was fascinated and history shows no example of material and moral power comparable to that of Napoleon when the Holy Father crossed the mountains to recognise and hail him as the instrument of Providence, and anoint him Cæsar in the name of God.

It was, however, just at this time that d'Aché, an exile, concealed in the Château of Tournebut, without a companion, without a penny, without a counsellor or ally other than the aged woman who gave him refuge, conceived the astonishing idea of struggling against the man before whom all Europe bowed the knee. Looked at in this light it seems madness, but undoubtedly d'Aché's royalist illusions blinded him to the conditions of the duel he was to engage in. But these illusions were common to many people for whom Bonaparte, at the height of his power, was never anything but an audacious criminal whose factitious greatness was at the mercy of a well-directed and fortunate blow.

Fouché's police had not given up hopes of finding the fugitive. They looked for him in Paris, Rouen, Saint-Denis-du-Bosguérard, near Bourgthéroulde, where his mother possessed a small estate; they watched closest at Saint-Clair whither his wife and daughters had returned after the execution of Georges. The doors of the Madelonnettes prison had been opened for them and they had been informed that they must remove themselves forty leagues from Paris and the coast; but the poor woman, almost without resources, had not paid attention to this injunction, and they were allowed to remain at Saint-Clair in the hope that d'Aché would tire of his wandering life, and allow himself to be taken at home. As to Placide, as soon as he found himself out of the Temple, and had conducted his sister-in-law and nieces home, he returned to Rouen, where he arrived in mid-July. Scarcely had he been one night in his lodging in the Rue Saint-Patrice, when he received a letter—how, or from where he could not say—announcing that his brother had gone away so as not to compromise his family again, and that he would not return to France until general peace was proclaimed, hoping then to obtain permission from the government to end his days in the bosom of his family.

D'Aché, however, was living in Tournebut without much mystery. The only precaution he took was to avoid leaving the property, and he had taken the name of "Deslorières," one of the pseudonyms of Georges Cadoudal, "as if he wanted to name himself as his successor." Little by little the servants became accustomed to the presence of this guest of whom Mme. de Combray took such good care "because he had had differences with the government," as she said. Under pretext of repairs undertaken in the church of Aubevoye, the curé of the parish was invited to celebrate mass every Sunday in the chapel of the château, and d'Aché could thus be present at the celebration without showing himself in the village.

Doubtless the days passed slowly for this man accustomed to an active life; he and his old friend dreamt of the return of the King, and Bonnœil, who spent part of the year at Tournebut, read to them a funeral oration of the Duc d'Enghien, a virulent pamphlet that the royalists passed from hand to hand, and of which he had taken a copy. How many times must d'Aché have paced the magnificent avenue of limes, which still exists as the only vestige of the old park. There is a moss-grown stone table on which one loves to fancy this strange man leaning his elbow while he thought of his "rival," and planned the future according to his royalist illusions as the other in his Olympia, the Tuileries, planned it according to his ambitious caprices.

This existence lasted fifteen months. From the time of his arrival at the end of March, 1804, until the day he left, it does not seem that d'Aché received any visitors, except Mme. Levasseur of Rouen, who, if police reports are to be believed, was simultaneously his mistress and Raoul Gaillard's. The truth is that she was a devoted friend of the royalists—to whom she had rendered great service, and through her d'Aché was kept informed of what happened in Lower Normandy during his seclusion at Tournebut. Since the general pacification, tranquillity was, in appearance at least, established; Chouannerie seemed to be forgotten. But conscription was not much to the taste of the rural classes, and the rigour with which it was applied alienated the population. The number of refractories and deserters augmented at each requisition; protected by the sympathy of the peasants they easily escaped all search; the country people considered them victims rather than rebels, and gave them assistance when they could do so without being seen. There were here all the elements of a new insurrection; to which would be added, if they succeeded in uniting and equipping all these malcontents, the survivors of Frotté's bands, exasperated by the rigours of the new régime, and the ill-treatment of the gendarmes.

The descent of a French prince on the Norman coast would in d'Aché's opinion, group all these malcontents. Thoroughly persuaded that to persuade one of them to cross the channel it would suffice to tell M. le Comte d'Artois or one of his sons that his presence was desired by the faithful population in the West, he thought of going himself to England with the invitation. Perhaps they would be able to persuade the King to put himself at the head of the movement, and be the first to land on French soil. This was d'Aché's secret conviction, and in the ardour of his credulous enthusiasm he was certain that on the announcement, Napoleon's Empire would crumble of itself, without the necessity of a single blow.

Such was the eternal subject of conversation between Mme. de Combray and her guest, varied by interminable parties of cards of tric-trac. In their feverish idleness, isolated from the rest of the world, ignorant of new ideas and new manners, they shut themselves up with their illusions, which took on the colour of reality. And while the exile studied the part of the coast where, followed by an army of volunteers with white plumes, he would go to receive his Majesty, the old Marquise put the last touches to the apartments long ago prepared for the reception of the King and his suite on their way to Paris. And in order to perpetuate the remembrance of this visit, which would be the most glorious page in the history of Tournebut, she had caused the old part of the château, left unfinished by Marillac, to be restored and ornamented.

In July, 1805, after more than a year passed in this solitude, d'Aché judged that the moment to act had arrived. The Emperor was going to take the field against a new coalition, and the campaign might be unfavourable to him. It only needed a defeat to shake to its foundations the new Empire whose prestige a victorious army alone maintained. It was important to profit by this chance should it arrive. And in order to be within reach of the English cruiser d'Aché had to be near Cotentin; he had many devoted friends in this region and was sure of finding a safe retreat. Mme. de Combray, taking advantage of the fair of Saint-Clair which was held every year in mid-July, near the Château of Donnay, could conduct her guest beyond Falaise without exciting suspicion. They determined to start then, and about July 15, 1805, the Marquise left Tournebut with her son Bonnœil, in a cabriolet that d'Aché drove, disguised as a postillion.

In this equipage, the man without any resource but his courage, and his royalist faith, whose dream was to change the course of the world's events, started on his campaign; and one is obliged to think, in face of this heroic simplicity, of Cervantes' hero, quitting his house one fine morning, and armed with an old shield and lance, encased in antiquated armour and animated by a sublime but foolish faith, going forth to succour the oppressed, and declare war on Giants.

CHAPTER IV

THE ADVENTURES OF D'ACHÉ

The demesne of Donnay, situated about three leagues from Falaise on the road to Harcourt, was one of the estates which Acquet de Férolles had usurped, under pretext of saving them from the Public Treasury and of taking over the management of the property of his brother-in-law, Bonnœil, who was an émigré. Now, the latter had for some time returned to the enjoyment of his civil rights, but Acquet had not restored his possessions. This terrible man, acting in the name of his wife, who was a claimant of the inheritance of the late M. de Combray, had instituted a series of lawsuits against his brother-in-law. He proved to be such a clever tactician, that though Mme. Acquet had for some time been suing for a separation, he managed to live on the Combray estates; fortifying his position by means of a store of quotations drawn, as occasion demanded, from the Common Law of Normandy, the Revolutionary Laws and the Code Napoleon. To deal with these questions in detail would be wearisome and useless. Suffice it to say that at the period at which we have arrived, all that Mme. Acquet had to depend upon was a pension of 2,000 francs which the court had granted to her on August 1, 1804, for her maintenance pending a definite decision. She lived alone at the Hôtel de Combray in the Rue du Trepot at Falaise, a very large house composed of two main buildings, one of which was vacant owing to the absence of Timoléon who had settled in Paris. Mme. de Combray had undertaken to assist with her granddaughters' education, and they had been sent off to a school kept by a Mme. du Saussay at Rouen.

Foreseeing that this state of things could not last forever, Acquet, despite Bonnœil's oft-repeated protests, continued to devastate Donnay, so as to get all he could out of it, cutting down the forests, chopping the elms into faggots, and felling the ancient beeches. The very castle whose façade but lately reached to the end of the stately avenue, suffered from his devastations. It was now nothing but a ruin with swing-doors and a leaking roof. Here Acquet had reserved a garret for himself, abandoning the rest of the house to the ravages of time and the weather. Shut up in this ruin like a wild beast in his lair, he would not permit the slightest infringement of what he called his rights. Mme. de Combray wished to spend the harvest season of 1803 at the château, where the happiest years of her life had been passed, and where all her children had grown up, but Acquet made the bailiff turn her out, and the Marquise took refuge in the village parsonage, which had been sold at the time of the Revolution as national property, and for which she had supplied half the money, when the Commune bought it back, to restore it to its original purpose. Since no priest had yet been appointed she was able to take up her residence there, to the indignation of her son-in-law, who considered this intrusion as a piece of bravado.

Two years later Mme. de Combray had still no other shelter at Donnay, and it was to this parsonage that she brought d'Aché. They arrived there on the evening of July 17th. A long stay in this conspicuous house, which was always exposed to the hateful espionage of Acquet, was out of the question for the exile. He nevertheless spent a fortnight there, without trying to hide himself, even going so far as to hunt, and receive several visits, among others one from Mme. Acquet, who came from Falaise to see her mother, and thus met d'Aché for the first time. At the beginning of August he quitted Donnay, and Mme. de Combray accompanied him as far as the country château of a neighbour, M. Descroisy, where he passed one night. At break of day he set out on horseback in the direction of Bayeux, Mme. de Combray alone knowing where he went.

In this neighbourhood d'Aché had the choice of several places of refuge. He was closely connected by ties of friendship with the family of Duquesnay de Monfiquet who lived at Mandeville near Trévières. M. de Monfiquet, a thoroughly loyal but quite unimportant nobleman, having emigrated at the outbreak of the Revolution, his estate at Mandeville had been sequestrated and his château pillaged and half demolished. Mme. de Monfiquet, a clever and energetic woman, being left with six daughters unprovided for, took refuge with the d'Aché's at Gournay, where she spent the whole period of the Terror. Madame d'Aché even kept Henriette, one of the little girls who was ill-favoured and hunchbacked but remarkably clever, with her for five years.

Monsieur de Monfiquet, returning from abroad in the year VII, and having somewhat reorganised his little estate at Mandeville, lived there in poverty with his family in the hope that brighter days would dawn for them with the return of the monarchy. On all these grounds d'Aché was sure of finding not only a safe retreat but congenial society. The few persons who were acquainted with what passed at Mandeville were convinced that Mlle. Henriette possessed a great influence over the exile, and that she had been his mistress for a long time. According to general opinion he made her his confidant and she helped him like a devoted admirer. In fact she arranged several other hiding-places for him in the neighbourhood of Trévières in case of need;—one at the mill at Dungy, another with M. de Cantelou at Lingèvres, and a third at a tanner's named La Pérandeère at Bayeux. And to escort him in his flights she secured a man of unparalleled audacity who had been a brigand in the district for ten years, and who had to avenge the death of his two brothers, who had fallen into an ambush and been shot at Bayeux in 1796. People called him David the Intrepid. Having been ten times condemned to death and certain of being shot as soon as he was caught, David had no settled abode. On stormy nights he would embark in a boat which he steered himself, and, sure of not being overtaken, he would reach England where he used to act as an agent for the emigrants. They say that he was not without influence with the entourage of the Comte d'Artois. When he stayed in France he lodged with an old lady former housekeeper to a Councillor of the Parliament of Normandy, who lived alone in an old house in Bayeux and to whom he had been recommended by Mlle. Henriette de Monfiquet. David did not take up much room. When he arrived he set in motion a contrivance of his own by which two steps of the principal staircase were raised, and slipping into the cavity thus made, he quickly replaced everything. All the gendarmes in Calvados could have gone up and down this staircase without suspecting that a man was hidden in the house, where, however, he was never looked for.

These were the persons and means made use of by d'Aché in his new theatre of operations: a poor hunchbacked girl was his council, and his army was composed of David the Intrepid. He was, moreover, penniless. At the beginning of the autumn Mme. de Combray sent him eight louis by Lanoë, a keeper who had been in her service, and who now occupied a small farm at Glatigny, near to Bretteville-sur-Dives. Lanoë belonged to that rapacious type of peasant whom even a small sum of money never fails to attract. Already he had on two occasions acted as guide to the Baron de Commarque and to Frotté when Mme. de Combray offered them shelter at Donnay. For this he had been summoned before a military commission and spent nearly two years in prison, but this had no effect. For three francs he would walk ten leagues and if he complained sufficiently of the dangers to which these missions exposed him the sum was doubled and he would go away satisfied. In the middle of August he went to Mandeville to fetch d'Aché to Donnay, where he spent ten days and again passed three weeks at the end of September. He was to have gone there again in December, but at the moment when he was preparing to start Bonnœil suddenly appeared at Mandeville, having come to warn him not to venture there as Mme. de Combray had been accused of a crime and was on the point of being arrested.

It was not without vexation that Acquet saw his mother-in-law settling herself at his very door. Keenly on the lookout for any means of annoying the Marquise, he was struck by the idea that if an incumbent were appointed to the vacant curé of Donnay, he would have to live at the parsonage, half of which belonged to the Commune, and that their being obliged to live in the same house would be a great inconvenience to Mme. de Combray. This prospect charmed Acquet, and as he had several friends in high positions, among them the Baron Darthenay his neighbour at Meslay, who had lately been elected deputy for Calvados, he had small difficulty in getting a priest appointed. A few days afterwards a curé, the Abbé Clérisse, arrived at Donnay, fully determined to carry out the duties of his ministry faithfully, and very far from foreseeing the tragic fate in store for him.

Mme. de Combray had made herself quite comfortable at the parsonage, which she considered in a manner her own property since she had furnished half the money for its purchase. She now saw herself compelled to surrender a portion of it, which from the very first embittered her against the new arrival. Acquet, for his part, fêted his protégé, and welcoming him cordially put him on his guard against the machinations of the Marquise, whom he represented as an inveterate enemy of the conciliatory government to which France owed the Concordat. The Abbé Clérisse, who, from the construction of the house was obliged to use the rooms in common with Mme. de Combray, was not long in noticing the mysterious behaviour of the occupants. There were conferences conducted in whispers, visitors who arrived at night and left at dawn, secret comings and goings, in short, all the strange doings of a houseful of conspirators, so that the good curé one day took Lanoë aside and recommended him to be prudent, "predicting that he would get himself into serious difficulties if he did not quit the service of the Marquise as soon as possible." Mme. de Combray, in her exasperation, called the Abbé "Concordataire," an epithet which, from her, was equivalent to renegade. She had the imprudence to add that the reign of the "usurper would not last forever, and that the princes would soon return at the head of an English army and restore everything." In her wrath she left the parsonage, making a great commotion, and went to beg shelter from her farmer Hébert, who lived in a cottage used as a public house, called La Bijude, where the road from Harcourt met that from Cesny. Acquet was triumphant. The astonished Abbé remained passive; and as ill luck would have it, fell ill and died a few days afterwards. A report was circulated, emanating from the château, that he had died of grief caused by Mme. de Combray. Then people began to talk in whispers about a certain basket of white wine with which she had presented the poor priest. A week later all those who sided with Acquet were convinced that the Marquise had poisoned the Abbé Clérisse, "after having been imprudent enough to take him into her confidence." Feeling ran high in the village. Acquet affected consternation. The authorities, no doubt informed by him, began making investigations when a nephew of the Marquise, M. de Saint Léonard, Mayor of Falaise, who was on very good terms with the Court, came down to hush up the affair and impose silence on the mischief-makers.

This first bout between Acquet de Férolles and the family de Combray resulted in d'Aché's being forbidden the house of his old friend. Feeling herself in the clutches of an enemy who was always on the watch, she did not dare to expose to denunciation a man on whose head the fate of the monarchy rested. D'Aché did not come to La Bijude the whole winter. Mme. de Combray lived there alone with her son Bonnœil and the farmer Hébert. She had the house done up and repainted, but it distressed her to be so meanly lodged, and she regretted the lofty halls and the quiet of Tournebut. At the beginning of Lent, 1806, she sent Lanoë for the last time to Mandeville to arrange with d'Aché some means of correspondence, and with Bonnœil she again started for Gaillon, determined never again to set foot on her estates in Lower Normandy as long as her son-in-law reigned there, and thoroughly convinced that the fast approaching return of the King would avenge all the humiliations she had lately endured. She had, moreover, quarrelled with her daughter, who had only come to Donnay twice during her mother's stay, and had there displayed only a very moderate appreciation of d'Aché's plans, and had seemed entirely uninterested in the annoyance caused to the Marquise, and her exodus to La Bijude.

If Mme. Acquet de Férolles was really lacking in interest, it was because a great event had occurred in her own life.

Acquet knew that his wife's suit for a separation must inevitably be granted. The ill-treatment she had had to endure was only too well-known, and every one in Falaise took her part. If Acquet lost the case, it would mean the end of the easy life he was leading at Donnay, and he not only wished to gain time but secretly hoped that his wife would commit some indiscretion that would regain for him if not the sympathies of the public, at least her loss of the suit which if won, would ruin him. In order to carry out his Machiavellian schemes, he pretended that he wished to come to an understanding with the Combray family, and he despatched one of his friends to Mme. Acquet to open negotiations. This friend, named Le Chevalier, was a handsome young man of twenty-five, with dark hair, a pale complexion and white teeth. He had languishing eyes, a sympathetic voice and a graceful figure, inexhaustible good-humour, despite his melancholy appearance, and unbounded audacity. As he was the owner of a farm in the Commune of Saint Arnould in the neighbourhood of Exmes, he was called Le Chevalier de Saint-Arnould, which gave him the position of a nobleman. He was moreover related to the nobility.

Less has been written about Le Chevalier than about most of those who were concerned in the troubles in the west. Nevertheless, his adventures deserve more than the few lines, often incorrect, devoted to him by some chroniclers of the revolt of the Chouans. He was a remarkable personality, very romantic, somewhat of an enigma, and one who by a touch of gallantry and scepticism was distinguished from his savage and heroic companions.

Born with a generous temperament and deeply in love with glory, as he said, he was the son of a councillor, hammer-keeper to the corporation of the woods and forests of Vire. A stay of several years in Paris where he took lessons from different masters as much in science as in the arts and foreign languages, had completed his education. He returned to Saint Arnould in 1799, uncertain as to the choice of a career, when a chance meeting with Picot, chief of the Auge division, whose death was described at the beginning of this story, decided his vocation, and Le Chevalier became a royalist officer, less from conviction than from generous feelings which inclined him towards the cause of the vanquished and oppressed. A pistol shot broke his left arm two or three days after he was enrolled, and he was scarcely cured of this wound when he again took the field and was implicated in the stopping of a coach. Three of his friends were imprisoned, and when he himself was arrested, he succeeded in proving that on the very day of the attack, in the neighbourhood of Evreux, he was on a visit to a senator in Paris who had great friends among the authorities, and the magistrates were compelled to yield before this indisputable alibi. Le Chevalier, nevertheless, appeared before the tribunal which was trying the cases of his companions, and pleaded their cause with the eloquence inspired by the purest and bravest friendship, and when he heard them condemned to death, he begged in a burst of feeling which amazed everybody, to be allowed to share their fate. It was considered a sufficient punishment to send him to prison at Caen, whence he was liberated a few months later, though he had to remain in the town under police surveillance. It was then that the wild romance of his life began.

He possessed an ample fortune. His chivalrous behaviour in the affair at Evreux had gained for him, among the Chouans such renown that without knowing him otherwise than from hearsay, Mme. de Combray travelled across Normandy, as did many other royalist ladies in order to visit the hero in prison and offer him her services. He had admirers who fawned on him, flatterers who praised him to the skies, and how could this rather hot-headed youth of twenty resist such adulation at that strange epoch when even the wisest lost their balance? At least his folly was generous.

Scarcely out of prison he was seized with pity for the misery of the pardoned Chouans, veritable pariahs, who lived by all sorts of contrivances or were dependent on charity, and he made their care his special charge. He was always followed by a dozen of these parasites, a ragged troop of whom filled the Café Hervieux, where he held his court and which moreover was frequented by teachers of English, mathematics and fencing, whom he had in his pay, and from whom he took lessons when not playing faro.

Le Chevalier had a warm heart, and a purse that was never closed. He was a façile speaker whose eloquence was of a forensic type. His friendships were passionate. While in prison he received news of the death of one of his friends, Gilbert, who had been guillotined at Evreux, and when some one congratulated him on his approaching release he replied: "Ah, my dear comrade! do you think this is a time to congratulate me? Do you know so little of my heart and are you so ignorant of the love I bore Gilbert? The happiness of my life is destroyed forever. Nothing can fill the void in my heart.... I have lived, ah! far too long. O divine duties of friendship and honour, how my heart burns to fulfil you! O eternity or annihilation, how sweet will you seem to me whence once I have fulfilled them!" Such was Le Chevalier's style and this affection contrasted singularly with the world in which he lived. His comparative wealth, his generosity, and an air of mystery about his life, gave him a certain advantage over the most popular leaders. People knew that he was dreaming of gigantic projects, and his partisans considered him cut out for the accomplishment of great things.

In reality Le Chevalier squandered his patrimony recklessly. The treasury of the party—presided over by an old officer of Frotté's, Bureau de Placène, who pompously styled himself the Treasurer-General—was empty, and orders came from "high places," without any one exactly knowing whence they emanated, for the faithful to refill them by pillaging the coffers of the state. The police had little by little relaxed their supervision of Le Chevalier's conduct, and he took advantage of this to go away for short periods. It was remarked that each of his absences generally coincided with the stopping of a coach—a frequent occurrence in Normandy at this time, and one that was considered as justifiable by the royalists. Seldom did they feel any qualms about these exploits. The driver, and often his escort, were accomplices of the Chouans. A few shots were fired from muskets or pistols to keep up the pretence of a fight. Some of the men opened the chests while others kept watch. The money belonging to the government was divided to the last sou, while that belonging to private individuals was carefully returned to the strong box. A few hours later the band returned to Caen and the noisy meetings at the Café Hervieux were not even interrupted.

What renders the figure of Le Chevalier especially attractive, despite these mad pranks, which no one of his day considered dishonourable, is the deep private grief which saddened his adventurous life. In 1801, when he was twenty-one years of age, and during his detention at Caen, he had married Lucile Thiboust, a girl somewhat older than himself, whose father had been overseer of an estate. He was obliged to break out of prison to spend a few rare hours with the wife whom he dearly loved, all the more so since his passion was oftenest obliged to expend itself in ardent letters not devoid of literary merit. In prison he learned of the birth of a son born of this union, and a week later, of the death of his adored wife. His grief was terrible, but he was seized with a passionate love for his child, and it is said that from that day forth he cared for no one else. He had lived so fast that at the age of twenty-three he was tired of life; his only anxiety was for the future of his son, whom he had confided to the care of a good woman named Marie Hamon. He traced out a line of conduct for this babe in swaddling clothes: "Let him flee corruption, seduction and all shameful and violent passions; let him be a friend as they were in ancient Greece, a lover as in ancient Gaul."

In short his exploits, his captivity, his sorrows, his eloquence, his courage, his noble bearing, made Le Chevalier a hero of romance, and this was the man whom Acquet de Férolles deemed it wise to despatch to his wife. Doubtless he had made his acquaintance through the medium of some of his Chouan comrades. He received him at Donnay, and in order to attach him to himself lent him large sums of money, which Le Chevalier immediately distributed among the crowd of parasites that never left him. Acquet told him of the separation with which his wife threatened him, begging him to use all his eloquence to bring about an amicable settlement.

The poor woman would never have known this peacemaker but for her husband, and we are ignorant of the manner in which he acquitted himself of his mission. She had yielded as much from inexperience as from compulsion, to a man who for five years had made her life a martyrdom. She lived at Falaise in an isolation that accorded ill with her yearning for love and her impressionable nature. The person who now came suddenly into her life corresponded so well with her idea of a hero—he was so handsome, so brave, so generous, he spoke with such gentleness and politeness that Mme. Acquet, to whom these qualities were startling novelties, loved him from the first day with an "ungovernable passion." She associated herself with his life with an ardour that excluded every other sentiment, and she so wished to stand well with him that, casting aside all prudence, she adopted his adventurous mode of living, mixing with the outcasts who formed the entourage of her lover, and with them frequenting the inns and cafés of Caen. He succeeded in avoiding the surveillance of the police, and secretly undertook journeys to Paris where he said he had friends in the Emperor's immediate circle. He travelled by those roads in Normandy which were known to all the old Chouans, talking to them of the good times when they made war on the Blues, and not hesitating to say that, whenever he wished, he had only to make a sign and an army would spring up around him. He maintained, moreover, a small troop of determined men who carried his messages and formed his staff.

There is not the slightest doubt that their chief resource lay in carrying off the money of the State which was sent from place to place in public conveyances, and it was this booty that enriched the coffers of the party, the treasurer, Placène, having long since grown indifferent to the source of his supplies. The agreement of certain dates is singularly convincing. Thus, at the beginning of December, 1805, d'Aché was at Mandeville with the Monfiquets, in a state of such penury that, as we have seen, Mme. de Combray sent him eight louis d'or by Lanoë; nevertheless, he was thinking of going to England to fetch back the princes. He would require a considerable sum to prepare for his journey, and to guard against all the contingencies of this somewhat audacious attempt. Mme. Acquet was informed of the situation by her mother whom she came to visit at Donnay, and on the 22d December, 1805, the coach from Rouen to Paris was attacked on the slope of Authevernes, at a distance of only three leagues from the Château of Tournebut. The travellers noticed that one of the brigands, dressed in a military costume, and whom his comrades called The Dragon, was so much thinner and more active than the rest, that he might well have been taken "for a woman dressed as a man." A fresh attack was made at the same place by the same band on the 15th February, 1806; and as before the band disappeared so rapidly, once the blow was struck, that it seemed they must have taken refuge in one of the neighbouring houses. Suspicion fell on the Château de Mussegros, situated about three leagues from Authevernes; but nobody then thought of Tournebut, the owners of which had been absent for seven months. It was only in March that Mme. de Combray returned there, and it was in April that d'Aché, having laid in a good stock of money, decided to cross the channel and convey to the princes the good wishes of their faithful provinces in the west.

D'Aché had not wasted his time during his stay at Mandeville. It was a difficult enterprise in existing circumstances to arrange his crossings with any chance of success. The embarkation was easy enough, and David the Intrepid had undertaken to see to it; but it was especially important to secure a safe return, and a secret landing on the French coast, lined as it was by patrols, watched day and night by custom-house officers, and guarded by sentinels at every point where a boat could approach the shore, offered almost insuperable difficulties. D'Aché selected a little creek at the foot of the rocks of Saint Honorine, scarcely two leagues from Trévières and David, who knew all the coast guards in the district, bribed one of them to become an accomplice.

It was on a stormy night at the end of April, 1806, that d'Aché put to sea in a boat seventeen feet long, which was steered by David the Intrepid. After tossing about for fifty hours, they landed in England. David immediately stood out to sea again, while d'Aché took the road to London.

One can easily imagine what the feelings of these royalist fanatics must have been when they approached the princes to whom they had devoted so many years of their lives, hunted over France and pursued like malefactors; how they must have anticipated the welcome in London that their devotion merited. They were prepared to be treated like sons by the King, as friends by the princes, as leaders by the emigrants, who were only waiting to return till France was reconquered for them. The deception was cruel. The emigrant world, so easy to dupe on account of its misfortunes, and immeasurable vanity, had fallen a victim to so many false Chouans—spies in disguise and barefaced swindlers, who each brought plans for the restoration, and after obtaining money made off and were never seen again—that distrust at last had taken the place of the unsuspecting confidence of former days. Every Frenchman who arrived in London was considered an adventurer, and as far as we can gather from this closed page of history,—for those, who tried the experiment of a visit to the exiled princes, have respectfully kept silence on the subject of their discomfiture—it appears that terrible mortifications were in store for the militant royalists who approached the emigrant leaders. D'Aché did not escape disillusionment, and though he did not disclose the incidents of his stay in London, we know that at first he was thrown into prison, and that for two months he could not succeed in obtaining an interview with the Comte d'Artois, much less with the exiled King.

M. de la Chapelle, the most influential man at the little court at Hartwell, sent for him and questioned him about his plans, but was opposed to his being received by the princes, though he put him in communication with King George's ministers, every person who brought news of any plot against Napoleon's government being sure of a welcome and a hearing from the latter.

After three weeks of conferences the expedition which was to support a general rising of the peasants in the West, was postponed till the spring of 1807. A feigned attack on Port-en-Bessin would allow of their surprising the islands of Tahitou and Saint-Marcouf as well as Port-Bail on the western slope of the Cotentin. The destruction of the roads, which protect the lower part of the peninsula, would insure the success of the undertaking by cutting off Cherbourg which, attacked from behind, would easily be carried, resistance being impossible. The invading army, concentrating under the forts of the town, in which they would have a safe retreat, would descend by Carenton on Saint-Lô and Caen to meet the army of peasants and malcontents whose cooperation d'Aché guaranteed. He undertook to collect twenty thousand men; the English government offered the same number of Russian and Swedish soldiers, and to provide for their transportation to the coast of France. Pending this, d'Aché was given unlimited credit on the banker Nourry at Caen.

His stay in London lasted nearly three months. Towards the end of July an English frigate took him to the fleet where Admiral Saumarez received him with great deference, and equipped a brig with fourteen cannon to convey him to the shore. When, at night, they were within a gunshot of the coast of Saint-Honorine, d'Aché himself made the signals agreed upon, which were quickly answered by the coast guard on shore. An hour afterwards David the Intrepid's boat hailed the English brig, and before daybreak d'Aché was back at Mandeville, sharing with his hosts the joy he felt at the success of his voyage. They began to make plans immediately. It was decided on the spot that the Château de Monfiquet should shelter the King during the first few days after he landed. Eight months were to elapse before the beginning of the campaign, and as money was not lacking this time was sufficient for d'Aché to prepare for operations.

We may as well mention at once that the English Cabinet, while playing on the fanaticism of d'Aché, as they had formerly done on that of Georges Cadoudal and so many others, had not the slightest intention of keeping their promises. Their hatred of Napoleon suggested to them the infamous idea of exciting the naïve royalists of France by raising hopes they never meant to satisfy. They abandoned them once they saw their dupes so deeply implicated that there was no drawing back, caring little if they helped them to the scaffold, desirous only of maintaining agitations in France and of driving them into such desperate straits that some assassin might arise from among them who would rid the world of Bonaparte. Here lies, doubtless, one of the reasons why the exiled princes so obstinately refused to encourage their partisans' attempts. Did they know of the snares laid for these unhappy creatures? Did they not dare to put them on their guard for fear of offending the English government? Was this the rent they paid for Hartwell? The history of the intrigues which played around the claimant to the throne is full of mystery. Those who were mixed up in them, such as Fauche-Bonel or Hyde de Neuville were ruined, and it required the daylight of the Restoration to open the eyes of the persons most interested to the fact that certain professions of devotion had been treacherous.

As far as d'Aché was concerned it seems fairly certain that he did not receive any promise from the princes, and was not even admitted to their presence; the English ministers alone encouraged him to embark on this extraordinary adventure, in which they were fully determined to let him ruin himself. Therefore the "unlimited" credit opened at the banker Nourry's was only a bait: while making the conspirators think they would never want for money, the credit was limited beforehand to 30,000 francs, a piece of duplicity which enraged even the detectives who, later on, discovered it.

It is not easy to follow d'Aché in the mysterious work upon which he entered: the precautions he took to escape the police have caused him to be lost to posterity as well. Some slight landmarks barely permit our following his trail during the few years which form the climax of his wonderful career.

We find him first of all during the autumn of 1806, at La Bijude, where Mme. de Combray, who had remained at Tournebut had charged Bonnœil and Mme. Acquet to go and receive him. There was some question of providing him with a messenger familiar with the haunts of the Chouans and the dangers connected with the task. To fulfil this duty Mme. Acquet proposed a German named Flierlé whom Le Chevalier recommended. Flierlé had distinguished himself in the revolt of the Chouans; a renowned fighter, he had been mixed up in every plot. He was in Paris at the time of the eighteenth Fructidor; he turned up there again at the moment when Saint-Réjant was preparing his infernal machine; he again spent three months there at the time of Georges' conspiracy. For the last two years, whilst waiting for a fresh engagement, he had lived on a small pension from the royal treasury, and when funds were low, he made one of his more fortunate companions in old days put him up; and thus he roamed from Caen to Falaise, from Mortain to Bayeux or Saint-Lô, even going into Mayenne in his wanderings. Although he would never have acknowledged it, we may say that he was one of the men usually employed in attacking public vehicles: in fact, he was an adept at it and went by the name of the "Teisch."

Summoned to La Bijude he presented himself there one morning towards the end of October. D'Aché arrived there the same evening while they were at dinner. They talked rather vaguely of the great project, but much of their old Chouan comrades. In spite of his decided German accent Flierlé was inexhaustible on this theme. He and d'Aché slept in the same room, and this intimacy lasted two whole days, at the end of which it was decided that Flierlé should be employed as a messenger at a salary of fifty crowns a month. That same night, Lanoë conducted d'Aché two leagues from La Bijude and left him on the road to Arjentan.

Here is a new landmark: on November 26th, Veyrat, the inspector of police, hastily informed Desmarets that d'Aché, whom they had been seeking for two years, had arrived the night before in Paris, getting out of the coach from Rennes in the company of a man named Durand. The latter, leaving his trunk at the office, spent the night at a house in the Rue Montmartre, whence he departed the next morning for Boulogne. As for d'Aché, wrote Veyrat, he had neither box nor parcel, and disappeared as soon as he got out of the carriage. Search was made in all the furnished lodgings and hotels in the neighbourhood, but without result. Desmarets set all his best men to work, but in vain: d'Aché was not to be found.

He was at Tournebut, where he spent a month. It is probable that a pressing need of money was the cause of this journey to Paris and his visit to Mme. de Combray. By this time d'Aché had exhausted his credit at the banker Nourry's. Believing that this source would never be exhausted, he had drawn on it largely. His disappointment was therefore cruel when he heard that his account was definitely closed. He found himself again without money, and by a coincidence which must be mentioned, the diligence from Paris to Rouen was robbed, during his stay at Tournebut, in November, 1806, at the Mill of Monflaines, about a hundred yards from Authevernes, where the preceding attacks had taken place. The booty was not large this time, and when d'Aché again took the road to Mandeville his resources consisted of six hundred francs.

He was obliged to spend the winter in torturing idleness; there is no indication of his movements till February, 1807. The time fixed for the great events was drawing near, and it was important to make them known. He decided on the plan of a manifesto which was to be widely circulated through the whole province, and would not allow any one to assist in drawing it up. This proclamation, written in the name of the princes, stipulated a general amnesty, the retention of those in authority, a reduction of taxation, and the abolition of conscription. Lanoë, summoned to Mandeville, received ten louis and the manuscript of the manifesto, with the order to get it printed as secretly as possible. The crafty Norman promised, slipped the paper into the lining of his coat, and after a fruitless—and probably very feeble—attempt on a printer's apprentice at Falaise, returned it to Flierlé, with many admonitions to be prudent, but only refunded five louis. Flierlé first applied to a bookseller in the Froide Rue at Caen. The latter, as soon as he found out what it contained, refused his assistance.

An incident now occurred, the importance of which it is difficult to discover, but which seems to have been great, to judge from the mystery in which it is shrouded. Whether he had received some urgent communication from England, or whether, in his state of destitution, he had thought of claiming the help of his friends at Tournebut, d'Aché despatched Flierlé to Mme. de Combray, and gave him two letters, advising him to use the greatest discretion. Flierlé set out on horseback from Caen in the morning of March 13th. At dawn next day he arrived at Rouen, and immediately repaired to the house of a Mme. Lambert, a milliner in the Rue de l'Hôpital, to whom one of the letters was addressed. "I gave it to her," he said, "on her staircase, without speaking to her, as I had been told to do, and set out that very morning for Tournebut, where I arrived between two and three o'clock. I gave Mme. de Combray the other letter, which she threw in the fire after having read it."

Flierlé slept at the château. Next day Bonnœil conducted him to Louviers, and there intrusted a packet of letters to him addressed to d'Aché. Both directed their steps to Rouen, and the German fetched from the Rue de l'Hôpital, the milliner's reply, which she gave him herself without saying a word.

He immediately continued his journey, and by March 20th was back at Mandeville, and placed the precious mail in d'Aché's hands. The latter had scarcely read it before he sent David word to get his boat ready, and without losing a moment, the letters which had arrived from Rouen were taken out to sea to the English fleet, to be forwarded to London.

We are still ignorant of the contents of these mysterious despatches, and inquiry on this point is reduced to supposition. Some pretended that d'Aché sent the manifesto to Mme. de Combray, and that it was clandestinely printed in the cellars at Tournebut; others maintain that towards March 15th Bonnœil returned from Paris, bringing with him the correspondence of the secret royalist committee which was to be sent to the English Cabinet via Mandeville. D'Aché certainly attached immense importance to this expedition, which ought, according to him, to make the princes decide on the immediate despatch of funds, and to hasten the preparation for the attack on the island of Tahitou. But days passed and no reply came. In the agony of uncertainty he decided to approach Le Chevalier, whom he only knew by reputation as being a shrewd and resolute man. The meeting took place at Trévières towards the middle of April, 1807. Le Chevalier brought one of his aides-de-camp with him, but d'Aché came alone.

The names of these two men are so little known, they occupy such a very humble place in history, that we can hardly imagine, now that we know how pitifully their dreams miscarried, how without being ridiculous they could fancy that any result whatever could come of their meeting. The surroundings made them consider themselves important: d'Aché was—or thought he was—the mouthpiece of the exiled King; as for Le Chevalier, whether from vainglory or credulity he boasted of an immense popularity with the Chouans, and spoke mysteriously of the royalist committee which, working in Paris, had succeeded, he said, in rallying to the cause men of considerable importance in the entourage of the Emperor himself.

Since he had been Mme. Acquet's adored lover, Le Chevalier's visits to the Café Hervieux had become rarer; his parasites had dispersed, and although he still kept up his house in the Rue Saint-Sauveur at Caen, he spent the greater part of his time either at Falaise or at La Bijude, where his devoted mistress alternately lived. The police of Count Caffarelli, Prefect of Calvados, had ceased keeping an eye on him, and he even received a passport for Paris, whither he went frequently. He always returned more confident than before, and in the little group amongst whom he lived at Falaise—consisting of his cousin, Dusaussay, two Chouan comrades, Beaupaire and Desmontis; a doctor in the Frotté army, Révérend; and the Notary of the Combray family, Maître Febre—he was never tired of talking in confidence about the secret Royalist Committee, and the near approach of the Restoration. The revolution which was to bring it about, was to be a very peaceful one, according to him. Bonaparte, taken prisoner by two of his generals, each at the head of 40,000 men, was to be handed over to the English and replaced by "a regency, the members of which were to be chosen from among the senators who could be trusted." The Comte d'Artois was then to be recalled—or his son, the Duc de Berry—to take possession of the kingdom as Lieutenant-General.