Ch. 3 - A Day Without a Morrow

The preceding events of this history having been greatly influenced by
the formation of the regions in which they happened, it is desirable
to give a minute description of them, without which the closing scenes
might be difficult of comprehension.

The town of Fougeres is partly built upon a slate rock, which seems to
have slipped from the mountains that hem in the broad valley of
Couesnon to the west and take various names according to their
localities. The town is separated from the mountains by a gorge,
through which flows a small river called the Nancon. To the east, the
view is the same as from the summit of La Pelerine; to the west, the
town looks down into the tortuous valley of the Nancon; but there is a
spot from which a section of the great valley and the picturesque
windings of the gorge can be seen at the same time. This place, chosen
by the inhabitants of the town for their Promenade, and to which the
steps of Mademoiselle de Verneuil were now turned, was destined to be
the theatre on which the drama begun at La Vivetiere was to end.
Therefore, however picturesque the other parts of Fougeres may be,
attention must be particularly given to the scenery which meets the
eye from this terrace.

To give an idea of the rock on which Fougeres stands, as seen on this
side, we may compare it to one of those immense towers circled by
Saracen architects with balconies on each story, which were reached by
spiral stairways. To add to this effect, the rock is capped by a
Gothic church, the small spires, clock-tower, and buttresses of which
make its shape almost precisely that of a sugar-loaf. Before the
portal of this church, which is dedicated to Saint-Leonard, is a
small, irregular square, where the soil is held up by a buttressed
wall, which forms a balustrade and communicates by a flight of steps
with the Promenade. This public walk, like a second cornice, extends
round the rock a few rods below the square of Saint-Leonard; it is a
broad piece of ground planted with trees, and it joins the
fortifications of the town. About ten rods below the walls and rocks
which support this Promenade (due to a happy combination of
indestructible slate and patient industry) another circular road
exists, called the "Queen's Staircase"; this is cut in the rock itself
and leads to a bridge built across the Nancon by Anne of Brittany.
Below this road, which forms a third cornice, gardens descend, terrace
after terrace, to the river, like shelves covered with flowers.

Parallel with the Promenade, on the other side of the Nancon and
across its narrow valley, high rock-formations, called the heights of
Saint-Sulpice, follow the stream and descend in gentle slopes to the
great valley, where they turn abruptly to the north. Towards the
south, where the town itself really ends and the faubourg Saint-
Leonard begins, the Fougeres rock makes a bend, becomes less steep,
and turns into the great valley, following the course of the river,
which it hems in between itself and the heights of Saint-Sulpice,
forming a sort of pass through which the water escapes in two
streamlets to the Couesnon, into which they fall. This pretty group of
rocky hills is called the "Nid-aux-Crocs"; the little vale they
surround is the "Val de Gibarry," the rich pastures of which supply
the butter known to epicures as that of the "Pree-Valaye."

At the point where the Promenade joins the fortifications is a tower
called the "Tour de Papegaut." Close to this square erection, against
the side of which the house now occupied by Mademoiselle de Verneuil
rested, is a wall, partly built by hands and partly formed of the
native rock where it offered a smooth surface. Here stands a gateway
leading to the faubourg of Saint-Sulpice and bearing the same name.
Above, on a breastwork of granite which commands the three valleys,
rise the battlements and feudal towers of the ancient castle of
Fougeres,--one of those enormous erections built by the Dukes of
Brittany, with lofty walls fifteen feet thick, protected on the east
by a pond from which flows the Nancon, the waters of which fill its
moats, and on the west by the inaccessible granite rock on which it
stands.

Seen from the Promenade, this magnificent relic of the Middle Ages,
wrapped in its ivy mantle, adorned with its square or rounded towers,
in either of which a whole regiment could be quartered,--the castle,
the town, and the rock, protected by walls with sheer surfaces, or by
the glacis of the fortifications, form a huge horseshoe, lined with
precipices, on which the Bretons have, in course of ages, cut various
narrow footways. Here and there the rocks push out like architectural
adornments. Streamlets issue from the fissures, where the roots of
stunted trees are nourished. Farther on, a few rocky slopes, less
perpendicular than the rest, afford a scanty pasture for the goats. On
all sides heather, growing from every crevice, flings its rosy
garlands over the dark, uneven surface of the ground. At the bottom of
this vast funnel the little river winds through meadows that are
always cool and green, lying softly like a carpet.

Beneath the castle and among the granite boulders is a church
dedicated to Saint-Sulpice, whose name is given to the suburb which
lies across the Nancon. This suburb, flung as it were to the bottom of
a precipice, and its church, the spire of which does not rise to the
height of the rocks which threaten to crush it, are picturesquely
watered by several affluents of the Nancon, shaded by trees and
brightened by gardens. The whole region of Fougeres, its suburbs, its
churches, and the hills of Saint-Sulpice are surrounded by the heights
of Rille, which form part of a general range of mountains enclosing
the broad valley of Couesnon.

Such are the chief features of this landscape, the principal
characteristic of which is a rugged wildness softened by smiling
accidents, by a happy blending of the finest works of men's hands with
the capricious lay of a land full of unexpected contrasts, by a
something, hardly to be explained, which surprises, astonishes, and
puzzles. In no other part of France can the traveller meet with such
grandiose contrasts as those offered by the great basin of the
Couesnon, and the valleys hidden among the rocks of Fougeres and the
heights of Rille. Their beauty is of that unspeakable kind in which
chance triumphs and all the harmonies of Nature do their part. The
clear, limpid, flowing waters, the mountains clothed with the vigorous
vegetation of those regions, the sombre rocks, the graceful buildings,
the fortifications raised by nature, and the granite towers built by
man; combined with all the artifices of light and shade, with the
contrasts of the varieties of foliage, with the groups of houses where
an active population swarms, with the lonely barren places where the
granite will not suffer even the lichen to fasten on its surface, in
short, with all the ideas we ask a landscape to possess: grace and
awfulness, poesy with its renascent magic, sublime pictures,
delightful ruralities,--all these are here; it is Brittany in bloom.

The tower called the Papegaut, against which the house now occupied by
Mademoiselle de Verneuil rested, has its base at the very bottom of
the precipice, and rises to the esplanade which forms the cornice or
terrace before the church of Saint-Leonard. From Marie's house, which
was open on three sides, could be seen the horseshoe (which begins at
the tower itself), the winding valley of the Nancon, and the square of
Saint-Leonard. It is one of a group of wooden buildings standing
parallel with the western side of the church, with which they form an
alley-way, the farther end of which opens on a steep street skirting
the church and leading to the gate of Saint-Leonard, along which
Mademoiselle de Verneuil now made her way.

Marie naturally avoided entering the square of the church which was
then above her, and turned towards the Promenade. The magnificence of
the scene which met her eyes silenced for a moment the tumult of her
passions. She admired the vast trend of the valley, which her eyes
took in, from the summit of La Pelerine to the plateau where the main
road to Vitry passes; then her eyes rested on the Nid-aux-Crocs and
the winding gorges of the Val de Gibarry, the crests of which were
bathed in the misty glow of the setting sun. She was almost frightened
by the depth of the valley of the Nancon, the tallest poplars of which
scarcely reached to the level of the gardens below the Queen's
Staircase. At this time of day the smoke from the houses in the
suburbs and in the valleys made a vapor in the air, through which the
various objects had a bluish tinge; the brilliant colors of the day
were beginning to fade; the firmament took a pearly tone; the moon was
casting its veil of light into the ravine; all things tended to plunge
the soul into reverie and bring back the memory of those beloved.

In a moment the scene before her was powerless to hold Marie's
thoughts. In vain did the setting sun cast its gold-dust and its
crimson sheets to the depths of the river and along the meadows and
over the graceful buildings strewn among the rocks; she stood
immovable, gazing at the heights of the Mont Saint-Sulpice. The
frantic hope which had led her to the Promenade was miraculously
realized. Among the gorse and bracken which grew upon those heights
she was certain that she recognized, in spite of the goatskins which
they wore, a number of the guests at La Vivetiere, and among them the
Gars, whose every moment became vivid to her eyes in the softened
light of the sinking sun. A few steps back of the ground of men she
distinguished her enemy, Madame du Gua. For a moment Marie fancied
that she dreamed, but her rival's hatred soon proved to her that the
dream was a living one. The attention she was giving to the least
little gesture of the marquis prevented her from observing the care
with which Madame du Gua aimed a musket at her. But a shot which woke
the echoes of the mountains, and a ball that whistled past her warned
Mademoiselle de Verneuil of her rival's determination. "She sends me
her card," thought Marie, smiling. Instantly a "Qui vive?" echoing
from sentry to sentry, from the castle to the Porte Saint-Leonard,
proved to the Chouans the alertness of the Blues, inasmuch as the
least accessible of their ramparts was so well guarded.

"It is she--and he," muttered Marie to herself.

To seek the marquis, follow his steps and overtake him, was a thought
that flashed like lightning through her mind. "I have no weapon!" she
cried. She remembered that on leaving Paris she had flung into a trunk
an elegant dagger formerly belonging to a sultana, which she had
jestingly brought with her to the theatre of war, as some persons take
note-books in which to jot down their travelling ideas; she was less
attracted by the prospect of shedding blood than by the pleasure of
wearing a pretty weapon studded with precious stones, and playing with
a blade that was stainless. Three days earlier she had deeply
regretted having put this dagger in a trunk, when to escape her
enemies at La Vivetiere she had thought for a moment of killing
herself. She now returned to the house, found the weapon, put it in
her belt, wrapped a large shawl round her shoulders and a black
lace scarf about her hair, and covered her head with one of those
broad-brimmed hats distinctive of Chouans which belonged to a servant
of the house. Then, with the presence of mind which excited passions
often give, she took the glove which Marche-a-Terre had given her as a
safeguard, and saying, in reply to Francine's terrible looks, "I would
seek him in hell," she returned to the Promenade.

The Gars was still at the same place, but alone. By the direction of
his telescope he seemed to be examining with the careful attention of
a commander the various paths across the Nancon, the Queen's
Staircase, and the road leading through the Porte Saint-Sulpice and
round the church of that name, where it meets the high-road under
range of the guns at the castle. Mademoiselle de Verneuil took one of
the little paths made by goats and their keepers leading down from the
Promenade, reached the Staircase, then the bottom of the ravine,
crossed the Nancon and the suburb, and divining like a bird in the
desert her right course among the dangerous precipices of the Mont
Saint-Sulpice, she followed a slippery track defined upon the granite,
and in spite of the prickly gorse and reeds and loose stones which
hindered her, she climbed the steep ascent with an energy greater
perhaps than that of a man,--the energy momentarily possessed by a
woman under the influence of passion.

Night overtook her as she endeavored by the failing moonlight to make
out the path the marquis must have taken; an obstinate quest without
reward, for the dead silence about her was sufficient proof of the
withdrawal of the Chouans and their leader. This effort of passion
collapsed with the hope that inspired it. Finding herself alone, after
nightfall, in a hostile country, she began to reflect; and Hulot's
advice, together with the recollection of Madame du Gua's attempt,
made her tremble with fear. The stillness of the night, so deep in
mountain regions, enabled her to hear the fall of every leaf even at a
distance, and these slight sounds vibrated on the air as though to
give a measure of the silence or the solitude. The wind was blowing
across the heights and sweeping away the clouds with violence,
producing an alternation of shadows and light, the effect of which
increased her fears, and gave fantastic and terrifying semblances to
the most harmless objects. She turned her eyes to the houses of
Fougeres, where the domestic lights were burning like so many earthly
stars, and she presently saw distinctly the tower of Papegaut. She was
but a very short distance from her own house, but within that space
was the ravine. She remembered the declivities by which she had come,
and wondered if there were not more risk in attempting to return to
Fougeres than in following out the purpose which had brought her. She
reflected that the marquis's glove would surely protect her from the
Chouans, and that Madame du Gua was the only enemy to be really
feared. With this idea in her mind, Marie clasped her dagger, and
tried to find the way to a country house the roofs of which she had
noticed as she climbed Saint-Sulpice; but she walked slowly, for she
suddenly became aware of the majestic solemnity which oppresses a
solitary being in the night time in the midst of wild scenery, where
lofty mountains nod their heads like assembled giants. The rustle of
her gown, caught by the brambles, made her tremble more than once, and
more than once she hastened her steps only to slacken them again as
she thought her last hour had come. Before long matters assumed an
aspect which the boldest men could not have faced without alarm, and
which threw Mademoiselle de Verneuil into the sort of terror that so
affects the very springs of life that all things become excessive,
weakness as well as strength. The feeblest beings will then do deeds
of amazing power; the strongest go mad with fear.

Marie heard at a short distance a number of strange sounds, distinct
yet vague, indicative of confusion and tumult, fatiguing to the ear
which tried to distinguish them. They came from the ground, which
seemed to tremble beneath the feet of a multitude of marching men. A
momentary clearness in the sky enabled her to perceive at a little
distance long files of hideous figures waving like ears of corn and
gliding like phantoms; but she scarcely saw them, for darkness fell
again, like a black curtain, and hid the fearful scene which seemed to
her full of yellow, dazzling eyes. She turned hastily and ran to the
top of a bank to escape meeting three of these horrible figures who
were coming towards her.

"Did you see it?" said one.

"I felt a cold wind as it rushed past me," replied a hoarse voice.

"I smelt a damp and graveyard smell," said the third.

"Was it white?" asked the first.

"Why should only /he/ come back out of all those we left dead at La
Pelerine?" said the second.

"Why indeed?" replied the third. "Why do the Sacre-Coeur men have the
preference? Well, at any rate, I'd rather die without confession than
wander about as he does, without eating or drinking, and no blood in
his body or flesh on his bones."

"Ah!"

This exclamation, or rather this fearful cry, issued from the group as
the three Chouans pointed to the slender form and pallid face of
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, who fled away with terrified rapidity
without a sound.

"Here he is!" "There he is!" "Where?" "There!" "He's gone!" "No!"
"Yes!" "Can you see him?" These cries reverberated like the monotonous
murmur of waves upon a shore.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil walked bravely in the direction of the house
she had seen, and soon came in sight of a number of persons, who all
fled away at her approach with every sign of panic fear. She felt
impelled to advance by a mysterious power which coerced her; the
lightness of her body, which seemed to herself inexplicable, was
another source of terror. These forms which rose in masses at her
approach, as if from the ground on which she trod, uttered moans which
were scarcely human. At last she reached, not without difficulty, a
trampled garden, the hedges and fences of which were broken down.
Stopped by a sentry, she showed the glove. The moon lighted her face,
and the muzzle of the gun already pointed at her was dropped by the
Chouan, who uttered a hoarse cry, which echoed through the place. She
now saw large buildings, where a few lighted windows showed the rooms
that were occupied, and presently reached the walls without further
hindrance. Through the window into which she looked, she saw Madame du
Gua and the leaders who were convoked at La Vivetiere. Bewildered at
the sight, also by the conviction of her danger, she turned hastily to
a little opening protected by iron bars, and saw in a long vaulted
hall the marquis, alone and gloomy, within six feet of her. The
reflection of the fire, before which he was sitting in a clumsy chair,
lighted his face with a vacillating ruddy glow that gave the character
of a vision to the scene. Motionless and trembling, the girl stood
clinging to the bars, to catch his words if he spoke. Seeing him so
depressed, disheartened, and pale, she believed herself to be the
cause of his sadness. Her anger changed to pity, her pity to
tenderness, and she suddenly knew that it was not revenge alone which
had brought her there.

The marquis rose, turned his head, and stood amazed when he saw, as if
in a cloud, Mademoiselle de Verneuil's face; then he shook his head
with a gesture of impatience and contempt, exclaiming: "Must I forever
see the face of that devil, even when awake?"

This utter contempt for her forced a half-maddened laugh from the
unhappy girl which made the young leader quiver. He sprang to the
window, but Mademoiselle de Verneuil was gone. She heard the steps of
a man behind her, which she supposed to be those of the marquis, and,
to escape him, she knew no obstacles; she would have scaled walls and
flown through air; she would have found and followed a path to hell
sooner than have seen again, in flaming letters on the forehead of
that man, "I despise you,"--words which an inward voice sounded in her
soul with the noise of a trumpet.

After walking a short distance without knowing where she went, she
stopped, conscious of a damp exhalation. Alarmed by the sound of
voices, she went down some steps which led into a cellar. As she
reached the last of them, she stopped to listen and discover the
direction her pursuers might take. Above the sounds from the outside,
which were somewhat loud, she could hear within the lugubrious moans
of a human being, which added to her terror. Rays of light coming down
the steps made her fear that this retreat was only too well known to
her enemies, and, to escape them, she summoned fresh energy. Some
moments later, after recovering her composure of mind, it was
difficult for her to conceive by what means she had been able to climb
a little wall, in a recess of which she was now hidden. She took no
notice at first of the cramped position in which she was, but before
long the pain of it became intolerable, for she was bending double
under the arched opening of a vault, like the crouching Venus which
ignorant persons attempt to squeeze into too narrow a niche. The wall,
which was rather thick and built of granite, formed a low partition
between the stairway and the cellar whence the groans were issuing.
Presently she saw an individual, clothed in a goatskin, enter the cave
beneath her, and move about, without making any sign of eager search.
Impatient to discover if she had any chance of safety, Mademoiselle de
Verneuil waited with anxiety till the light brought by the new-comer
lighted the whole cave, where she could partly distinguish a formless
but living mass which was trying to reach a part of the wall, with
violent and repeated jerks, something like those of a carp lying out
of water on a shore.

A small pine torch threw its blue and hazy light into the cave. In
spite of the gloomy poetic effects which Mademoiselle de Verneuil's
imagination cast about this vaulted chamber, which was echoing to the
sounds of a pitiful prayer, she was obliged to admit that the place
was nothing more than an underground kitchen, evidently long
abandoned. When the formless mass was distinguishable it proved to be
a short and very fat man, whose limbs were carefully bound before he
had been left lying on the damp stone floor of the kitchen by those
who had seized him. When he saw the new-comer approach him with a
torch in one hand and a fagot of sticks in the other, the captive gave
a dreadful groan, which so wrought upon the sensibilities of
Mademoiselle de Verneuil that she forgot her own terror and despair
and the cramped position of her limbs, which were growing numb. But
she made a great effort and remained still. The Chouan flung the
sticks into the fireplace, after trying the strength of an old crane
which was fastened to a long iron bar; then he set fire to the wood
with his torch. Marie saw with terror that the man was the same
Pille-Miche to whom her rival had delivered her, and whose figure,
illuminated by the flame, was like that of the little boxwood men so
grotesquely carved in Germany. The moans of his prisoner produced a
broad grin upon features that were ribbed with wrinkles and tanned by
the sun.

"You see," he said to his victim, "that we Christians keep our
promises, which you don't. That fire is going to thaw out your legs
and tongue and hands. Hey! hey! I don't see a dripping-pan to put
under your feet; they are so fat the grease may put out the fire. Your
house must be badly furnished if it can't give its master all he wants
to warm him."

The victim uttered a sharp cry, as if he hoped someone would hear him
through the ceiling and come to his assistance.

"Ho! sing away, Monsieur d'Orgemont; they are all asleep upstairs, and
Marche-a-Terre is just behind me; he'll shut the cellar door."

While speaking Pille-Miche was sounding with the butt-end of his
musket the mantel-piece of the chimney, the tiles of the floor, the
walls and the ovens, to discover, if possible, where the miser hid his
gold. This search was made with such adroitness that d'Orgemont kept
silence, as if he feared to have been betrayed by some frightened
servant; for, though he trusted his secrets to no one, his habits gave
plenty of ground for logical deductions. Pille-Miche turned several
times sharply to look at his victim, as children do when they try to
guess, by the conscious expression of the comrade who has hidden an
article, whether they are nearer to or farther away from it.
D'Orgemont pretended to be alarmed when the Chouan tapped the ovens,
which sounded hollow, and seemed to wish to play upon his eager
credulity. Just then three other Chouans rushed down the steps and
entered the kitchen. Seeing Marche-a-Terre among them Pille-Miche
discontinued his search, after casting upon d'Orgemont a look that
conveyed the wrath of his balked covetousness.

"Marie Lambrequin has come to life!" cried Marche-a-Terre, proclaiming
by his manner that all other interests were of no account beside this
great piece of news.

"I'm not surprised," said Pille-Miche, "he took the sacrament so
often; the good God belonged to him."

"Ha! ha!" observed Mene-a-Bien, "that didn't stand him in anything at
his death. He hadn't received absolution before the affair at La
Pelerine. He had cheapened Goguelu's daughter, and was living in
mortal sin. The Abbe Gudin said he'd have to roam round two months as
a ghost before he could come to life. We saw him pass us,--he was
pale, he was cold, he was thin, he smelt of the cemetery."

"And his Reverence says that if a ghost gets hold of a living man he
can force him to be his companion," said the fourth Chouan.

The grotesque appearance of this last speaker drew Marche-a-Terre from
the pious reflections he had been making on the accomplishment of this
miracle of coming to life which, according to the Abbe Gudin would
happen to every true defender of religion and the king.

"You see, Galope-Chopine," he said to the fourth man gravely, "what
comes of omitting even the smallest duty commanded by our holy
religion. It is a warning to us, given by Saint Anne of Auray, to be
rigorous with ourselves for the slightest sin. Your cousin Pille-Miche
has asked the Gars to give you the surveillance of Fougeres, and the
Gars consents, and you'll be well paid--but you know with what flour
we bake a traitor's bread."

"Yes, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre."

"And you know why I tell you that. Some say you like cider and
gambling, but you can't play heads or tails now, remember; you must
belong to us only, or--"

"By your leave, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, cider and stakes are two good
things which don't hinder a man's salvation."

"If my cousin commits any folly," said Pille-Miche, "it will be out of
ignorance."

"In any way he commits it, if harm comes," said Marche-a-Terre, in a
voice which made the arched roof tremble, "my gun won't miss him. You
will answer for him to me," he added, turning to Pille-Miche; "for if
he does wrong I shall take it out on the thing that fills your
goatskin."

"But, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, with all due respect," said
Galope-Chopine, "haven't you sometimes taken a counterfeit Chouan for
a real one."

"My friend," said Marche-a-Terre in a curt tone, "don't let that
happen in your case, or I'll cut you in two like a turnip. As to the
emissaries of the Gars, they all carry his glove, but since that
affair at La Vivetiere the Grande Garce has added a green ribbon to
it."

Pille Miche nudged his comrade by the elbow and showed him d'Orgemont,
who was pretending to be asleep; but Pille-Miche and Marche-a-Terre
both knew by experience that no one ever slept by the corner of their
fire, and though the last words said to Galope-Chopine were almost
whispered, they must have been heard by the victim, and the four
Chouans looked at him fixedly, thinking perhaps that fear had deprived
him of his senses.

Suddenly, at a slight sign from Marche-a-Terre, Pille-Miche pulled off
d'Orgemont's shoes and stockings, Mene-a-Bien and Galope-Chopine
seized him round the body and carried him to the fire. Then
Marche-a-Terre took one of the thongs that tied the fagots and fastened
the miser's feet to the crane. These actions and the horrible celerity
with which they were done brought cries from the victim, which became
heart-rending when Pille-Miche gathered the burning sticks under his
legs.

"My friends, my good friends," screamed d'Orgemont, "you hurt me, you
kill me! I'm a Christian like you."

"You lie in your throat!" replied Marche-a-Terre. "Your brother denied
God; and as for you, you bought the abbey of Juvigny. The Abbe Gudin
says we can roast apostates when we find them."

"But, my brothers in God, I don't refuse to pay."

"We gave you two weeks, and it is now two months, and Galope-Chopine
here hasn't received the money."

"Haven't you received any of it, Galope-Chopine?" asked the miser, in
despair.

"None of it, Monsieur d'Orgemont," replied Galope-Chopine, frightened.

The cries, which had sunk into groans, continuous as the rattle in a
dying throat, now began again with dreadful violence. Accustomed to
such scenes, the four Chouans looked at d'Orgemont, who was twisting
and howling, so coolly that they seemed like travellers watching
before an inn fire till the roast meat was done enough to eat.

"I'm dying, I'm dying!" cried the victim, "and you won't get my
money."

In spite of these agonizing cries, Pille-Miche saw that the fire did
not yet scorch the skin; he drew the sticks cleverly together so as to
make a slight flame. On this d'Orgemont called out in a quavering
voice: "My friends, unbind me! How much do you want? A hundred crowns
--a thousand crowns--ten thousand crowns--a hundred thousand crowns--I
offer you two hundred thousand crowns!"

The voice became so lamentable that Mademoiselle de Verneuil forgot
her own danger and uttered an exclamation.

"Who spoke?" asked Marche-a-Terre.

The Chouans looked about them with terrified eyes. These men, so brave
in fight, were unable to face a ghost. Pille-Miche alone continued to
listen to the promises which the flames were now extracting from his
victim.

"Five hundred thousand crowns--yes, I'll give them," cried the victim.

"Well, where are they?" answered Pille-Miche, tranquilly.

"Under the first apple-tree--Holy Virgin! at the bottom of the garden
to the left--you are brigands--thieves! Ah! I'm dying--there's ten
thousand francs--"

"Francs! we don't want francs," said Marche-a-Terre; "those Republican
coins have pagan figures which oughtn't to pass."

"They are not francs, they are good louis d'or. But oh! undo me,
unbind me! I've told you where my life is--my money."

The four Chouans looked at each other as if thinking which of their
number they could trust sufficiently to disinter the money.

The cannibal cruelty of the scene so horrified Mademoiselle de
Verneuil that she could bear it no longer. Though doubtful whether the
role of ghost, which her pale face and the Chouan superstitions
evidently assigned to her, would carry her safely through the danger,
she called out, courageously, "Do you not fear God's anger? Unbind
him, brutes!"

The Chouans raised their heads and saw in the air above them two eyes
which shone like stars, and they fled, terrified. Mademoiselle de
Verneuil sprang into the kitchen, ran to d'Orgemont, and pulled him so
violently from the crane that the thong broke. Then with the blade of
her dagger she cut the cords which bound him. When the miser was free
and on his feet, the first expression of his face was a painful but
sardonic grin.

"Apple-tree! yes, go to the apple-tree, you brigands," he said. "Ho,
ho! this is the second time I've fooled them. They won't get a third
chance at me."

So saying, he caught Mademoiselle de Verneuil's hand, drew her under
the mantel-shelf to the back of the hearth in a way to avoid
disturbing the fire, which covered only a small part of it; then he
touched a spring; the iron back was lifted, and when their enemies
returned to the kitchen the heavy door of the hiding-place had already
fallen noiselessly. Mademoiselle de Verneuil then understood the
carp-like movements she had seen the miser making.

"The ghost has taken the Blue with him," cried the voice of
Marche-a-Terre.

The fright of the Chouans must have been great, for the words were
followed by a stillness so profound that d'Orgemont and his companion
could hear them muttering to themselves: "Ave, sancta Anna Auriaca
gratia plena, Dominus tecum," etc.

"They are praying, the fools!" cried d'Orgemont.

"Hush! are you not afraid they will discover us?" said Mademoiselle de
Verneuil, checking her companion.

The old man's laugh dissipated her fears.

"That iron back is set in a wall of granite two feet thick," he said.
"We can hear them, but they can't hear us."

Then he took the hand of his preserver and placed it near a crevice
through which a current of fresh air was blowing. She then perceived
that the opening was made in the shaft of the chimney.

"Ai! ai!" cried d'Orgemont. "The devil! how my legs smart!"

The Chouans, having finished their prayer, departed, and the old miser
again caught the hand of his companion and helped her to climb some
narrow winding steps cut in the granite wall. When they had mounted
some twenty of these steps the gleam of a lamp dimly lighted their
heads. The miser stopped, turned to his companion, examined her face
as if it were a bank note he was doubtful about cashing, and heaved a
heavy sigh.

"By bringing you here," he said, after a moment's silence, "I have
paid you in full for the service you did me; I don't see why I should
give you--"

"Monsieur, I ask nothing of you," she said.

These words, and also, perhaps, the disdainful expression on the
beautiful face, reassured the old man, for he answered, not without a
sigh, "Ah! if you take it that way, I have gone too far not to
continue on."

He politely assisted Marie to climb a few more steps rather strangely
constructed, and half willingly, half reluctantly, ushered her into a
small closet about four feet square, lighted by a lamp hanging from
the ceiling. It was easy to see that the miser had made preparations
to spend more than one day in this retreat if the events of the civil
war compelled him to hide himself.

"Don't brush against that wall, you might whiten yourself," said
d'Orgemont suddenly, as he hurriedly put his hand between the girl's
shawl and the stones which seemed to have been lately whitewashed. The
old man's action produced quite another effect from that he intended.
Marie looked about her and saw in one corner a sort of projection, the
shape of which forced from her a cry of terror, for she fancied it was
that of a human being standing erect and mortared into the wall.
D'Orgemont made a violent sign to her to hold her tongue, and his
little eyes of a porcelain blue showed as much fear as those of his
companion.

"Fool! do you think I murdered him? It is the body of my brother," and
the old man gave a lugubrious sigh. "He was the first sworn-in priest;
and this was the only asylum where he was safe against the fury of the
Chouans and the other priests. He was my elder brother, and he alone
had the patience to each me the decimal calculus. Oh! he was a good
priest! He was economical and laid by money. It is four years since he
died; I don't know what was the matter with him; perhaps it was that
priests are so in the habit of kneeling down to pray that he couldn't
get accustomed to standing upright here as I do. I walled him up
there; /they'd/ have dug him up elsewhere. Some day perhaps I can put
him in holy ground, as he used to call it,--poor man, he only took the
oath out of fear."

A tear rolled from the hard eyes of the little old man, whose rusty
wig suddenly seemed less hideous to the girl, and she turned her eyes
respectfully away from his distress. But, in spite of these tender
reminiscences, d'Orgemont kept on saying, "Don't go near the wall, you
might--"

His eyes never ceased to watch hers, hoping thus to prevent her from
examining too closely the walls of the closet, where the close air was
scarcely enough to inflate the lungs. Marie succeeded, however, in
getting a sufficiently good look in spite of her Argus, and she came
to the conclusion that the strange protuberances in the walls were
neither more nor less than sacks of coin which the miser had placed
there and plastered up.

Old d'Orgemont was now in a state of almost grotesque bewilderment.
The pain in his legs, the terror he felt at seeing a human being in
the midst of his hoards, could be read in every wrinkle of his face,
and yet at the same time his eyes expressed, with unaccustomed fire, a
lively emotion excited in him by the presence of his liberator, whose
white and rosy cheek invited kisses, and whose velvety black eye sent
waves of blood to his heart, so hot that he was much in doubt whether
they were signs of life or of death.

"Are you married?" he asked, in a trembling voice.

"No," she said, smiling.

"I have a little something," he continued, heaving a sigh, "though I
am not so rich as people think for. A young girl like you must love
diamonds, trinkets, carriages, money. I've got all that to give--after
my death. Hey! if you will--"

The old man's eyes were so shrewd and betrayed such calculation in
this ephemeral love that Mademoiselle de Verneuil, as she shook her
head in sign of refusal, felt that his desire to marry her was solely
to bury his secret in another himself.

"Money!" she said, with a look of scorn which made him satisfied and
angry both; "money is nothing to me. You would be three times as rich
as you are, if you had all the gold that I have refused--" she stopped
suddenly.

"Don't go near that wall, or--"

"But I hear a voice," she said; "it echoes through that wall,--a voice
that is more to me than all your riches."

Before the miser could stop her Marie had laid her hand on a small
colored engraving of Louis XV. on horseback; to her amazement it
turned, and she saw, in a room beneath her, the Marquis de Montauran,
who was loading a musket. The opening, hidden by a little panel on
which the picture was gummed, seemed to form some opening in the
ceiling of the adjoining chamber, which, no doubt, was the bedroom of
the royalist general. D'Orgemont closed the opening with much
precaution, and looked at the girl sternly.

"Don't say a word if you love your life. You haven't thrown your
grappling-iron on a worthless building. Do you know that the Marquis
de Montauran is worth more than one hundred thousand francs a year
from lands which have not yet been confiscated? And I read in the
Primidi de l'Ille-et-Vilaine a decree of the Consuls putting an end to
confiscation. Ha! ha! you'll think the Gars a prettier fellow than
ever, won't you? Your eyes are shining like two new louis d'or."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil's face was, indeed, keenly excited when she
heard that well-known voice so near her. Since she had been standing
there, erect, in the midst as it were of a silver mine, the spring of
her mind, held down by these strange events, recovered itself. She
seemed to have formed some sinister resolution and to perceive a means
of carrying it out.

"There is no return from such contempt," she was saying to herself;
"and if he cannot love me, I will kill him--no other woman shall have
him."

"No, abbe, no!" cried the young chief, in a loud voice which was heard
through the panel, "it must be so."

"Monsieur le marquis," replied the Abbe Gudin, haughtily; "you will
scandalize all Brittany if you give that ball at Saint James. It is
preaching, not dancing, which will rouse our villagers. Take guns, not
fiddles."

"Abbe, you have sense enough to know that it is not in a general
assembly of our partisans that I can learn to know these people, or
judge of what I may be able to undertake with them. A supper is better
for examining faces than all the spying in the world, of which, by the
bye, I have a horror; they can be made to talk with glasses in their
hand."

Marie quivered, as she listened, and conceived the idea of going to
the ball and there avenging herself.

"Do you take me for an idiot with your sermon against dancing?"
continued Montauran. "Wouldn't you yourself dance a reed if it would
restore your order under its new name of Fathers of the Faith? Don't
you know that Bretons come away from the mass and go to dancing? Are
you aware that Messieurs Hyde de Neuville and d'Andigne had a
conference, five days ago, with the First Consul, on the question of
restoring his Majesty Louis XVIII.? Ah, monsieur, the princes are
deceived as to the true state of France. The devotions which uphold
them are solely those of rank. Abbe, if I have set my feet in blood,
at least I will not go into it to my middle without full knowledge of
what I do. I am devoted to the king, but not to four hot-heads, not to
a man crippled with debt like Rifoel, not to 'chauffeurs,' not to--"

"Say frankly, monsieur, not to abbes who force contributions on the
highway to carry on the war," retorted the Abbe Gudin.

"Why should I not say it?" replied the marquis, sharply; "and I'll
say, further, that the great and heroic days of La Vendee are over."

"Monsieur le marquis, we can perform miracles without you."

"Yes, like that of Marie Lambrequin, whom I hear you have brought to
life," said the marquis, smiling. "Come, come, let us have no rancor,
abbe. I know that you run all risks and would shoot a Blue as readily
as you say an /oremus/. God willing, I hope to make you assist with a
mitre on your head at the king's coronation."

This last remark must have had some magic power, for the click of a
musket was heard as the abbe exclaimed, "I have fifty cartridges in my
pocket, monsieur le marquis, and my life is the king's."

"He's a debtor of mine," whispered the usurer to Marie. "I don't mean
the five or six hundred crowns he has borrowed, but a debt of blood
which I hope to make him pay. He can never suffer as much evil as I
wish him, the damned Jesuit! He swore the death of my brother, and
raised the country against him. Why? Because the poor man was afraid
of the new laws." Then, after applying his ear to another part of his
hiding-place, he added, "They are all decamping, those brigands. I
suppose they are going to do some other miracle elsewhere. I only hope
they won't bid me good-bye as they did the last time, by setting fire
to my house."

After the lapse of about half an hour, during which time the usurer
and Mademoiselle de Verneuil looked at each other as if they were
studying a picture, the coarse, gruff voice of Galope-Chopine was
heard saying, in a muffled tone: "There's no longer any danger,
Monsieur d'Orgemont. But this time, you must allow that I have earned
my thirty crowns."

"My dear," said the miser to Marie, "swear to shut your eyes."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil placed one hand over her eyelids; but for
greater security d'Orgemont blew out the lamp, took his liberator by
the hand, and helped her to make seven or eight steps along a
difficult passage. At the end of some minutes he gently removed her
hand, and she found herself in the very room the Marquis de Montauran
had just quitted, and which was, in fact, the miser's own bedroom.

"My dear girl," said the old man, "you can safely go now. Don't look
about you that way. I dare say you have no money with you. Here are
ten crowns; they are a little shaved, but they'll pass. When you leave
the garden you will see a path that leads straight to the town, or, as
they say now, the district. But the Chouans will be at Fougeres, and
it is to be presumed that you can't get back there at once. You may
want some safe place to hide in. Remember what I say to you, but don't
make use of it unless in some great emergency. You will see on the
road which leads to Nid-aux-Crocs through the Val de Gibarry, a
farmhouse belonging to Cibot--otherwise called Galope-Chopine. Go in,
and say to his wife: 'Good-day, Becaniere,' and Barbette will hide you.
If Galope-Chopine discovers you he will either take you for the ghost,
if it is dark, or ten crowns will master him if it is light. Adieu,
our account is squared. But if you choose," he added, waving his hand
about him, "all this is yours."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil gave the strange old man a look of thanks,
and succeeded in extracting a sigh from him, expressing a variety of
emotions.

"You will of course return me my ten crowns; and please remark that I
ask no interest. You can pay them to my credit with Maitre Patrat, the
notary at Fougeres, who would draw our marriage contract if you
consented to be mine. Adieu."

"Adieu," she said, smiling and waving her hand.

"If you ever want money," he called after her, "I'll lend it to you at
five per cent; yes, only five--did I say five?--why, she's gone! That
girl looks to me like a good one; nevertheless, I'll change the secret
opening of my chimney."

Then he took a twelve-pound loaf and a ham, and returned to his
hiding-place.

* * * * *

As Mademoiselle de Verneuil walked through the country she seemed to
breathe a new life. The freshness of the night revived her after the
fiery experience of the last few hours. She tried to follow the path
explained to her by d'Orgemont, but the darkness became so dense after
the moon had gone down that she was forced to walk hap-hazard,
blindly. Presently the fear of falling down some precipice seized her
and saved her life, for she stopped suddenly, fancying the ground
would disappear before her if she made another step. A cool breeze
lifting her hair, the murmur of the river, and her instinct all
combined to warn her that she was probably on the verge of the
Saint-Sulpice rocks. She slipped her arm around a tree and waited for
dawn with keen anxiety, for she heard a noise of arms and horses and
human voices; she was grateful to the darkness which saved her from
the Chouans, who were evidently, as the miser had said, surrounding
Fougeres.

Like fires lit at night as signals of liberty, a few gleams, faintly
crimsoned, began to show upon the summits, while the bases of the
mountains still retained the bluish tints which contrasted with the
rosy clouds that were floating in the valley. Soon a ruby disk rose
slowly on the horizon and the skies greeted it; the varied landscape,
the bell-tower of Saint-Leonard, the rocks, the meadows buried in
shadow, all insensibly reappeared, and the trees on the summits were
defined against the skies in the rising glow. The sun freed itself
with a graceful spring from the ribbons of flame and ochre and
sapphire. Its vivid light took level lines from hill to hill and
flowed into the vales. The dusk dispersed, day mastered Nature. A
sharp breeze crisped the air, the birds sang, life wakened everywhere.
But the girl had hardly time to cast her eyes over the whole of this
wondrous landscape before, by a phenomenon not infrequent in these
cool regions, the mists spread themselves in sheets, filled the
valleys, and rose to the tops of the mountains, burying the great
valley beneath a mantle of snow. Mademoiselle de Verneuil fancied for
a moment she saw a /mer de glace/, like those of the Alps. Then the
vaporous atmosphere rolled like the waves of ocean, lifted
impenetrable billows which softly swayed, undulated, and were
violently whirled, catching from the sun's rays a vivid rosy tint, and
showing here and there in their depths the transparencies of a lake of
molten silver. Suddenly the north wind swept this phantasmagoric scene
and scattered the mists which laid a dew full of oxygen on the
meadows.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil was now able to distinguish a dark mass of
men on the rocks of Fougeres. Seven or eight hundred Chouans were
running like ants through the suburb of Saint-Sulpice. The sleeping
town would certainly have been overpowered in spite of its
fortifications and its old gray towers, if Hulot had not been alert. A
battery, concealed on a height at the farther end of the basin formed
by the ramparts, replied to the first fire of the Chouans by taking
them diagonally on the road to the castle. The balls swept the road.
Then a company of Blues made a sortie from the Saint-Sulpice gate,
profited by the surprise of the royalists to form in line upon the
high-road, and poured a murderous fire upon them. The Chouans made no
attempt to resist, seeing that the ramparts of the castle were covered
with soldiers, and that the guns of the fortress sufficiently
protected the Republican advance.

Meantime, however, other Chouans, masters of the little valley of the
Nancon, had swarmed up the rocks and reached the Promenade, which was
soon covered with goatskins, giving it to Marie's eyes the appearance
of a thatched roof, brown with age. At the same moment loud reports
were heard from the part of the town which overlooks the valley of
Couesnon. Evidently, Fougeres was attacked on all sides and completely
surrounded. Flames rising on the western side of the rock showed that
the Chouans were setting fire to the suburbs; but these soon ceased,
and a column of black smoke which succeeded them showed that the fire
was extinguished. Brown and white clouds again hid the scene from
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, but they were clouds of smoke from the fire
and powder, which the wind dispersed. The Republican commander, as
soon as he saw his first orders admirably executed, changed the
direction of his battery so as to sweep, successively, the valley of
the Nancon, the Queen's Staircase, and the base of the rock of
Fougeres. Two guns posted at the gate of Saint-Leonard scattered the
ant-hill of Chouans who had seized that position, and the national
guard of the town, rushing in haste to the square before the Church,
succeeded in dislodging the enemy. The fight lasted only half an hour,
and cost the Blues a hundred men. The Chouans, beaten on all sides,
retreated under orders from the Gars, whose bold attempt failed
(although he did not know this) in consequence of the massacre at La
Vivetiere, which had brought Hulot secretly and in all haste to
Fougeres. The artillery had arrived only that evening, and the news
had not reached Montauran; otherwise, he would certainly have
abandoned an enterprise which, if it failed, could only have bad
results. As soon as he heard the guns the marquis knew it would be
madness to continue, out of mere pride, a surprise which had missed
fire. Therefore, not to lose men uselessly, he sent at once to all
points of the attack, ordering an immediate retreat. The commandant,
seeing his adversary on the rocks of Saint-Sulpice surrounded by a
council of men, endeavored to pour a volley upon him; but the spot was
cleverly selected, and the young leader was out of danger in a moment.
Hulot now changed parts with his opponent and became the aggressor. At
the first sign of the Gars' intention, the company stationed under the
walls of the castle were ordered to cut off the Chouans' retreat by
seizing the upper outlet of the valley of the Nancon.

Notwithstanding her desire for revenge, Mademoiselle de Verneuil's
sympathies were with the men commanded by her lover, and she turned
hastily to see if the other end of the valley were clear for them; but
the Blues, conquerors no doubt on the opposite side of Fougeres, were
returning from the valley of Couesnon and taking possession of the
Nid-aux-Crocs and that portion of the Saint-Sulpice rocks which
overhang the lower end of the valley of the Nancon. The Chouans, thus
hemmed in to the narrow fields of the gorge, seemed in danger of
perishing to the last man, so cleverly and sagaciously were the
commandant's measures taken. But Hulot's cannon were powerless at
these two points; and here, the town of Fougeres being quite safe,
began one of those desperate struggles which denoted the character of
Chouan warfare.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil now comprehended the presence of the masses
of men she had seen as she left the town, the meeting of the leaders
at d'Orgemont's house, and all the other events of the night,
wondering how she herself had escaped so many dangers. The attack,
prompted by desperation, interested her so keenly that she stood
motionless, watching the living pictures as they presented themselves
to her sight. Presently the struggle at the foot of the mountain had a
deeper interest for her. Seeing the Blues almost masters of the
Chouans, the marquis and his friends rushed into the valley of the
Nancon to support their men. The rocks were now covered with
straggling groups of furious combatants deciding the question of life
or death on a ground and with weapons that were more favorable to the
Goatskins. Slowly this moving arena widened. The Chouans, recovering
themselves, gained the rocks, thanks to the shrubs and bushes which
grew here and there among them. For a moment Mademoiselle de Verneuil
felt alarmed as she saw, rather late, her enemies swarming over the
summit and defending the dangerous paths by which alone she could
descend. Every issue on the mountain was occupied by one or other of
the two parties; afraid of encountering them she left the tree behind
which she had been sheltering, and began to run in the direction of
the farm which d'Orgemont had mentioned to her. After running some
time on the slope of Saint-Sulpice which overlooks the valley of
Couesnon she saw a cow-shed in the distance, and thought it must
belong to the house of Galope-Chopine, who had doubtless left his wife
at home and alone during the fight. Mademoiselle de Verneuil hoped to
be able to pass a few hours in this retreat until it was possible for
her to return to Fougeres without danger. According to all appearance
Hulot was to triumph. The Chouans were retreating so rapidly that she
heard firing all about her, and the fear of being shot made her hasten
to the cottage, the chimney of which was her landmark. The path she
was following ended at a sort of shed covered with a furze-roof,
supported by four stout trees with the bark still on them. A mud wall
formed the back of this shed, under which were a cider-mill, a flail
to thresh buckwheat, and several agricultural implements. She stopped
before one of the posts, unwilling to cross the dirty bog which formed
a sort of courtyard to the house which, in her Parisian ignorance, she
had taken for a stable.

The cabin, protected from the north wind by an eminence towering above
the roof, which rested against it, was not without a poetry of its
own; for the tender shoots of elms, heather, and various rock-flowers
wreathed it with garlands. A rustic staircase, constructed between the
shed and the house, enabled the inhabitants to go to the top of the
rock and breathe a purer air. On the left, the eminence sloped
abruptly down, giving to view a series of fields, the first of which
belonged no doubt to this farm. These fields were like bowers,
separated by banks which were planted with trees. The road which led
to them was barred by the trunk of an old, half-rotten tree,--a Breton
method of enclosure the name of which may furnish, further on, a
digression which will complete the characterization of this region.
Between the stairway cut in the schist rock and the path closed by
this old tree, in front of the marsh and beneath the overhanging rock,
several granite blocks roughly hewn, and piled one upon the other,
formed the four corners of the cottage and held up the planks,
cobblestones, and pitch amalgam of which the walls were made. The fact
that one half of the roof was covered with furze instead of thatch,
and the other with shingles or bits of board cut into the form of
slates, showed that the building was in two parts; one half, with a
broken hurdle for a door, served as a stable, the other half was the
dwelling of the owner. Though this hut owed to the neighborhood of the
town a few improvements which were wholly absent from such buildings
that were five or six miles further off, it showed plainly enough the
instability of domestic life and habits to which the wars and customs
of feudality had reduced the serf; even to this day many of the
peasants of those parts call a seignorial chateau, "The Dwelling."

While examining the place, with an astonishment we can readily
conceive, Mademoiselle de Verneuil noticed here and there in the
filth of the courtyard a few bits of granite so placed as to form
stepping-stones to the house. Hearing the sound of musketry that was
evidently coming nearer, she jumped from stone to stone, as if crossing
a rivulet, to ask shelter. The house was closed by a door opening in
two parts; the lower one of wood, heavy and massive, the upper one a
shutter which served as a window. In many of the smaller towns of
France the shops have the same type of door though far more decorated,
the lower half possessing a call-bell. The door in question opened
with a wooden latch worthy of the golden age, and the upper part was
never closed except at night, for it was the only opening through
which daylight could enter the room. There was, to be sure, a clumsy
window, but the glass was thick like the bottom of a bottle, and the
lead which held the panes in place took so much room that the opening
seemed intended to intercept the light rather than admit it. As soon
as Mademoiselle de Verneuil had turned the creaking hinges of the
lower door she smelt an intolerable ammoniacal odor, and saw that the
beasts in the stable had kicked through the inner partition which
separated the stable from the dwelling. The interior of the farmhouse,
for such it was, did not belie its exterior.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil was asking herself how it was possible for
human beings to live in such habitual filth, when a ragged boy about
eight or nine years old suddenly presented his fresh and rosy face,
with a pair of fat cheeks, lively eyes, ivory teeth, and a mass of
fair hair, which fell in curls upon his half-naked shoulders. His
limbs were vigorous, and his attitude had the charm of that amazement
and naive curiosity which widens a child's eyes. The little fellow was
a picture of beauty.

"Where is your mother?" said Marie, in a gentle voice, stooping to
kiss him between the eyes.

After receiving her kiss the child slipped away like an eel, and
disappeared behind a muck-heap which was piled at the top of a mound
between the path and the house; for, like many Breton farmers who have
a system of agriculture that is all their own, Galope-Chopine put his
manure in an elevated spot, so that by the time it was wanted for use
the rains had deprived it of all its virtue. Alone for a few minutes,
Marie had time to make an inventory. The room in which she waited for
Barbette was the whole house. The most obvious and sumptuous object
was a vast fireplace with a /mantle/-shelf of blue granite. The
etymology of that word was shown by a strip of green serge, edged with
a pale-green ribbon, cut in scallops, which covered and overhung the
whole shelf, on which stood a colored plaster cast of the Holy Virgin.
On the pedestal of the statuette were two lines of a religious poem
very popular in Brittany:--

"I am the mother of God,
Protectress of the sod."

Behind the Virgin a hideous image, daubed with red and blue under
pretence of painting, represented Saint-Labre. A green serge bed of
the shape called "tomb," a clumsy cradle, a spinning-wheel, common
chairs, and a carved chest on which lay utensils, were about the whole
of Galope-Chopine's domestic possessions. In front of the window stood
a chestnut table flanked by two benches of the same wood, to which the
sombre light coming through the thick panes gave the tone of mahogany.
An immense cask of cider, under the bung of which Mademoiselle de
Verneuil noticed a pool of yellow mud, which had decomposed the
flooring, although it was made of scraps of granite conglomerated in
clay, proved that the master of the house had a right to his Chouan
name, and that the pints galloped down either his own throat or that
of his friends. Two enormous jugs full of cider stood on the table.
Marie's attention, caught at first by the innumerable spider's-webs
which hung from the roof, was fixing itself on these pitchers when the
noise of fighting, growing more and more distinct, impelled her to
find a hiding-place, without waiting for the woman of the house, who,
however, appeared at that moment.

"Good-morning, Becaniere," said Marie, restraining a smile at the
appearance of a person who bore some resemblance to the heads which
architects attach to window-casings.

"Ha! you come from d'Orgemont?" answered Barbette, in a tone that was
far from cordial.

"Yes, where can you hide me? for the Chouans are close by--"

"There," replied Barbette, as much amazed at the beauty as by the
strange apparel of a being she could hardly believe to be of her own
sex,--"there, in the priest's hiding-place."

She took her to the head of the bed, and was putting her behind it,
when they were both startled by the noise of a man springing into the
courtyard. Barbette had scarcely time to drop the curtain of the bed
and fold it about the girl before she was face to face with a fugitive
Chouan.

"Where can I hide, old woman? I am the Comte de Bauvan," said the
new-comer.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil quivered as she recognized the voice of the
belated guest, whose words, still a secret to her, brought about the
catastrophe of La Vivetiere.

"Alas! monseigneur, don't you see, I have no place? What I'd better do
is to keep outside and watch that no one gets in. If the Blues come,
I'll let you know. If I stay here, and they find me with you, they'll
burn my house down."

Barbette left the hut, feeling herself incapable of settling the
interests of two enemies who, in virtue of the double role her husband
was playing, had an equal right to her hiding-place.

"I've only two shots left," said the count, in despair. "It will be
very unlucky if those fellows turn back now and take a fancy to look
under this bed."

He placed his gun gently against the headboard behind which Marie was
standing among the folds of the green serge, and stooped to see if
there was room for him under the bed. He would infallibly have seen
her feet, but she, rendered desperate by her danger, seized his gun,
jumped quickly into the room, and threatened him. The count broke into
a peal of laughter when he caught sight of her, for, in order to hide
herself, Marie had taken off her broad-brimmed Chouan hat, and her
hair was escaping, in heavy curls, from the lace scarf which she had
worn on leaving home.

"Don't laugh, monsieur le comte; you are my prisoner. If you make the
least movement, you shall know what an offended woman is capable of
doing."

As the count and Marie stood looking at each other with differing
emotions, confused voices were heard without among the rocks, calling
out, "Save the Gars! spread out, spread out, save the Gars!"

Barbette's voice, calling to her boy, was heard above the tumult with
very different sensations by the two enemies, to whom Barbette was
really speaking instead of to her son.

"Don't you see the Blues?" she cried sharply. "Come here, you little
scamp, or I shall be after you. Do you want to be shot? Come, hide,
quick!"

While these things took place rapidly a Blue jumped into the marshy
courtyard.

"Beau-Pied!" exclaimed Mademoiselle de Verneuil.

Beau-Pied, hearing her voice, rushed into the cottage, and aimed at
the count.

"Aristocrat!" he cried, "don't stir, or I'll demolish you in a wink,
like the Bastille."

"Monsieur Beau-Pied," said Mademoiselle de Verneuil, in a persuasive
voice, "you will be answerable to me for this prisoner. Do as you like
with him now, but you must return him to me safe and sound at
Fougeres."

"Enough, madame!"

"Is the road to Fougeres clear?"

"Yes, it's safe enough--unless the Chouans come to life."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil picked up the count's gun gaily, and smiled
satirically as she said to her prisoner, "Adieu, monsieur le comte, au
revoir!"

Then she darted down the path, having replaced the broad hat upon her
head.

"I have learned too late," said the count, "not to joke about the
virtue of a woman who has none."

"Aristocrat!" cried Beau-Pied, sternly, "if you don't want me to send
you to your /ci-devant/ paradise, you will not say a word against that
beautiful lady."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil returned to Fougeres by the paths which
connect the rocks of Saint-Sulpice with the Nid-aux-Crocs. When she
reached the latter height and had threaded the winding way cut in its
rough granite, she stopped to admire the pretty valley of the Nancon,
lately so turbulent and now so tranquil. Seen from that point, the
vale was like a street of verdure. Mademoiselle de Verneuil re-entered
the town by the Porte Saint-Leonard. The inhabitants, still uneasy
about the fighting, which, judging by the distant firing, was still
going on, were waiting the return of the National Guard, to judge of
their losses. Seeing the girl in her strange costume, her hair
dishevelled, a gun in her hand, her shawl and gown whitened against
the walls, soiled with mud and wet with dew, the curiosity of the
people was keenly excited,--all the more because the power, beauty,
and singularity of this young Parisian had been the subject of much
discussion.

Francine, full of dreadful fears, had waited for her mistress
throughout the night, and when she saw her she began to speak; but
Marie, with a kindly gesture, silenced her.

"I am not dead, my child," she said. "Ah!" she added, after a pause,
"I wanted emotions when I left Paris, and I have had them!"

Francine asked if she should get her some food, observing that she
must be in great need of it.

"No, no; a bath, a bath!" cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil. "I must
dress at once."

Francine was not a little surprised when her mistress required her to
unpack the most elegant of the dresses she had brought with her.
Having bathed and breakfasted, Marie made her toilet with all the
minute care which a woman gives to that important act when she expects
to meet the eyes of her lover in a ball-room. Francine could not
explain to herself the mocking gaiety of her mistress. It was not the
joy of love,--a woman never mistakes that; it was rather an expression
of concentrated maliciousness, which to Francine's mind boded evil.
Marie herself drew the curtains of the window from which the glorious
panorama could be seen, then she moved the sofa to the chimney corner,
turning it so that the light would fall becomingly on her face; then
she told Francine to fetch flowers, that the room might have a festive
air; and when they came she herself directed their arrangement in a
picturesque manner. Giving a last glance of satisfaction at these
various preparations she sent Francine to the commandant with a
request that he would bring her prisoner to her; then she lay down
luxuriously on a sofa, partly to rest, and partly to throw herself
into an attitude of graceful weakness, the power of which is
irresistible in certain women. A soft languor, the seductive pose of
her feet just seen below the drapery of her gown, the plastic ease of
her body, the curving of the throat,--all, even the droop of her
slender fingers as they hung from the pillow like the buds of a bunch
of jasmine, combined with her eyes to produce seduction. She burned
certain perfumes to fill the air with those subtle emanations which
affect men's fibres powerfully, and often prepare the way for
conquests which women seek to make without seeming to desire them.
Presently the heavy step of the old soldier resounded in the adjoining
room.

"Well, commandant, where is my captive?" she said.

"I have just ordered a picket of twelve men to shoot him, being taken
with arms in his hand."

"Why have you disposed of my prisoner?" she asked. "Listen to me,
commandant; surely, if I can trust your face, the death of a man
/after/ a fight is no particular satisfaction to you. Well, then, give
my Chouan a reprieve, for which I will be responsible, and let me see
him. I assure you that aristocrat has become essential to me, and he
can be made to further the success of our plans. Besides, to shoot a
mere amateur in Chouannerie would be as absurd as to fire on a balloon
when a pinprick would disinflate it. For heaven's sake leave cruelty
to the aristocracy. Republicans ought to be generous. Wouldn't you and
yours have forgiven the victims of Quiberon? Come, send your twelve
men to patrol the town, and dine with me and bring the prisoner. There
is only an hour of daylight left, and don't you see," she added
smiling, "that if you are too late, my toilet will have lost its
effect?"

"But, mademoiselle," said the commandant, amazed.

"Well, what? But I know what you mean. Don't be anxious; the count
shall not escape. Sooner or later that big butterfly will burn himself
in your fire."

The commandant shrugged his shoulders slightly, with the air of a man
who is forced to obey, whether he will or no, the commands of a pretty
woman; and he returned in about half an hour, followed by the Comte de
Bauvan.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil feigned surprise and seemed confused that the
count should see her in such a negligent attitude; then, after reading
in his eyes that her first effect was produced, she rose and busied
herself about her guests with well-bred courtesy. There was nothing
studied or forced in her motions, smiles, behavior, or voice, nothing
that betrayed premeditation or purpose. All was harmonious; no part
was over-acted; an observer could not have supposed that she affected
the manners of a society in which she had not lived. When the Royalist
and the Republic were seated she looked sternly at the count. He, on
his part, knew women sufficiently well to feel certain that the
offence he had committed against this woman was equivalent to a
sentence of death. But in spite of this conviction, and without
seeming either gay or gloomy, he had the air of a man who did not take
such serious results into consideration; in fact, he really thought it
ridiculous to fear death in presence of a pretty woman. Marie's stern
manner roused ideas in his mind.

"Who knows," thought he, "whether a count's coronet wouldn't please
her as well as that of her lost marquis? Montauran is as lean as a
nail, while I--" and he looked himself over with an air of
satisfaction. "At any rate I should save my head."

These diplomatic revelations were wasted. The passion the count
proposed to feign for Mademoiselle de Verneuil became a violent
caprice, which the dangerous creature did her best to heighten.

"Monsieur le comte," she said, "you are my prisoner, and I have the
right to dispose of you. Your execution cannot take place without my
consent, and I have too much curiosity to let them shoot you at
present."

"And suppose I am obstinate enough to keep silence?" he replied gaily.

"With an honest woman, perhaps, but with a woman of the town, no, no,
monsieur le comte, impossible!" These words, full of bitter sarcasm,
were hissed, as Sully says, in speaking of the Duchesse de Beaufort,
from so sharp a beak that the count, amazed, merely looked at his
antagonist. "But," she continued, with a scornful glance, "not to
contradict you, if I am a creature of that kind I will act like one.
Here is your gun," and she offered him his weapon with a mocking air.

"On the honor of a gentleman, mademoiselle--"

"Ah!" she said, interrupting him, "I have had enough of the honor of
gentlemen. It was on the faith of that that I went to La Vivetiere.
Your leader had sworn to me that I and my escort should be safe
there."

"What an infamy!" cried Hulot, contracting his brows.

"The fault lies with monsieur le comte," said Marie, addressing Hulot.
"I have no doubt the Gars meant to keep his word, but this gentleman
told some calumny about me which confirmed those that Charette's
mistress had already invented--"

"Mademoiselle," said the count, much troubled, "with my head under the
axe I would swear that I said nothing but the truth."

"In saying what?"

"That you were the--"

"Say the word, mistress of--"

"The Marquis de Lenoncourt, the present duke, a friend of mine,"
replied the count.

"Now I can let you go to execution," she said, without seeming at all
agitated by the outspoken reply of the count, who was amazed at the
real or pretended indifference with which she heard his statement.
"However," she added, laughing, "you have not wronged me more than
that friend of whom you suppose me to have been the--Fie! monsieur le
comte; surely you used to visit my father, the Duc de Verneuil? Yes?
well then--"

Evidently considering Hulot one too many for the confidence she was
about to make, Mademoiselle de Verneuil motioned the count to her
side, and said a few words in her ear. Monsieur de Bauvan gave a low
ejaculation of surprise and looked with bewilderment at Marie, who
completed the effect of her words by leaning against the chimney in
the artless and innocent attitude of a child.

"Mademoiselle," cried the count, "I entreat your forgiveness, unworthy
as I am of it."

"I have nothing to forgive," she replied. "You have no more ground for
repentance than you had for the insolent supposition you proclaimed at
La Vivetiere. But this is a matter beyond your comprehension. Only,
remember this, monsieur le comte, the daughter of the Duc de Verneuil
has too generous a spirit not to take a lively interest in your fate."

"Even after I have insulted you?" said the count, with a sort of
regret.

"Some are placed so high that insult cannot touch them. Monsieur le
comte,--I am one of them."

As she said the words, the girl assumed an air of pride and nobility
which impressed the prisoner and made the whole of this strange
intrigue much less clear to Hulot than the old soldier had thought it.
He twirled his moustache and looked uneasily at Mademoiselle de
Verneuil, who made him a sign, as if to say she was still carrying out
her plan.

"Now," continued Marie, after a pause, "let us discuss these matters.
Francine, my dear, bring lights."

She adroitly led the conversation to the times which had now, within a
few short years, become the "ancien regime." She brought back that
period to the count's mind by the liveliness of her remarks and
sketches, and gave him so many opportunities to display his wit, by
cleverly throwing repartees in his way, that he ended by thinking he
had never been so charming; and that idea having rejuvenated him, he
endeavored to inspire this seductive young woman with his own good
opinion of himself. The malicious creature practised, in return, every
art of her coquetry upon him, all the more adroitly because it was
mere play to her. Sometimes she let him think he was making rapid
progress, and then, as if surprised at the sentiment she was feeling,
she showed a sudden coolness which charmed him, and served to increase
imperceptibly his impromptu passion. She was like a fisherman who
lifts his line from time to time to see if the fish is biting. The
poor count allowed himself to be deceived by the innocent air with
which she accepted two or three neatly turned compliments. Emigration,
Brittany, the Republic, and the Chouans were far indeed from his
thoughts. Hulot sat erect and silent as the god Thermes. His want of
education made him quite incapable of taking part in a conversation of
this kind; he supposed that the talking pair were very witty, but his
efforts at comprehension were limited to discovering whether they were
plotting against the Republic in covert language.

"Montauran," the count was saying, "has birth and breeding, he is a
charming fellow, but he doesn't understand gallantry. He is too young
to have seen Versailles. His education is deficient. Instead of
diplomatically defaming, he strikes a blow. He may be able to love
violently, but he will never have that fine flower of breeding in his
gallantry which distinguished Lauzun, Adhemar, Coigny, and so many
others! He hasn't the winning art of saying those pretty nothings to
women which, after all, they like better than bursts of passion, which
soon weary them. Yes, though he has undoubtedly had many love-affairs,
he has neither the grace nor the ease that should belong to them."

"I have noticed that myself," said Marie.

"Ah!" thought the count, "there's an inflection in her voice, and a
look in her eye which shows me plainly I shall soon be /on terms/ with
her; and faith! to get her, I'll believe all she wants me to."

He offered her his hand, for dinner was now announced. Mademoiselle de
Verneuil did the honors with a politeness and tact which could only
have been acquired by the life and training of a court.

"Leave us," she whispered to Hulot as they left the table. "You will
only frighten him; whereas, if I am alone with him I shall soon find
out all I want to know; he has reached the point where a man tells me
everything he thinks, and sees through my eyes only."

"But afterwards?" said Hulot, evidently intending to claim the
prisoner.

"Afterwards, he is to be free--free as air," she replied.

"But he was taken with arms in his hand."

"No," she said, making one of those sophistical jokes with which women
parry unanswerable arguments, "I had disarmed him. Count," she said,
turning back to him as Hulot departed, "I have just obtained your
liberty, but--nothing for nothing," she added, laughing, with her head
on one side as if to interrogate him.

"Ask all, even my name and my honor," he cried, intoxicated. "I lay
them at your feet."

He advanced to seize her hand, trying to make her take his passion for
gratitude; but Mademoiselle de Verneuil was not a woman to be thus
misled. So, smiling in a way to give some hope to this new lover, she
drew back a few steps and said: "You might make me regret my
confidence."

"The imagination of a young girl is more rapid than that of a woman,"
he answered, laughing.

"A young girl has more to lose than a woman."

"True; those who carry a treasure ought to be distrustful."

"Let us quit such conventional language," she said, "and talk
seriously. You are to give a ball at Saint-James. I hear that your
headquarters, arsenals, and base of supplies are there. When is the
ball to be?"

"To-morrow evening."

"You will not be surprised if a slandered woman desires, with a
woman's obstinacy, to obtain a public reparation for the insults
offered to her, in presence of those who witnessed them. I shall go to
your ball. I ask you to give me your protection from the moment I
enter the room until I leave it. I ask nothing more than a promise,"
she added, as he laid his hand on his heart. "I abhor oaths; they are
too like precautions. Tell me only that you engage to protect my
person from all dangers, criminal or shameful. Promise to repair the
wrong you did me, by openly acknowledging that I am the daughter of
the Duc de Verneuil; but say nothing of the trials I have borne in
being illegitimate,--this will pay your debt to me. Ha! two hours'
attendance on a woman in a ball-room is not so dear a ransom for your
life, is it? You are not worth a ducat more." Her smile took the
insult from her words.

"What do you ask for the gun?" said the count, laughing.

"Oh! more than I do for you."

"What is it?"

"Secrecy. Believe me, my dear count, a woman is never fathomed except
by a woman. I am certain that if you say one word of this, I shall be
murdered on my way to that ball. Yesterday I had warning enough. Yes,
that woman is quick to act. Ah! I implore you," she said, "contrive
that no harm shall come to me at the ball."

"You will be there under my protection," said the count, proudly.
"But," he added, with a doubtful air, "are you coming for the sake of
Montauran?"

"You wish to know more than I know myself," she answered, laughing.
"Now go," she added, after a pause. "I will take you to the gate of
the town myself, for this seems to me a cannibal warfare."

"Then you do feel some interest in me?" exclaimed the count. "Ah!
mademoiselle, permit me to hope that you will not be insensible to my
friendship--for that sentiment must content me, must it not?" he added
with a conceited air.

"Ah! diviner!" she said, putting on the gay expression a woman assumes
when she makes an avowal which compromises neither her dignity nor her
secret sentiments.

Then, having slipped on a pelisse, she accompanied him as far as the
Nid-aux-Crocs. When they reached the end of the path she said,
"Monsieur, be absolutely silent on all this; even to the marquis"; and
she laid her finger on both lips.

The count, emboldened by so much kindness, took her hand; she let him
do so as though it were a great favor, and he kissed it tenderly.

"Oh! mademoiselle," he cried, on knowing himself beyond all danger,
"rely on me for life, for death. Though I owe you a gratitude equal to
that I owe my mother, it will be very difficult to restrain my
feelings to mere respect."

He sprang into the narrow pathway. After watching him till he reached
the rocks of Saint-Sulpice, Marie nodded her head in sign of
satisfaction, saying to herself in a low voice: "That fat fellow has
given me more than his life for his life! I can make him my creator at
a very little cost! Creature or creator, that's all the difference
there is between one man and another--"

She did not finish her thought, but with a look of despair she turned
and re-entered the Porte Saint-Leonard, where Hulot and Corentin were
awaiting her.

"Two more days," she cried, "and then--" She stopped, observing that
they were not alone--"he shall fall under your guns," she whispered to
Hulot.

The commandant recoiled a step and looked with a jeering contempt,
impossible to render, at the woman whose features and expression gave
no sign whatever of relenting. There is one thing remarkable about
women: they never reason about their blameworthy actions,--feeling
carries them off their feet; even in their dissimulation there is an
element of sincerity; and in women alone crime may exist without
baseness, for it often happens that they do not know how it came about
that they committed it.

"I am going to Saint-James, to a ball the Chouans give to-morrow
night, and--"

"But," said Corentin, interrupting her, "that is fifteen miles
distant; had I not better accompany you?"

"You think a great deal too much of something I never think of at
all," she replied, "and that is yourself."

Marie's contempt for Corentin was extremely pleasing to Hulot, who
made his well-known grimace as she turned away in the direction of her
own house. Corentin followed her with his eyes, letting his face
express a consciousness of the fatal power he knew he could exercise
over the charming creature, by working upon the passions which sooner
or later, he believed, would give her to him.

As soon as Mademoiselle de Verneuil reached home she began to
deliberate on her ball-dress. Francine, accustomed to obey without
understanding her mistress's motives, opened the trunks, and suggested
a Greek costume. The Republican fashions of those days were all Greek
in style. Marie chose one which could be put in a box that was easy to
carry.

"Francine, my dear, I am going on an excursion into the country; do
you want to go with me, or will you stay behind?"

"Stay behind!" exclaimed Francine; "then who would dress you?"

"Where have you put that glove I gave you this morning?"

"Here it is."

"Sew this green ribbon into it, and, above all, take plenty of money."
Then noticing that Francine was taking out a number of the new
Republican coins, she cried out, "Not those; they would get us
murdered. Send Jeremie to Corentin--no, stay, the wretch would follow
me--send to the commandant; ask him from me for some six-franc
crowns."

With the feminine sagacity which takes in the smallest detail, she
thought of everything. While Francine was completing the arrangements
for this extraordinary trip, Marie practised the art of imitating an
owl, and so far succeeded in rivalling Marche-a-Terre that the
illusion was a good one. At midnight she left Fougeres by the gate of
Saint-Leonard, took the little path to Nid-aux-Crocs, and started,
followed by Francine, to cross the Val de Gibarry with a firm step,
under the impulse of that strong will which gives to the body and its
bearing such an expression of force. To leave a ball-room with
sufficient care to avoid a cold is an important affair to the health
of a woman; but let her have a passion in her heart, and her body
becomes adamant. Such an enterprise as Marie had now undertaken would
have floated in a bold man's mind for a long time; but Mademoiselle de
Verneuil had no sooner thought of it than its dangers became to her
attractions.

"You are starting without asking God to bless you," said Francine,
turning to look at the tower of Saint-Leonard.

The pious Breton stopped, clasped her hands, and said an "Ave" to
Saint Anne of Auray, imploring her to bless their expedition; during
which time her mistress waited pensively, looking first at the artless
attitude of her maid who was praying fervently, and then at the
effects of the vaporous moonlight as it glided among the traceries of
the church building, giving to the granite all the delicacy of
filagree. The pair soon reached the hut of Galope-Chopine. Light as
their steps were they roused one of those huge watch-dogs on whose
fidelity the Bretons rely, putting no fastening to their doors but a
simple latch. The dog ran to the strangers, and his bark became so
threatening that they were forced to retreat a few steps and call for
help. But no one came. Mademoiselle de Verneuil then gave the owl's
cry, and instantly the rusty hinges of the door made a creaking sound,
and Galope-Chopine, who had risen hastily, put out his head.

"I wish to go to Saint-James," said Marie, showing the Gars' glove.
"Monsieur le Comte de Bauvan told me that you would take me there and
protect me on the way. Therefore be good enough to get us two riding
donkeys, and make yourself ready to go with us. Time is precious, for
if we do not get to Saint-James before to-morrow night I can neither
see the ball nor the Gars."

Galope-Chopine, completely bewildered, took the glove and turned it
over and over, after lighting a pitch candle about a finger thick and
the color of gingerbread. This article of consumption, imported into
Brittany from the North, was only one more proof to the eyes in this
strange country of a utter ignorance of all commercial principles,
even the commonest. After seeing the green ribbon, staring at
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, scratching his ear, and drinking a beaker
of cider (having first offered a glass to the beautiful lady),
Galope-Chopine left her seated before the table and went to fetch the
required donkeys.

The violet gleam cast by the pitch candle was not powerful enough to
counteract the fitful moonlight, which touched the dark floor and
furniture of the smoke-blackened cottage with luminous points. The
little boy had lifted his pretty head inquisitively, and above it two
cows were poking their rosy muzzles and brilliant eyes through the
holes in the stable wall. The big dog, whose countenance was by no
means the least intelligent of the family, seemed to be examining the
strangers with as much curiosity as the little boy. A painter would
have stopped to admire the night effects of this scene, but Marie, not
wishing to enter into conversation with Barbette, who sat up in bed
and began to show signs of amazement at recognizing her, left the
hovel to escape its fetid air and the questions of its mistress. She
ran quickly up the stone staircase behind the cottage, admiring the
vast details of the landscape, the aspect of which underwent as many
changes as spectators made steps either upward to the summits or
downward to the valleys. The moonlight was now enveloping like a
luminous mist the valley of Couesnon. Certainly a woman whose heart
was burdened with a despised love would be sensitive to the melancholy
which that soft brilliancy inspires in the soul, by the weird
appearance it gives to objects and the colors with which it tints the
streams.

The silence was presently broken by the braying of a donkey. Marie
went quickly back to the hut, and the party started. Galope-Chopine,
armed with a double-barrelled gun, wore a long goatskin, which gave
him something the look of Robinson Crusoe. His blotched face, seamed
with wrinkles, was scarcely visible under the broad-brimmed hat which
the Breton peasants still retain as a tradition of the olden time;
proud to have won, after their servitude, the right to wear the former
ornament of seignorial heads. This nocturnal caravan, protected by a
guide whose clothing, attitudes, and person had something patriarchal
about them, bore no little resemblance to the Flight into Egypt as we
see it represented by the sombre brush of Rembrandt. Galope-Chopine
carefully avoided the main-road and guided the two women through the
labyrinth of by-ways which intersect Brittany.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil then understood the Chouan warfare. In
threading these complicated paths, she could better appreciate the
condition of a country which when she saw it from an elevation had
seemed to her so charming, but into which it was necessary to
penetrate before the dangers and inextricable difficulties of it could
be understood. Round each field, and from time immemorial, the
peasants have piled mud walls, about six feet high, and prismatic in
shape; on the top of which grow chestnuts, oaks and beeches. The walls
thus planted are called hedges (Norman hedges) and the long branches
of the trees sweeping over the pathways arch them. Sunken between
these walls (made of a clay soil) the paths are like the covered ways
of a fortification, and where the granite rock, which in these regions
comes to the surface of the ground, does not make a sort of rugged
natural pavement, they become so impracticable that the smallest
vehicles can only be drawn over them by two pairs of oxen or Breton
horses, which are small but usually vigorous. These by-ways are so
swampy that foot-passengers have gradually by long usage made other
paths beside them on the hedge-banks which are called "rotes"; and
these begin and end with each division into fields. In order to cross
from one field to another it is necessary to climb the clay banks by
means of steps which are often very slippery after a rain.

Travellers have many other obstacles to encounter in these intricate
paths. Thus surrounded, each field is closed by what is called in the
West an /echalier/. That is a trunk or stout branch of a tree, one end
of which, being pierced, is fitted to an upright post which serves as
a pivot on which it turns. One end of the /echalier/ projects far
enough beyond the pivot to hold a weight, and this singular rustic
gate, the post of which rests in a hole made in the bank, is so easy
to work that a child can handle it. Sometimes the peasants economize
the stone which forms the weight by lengthening the trunk or branch
beyond the pivot. This method of enclosure varies with the genius of
each proprietor. Sometimes it consists of a single trunk or branch,
both ends of which are embedded in the bank. In other places it looks
like a gate, and is made of several slim branches placed at regular
distances like the steps of a ladder lying horizontally. The form
turns, like the /echalier/, on a pivot. These "hedges" and /echaliers/
give the region the appearance of a huge chess-board, each field
forming a square, perfectly isolated from the rest, closed like a
fortress and protected by ramparts. The gate, which is very easy to
defend, is a dangerous spot for assailants. The Breton peasant thinks
he improves his fallow land by encouraging the growth of gorse, a
shrub so well treated in these regions that it soon attains the height
of a man. This delusion, worthy of a population which puts its manure
on the highest spot in the courtyard, has covered the soil to a
proportion of one fourth with masses of gorse, in the midst of which a
thousand men might ambush. Also there is scarcely a field without a
number of old apple-trees, the fruit being used for cider, which kill
the vegetation wherever their branches cover the ground. Now, if the
reader will reflect on the small extent of open ground within these
hedges and large trees whose hungry roots impoverish the soil, he will
have an idea of the cultivation and general character of the region
through which Mademoiselle de Verneuil was now passing.

It is difficult to say whether the object of these enclosures is to
avoid all disputes of possession, or whether the custom is a lazy one
of keeping the cattle from straying, without the trouble of watching
them; at any rate such formidable barriers are permanent obstacles,
which make these regions impenetrable and ordinary warfare impossible.
There lies the whole secret of the Chouan war. Mademoiselle de
Verneuil saw plainly the necessity the Republic was under to strangle
the disaffection by means of police and by negotiation, rather than by
a useless employment of military force. What could be done, in fact,
with a people wise enough to despise the possession of towns, and hold
to that of an open country already furnished with indestructible
fortifications? Surely, nothing except negotiate; especially as the
whole active strength of these deluded peasants lay in a single able
and enterprising leader. She admired the genius of the minister who,
sitting in his study, had been able to grasp the true way of procuring
peace. She thought she understood the considerations which act on the
minds of men powerful enough to take a bird's-eye view of an empire;
men whose actions, criminal in the eyes of the masses, are the outcome
of a vast and intelligent thought. There is in these terrible souls
some mysterious blending of the force of fate and that of destiny,
some prescience which suddenly elevates them above their fellows; the
masses seek them for a time in their own ranks, then they raise their
eyes and see these lordly souls above them.

Such reflections as these seemed to Mademoiselle de Verneuil to
justify and even to ennoble her thoughts of vengeance; this travail of
her soul and its expectations gave her vigor enough to bear the
unusual fatigues of this strange journey. At the end of each property
Galope-Chopine made the women dismount from their donkeys and climb
the obstructions; then, mounting again, they made their way through
the boggy paths which already felt the approach of winter. The
combination of tall trees, sunken paths, and enclosed places, kept the
soil in a state of humidity which wrapped the travellers in a mantle
of ice. However, after much wearisome fatigue, they managed to reach
the woods of Marignay by sunrise. The journey then became less
difficult, and led by a broad footway through the forest. The arch
formed by the branches, and the great size of the trees protected the
travellers from the weather, and the many difficulties of the first
half of their way did not recur.

They had hardly gone a couple of miles through the woods before they
heard a confused noise of distant voices and the tinkling of a bell,
the silvery tones of which did not have the monotonous sound given by
the movements of cattle. Galope-Chopine listened with great attention,
as he walked along, to this melody; presently a puff of wind brought
several chanted words to his ear, which seemed to affect him
powerfully, for he suddenly turned the wearied donkeys into a by-path,
which led away from Saint-James, paying no attention to the
remonstrances of Mademoiselle de Verneuil, whose fears were increased
by the darkness of the forest path along which their guide now led
them. To right and left were enormous blocks of granite, laid one upon
the other, of whimsical shape. Across them huge roots had glided, like
monstrous serpents, seeking from afar the juicy nourishment enjoyed by
a few beeches. The two sides of the road resembled the subterranean
grottos that are famous for stalactites. Immense festoons of stone,
where the darkling verdure of ivy and holly allied itself to the
green-gray patches of the moss and lichen, hid the precipices and the
openings into several caves. When the three travellers had gone a few
steps through a very narrow path a most surprising spectacle suddenly
unfolded itself to Mademoiselle de Verneuil's eyes, and made her
understand the obstinacy of her Chouan guide.

A semi-circular basin of granite blocks formed an ampitheatre, on the
rough tiers of which rose tall black pines and yellowing chestnuts,
one above the other, like a vast circus, where the wintry sun shed its
pale colors rather than poured its light, and autumn had spread her
tawny carpet of fallen leaves. About the middle of this hall, which
seemed to have had the deluge for its architect, stood three enormous
Druid stones,--a vast altar, on which was raised an old church-banner.
About a hundred men, kneeling with bared heads, were praying fervently
in this natural enclosure, where a priest, assisted by two other
ecclesiastics, was saying mass. The poverty of the sacerdotal
vestments, the feeble voice of the priest, which echoed like a murmur
through the open space, the praying men filled with conviction and
united by one and the same sentiment, the bare cross, the wild and
barren temple, the dawning day, gave the primitive character of the
earlier times of Christianity to the scene. Mademoiselle de Verneuil
was struck with admiration. This mass said in the depths of the woods,
this worship driven back by persecution to its sources, the poesy of
ancient times revived in the midst of this weird and romantic nature,
these armed and unarmed Chouans, cruel and praying, men yet children,
all these things resembled nothing that she had ever seen or yet
imagined. She remembered admiring in her childhood the pomps of the
Roman church so pleasing to the senses; but she knew nothing of God
/alone/, his cross on the altar, his altar the earth. In place of the
carved foliage of a Gothic cathedral, the autumnal trees upheld the
sky; instead of a thousand colors thrown through stained glass
windows, the sun could barely slide its ruddy rays and dull
reflections on altar, priest, and people. The men present were a fact,
a reality, and not a system,--it was a prayer, not a religion. But
human passions, the momentary repression of which gave harmony to the
picture, soon reappeared on this mysterious scene and gave it powerful
vitality.

As Mademoiselle de Verneuil reached the spot the reading of the gospel
was just over. She recognized in the officiating priest, not without
fear, the Abbe Gudin, and she hastily slipped behind a granite block,
drawing Francine after her. She was, however, unable to move
Galope-Chopine from the place he had chosen, and from which he intended
to share in the benefits of the ceremony; but she noticed the nature of
the ground around her, and hoped to be able to evade the danger by
getting away, when the service was over, before the priests. Through a
large fissure of the rock that hid her, she saw the Abbe Gudin
mounting a block of granite which served him as a pulpit, where he
began his sermon with the words,--

"/In nomine Patris et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti/."

All present made the sign of the cross.

"My dear friends," continued the abbe, "let us pray in the first place
for the souls of the dead,--Jean Cochegrue, Nicalos Laferte, Joseph
Brouet, Francois Parquoi, Sulpice Coupiau, all of this parish, and
dead of wounds received in the fight on Mont Pelerine and at the siege
of Fougeres. /De profundis/," etc.

The psalm was recited, according to custom, by the congregation and
the priests, taking verses alternately with a fervor which augured
well for the success of the sermon. When it was over the abbe
continued, in a voice which became gradually louder and louder, for
the former Jesuit was not unaware that vehemence of delivery was in
itself a powerful argument with which to persuade his semi-savage
hearers.

"These defenders of our God, Christians, have set you an example of
duty," he said. "Are you not ashamed of what will be said of you in
paradise? If it were not for these blessed ones, who have just been
received with open arms by all the saints, our Lord might have thought
that your parish is inhabited by Mahometans!--Do you know, men, what
is said of you in Brittany and in the king's presence? What! you don't
know? Then I shall tell you. They say: 'Behold, the Blues have cast
down altars, and killed priests, and murdered the king and queen; they
mean to make the parish folk of Brittany Blues like themselves, and
send them to fight in foreign lands, away from their churches, where
they run the risk of dying without confession and going eternally to
hell; and yet the gars of Marignay, whose churches they have burned,
stand still with folded arms! Oh! oh! this Republic of damned souls
has sold the property of God and that of the nobles at auction; it has
shared the proceeds with the Blues; it has decreed, in order to gorge
itself with money as it does with blood, that a crown shall be only
worth three francs instead of six; and yet the gars of Marignay
haven't seized their weapons and driven the Blues from Brittany! Ha!
paradise will be closed to them! they can never save their souls!'
That's what they say of you in the king's presence! It is your own
salvation, Christians, which is at stake. Your souls are to be saved
by fighting for religion and the king. Saint Anne of Auray herself
appeared to me yesterday at half-past two o'clock; and she said to me
these very words which I now repeat to you: 'Are you a priest of
Marignay?' 'Yes, madame, ready to serve you.' 'I am Saint Anne of
Auray, aunt of God, after the manner of Brittany. I have come to bid
you warn the people of Marignay that they must not hope for salvation
if they do not take arms. You are to refuse them absolution for their
sins unless they serve God. Bless their guns, and those who gain
absolution will never miss the Blues, because their guns are
sanctified.' She disappeared, leaving an odor of incense behind her. I
marked the spot. It is under the oak of the Patte d'Oie; just where
that beautiful wooden Virgin was placed by the rector of Saint-James;
to whom the crippled mother of Pierre Leroi (otherwise called
Marche-a-Terre) came to pray, and was cured of all her pains, because
of her son's good deeds. You see her there in the midst of you, and
you know that she walks without assistance. It was a miracle--a miracle
intended, like the resurrection of Marie Lambrequin to prove to you
that God will never forsake the Breton cause so long as the people
fight for his servants and for the king. Therefore, my dear brothers,
if you wish to save your souls and show yourselves defenders of God
and the king, you will obey all the orders of the man whom God has
sent to us, and whom we call THE GARS. Then indeed, you will no longer
be Mahometans; you will rank with all the gars of Brittany under the
flag of God. You can take from the pockets of the Blues the money they
have stolen from you; for, if the fields have to go uncultivated while
you are making war, God and the king will deliver to you the spoils of
your enemies. Shall it be said, Christians, that the gars of Marignay
are behind the gars of the Morbihan, the gars of Saint-Georges, of
Vitre, or Antrain, who are all faithful to God and the king? Will you
let them get all the spoils? Will you stand like heretics, with your
arms folded, when other Bretons are saving their souls and saving
their king? 'Forsake all, and follow me,' says the Gospel. Have we not
forsaken our tithes, we priests? And you, I say to you, forsake all
for this holy war! You shall be like the Maccabees. All will be
forgiven you. You will find the priests and curates in your midst, and
you will conquer! Pay attention to these words, Christians," he said,
as he ended; "for this day only have we the power to bless your guns.
Those who do not take advantage of the Saint's favor will not find her
merciful; she will not forgive them or listen to them as she did in
the last war."

This appeal, enforced by the power of a loud voice and by many
gestures, the vehemence of which bathed the orator in perspiration,
produced, apparently, very little effect. The peasants stood
motionless, their eyes on the speaker, like statues; but Mademoiselle
de Verneuil presently noticed that this universal attitude was the
result of a spell cast by the abbe on the crowd. He had, like great
actors, held his audience as one man by addressing their passions and
self-interests. He had absolved excesses before committal, and broken
the only bonds which held these boorish men to the practice of
religious and social precepts. He had prostituted his sacred office to
political interests; but it must be said that, in these times of
revolution, every man made a weapon of whatever he possessed for the
benefit of his party, and the pacific cross of Jesus became as much an
instrument of war as the peasant's plough-share.

Seeing no one with whom to advise, Mademoiselle de Verneuil turned to
look for Francine, and was not a little astonished to see that she
shared in the rapt enthusiasm, and was devoutly saying her chaplet
over some beads which Galope-Chopine had probably given her during the
sermon.

"Francine," she said, in a low voice, "are you afraid of being a
Mahometan?"

"Oh! mademoiselle," replied the girl, "just see Pierre's mother; she
is walking!"

Francine's whole attitude showed such deep conviction that Marie
understood at once the secret of the homily, the influence of the
clergy over the rural masses, and the tremendous effect of the scene
which was now beginning.

The peasants advanced one by one and knelt down, presenting their guns
to the preacher, who laid them upon the altar. Galope-Chopine offered
his old duck-shooter. The three priests sang the hymn "Veni, Creator,"
while the celebrant wrapped the instruments of death in bluish clouds
of incense, waving the smoke into shapes that appeared to interlace
one another. When the breeze had dispersed the vapor the guns were
returned in due order. Each man received his own on his knees from the
hands of the priests, who recited a Latin prayer as they returned
them. After the men had regained their places, the profound enthusiasm
of the congregation, mute till then, broke forth and resounded in a
formidable manner.

"/Domine salvum fac regem/!" was the prayer which the preacher intoned
in an echoing voice, and was then sung vehemently by the people. The
cry had something savage and warlike in it. The two notes of the word
/regem/, readily interpreted by the peasants, were taken with such
energy that Mademoiselle de Verneuil's thoughts reverted almost
tenderly to the exiled Bourbon family. These recollections awakened
those of her past life. Her memory revived the fetes of a court now
dispersed, in which she had once a share. The face of the marquis
entered her reverie. With the natural mobility of a woman's mind she
forgot the scene before her and reverted to her plans of vengeance,
which might cost her her life or come to nought under the influence of
a look. Seeing a branch of holly the trivial thought crossed her mind
that in this decisive moment, when she wished to appear in all her
beauty at the ball, she had no decoration for her hair; and she
gathered a tuft of the prickly leaves and shining berries with the
idea of wearing them.

"Ho! ho! my gun may miss fire on a duck, but on a Blue, never!" cried
Galope-Chopine, nodding his head in sign of satisfaction.

Marie examined her guide's face attentively, and found it of the type
of those she had just seen. The old Chouan had evidently no more ideas
than a child. A naive joy wrinkled his cheeks and forehead as he
looked at his gun; but a pious conviction cast upon that expression of
his joy a tinge of fanaticism, which brought into his face for an
instant the signs of the vices of civilization.

Presently they reached a village, or rather a collection of huts like
that of Galope-Chopine, where the rest of the congregation arrived
before Mademoiselle de Verneuil had finished the milk and bread and
butter which formed the meal. This irregular company was led by the
abbe, who held in his hand a rough cross draped with a flag, followed
by a gars, who was proudly carrying the parish banner. Mademoiselle de
Verneuil was compelled to mingle with this detachment, which was on
its way, like herself, to Saint-James, and would naturally protect her
from all danger as soon as Galope-Chopine informed them that the Gars
glove was in her possession, provided always that the abbe did not see
her.

Towards sunset the three travellers arrived safely at Saint-James, a
little town which owes its name to the English, by whom it was built
in the fourteenth century, during their occupation of Brittany. Before
entering it Mademoiselle de Verneuil was witness of a strange scene of
this strange war, to which, however, she gave little attention; she
feared to be recognized by some of her enemies, and this dread
hastened her steps. Five or six thousand peasants were camping in a
field. Their clothing was not in any degree warlike; in fact, this
tumultuous assembly resembled that of a great fair. Some attention was
needed to even observe that these Bretons were armed, for their
goatskins were so made as to hide their guns, and the weapons that
were chiefly visible were the scythes with which some of the men had
armed themselves while awaiting the distribution of muskets. Some were
eating and drinking, others were fighting and quarrelling in loud
tones, but the greater part were sleeping on the ground. An officer in
a red uniform attracted Mademoiselle de Verneuil's attention, and she
supposed him to belong to the English service. At a little distance
two other officers seemed to be trying to teach a few Chouans, more
intelligent than the rest, to handle two cannon, which apparently
formed the whole artillery of the royalist army. Shouts hailed the
coming of the gars of Marignay, who were recognized by their banner.
Under cover of the tumult which the new-comers and the priests excited
in the camp, Mademoiselle de Verneuil was able to make her way past it
and into the town without danger. She stopped at a plain-looking inn
not far from the building where the ball was to be given. The town was
so full of strangers that she could only obtain one miserable room.
When she was safely in it Galope-Chopine brought Francine the box
which contained the ball dress, and having done so he stood
stock-still in an attitude of indescribable irresolution. At any other
time Mademoiselle de Verneuil would have been much amused to see what
a Breton peasant can be like when he leaves his native parish; but now
she broke the charm by opening her purse and producing four crowns of
six francs each, which she gave him.

"Take it," she said, "and if you wish to oblige me, you will go
straight back to Fougeres without entering the camp or drinking any
cider."

The Chouan, amazed at her liberality, looked first at the crowns
(which he had taken) and then at Mademoiselle de Verneuil; but she
made him a sign with her hand and he disappeared.

"How could you send him away, mademoiselle?" said Francine. "Don't you
see how the place is surrounded? we shall never get away! and who will
protect you here?"

"You have a protector of your own," said Marie maliciously, giving in
an undertone Marche-a-Terre's owl cry which she was constantly
practising.

Francine colored, and smiled rather sadly at her mistress's gaiety.

"But who is yours?" she said.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil plucked out her dagger, and showed it to the
frightened girl, who dropped on a chair and clasped her hands.

"What have you come here for, Marie?" she cried in a supplicating
voice which asked no answer.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil was busily twisting the branches of holly
which she had gathered.

"I don't know whether this holly will be becoming," she said; "a
brilliant skin like mine may possibly bear a dark wreath of this kind.
What do you think, Francine?"

Several remarks of the same kind as she dressed for the ball showed
the absolute self-possession and coolness of this strange woman.
Whoever had listened to her then would have found it hard to believe
in the gravity of a situation in which she was risking her life. An
Indian muslin gown, rather short and clinging like damp linen,
revealed the delicate outlines of her shape; over this she wore a red
drapery, numerous folds of which, gradually lengthening as they fell
by her side, took the graceful curves of a Greek peplum. This
voluptuous garment of the pagan priestesses lessened the indecency of
the rest of the attire which the fashions of the time suffered women
to wear. To soften its immodesty still further, Marie threw a gauze
scarf over her shoulders, left bare and far too low by the red
drapery. She wound the long braids of her hair into the flat irregular
cone above the nape of the neck which gives such grace to certain
antique statues by an artistic elongation of the head, while a few
stray locks escaping from her forehead fell in shining curls beside
her cheeks. With a form and head thus dressed, she presented a perfect
likeness of the noble masterpieces of Greek sculpture. She smiled as
she looked with approval at the arrangement of her hair, which brought
out the beauties of her face, while the scarlet berries of the holly
wreath which she laid upon it repeated charmingly the color of the
peplum. As she twisted and turned a few leaves, to give capricious
diversity to their arrangement, she examined her whole costume in a
mirror to judge of its general effect.

"I am horrible to-night," she said, as though she were surrounded by
flatterers. "I look like a statue of Liberty."

She placed the dagger carefully in her bosom leaving the rubies in the
hilt exposed, their ruddy reflections attracting the eye to the hidden
beauties of her shape. Francine could not bring herself to leave her
mistress. When Marie was ready she made various pretexts to follow
her. She must help her to take off her mantle, and the overshoes which
the mud and muck in the streets compelled her to wear (though the
roads had been sanded for this occasion); also the gauze veil which
Mademoiselle de Verneuil had thrown over her head to conceal her
features from the Chouans who were collecting in the streets to watch
the company. The crowd was in fact so great that they were forced to
make their way through two hedges of Chouans. Francine no longer
strove to detain her mistress, and after giving a few last touches to
a costume the greatest charm of which was its exquisite freshness, she
stationed herself in the courtyard that she might not abandon this
beloved mistress to her fate without being able to fly to her succor;
for the poor girl foresaw only evil in these events.

A strange scene was taking place in Montauran's chamber as Marie was
on her way to the ball. The young marquis, who had just finished
dressing, was putting on the broad red ribbon which distinguished him
as first in rank of the assembly, when the Abbe Gudin entered the room
with an anxious air.

"Monsieur le marquis, come quickly," he said. "You alone can quell a
tumult which has broken out, I don't know why, among the leaders. They
talk of abandoning the king's cause. I think that devil of a Rifoel is
at the bottom of it. Such quarrels are always caused by some mere
nonsense. Madame du Gua reproached him, so I hear, for coming to the
ball ill-dressed."

"That woman must be crazy," cried the marquis, "to try to--"

"Rifoel retorted," continued the abbe, interrupting his chief, "that
if you had given him the money promised him in the king's name--"

"Enough, enough; I understand it all now. This scene has all been
arranged, and you are put forward as ambassador--"

"I, monsieur le marquis!" said the abbe, again interrupting him. "I am
supporting you vigorously, and you will, I hope, do me the justice to
believe that the restoration of our altars in France and that of the
king upon the throne of his fathers are far more powerful incentives
to my humble labors than the bishopric of Rennes which you--"

The abbe dared say no more, for the marquis smiled bitterly at his
last words. However, the young chief instantly repressed all
expression of feeling, his brow grew stern, and he followed the Abbe
Gudin into a hall where the worst of the clamor was echoing.

"I recognize no authority here," Rifoel was saying, casting angry
looks at all about him and laying his hand on the hilt of his sabre.

"Do you recognize that of common-sense?" asked the marquis, coldly.

The young Chevalier de Vissard, better known under his patronymic of
Rifoel, was silent before the general of the Catholic armies.

"What is all this about, gentlemen?" asked the marquis, examining the
faces round him.

"This, monsieur le marquis," said a famous smuggler, with the
awkwardness of a man of the people who long remains under the yoke of
respect to a great lord, though he admits no barriers after he has
once jumped them, and regards the aristocrat as an equal only,
"/this/," he said, "and you have come in the nick of time to hear it.
I am no speaker of gilded phrases, and I shall say things plainly. I
commanded five hundred men during the late war. Since we have taken up
arms again I have raised a thousand heads as hard as mine for the
service of the king. It is now seven years that I have risked my life
in the good cause; I don't blame you, but I say that the laborer is
worthy of his hire. Now, to begin with, I demand that I be called
Monsieur de Cottereau. I also demand that the rank of colonel shall be
granted me, or I send in my adhesion to the First Consul! Let me tell
you, monsieur le marquis, my men and I have a devilishly importunate
creditor who must be satisfied--he's here!" he added, striking his
stomach.

"Have the musicians come?" said the marquis, in a contemptuous tone,
turning to Madame du Gua.

But the smuggler had dealt boldly with an important topic, and the
calculating, ambitious minds of those present had been too long in
suspense as to what they might hope for from the king to allow the
scorn of their new leader to put an end to the scene. Rifoel hastily
blocked the way before Montauran, and seized his hand to oblige him to
remain.

"Take care, monsieur le marquis," he said; "you are treating far too
lightly men who have a right to the gratitude of him whom you are here
to represent. We know that his Majesty has sent you with full powers
to judge of our services, and we say that they ought to be recognized
and rewarded, for we risk our heads upon the scaffold daily. I know,
so far as I am concerned, that the rank of brigadier-general--"

"You mean colonel."

"No, monsieur le marquis; Charette made me a colonel. The rank I
mention cannot be denied me. I am not arguing for myself, I speak for
my brave brothers-in-arms, whose services ought to be recorded. Your
signature and your promise will suffice them for the present; though,"
he added, in a low voice, "I must say they are satisfied with very
little. But," he continued, raising his voice, "when the sun rises on
the chateau of Versailles to glorify the return of the monarchy after
the faithful have conquered France, /in France/, for the king, will
they obtain favors for their families, pensions for widows, and the
restitution of their confiscated property? I doubt it. But, monsieur
le marquis, we must have certified proof of our services when that
time comes. I will never distrust the king, but I do distrust those
cormorants of ministers and courtiers, who tingle his ears with talk
about the public welfare, the honor of France, the interests of the
crown, and other crochets. They will sneer at a loyal Vendean or a
brave Chouan, because he is old and the sword he drew for the good
cause dangles on his withered legs, palsied with exposure. Can you say
that we are wrong in feeling thus?"

"You talk well, Monsieur du Vissard, but you are over hasty," replied
the marquis.

"Listen, marquis," said the Comte de Bauvan, in a whisper. "Rifoel has
really, on my word, told the truth. You are sure, yourself, to have
the ear of the king, while the rest of us only see him at a distance
and from time to time. I will own to you that if you do not give me
your word as a gentleman that I shall, in due course of time, obtain
the place of Master of Woods and Waters in France, the devil take me
if I will risk my neck any longer. To conquer Normandy for the king is
not an easy matter, and I demand the Order for it. But," he added,
coloring, "there's time enough to think of that. God forbid that I
should imitate these poor mercenaries and harass you. Speak to the
king for me, and that's enough."

Each of the chiefs found means to let the marquis know, in a more or
less ingenious manner, the exaggerated price they set upon their
services. One modestly demanded the governorship of Brittany; another
a barony; this one a promotion; that one a command; and all wanted
pensions.

"Well, baron," said the marquis to Monsieur du Guenic, "don't you want
anything?"

"These gentlemen have left me nothing but the crown of France,
marquis, but I might manage to put up with that--"

"Gentlemen!" cried the Abbe Gudin, in a loud voice, "remember that if
you are too eager you will spoil everything in the day of victory. The
king will then be compelled to make concessions to the revolutionists."

"To those Jacobins!" shouted the smuggler. "Ha! if the king would let
me have my way, I'd answer for my thousand men; we'd soon wring their
necks and be rid of them."

"Monsieur /de/ Cottereau," said the marquis, "I see some of our
invited guests arriving. We must all do our best by attention and
courtesy to make them share our sacred enterprise; you will agree, I
am sure, that this is not the moment to bring forward your demands,
however just they may be."

So saying, the marquis went to the door, as if to meet certain of the
country nobles who were entering the room, but the bold smuggler
barred his way in a respectful manner.

"No, no, monsieur le marquis, excuse me," he said; "the Jacobins
taught me too well in 1793 that it is not he who sows and reaps who
eats the bread. Sign this bit of paper for me, and to-morrow I'll
bring you fifteen hundred gars. If not, I'll treat with the First
Consul."

Looking haughtily about him, the marquis saw plainly that the boldness
of the old partisan and his resolute air were not displeasing to any
of the spectators of this debate. One man alone, sitting by himself in
a corner of the room, appeared to take no part in the scene, and to be
chiefly occupied in filling his pipe. The contemptuous air with which
he glanced at the speakers, his modest demeanor, and a look of
sympathy which the marquis encountered in his eyes, made the young
leader observe the man, whom he then recognized as Major Brigaut, and
he went suddenly up to him.

"And you, what do you want?" he said.

"Oh, monsieur le marquis, if the king comes back that's all I want."

"But for yourself?"

"For myself? are you joking?"

The marquis pressed the horny hand of the Breton, and said to Madame
du Gua, who was near them: "Madame, I may perish in this enterprise
before I have time to make a faithful report to the king on the
Catholic armies of Brittany. I charge you, in case you live to see the
Restoration, not to forget this honorable man nor the Baron du Guenic.
There is more devotion in them than in all those other men put
together."

He pointed to the chiefs, who were waiting with some impatience till
the marquis should reply to their demands. They were all holding
papers in their hands, on which, no doubt, their services were
recorded over the signatures of the various generals of the former
war; and all were murmuring. The Abbe Gudin, the Comte de Bauvan, and
the Baron du Guenic were consulting how best to help the marquis in
rejecting these extravagant demands, for they felt the position of the
young leader to be extremely delicate.

Suddenly the marquis ran his blue eyes, gleaming with satire, over the
whole assembly, and said in a clear voice: "Gentlemen, I do not know
whether the powers which the king has graciously assigned to me are
such that I am able to satisfy your demands. He doubtless did not
foresee such zeal, such devotion, on your part. You shall judge
yourselves of the duties put upon me,--duties which I shall know how
to accomplish."

So saying, he left the room and returned immediately holding in his
hand an open letter bearing the royal seal and signature.

"These are the letters-patent in virtue of which you are to obey me,"
he said. "They authorize me to govern the provinces of Brittany,
Normandy, Maine, and Anjou, in the king's name, and to recognize the
services of such officers as may distinguish themselves in his
armies."

A movement of satisfaction ran through the assembly. The Chouans
approached the marquis and made a respectful circle round him. All
eyes fastened on the king's signature. The young chief, who was
standing near the chimney, suddenly threw the letters into the fire,
and they were burned in a second.

"I do not choose to command any," cried the young man, "but those who
see a king in the king, and not a prey to prey upon. You are free,
gentlemen, to leave me."

Madame du Gua, the Abbe Gudin, Major Brigaut, the Chevalier du
Vissard, the Baron du Guenic, and the Comte de Bauvan raised the cry
of "Vive le roi!" For a moment the other leaders hesitated; then,
carried away by the noble action of the marquis, they begged him to
forget what had passed, assuring him that, letters-patent or not, he
must always be their leader.

"Come and dance," cried the Comte de Bauvan, "and happen what will!
After all," he added, gaily, "it is better, my friends, to pray to God
than the saints. Let us fight first, and see what comes of it."

"Ha! that's good advice," said Brigaut. "I have never yet known a
day's pay drawn in the morning."

The assembly dispersed about the rooms, where the guests were now
arriving. The marquis tried in vain to shake off the gloom which
darkened his face. The chiefs perceived the unfavorable impression
made upon a young man whose devotion was still surrounded by all the
beautiful illusions of youth, and they were ashamed of their action.

However, a joyous gaiety soon enlivened the opening of the ball, at
which were present the most important personages of the royalist
party, who, unable to judge rightly, in the depths of a rebellious
province, of the actual events of the Revolution, mistook their hopes
for realities. The bold operations already begun by Montauran, his
name, his fortune, his capacity, raised their courage and caused that
political intoxication, the most dangerous of all excitements, which
does not cool till torrents of blood have been uselessly shed. In the
minds of all present the Revolution was nothing more than a passing
trouble to the kingdom of France, where, to their belated eyes,
nothing was changed. The country belonged as it ever did to the house
of Bourbon. The royalists were the lords of the soil as completely as
they were four years earlier, when Hoche obtained less a peace than an
armistice. The nobles made light of the revolutionists; for them
Bonaparte was another, but more fortunate, Marceau. So gaiety reigned.
The women had come to dance. A few only of the chiefs, who had fought
the Blues, knew the gravity of the situation; but they were well aware
that if they talked of the First Consul and his power to their
benighted companions, they could not make themselves understood. These
men stood apart and looked at the women with indifference. Madame du
Gua, who seemed to do the honors of the ball, endeavored to quiet the
impatience of the dancers by dispensing flatteries to each in turn.
The musicians were tuning their instruments and the dancing was about
to begin, when Madame du Gua noticed the gloom on de Montauran's face
and went hurriedly up to him.

"I hope it is not that vulgar scene you have just had with those
clodhoppers which depresses you?" she said.

She got no answer; the marquis, absorbed in thought, was listening in
fancy to the prophetic reasons which Marie had given him in the midst
of the same chiefs at La Vivetiere, urging him to abandon the struggle
of kings against peoples. But the young man's soul was too proud, too
lofty, too full perhaps of conviction, to abandon an enterprise he had
once begun, and he decided at this moment, to continue it boldly in
the face of all obstacles. He raised his head haughtily, and for the
first time noticed that Madame du Gua was speaking to him.

"Your mind is no doubt at Fougeres," she remarked bitterly, seeing how
useless her efforts to attract his attention had been. "Ah, monsieur,
I would give my life to put /her/ within your power, and see you happy
with her."

"Then why have you done all you could to kill her?"

"Because I wish her dead or in your arms. Yes, I may have loved the
Marquis de Montauran when I thought him a hero, but now I feel only a
pitying friendship for him; I see him shorn of all his glory by a
fickle love for a worthless woman."

"As for love," said the marquis, in a sarcastic tone, "you judge me
wrong. If I loved that girl, madame, I might desire her less; if it
were not for you, perhaps I should not think of her at all."

"Here she is!" exclaimed Madame du Gua, abruptly.

The haste with which the marquis looked round went to the heart of the
woman; but the clear light of the wax candles enabled her to see every
change on the face of the man she loved so violently, and when he
turned back his face, smiling at her woman's trick, she fancied there
was still some hope of recovering him.

"What are you laughing at?" asked the Comte de Bauvan.

"At a soap-bubble which has burst," interposed Madame du Gua, gaily.
"The marquis, if we are now to believe him, is astonished that his
heart ever beat the faster for that girl who presumes to call herself
Mademoiselle de Verneuil. You know who I mean."

"That girl!" echoed the count. "Madame, the author of a wrong is bound
to repair it. I give you my word of honor that she is really the
daughter of the Duc de Verneuil."

"Monsieur le comte," said the marquis, in a changed voice, "which of
your statements am I to believe,--that of La Vivetiere, or that now
made?"

The loud voice of a servant at the door announced Mademoiselle de
Verneuil. The count sprang forward instantly, offered his hand to the
beautiful woman with every mark of profound respect, and led her
through the inquisitive crowd to the marquis and Madame du Gua.
"Believe the one now made," he replied to the astonished young leader.

Madame du Gua turned pale at the unwelcome sight of the girl, who
stood for a moment, glancing proudly over the assembled company, among
whom she sought to find the guests at La Vivetiere. She awaited the
forced salutation of her rival, and, without even looking at the
marquis, she allowed the count to lead her to the place of honor
beside Madame du Gua, whose bow she returned with an air that was
slightly protecting. But the latter, with a woman's instinct, took no
offense; on the contrary, she immediately assumed a smiling, friendly
manner. The extraordinary dress and beauty of Mademoiselle de Verneuil
caused a murmur throughout the ballroom. When the marquis and Madame
du Gua looked towards the late guests at La Vivetiere they saw them in
an attitude of respectful admiration which was not assumed; each
seemed desirous of recovering favor with the misjudged young woman.
The enemies were in presence of each other.

"This is really magic, mademoiselle," said Madame du Gua; "there is no
one like you for surprises. Have you come all alone?"

"All alone," replied Mademoiselle de Verneuil. "So you have only one
to kill to-night, madame."

"Be merciful," said Madame du Gua. "I cannot express to you the
pleasure I have in seeing you again. I have truly been overwhelmed by
the remembrance of the wrongs I have done you, and am most anxious for
an occasion to repair them."

"As for those wrongs, madame, I readily pardon those you did to me,
but my heart bleeds for the Blues whom you murdered. However, I excuse
all, in return for the service you have done me."

Madame du Gua lost countenance as she felt her hand pressed by her
beautiful rival with insulting courtesy. The marquis had hitherto
stood motionless, but he now seized the arm of the count.

"You have shamefully misled me," he said; "you have compromised my
honor. I am not a Geronte of comedy, and I shall have your life or you
will have mine."

"Marquis," said the count, haughtily, "I am ready to give you all the
explanations you desire."

They passed into the next room. The witnesses of this scene, even
those least initiated into the secret, began to understand its nature,
so that when the musicians gave the signal for the dancing to begin no
one moved.

"Mademoiselle, what service have I rendered you that deserves a
return?" said Madame du Gua, biting her lips in a sort of rage.

"Did you not enlighten me as to the true character of the Marquis de
Montauran, madame? With what utter indifference that man allowed me to
go to my death! I give him up to you willingly!"

"Then why are you here?" asked Madame du Gua, eagerly.

"To recover the respect and consideration you took from me at La
Vivetiere, madame. As for all the rest, make yourself easy. Even if
the marquis returned to me, you know very well that a return is never
love."

Madame du Gua took Mademoiselle de Verneuil's hand with that
affectionate touch and motion which women practise to each other,
especially in the presence of men.

"Well, my poor dear child," she said, "I am glad to find you so
reasonable. If the service I did you was rather harsh," she added,
pressing the hand she held, and feeling a desire to rend it as her
fingers felt its softness and delicacy, "it shall at least be
thorough. Listen to me, I know the character of the Gars; he meant to
deceive you; he neither can nor will marry any woman except--"

"Ah!"

"Yes, mademoiselle, he has accepted his dangerous mission to win the
hand of Mademoiselle d'Uxelles, a marriage to which his Majesty has
promised his countenance."

"Ah! ah!"

Mademoiselle de Verneuil added not a word to that scornful
ejaculation. The young and handsome Chevalier du Vissard, eager to be
forgiven for the joke which had led to the insults at La Vivetiere,
now came up to her and respectfully invited her to dance. She placed
her hand in his, and they took their places in a quadrille opposite to
Madame du Gua. The gowns of the royalist women, which recalled the
fashions of the exiled court, and their creped and powdered hair
seemed absurd as soon as they were contrasted with the attire which
republican fashions authorized Mademoiselle de Verneuil to wear. This
attire, which was elegant, rich, and yet severe, was loudly condemned
but inwardly envied by all the women present. The men could not
restrain their admiration for the beauty of her natural hair and the
adjustment of a dress the charm of which was in the proportions of the
form which it revealed.

At that moment the marquis and the count re-entered the ballroom
behind Mademoiselle de Verneuil, who did not turn her head. If a
mirror had not been there to inform her of Montauran's presence, she
would have known it from Madame du Gua's face, which scarcely
concealed, under an apparently indifferent air, the impatience with
which she awaited the conflict which must, sooner or later, take place
between the lovers. Though the marquis talked with the count and other
persons, he heard the remarks of all the dancers who from time to time
in the mazes of the quadrille took the place of Mademoiselle de
Verneuil and her partner.

"Positively, madame, she came alone," said one.

"She must be a bold woman," replied the lady.

"If I were dressed like that I should feel myself naked," said another
woman.

"Oh, the gown is not decent, certainly," replied her partner; "but it
is so becoming, and she is so handsome."

"I am ashamed to look at such perfect dancing, for her sake; isn't it
exactly that of an opera girl?" said the envious woman.

"Do you suppose that she has come here to intrigue for the First
Consul?" said another.

"A joke if she has," replied the partner.

"Well, she can't offer innocence as a dowry," said the lady, laughing.

The Gars turned abruptly to see the lady who uttered this sarcasm, and
Madame du Gua looked at him as if to say, "You see what people think
of her."

"Madame," said the count, laughing, "so far, it is only women who have
taken her innocence away from her."

The marquis privately forgave the count. When he ventured to look at
his mistress, whose beauty was, like that of most women, brought into
relief by the light of the wax candles, she turned her back upon him
as she resumed her place, and went on talking to her partner in a way
to let the marquis hear the sweetest and most caressing tones of her
voice.

"The First Consul sends dangerous ambassadors," her partner was
saying.

"Monsieur," she replied, "you all said that at La Vivetiere."

"You have the memory of a king," replied he, disconcerted at his own
awkwardness.

"To forgive injuries one must needs remember them," she said quickly,
relieving his embarrassment with a smile.

"Are we all included in that amnesty?" said the marquis, approaching
her.

But she darted away in the dance, with the gaiety of a child, leaving
him without an answer. He watched her coldly and sadly; she saw it,
and bent her head with one of those coquettish motions which the
graceful lines of her throat enabled her to make, omitting no movement
or attitude which could prove to him the perfection of her figure. She
attracted him like hope, and eluded him like a memory. To see her thus
was to desire to possess her at any cost. She knew that, and the sense
it gave her of her own beauty shed upon her whole person an
inexpressible charm. The marquis felt the storm of love, of rage, of
madness, rising in his heart; he wrung the count's hand violently, and
left the room.

"Is he gone?" said Mademoiselle de Verneuil, returning to her place.

The count gave her a glance and passed into the next room, from which
he presently returned accompanied by the Gars.

"He is mine!" she thought, observing his face in the mirror.

She received the young leader with a displeased air and said nothing,
but she smiled as she turned away from him; he was so superior to all
about him that she was proud of being able to rule him; and obeying an
instinct which sways all women more or less, she resolved to let him
know the value of a few gracious words by making him pay dear for
them. As soon as the quadrille was over, all the gentlemen who had
been at La Vivetiere surrounded Mademoiselle de Verneuil, wishing by
their flattering attentions to obtain her pardon for the mistake they
had made; but he whom she longed to see at her feet did not approach
the circle over which she now reigned a queen.

"He thinks I still love him," she thought, "and does not wish to be
confounded with mere flatterers."

She refused to dance again. Then, as if the ball were given for her,
she walked about on the arm of the Comte de Bauvan, to whom she was
pleased to show some familiarity. The affair at La Vivetiere was by
this time known to all present, thanks to Madame du Gua, and the
lovers were the object of general attention. The marquis dared not
again address his mistress; a sense of the wrong he had done her and
the violence of his returning passion made her seem to him actually
terrible. On her side Marie watched his apparently calm face while she
seemed to be observing the ball.

"It is fearfully hot here," she said to the count. "Take me to the
other side where I can breathe; I am stifling here."

And she motioned towards a small room where a few card-players were
assembled. The marquis followed her. He ventured to hope she had left
the crowd to receive him, and this supposed favor roused his passion
to extreme violence; for his love had only increased through the
resistance he had made to it during the last few days. Mademoiselle de
Verneuil still tormented him; her eyes, so soft and velvety for the
count, were hard and stern when, as if by accident, they met his.
Montauran at last made a painful effort and said, in a muffled voice,
"Will you never forgive me?"

"Love forgives nothing, or it forgives all," she said, coldly. "But,"
she added, noticing his joyful look, "it must be love."

She took the count's arm once more and moved forward into a small
boudoir which adjoined the cardroom. The marquis followed her.

"Will you not hear me?" he said.

"One would really think, monsieur," she replied, "that I had come here
to meet you, and not to vindicate my own self-respect. If you do not
cease this odious pursuit I shall leave the ballroom."

"Ah!" he cried, recollecting one of the crazy actions of the last Duc
de Lorraine, "let me speak to you so long as I can hold this live coal
in my hand."

He stooped to the hearth and picking up a brand held it tightly.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil flushed, took her arm from that of the count,
and looked at the marquis in amazement. The count softly withdrew,
leaving them alone together. So crazy an action shook Marie's heart,
for there is nothing so persuasive in love as courageous folly.

"You only prove to me," she said, trying to make him throw away the
brand, "that you are willing to make me suffer cruelly. You are
extreme in everything. On the word of a fool and the slander of a
woman you suspected that one who had just saved your life was capable
of betraying you."

"Yes," he said, smiling, "I have been very cruel to you; but
nevertheless, forget it; I shall never forget it. Hear me. I have been
shamefully deceived; but so many circumstances on that fatal day told
against you--"

"And those circumstances were stronger than your love?"

He hesitated; she made a motion of contempt, and rose.

"Oh, Marie. I shall never cease to believe in you now."

"Then throw that fire away. You are mad. Open your hand; I insist upon
it."

He took delight in still resisting the soft efforts of her fingers,
but she succeeded in opening the hand she would fain have kissed.

"What good did that do you?" she said, as she tore her handkerchief
and laid it on the burn, which the marquis covered with his glove.

Madame du Gua had stolen softly into the cardroom, watching the lovers
with furtive eyes, but escaping theirs adroitly; it was, however,
impossible for her to understand their conversation from their
actions.

"If all that they said of me was true you must admit that I am avenged
at this moment," said Marie, with a look of malignity which startled
the marquis.

"What feeling brought you here?" he asked.

"Do you suppose, my dear friend, that you can despise a woman like me
with impunity? I came here for your sake and for my own," she
continued, after a pause, laying her hand on the hilt of rubies in her
bosom and showing him the blade of her dagger.

"What does all that mean?" thought Madame du Gua.

"But," she continued, "you still love me; at any rate, you desire me,
and the folly you have just committed," she added, taking his hand,
"proves it to me. I will again be that I desired to be; and I return
to Fougeres happy. Love absolves everything. You love me; I have
regained the respect of the man who represents to me the whole world,
and I can die."

"Then you still love me?" said the marquis.

"Have I said so?" she replied with a scornful look, delighting in the
torture she was making him endure. "I have run many risks to come
here. I have saved Monsieur de Bauvan's life, and he, more grateful
than others, offers me in return his fortune and his name. You have
never even thought of doing that."

The marquis, bewildered by these words, stifled the worst anger he had
ever felt, supposing that the count had played him false. He made no
answer.

"Ah! you reflect," she said, bitterly.

"Mademoiselle," replied the young man, "your doubts justify mine."

"Let us leave this room," said Mademoiselle de Verneuil, catching
sight of a corner of Madame du Gua's gown, and rising. But the wish to
reduce her rival to despair was too strong, and she made no further
motion to go.

"Do you mean to drive me to hell?" cried the marquis, seizing her hand
and pressing it violently.

"Did you not drive me to hell five days ago? are you not leaving me at
this very moment uncertain whether your love is sincere or not?"

"But how do I know whether your revenge may not lead you to obtain my
life to tarnish it, instead of killing me?"

"Ah! you do not love me! you think of yourself and not of me!" she
said angrily, shedding a few tears.

The coquettish creature well knew the power of her eyes when moistened
by tears.

"Well, then," he cried, beside himself, "take my life, but dry those
tears."

"Oh, my love! my love!" she exclaimed in a stifled voice: "those are
the words, the accents, the looks I have longed for, to allow me to
prefer your happiness to mine. But," she added, "I ask one more proof
of your love, which you say is so great. I wish to stay here only so
long as may be needed to show the company that you are mine. I will
not even drink a glass of water in the house of a woman who has twice
tried to kill me, who is now, perhaps, plotting mischief against us,"
and she showed the marquis the floating corner of Madame du Gua's
drapery. Then she dried her eyes and put her lips to the ear of the
young man, who quivered as he felt the caress of her warm breath. "See
that everything is prepared for my departure," she said; "you shall
take me yourself to Fougeres and there only will I tell you if I love
you. For the second time I trust you. Will you trust me a second
time?"

"Ah, Marie, you have brought me to a point where I know not what I do.
I am intoxicated by your words, your looks, by you--by you, and I am
ready to obey you."

"Well, then, make me for an instant very happy. Let me enjoy the only
triumph I desire. I want to breathe freely, to drink of the life I
have dreamed, to feed my illusions before they are gone forever. Come
--come into the ballroom and dance with me."

They re-entered the room together, and though Mademoiselle de Verneuil
was as completely satisfied in heart and vanity as any woman ever
could be, the unfathomable gentleness of her eyes, the demure smile on
her lips, the rapidity of the motions of a gay dance, kept the secret
of her thoughts as the sea swallows those of the criminal who casts a
weighted body into its depths. But a murmur of admiration ran through
the company as, circling in each other's arms, voluptuously
interlaced, with heavy heads, and dimmed sight, they waltzed with a
sort of frenzy, dreaming of the pleasures they hoped to find in a
future union.

A few moments later Mademoiselle de Verneuil and the marquis were in
the latter's travelling-carriage drawn by four horses. Surprised to
see these enemies hand in hand, and evidently understanding each
other, Francine kept silence, not daring to ask her mistress whether
her conduct was that of treachery or love. Thanks to the darkness, the
marquis did not observe Mademoiselle de Verneuil's agitation as they
neared Fougeres. The first flush of dawn showed the towers of
Saint-Leonard in the distance. At that moment Marie was saying to
herself: "I am going to my death."

As they ascended the first hill the lovers had the same thought; they
left the carriage and mounted the rise on foot, in memory of their
first meeting. When Marie took the young man's arm she thanked him by
a smile for respecting her silence; then, as they reached the summit
of the plateau and looked at Fougeres, she threw off her reverie.

"Don't come any farther," she said; "my authority cannot save you from
the Blues to-day."

Montauran showed some surprise. She smiled sadly and pointed to a
block of granite, as if to tell him to sit down, while she herself
stood before him in a melancholy attitude. The rending emotions of her
soul no longer permitted her to play a part. At that moment she would
have knelt on red-hot coals without feeling them any more than the
marquis had felt the fire-brand he had taken in his hand to prove the
strength of his passion. It was not until she had contemplated her
lover with a look of the deepest anguish that she said to him, at
last:--

"All that you have suspected of me is true."

The marquis started.

"Ah! I pray you," she said, clasping her hands, "listen to me without
interruption. I am indeed the daughter of the Duc de Verneuil,--but
his natural daughter. My mother, a Demoiselle de Casteran, who became
a nun to escape the reproaches of her family, expiated her fault by
fifteen years of sorrow, and died at Seez, where she was abbess. On
her death-bed she implored, for the first time and only for me, the
help of the man who had betrayed her, for she knew she was leaving me
without friends, without fortune, without a future. The duke accepted
the charge, and took me from the roof of Francine's mother, who had
hitherto taken care of me; perhaps he liked me because I was
beautiful; possibly I reminded him of his youth. He was one of those
great lords of the old regime, who took pride in showing how they
could get their crimes forgiven by committing them with grace. I will
say no more, he was my father. But let me explain to you how my life
in Paris injured my soul. The society of the Duc de Verneuil, to which
he introduced me, was bitten by that scoffing philosophy about which
all France was then enthusiastic because it was wittily professed. The
brilliant conversations which charmed my ear were marked by subtlety
of perception and by witty contempt for all that was true and
spiritual. Men laughed at sentiments, and pictured them all the better
because they did not feel them; their satirical epigrams were as
fascinating as the light-hearted humor with which they could put a
whole adventure into a word; and yet they had sometimes too much wit,
and wearied women by making love an art, and not a matter of feeling.
I could not resist the tide. And yet my soul was too ardent--forgive
this pride--not to feel that their minds had withered their hearts;
and the life I led resulted in a perpetual struggle between my natural
feelings and beliefs and the vicious habits of mind which I there
contracted. Several superior men took pleasure in developing in me
that liberty of thought and contempt for public opinion which do tear
from a woman her modesty of soul, robbed of which she loses her charm.
Alas! my subsequent misfortunes have failed to lessen the faults I
learned through opulence. My father," she continued, with a sigh, "the
Duc de Verneuil, died, after duly recognizing me as his daughter and
making provisions for me by his will, which considerably reduced the
fortune of my brother, his legitimate son. I found myself one day
without a home and without a protector. My brother contested the will
which made me rich. Three years of my late life had developed my
vanity. By satisfying all my fancies my father had created in my
nature a need of luxury, and given me habits of self-indulgence of
which my own mind, young and artless as it then was, could not
perceive either the danger or the tyranny. A friend of my father, the
Marechal Duc de Lenoncourt, then seventy years old, offered to become
my guardian, and I found myself, soon after the termination of the
odious suit, in a brilliant home, where I enjoyed all the advantages
of which my brother's cruelty had deprived me. Every evening the old
marechal came to sit with me and comfort me with kind and consoling
words. His white hair and the many proofs he gave me of paternal
tenderness led me to turn all the feelings of my heart upon him, and I
felt myself his daughter. I accepted his presents, hiding none of my
caprices from him, for I saw how he loved to gratify them. I heard one
fatal evening that all Paris believed me the mistress of the poor old
man. I was told that it was then beyond my power to recover an
innocence thus gratuitously denied me. They said that the man who had
abused my inexperience could not be lover, and would not be my
husband. The week in which I made this horrible discovery the duke
left Paris. I was shamefully ejected from the house where he had
placed me, and which did not belong to him. Up to this point I have
told you the truth as though I stood before God; but now, do not ask a
wretched woman to give account of sufferings which are buried in her
heart. The time came when I found myself married to Danton. A few days
later the storm uprooted the mighty oak around which I had thrown my
arms. Again I was plunged into the worst distress, and I resolved to
kill myself. I don't know whether love of life, or the hope of
wearying ill-fortune and of finding at the bottom of the abyss the
happiness which had always escaped me were, unconsciously to myself,
my advisers, or whether I was fascinated by the arguments of a young
man from Vendome, who, for the last two years, has wound himself about
me like a serpent round a tree,--in short, I know not how it is that I
accepted, for a payment of three hundred thousand francs, the odious
mission of making an unknown man fall in love with me and then
betraying him. I met you; I knew you at once by one of those
presentiments which never mislead us; yet I tried to doubt my
recognition, for the more I came to love you, the more the certainty
appalled me. When I saved you from the hands of Hulot, I abjured the
part I had taken; I resolved to betray the slaughterers, and not their
victim. I did wrong to play with men, with their lives, their
principles, with myself, like a thoughtless girl who sees only
sentiments in this life. I believed you loved me; I let myself cling
to the hope that my life might begin anew; but all things have
revealed my past,--even I myself, perhaps, for you must have
distrusted a woman so passionate as you have found me. Alas! is there
no excuse for my love and my deception? My life was like a troubled
sleep; I woke and thought myself a girl; I was in Alencon, where all
my memories were pure and chaste. I had the mad simplicity to think
that love would baptize me into innocence. For a moment I thought
myself pure, for I had never loved. But last night your passion seemed
to me true, and a voice cried to me, 'Do not deceive him.' Monsieur le
marquis," she said, in a guttural voice which haughtily challenged
condemnation, "know this; I am a dishonored creature, unworthy of you.
From this hour I accept my fate as a lost woman. I am weary of playing
a part,--the part of a woman to whom you had brought back the
sanctities of her soul. Virtue is a burden to me. I should despise you
if you were weak enough to marry me. The Comte de Bauvan might commit
that folly, but you--you must be worthy of your future and leave me
without regret. A courtesan is too exacting; I should not love you
like the simple, artless girl who felt for a moment the delightful
hope of being your companion, of making you happy, of doing you honor,
of becoming a noble wife. But I gather from that futile hope the
courage to return to a life of vice and infamy, that I may put an
eternal barrier between us. I sacrifice both honor and fortune to you.
The pride I take in that sacrifice will support me in my wretchedness,
--fate may dispose of me as it will. I will never betray you. I shall
return to Paris. There your name will be to me a part of myself, and
the glory you win will console my grief. As for you, you are a man,
and you will forget me. Farewell."

She darted away in the direction of the gorges of Saint-Sulpice, and
disappeared before the marquis could rise to detain her. But she came
back unseen, hid herself in a cavity of the rocks, and examined the
young man with a curiosity mingled with doubt. Presently she saw him
walking like a man overwhelmed, without seeming to know where he went.

"Can he be weak?" she thought, when he had disappeared, and she felt
she was parted from him. "Will he understand me?" She quivered. Then
she turned and went rapidly towards Fougeres, as though she feared the
marquis might follow her into the town, where certain death awaited
him.

"Francine, what did he say to you?" she asked, when the faithful girl
rejoined her.

"Ah! Marie, how I pitied him. You great ladies stab a man with your
tongues."

"How did he seem when he came up to you?"

"As if he saw me not at all! Oh, Marie, he loves you!"

"Yes, he loves me, or he does not love me--there is heaven or hell for
me in that," she answered. "Between the two extremes there is no spot
where I can set my foot."

After thus carrying out her resolution, Marie gave way to grief, and
her face, beautified till then by these conflicting sentiments,
changed for the worse so rapidly that in a single day, during which
she floated incessantly between hope and despair, she lost the glow of
beauty, and the freshness which has its source in the absence of
passion or the ardor of joy. Anxious to ascertain the result of her
mad enterprise, Hulot and Corentin came to see her soon after her
return. She received them smiling.

"Well," she said to the commandant, whose care-worn face had a
questioning expression, "the fox is coming within range of your guns;
you will soon have a glorious triumph over him."

"What happened?" asked Corentin, carelessly, giving Mademoiselle de
Verneuil one of those oblique glances with which diplomatists of his
class spy on thought.

"Ah!" she said, "the Gars is more in love than ever; I made him come
with me to the gates of Fougeres."

"Your power seems to have stopped there," remarked Corentin; "the
fears of your /ci-devant/ are greater than the love you inspire."

"You judge him by yourself," she replied, with a contemptuous look.

"Well, then," said he, unmoved, "why did you not bring him here to
your own house?"

"Commandant," she said to Hulot, with a coaxing smile, "if he really
loves me, would you blame me for saving his life and getting him to
leave France?"

The old soldier came quickly up to her, took her hand, and kissed it
with a sort of enthusiasm. Then he looked at her fixedly and said in a
gloomy tone: "You forget my two friends and my sixty-three men."

"Ah, commandant," she cried, with all the naivete of passion, "he was
not accountable for that; he was deceived by a bad woman, Charette's
mistress, who would, I do believe, drink the blood of the Blues."

"Come, Marie," said Corentin, "don't tease the commandant; he does not
understand such jokes."

"Hold your tongue," she answered, "and remember that the day when you
displease me too much will have no morrow for you."

"I see, mademoiselle," said Hulot, without bitterness, "that I must
prepare for a fight."

"You are not strong enough, my dear colonel. I saw more than six
thousand men at Saint-James,--regular troops, artillery, and English
officers. But they cannot do much unless /he/ leads them? I agree with
Fouche, his presence is the head and front of everything."

"Are we to get his head?--that's the point," said Corentin,
impatiently.

"I don't know," she answered, carelessly.

"English officers!" cried Hulot, angrily, "that's all that was wanting
to make a regular brigand of him. Ha! ha! I'll give him English, I
will!"

"It seems to me, citizen-diplomat," said Hulot to Corentin, after the
two had taken leave and were at some distance from the house, "that
you allow that girl to send you to the right-about when she pleases."

"It is quite natural for you, commandant," replied Corentin, with a
thoughtful air, "to see nothing but fighting in what she said to us.
You soldiers never seem to know there are various ways of making war.
To use the passions of men and women like wires to be pulled for the
benefit of the State; to keep the running-gear of the great machine we
call government in good order, and fasten to it the desires of human
nature, like baited traps which it is fun to watch,--I call /that/
creating a world, like God, and putting ourselves at the centre of
it!"

"You will please allow me to prefer my calling to yours," said the
soldier, curtly. "You can do as you like with your running-gear; I
recognize no authority but that of the minister of war. I have my
orders; I shall take the field with veterans who don't skulk, and face
an enemy you want to catch behind."

"Oh, you can fight if you want to," replied Corentin. "From what that
girl has dropped, close-mouthed as you think she is, I can tell you
that you'll have to skirmish about, and I myself will give you the
pleasure of an interview with the Gars before long."

"How so?" asked Hulot, moving back a step to get a better view of this
strange individual.

"Mademoiselle de Verneuil is in love with him," replied Corentin, in
a thick voice, "and perhaps he loves her. A marquis, a knight of
Saint-Louis, young, brilliant, perhaps rich,--what a list of
temptations! She would be foolish indeed not to look after her own
interests and try to marry him rather than betray him. The girl is
attempting to fool us. But I saw hesitation in her eyes. They probably
have a rendezvous; perhaps they've met already. Well, to-morrow I shall
have him by the forelock. Yesterday he was nothing more than the enemy
of the Republic, to-day he is mine; and I tell you this, every man who
has been so rash as to come between that girl and me has died upon the
scaffold."

So saying, Corentin dropped into a reverie which hindered him from
observing the disgust on the face of the honest soldier as he
discovered the depths of this intrigue, and the mechanism of the means
employed by Fouche. Hulot resolved on the spot to thwart Corentin in
every way that did not conflict essentially with the success of the
government, and to give the Gars a fair chance of dying honorably,
sword in hand, before he could fall a prey to the executioner, for
whom this agent of the detective police acknowledged himself the
purveyor.

"If the First Consul would listen to me," thought Hulot, as he turned
his back on Corentin, "he would leave those foxes to fight
aristocrats, and send his solders on other business."

Corentin looked coldly after the old soldier, whose face had
brightened at the resolve, and his eyes gleamed with a sardonic
expression, which showed the mental superiority of this subaltern
Machiavelli.

"Give an ell of blue cloth to those fellows, and hang a bit of iron at
their waists," he said to himself, "and they'll think there's but one
way to kill people." Then, after walking up and down awhile very
slowly, he exclaimed suddenly, "Yes, the time has come, that woman
shall be mine! For five years I've been drawing the net round her, and
I have her now; with her, I can be a greater man in the government
than Fouche himself. Yes, if she loses the only man she has ever
loved, grief will give her to me, body and soul; but I must be on the
watch night and day."

A few moments later the pale face of this man might have been seen
through the window of a house, from which he could observe all who
entered the cul-de-sac formed by the line of houses running parallel
with Saint-Leonard, one of those houses being that now occupied by
Mademoiselle de Verneuil. With the patience of a cat watching a mouse
Corentin was there in the same place on the following morning,
attentive to the slightest noise, and subjecting the passers-by to the
closest examination. The day that was now beginning was a market-day.
Although in these calamitous times the peasants rarely risked
themselves in the towns, Corentin presently noticed a small man with a
gloomy face, wrapped in a goatskin, and carrying on his arm a small
flat basket; he was making his way in the direction of Mademoiselle de
Verneuil's house, casting careless glances about him. Corentin watched
him enter the house; then he ran down into the street, meaning to
waylay the man as he left; but on second thoughts it occurred to him
that if he called unexpectedly on Mademoiselle de Verneuil he might
surprise by a single glance the secret that was hidden in the basket
of the emissary. Besides, he had already learned that it was
impossible to extract anything from the inscrutable answers of Bretons
and Normans.

"Galope-Chopine!" cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil, when Francine
brought the man to her. "Does he love me?" she murmured to herself, in
a low voice.

The instinctive hope sent a brilliant color to her cheeks and joy into
her heart. Galope-Chopine looked alternately from the mistress to the
maid with evident distrust of the latter; but a sign from Mademoiselle
de Verneuil reassured him.

"Madame," he said, "about two o'clock /he/ will be at my house waiting
for you."

Emotion prevented Mademoiselle de Verneuil from giving any other reply
than a movement of her head, but the man understood her meaning. At
that moment Corentin's step was heard in the adjoining room, but
Galope-Chopine showed no uneasiness, though Mademoiselle de Verneuil's
look and shudder warned him of danger, and as soon as the spy had
entered the room the Chouan raised his voice to an ear-splitting tone.

"Ha, ha!" he said to Francine, "I tell you there's Breton butter /and/
Breton butter. You want the Gibarry kind, and you won't give more than
eleven sous a pound; then why did you send me to fetch it? It is good
butter that," he added, uncovering the basket to show the pats which
Barbette had made. "You ought to be fair, my good lady, and pay one
sou more."

His hollow voice betrayed no emotion, and his green eyes, shaded by
thick gray eyebrows, bore Corentin's piercing glance without
flinching.

"Nonsense, my good man, you are not here to sell butter; you are
talking to a lady who never bargained for a thing in her life. The
trade you run, old fellow, will shorten you by a head in a very few
days"; and Corentin, with a friendly tap on the man's shoulder, added,
"you can't keep up being a spy of the Blues and a spy of the Chouans
very long."

Galope-Chopine needed all his presence of mind to subdue his rage, and
not deny the accusation which his avarice had made a just one. He
contented himself with saying:--

"Monsieur is making game of me."

Corentin turned his back on the Chouan, but, while bowing to
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, whose heart stood still, he watched him in
the mirror behind her. Galope-Chopine, unaware of this, gave a glance
to Francine, to which she replied by pointing to the door, and saying,
"Come with me, my man, and we will settle the matter between us."

Nothing escaped Corentin, neither the fear which Mademoiselle de
Verneuil could not conceal under a smile, nor her color and the
contraction of her features, nor the Chouan's sign and Francine's
reply; he had seen all. Convinced that Galope-Chopine was sent by the
marquis, he caught the man by the long hairs of his goatskin as he was
leaving the room, turned him round to face him, and said with a keen
look: "Where do you live, my man? I want butter, too."

"My good monsieur," said the Chouan, "all Fougeres knows where I live.
I am--"

"Corentin!" exclaimed Mademoiselle de Verneuil, interrupting
Galope-Chopine. "Why do you come here at this time of day? I am
scarcely dressed. Let that peasant alone; he does not understand your
tricks any more than I understand the motive of them. You can go, my
man."

Galope-Chopine hesitated a moment. The indecision, real or feigned, of
the poor devil, who knew not which to obey, deceived even Corentin;
but the Chouan, finally, after an imperative gesture from the lady,
left the room with a dragging step. Mademoiselle de Verneuil and
Corentin looked at each other in silence. This time Marie's limpid
eyes could not endure the gleam of cruel fire in the man's look. The
resolute manner in which the spy had forced his way into her room, an
expression on his face which Marie had never seen there before, the
deadened tones of his shrill voice, his whole demeanor,--all these
things alarmed her; she felt that a secret struggle was about to take
place between them, and that he meant to employ against her all the
powers of his evil influence. But though she had at this moment a full
and distinct view of the gulf into which she was plunging, she
gathered strength from her love to shake off the icy chill of these
presentiments.

"Corentin," she said, with a sort of gayety, "I hope you are going to
let me make my toilet?"

"Marie," he said,--"yes, permit me to call you so,--you don't yet know
me. Listen; a much less sagacious man than I would see your love for
the Marquis de Montauran. I have several times offered you my heart
and hand. You have never thought me worthy of you; and perhaps you are
right. But however much you may feel yourself too high, too beautiful,
too superior for me, I can compel you to come down to my level. My
ambition and my maxims have given you a low opinion of me; frankly,
you are mistaken. Men are not worth even what I rate them at, and that
is next to nothing. I shall certainly attain a position which will
gratify your pride. Who will ever love you better, or make you more
absolutely mistress of yourself and of him, than the man who has loved
you now for five years? Though I run the risk of exciting your
suspicions,--for you cannot conceive that any one should renounce an
idolized woman out of excessive love,--I will now prove to you the
unselfishness of my passion. If the marquis loves you, marry him; but
before you do so, make sure of his sincerity. I could not endure to
see you deceived, for I do prefer your happiness to my own. My
resolution may surprise you; lay it to the prudence of a man who is
not so great a fool as to wish to possess a woman against her will. I
blame myself, not you, for the failure of my efforts to win you. I
hoped to do so by submission and devotion, for I have long, as you
well know, tried to make you happy according to my lights; but you
have never in any way rewarded me."

"I have suffered you to be near me," she said, haughtily.

"Add that you regret it."

"After involving me in this infamous enterprise, do you think that I
have any thanks to give you?"

"When I proposed to you an enterprise which was not exempt from blame
to timid minds," he replied, audaciously, "I had only your own
prosperity in view. As for me, whether I succeed or fail, I can make
all results further my ends. If you marry Montauran, I shall be
delighted to serve the Bourbons in Paris, where I am already a member
of the Clichy club. Now, if circumstances were to put me in
correspondence with the princes I should abandon the interests of the
Republic, which is already on its last legs. General Bonaparte is much
too able a man not to know that he can't be in England and in Italy at
the same time, and that is how the Republic is about to fall. I have
no doubt he made the 18th Brumaire to obtain greater advantages over
the Bourbons when it came to treating with them. He is a long-headed
fellow, and very keen; but the politicians will get the better of him
on their own ground. The betrayal of France is another scruple which
men of superiority leave to fools. I won't conceal from you that I
have come here with the necessary authority to open negotiations with
the Chouans, /or/ to further their destruction, as the case may be;
for Fouche, my patron, is deep; he has always played a double part;
during the Terror he was as much for Robespierre as for Danton--"

"Whom you basely abandoned," she said.

"Nonsense; he is dead,--forget him," replied Corentin. "Come, speak
honestly to me; I have set you the example. Old Hulot is deeper than
he looks; if you want to escape his vigilance, I can help you.
Remember that he holds all the valleys and will instantly detect a
rendezvous. If you make one in Fougeres, under his very eyes, you are
at the mercy of his patrols. See how quickly he knew that this Chouan
had entered your house. His military sagacity will show him that your
movements betray those of the Gars--if Montauran loves you."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil had never listened to a more affectionate
voice; Corentin certainly seemed sincere, and spoke confidingly. The
poor girl's heart was so open to generous impressions that she was on
the point of betraying her secret to the serpent who had her in his
folds, when it occurred to her that she had no proof beyond his own
words of his sincerity, and she felt no scruple in blinding him.

"Yes," she said, "you are right, Corentin. I do love the marquis, but
he does not love me--at least, I fear so; I can't help fearing that
the appointment he wishes me to make with him is a trap."

"But you said yesterday that he came as far as Fougeres with you,"
returned Corentin. "If he had meant to do you bodily harm you wouldn't
be here now."

"You've a cold heart, Corentin. You can draw shrewd conclusions as to
the ordinary events of human life, but not on those of passion.
Perhaps that is why you inspire me with such repulsion. As you are so
clear-sighted, you may be able to tell me why a man from whom I
separated myself violently two days ago now wishes me to meet him in a
house at Florigny on the road to Mayenne."

At this avowal, which seemed to escape her with a recklessness that
was not unnatural in so passionate a creature, Corentin flushed, for
he was still young; but he gave her a sidelong penetrating look,
trying to search her soul. The girl's artlessness was so well played,
however, that she deceived the spy, and he answered with crafty
good-humor, "Shall I accompany you at a distance? I can take a few
solders with me, and be ready to help and obey you."

"Very good," she said; "but promise me, on your honor,--no, I don't
believe in it; by your salvation,--but you don't believe in God; by
your soul,--but I don't suppose you have any! what pledge /can/ you
give me of your fidelity? and yet you expect me to trust you, and put
more than my life--my love, my vengeance--into your hands?"

The slight smile which crossed the pallid lips of the spy showed
Mademoiselle de Verneuil the danger she had just escaped. The man,
whose nostrils contracted instead of dilating, took the hand of his
victim, kissed it with every mark of the deepest respect, and left the
room with a bow that was not devoid of grace.

Three hours after this scene Mademoiselle de Verneuil, who feared the
man's return, left the town furtively by the Porte Saint-Leonard, and
made her way through the labyrinth of paths to the cottage of
Galope-Chopine, led by the dream of at last finding happiness, and
also by the purpose of saving her lover from the danger that
threatened him.

During this time Corentin had gone to find the commandant. He had some
difficulty in recognizing Hulot when he found him in a little square,
where he was busy with certain military preparations. The brave
veteran had made a sacrifice, the full merit of which may be difficult
to appreciate. His queue and his moustache were cut off, and his hair
had a sprinkling of powder. He had changed his uniform for a goatskin,
wore hobnailed shoes, a belt full of pistols, and carried a heavy
carbine. In this costume he was reviewing about two hundred of the
natives of Fougeres, all in the same kind of dress, which was fitted
to deceive the eye of the most practised Chouan. The warlike spirit of
the little town and the Breton character were fully displayed in this
scene, which was not at all uncommon. Here and there a few mothers and
sisters were bringing to their sons and brothers gourds filled with
brandy, or forgotten pistols. Several old men were examining into the
number and condition of the cartridges of these young national guards
dressed in the guise of Chouans, whose gaiety was more in keeping with
a hunting expedition than the dangerous duty they were undertaking. To
them, such encounters with Chouannerie, where the Breton of the town
fought the Breton of the country district, had taken the place of the
old chivalric tournaments. This patriotic enthusiasm may possibly have
been connected with certain purchases of the "national domain." Still,
the benefits of the Revolution which were better understood and
appreciated in the towns, party spirit, and a certain national delight
in war, had a great deal to do with their ardor.

Hulot, much gratified, was going through the ranks and getting
information from Gudin, on whom he was now bestowing the confidence
and good-will he had formerly shown to Merle and Gerard. A number of
the inhabitants stood about watching the preparations, and comparing
the conduct of their tumultuous contingent with the regulars of
Hulot's brigade. Motionless and silent the Blues were awaiting, under
control of their officers, the orders of the commandant, whose figure
they followed with their eyes as he passed from rank to rank of the
contingent. When Corentin came near the old warrior he could not help
smiling at the change which had taken place in him. He looked like a
portrait that has little or no resemblance to the original.

"What's all this?" asked Corentin.

"Come with us under fire, and you'll find out," replied Hulot.

"Oh! I'm not a Fougeres man," said Corentin.

"Easy to see that, citizen," retorted Gudin.

A few contemptuous laughs came from the nearest ranks.

"Do you think," said Corentin, sharply, "that the only way to serve
France is with bayonets?"

Then he turned his back to the laughers, and asked a woman beside him
if she knew the object of the expedition.

"Hey! my good man, the Chouans are at Florigny. They say there are
more than three thousand, and they are coming to take Fougeres."

"Florigny?" cried Corentin, turning white; "then the rendezvous is not
there! Is Florigny on the road to Mayenne?" he asked.

"There are not two Florignys," replied the woman, pointing in the
direction of the summit of La Pelerine.

"Are you going in search of the Marquis de Montauran?" said Corentin
to Hulot.

"Perhaps I am," answered the commandant, curtly.

"He is not at Florigny," said Corentin. "Send your troops there by all
means; but keep a few of those imitation Chouans of yours with you,
and wait for me."

"He is too malignant not to know what he's about," thought Hulot as
Corentin made off rapidly, "he's the king of spies."

Hulot ordered the battalion to start. The republican soldiers marched
without drums and silently through the narrow suburb which led to the
Mayenne high-road, forming a blue and red line among the trees and
houses. The disguised guard followed them; but Hulot, detaining Gudin
and about a score of the smartest young fellows of the town, remained
in the little square, awaiting Corentin, whose mysterious manner had
piqued his curiosity. Francine herself told the astute spy, whose
suspicions she changed into certainty, of her mistress's departure.
Inquiring of the post guard at the Porte Saint-Leonard, he learned
that Mademoiselle de Verneuil had passed that way. Rushing to the
Promenade, he was, unfortunately, in time to see her movements. Though
she was wearing a green dress and hood, to be less easily
distinguished, the rapidity of her almost distracted step enabled him
to follow her with his eye through the leafless hedges, and to guess
the point towards which she was hurrying.

"Ha!" he cried, "you said you were going to Florigny, but you are in
the valley of Gibarry! I am a fool, she has tricked me! No matter, I
can light my lamp by day as well as by night."

Corentin, satisfied that he knew the place of the lovers' rendezvous,
returned in all haste to the little square, which Hulot, resolved not
to wait any longer, was just quitting to rejoin his troops.

"Halt, general!" he cried to the commandant, who turned round.

He then told Hulot the events relating to the marquis and Mademoiselle
de Verneuil, and showed him the scheme of which he held a thread.
Hulot, struck by his perspicacity, seized him by the arm.

"God's thunder! citizen, you are right," he cried. "The brigands are
making a false attack over there to keep the coast clear; but the two
columns I sent to scour the environs between Antrain and Vitre have
not yet returned, so we shall have plenty of reinforcements if we need
them; and I dare say we shall, for the Gars is not such a fool as to
risk his life without a bodyguard of those damned owls. Gudin," he
added, "go and tell Captain Lebrun that he must rub those fellows'
noses at Florigny without me, and come back yourself in a flash. You
know the paths. I'll wait till you return, and /then/--we'll avenge
those murders at La Vivetiere. Thunder! how he runs," he added, seeing
Gudin disappear as if by magic. "Gerard would have loved him."

On his return Gudin found Hulot's little band increased in numbers by
the arrival of several soldiers taken from the various posts in the
town. The commandant ordered him to choose a dozen of his compatriots
who could best counterfeit the Chouans, and take them out by the Porte
Saint-Leonard, so as to creep round the side of the Saint-Sulpice
rocks which overlooks the valley of Couesnon and on which was the
hovel of Galope-Chopine. Hulot himself went out with the rest of his
troop by the Porte Saint-Sulpice, to reach the summit of the same
rocks, where, according to his calculations, he ought to meet the men
under Beau-Pied, whom he meant to use as a line of sentinels from the
suburb of Saint-Sulpice to the Nid-aux-Crocs.

Corentin, satisfied with having delivered over the fate of the Gars to
his implacable enemies, went with all speed to the Promenade, so as to
follow with his eyes the military arrangements of the commandant. He
soon saw Gudin's little squad issuing from the valley of the Nancon
and following the line of the rocks to the great valley, while Hulot,
creeping round the castle of Fougeres, was mounting the dangerous path
which leads to the summit of Saint-Sulpice. The two companies were
therefore advancing on parallel lines. The trees and shrubs, draped by
the rich arabesques of the hoarfrost, threw whitish reflections which
enabled the watcher to see the gray lines of the squads in motion.
When Hulot reached the summit of the rocks, he detached all the
soldiers in uniform from his main body, and made them into a line of
sentinels, each communicating with the other, the first with Gudin,
the last with Hulot; so that no shrub could escape the bayonets of the
three lines which were now in a position to hunt the Gars across field
and mountain.

"The sly old wolf!" thought Corentin, as the shining muzzle of the
last gun disappeared in the bushes. "The Gars is done for. If Marie
had only betrayed that damned marquis, she and I would have been
united in the strongest of all bonds--a vile deed. But she's mine, in
any case."

The twelve young men under Gudin soon reached the base of the rocks of
Saint-Sulpice. Here Gudin himself left the road with six of them,
jumping the stiff hedge into the first field of gorse that he came to,
while the other six by his orders did the same on the other side of
the road. Gudin advanced to an apple-tree which happened to be in the
middle of the field. Hearing the rustle of this movement through the
gorse, seven or eight men, at the head of whom was Beau-Pied, hastily
hid behind some chestnut-trees which topped the bank of this
particular field. Gudin's men did not see them, in spite of the white
reflections of the hoar-frost and their own practised sight.

"Hush! here they are," said Beau-Pied, cautiously putting out his
head. "The brigands have more men than we, but we have 'em at the
muzzles of our guns, and we mustn't miss them, or, by the Lord, we are
not fit to be soldiers of the pope."

By this time Gudin's keen eyes had discovered a few muzzles pointing
through the branches at his little squad. Just then eight voices cried
in derision, "Qui vive?" and eight shots followed. The balls whistled
round Gudin and his men. One fell, another was shot in the arm. The
five others who were safe and sound replied with a volley and the cry,
"Friends!" Then they marched rapidly on their assailants so as to
reach them before they had time to reload.

"We did not know how true we spoke," cried Gudin, as he recognized the
uniforms and the battered hats of his own brigade. "Well, we behaved
like Bretons, and fought before explaining."

The other men were stupefied on recognizing the little company.

"Who the devil would have known them in those goatskins?" cried
Beau-Pied, dismally.

"It is a misfortune," said Gudin, "but we are all innocent if you were
not informed of the sortie. What are you doing here?" he asked.

"A dozen of those Chouans are amusing themselves by picking us off,
and we are getting away as best we can, like poisoned rats; but by
dint of scrambling over these hedges and rocks--may the lightning
blast 'em!--our compasses have got so rusty we are forced to take a
rest. I think those brigands are now somewhere near the old hovel
where you see that smoke."

"Good!" cried Gudin. "You," he added to Beau-Pied and his men, "fall
back towards the rocks through the fields, and join the line of
sentinels you'll find there. You can't go with us, because you are in
uniform. We mean to make an end of those curs now; the Gars is with
them. I can't stop to tell you more. To the right, march! and don't
administer any more shots to our own goatskins; you'll know ours by
their cravats, which they twist round their necks and don't tie."

Gudin left his two wounded men under the apple-tree, and marched
towards Galope-Chopine's cottage, which Beau-Pied had pointed out to
him, the smoke from the chimney serving as a guide.

While the young officer was thus closing in upon the Chouans, the
little detachment under Hulot had reached a point still parallel with
that at which Gudin had arrived. The old soldier, at the head of his
men, was silently gliding along the hedges with the ardor of a young
man; he jumped them from time to time actively enough, casting his
wary eyes to the heights and listening with the ear of a hunter to
every noise. In the third field to which he came he found a woman
about thirty years old, with bent back, hoeing the ground vigorously,
while a small boy with a sickle in his hand was knocking the hoarfrost
from the rushes, which he cut and laid in a heap. At the noise Hulot
made in jumping the hedge, the boy and his mother raised their heads.
Hulot mistook the young woman for an old one, naturally enough.
Wrinkles, coming long before their time, furrowed her face and neck;
she was clothed so grotesquely in a worn-out goatskin that if it had
not been for a dirty yellow petticoat, a distinctive mark of sex,
Hulot would hardly have known the gender she belonged to; for the
meshes of her long black hair were twisted up and hidden by a red
worsted cap. The tatters of the little boy did not cover him, but left
his skin exposed.

"Ho! old woman!" called Hulot, in a low voice, approaching her, "where
is the Gars?"

The twenty men who accompanied Hulot now jumped the hedge.

"Hey! if you want the Gars you'll have to go back the way you came,"
said the woman, with a suspicious glance at the troop.

"Did I ask you the road to Fougeres, old carcass?" said Hulot,
roughly. "By Saint-Anne of Auray, have you seen the Gars go by?"

"I don't know what you mean," replied the woman, bending over her hoe.

"You damned garce, do you want to have us eaten up by the Blues who
are after us?"

At these words the woman raised her head and gave another look of
distrust at the troop as she replied, "How can the Blues be after you?
I have just seen eight or ten of them who were going back to Fougeres
by the lower road."

"One would think she meant to stab us with that nose of hers!" cried
Hulot. "Here, look, you old nanny-goat!"

And he showed her in the distance three or four of his sentinels,
whose hats, guns, and uniforms it was easy to recognize.

"Are you going to let those fellows cut the throats of men who are
sent by Marche-a-Terre to protect the Gars?" he cried, angrily.

"Ah, beg pardon," said the woman; "but it is so easy to be deceived.
What parish do you belong to?"

"Saint-Georges," replied two or three of the men, in the Breton
patois, "and we are dying of hunger."

"Well, there," said the woman; "do you see that smoke down there?
that's my house. Follow the path to the right, and you will come
to the rock above it. Perhaps you'll meet my man on the way.
Galope-Chopine is sure to be on watch to warn the Gars. He is
spending the day in our house," she said, proudly, "as you seem
to know."

"Thank you, my good woman," replied Hulot. "Forward, march! God's
thunder! we've got him," he added, speaking to his men.

The detachment followed its leader at a quick step through the path
pointed out to them. The wife of Galope-Chopine turned pale as she
heard the un-Catholic oath of the so-called Chouan. She looked at the
gaiters and goatskins of his men, then she caught her boy in her arms,
and sat down on the ground, saying, "May the holy Virgin of Auray and
the ever blessed Saint-Labre have pity upon us! Those men are not
ours; their shoes have no nails in them. Run down by the lower road
and warn your father; you may save his head," she said to the boy, who
disappeared like a deer among the bushes.

* * * * *

Mademoiselle de Verneuil met no one on her way, neither Blues nor
Chouans. Seeing the column of blue smoke which was rising from the
half-ruined chimney of Galope-Chopine's melancholy dwelling, her heart
was seized with a violent palpitation, the rapid, sonorous beating of
which rose to her throat in waves. She stopped, rested her hand
against a tree, and watched the smoke which was serving as a beacon to
the foes as well as to the friends of the young chieftain. Never had
she felt such overwhelming emotion.

"Ah! I love him too much," she said, with a sort of despair. "To-day,
perhaps, I shall no longer be mistress of myself--"

She hurried over the distance which separated her from the cottage,
and reached the courtyard, the filth of which was now stiffened by the
frost. The big dog sprang up barking, but a word from Galope-Chopine
silenced him and he wagged his tail. As she entered the house Marie
gave a look which included everything. The marquis was not there. She
breathed more freely, and saw with pleasure that the Chouan had taken
some pains to clean the dirty and only room in his hovel. He now took
his duck-gun, bowed silently to his guest and left the house, followed
by his dog. Marie went to the threshold of the door and watched him as
he took the path to the right of his hut. From there she could
overlook a series of fields, the curious openings to which formed a
perspective of gates; for the leafless trees and hedges were no longer
a barrier to a full view of the country. When the Chouan's broad hat
was out of sight Mademoiselle de Verneuil turned round to look for the
church at Fougeres, but the shed concealed it. She cast her eyes over
the valley of the Couesnon, which lay before her like a vast sheet of
muslin, the whiteness of which still further dulled a gray sky laden
with snow. It was one of those days when nature seems dumb and noises
are absorbed by the atmosphere. Therefore, though the Blues and their
contingent were marching through the country in three lines, forming a
triangle which drew together as they neared the cottage, the silence
was so profound that Mademoiselle de Verneuil was overcome by a
presentiment which added a sort of physical pain to her mental
torture. Misfortune was in the air.

At last, in a spot where a little curtain of wood closed the
perspective of gates, she saw a young man jumping the barriers like a
squirrel and running with astonishing rapidity. "It is he!" she
thought.

The Gars was dressed as a Chouan, with a musket slung from his
shoulder over his goatskin, and would have been quite disguised were
it not for the grace of his movements. Marie withdrew hastily into the
cottage, obeying one of those instinctive promptings which are as
little explicable as fear itself. The young man was soon beside her
before the chimney, where a bright fire was burning. Both were
voiceless, fearing to look at each other, or even to make a movement.
One and the same hope united them, the same doubt; it was agony, it
was joy.

"Monsieur," said Mademoiselle de Verneuil at last, in a trembling
voice, "your safety alone has brought me here."

"My safety!" he said, bitterly.

"Yes," she answered; "so long as I stay at Fougeres your life is
threatened, and I love you too well not to leave it. I go to-night."

"Leave me! ah, dear love, I shall follow you."

"Follow me!--the Blues?"

"Dear Marie, what have the Blues got to do with our love?"

"But it seems impossible that you can stay with me in France, and
still more impossible that you should leave it with me."

"Is there anything impossible to those who love?"

"Ah, true! true! all is possible--have I not the courage to resign
you, for your sake."

"What! you could give yourself to a hateful being whom you did not
love, and you refuse to make the happiness of a man who adores you,
whose life you fill, who swears to be yours, and yours only. Hear me,
Marie, do you love me?"

"Yes," she said.

"Then be mine."

"You forget the infamous career of a lost woman; I return to it, I
leave you--yes, that I may not bring upon your head the contempt that
falls on mine. Without that fear, perhaps--"

"But if I fear nothing?"

"Can I be sure of that? I am distrustful. Who could be otherwise in a
position like mine? If the love we inspire cannot last at least it
should be complete, and help us to bear with joy the injustice of the
world. But you, what have you done for me? You desire me. Do you think
that lifts you above other men? Suppose I bade you renounce your
ideas, your hopes, your king (who will, perhaps, laugh when he hears
you have died for him, while I would die for you with sacred joy!); or
suppose I should ask you to send your submission to the First Consul
so that you could follow me to Paris, or go with me to America,--away
from the world where all is vanity; suppose I thus tested you, to know
if you loved me for myself as at this moment I love you? To say all in
a word, if I wished, instead of rising to your level, that you should
fall to mine, what would you do?"

"Hush, Marie, be silent, do not slander yourself," he cried. "Poor
child, I comprehend you. If my first desire was passion, my passion
now is love. Dear soul of my soul, you are as noble as your name, I
know it,--as great as you are beautiful. I am noble enough, I feel
myself great enough to force the world to receive you. Is it because I
foresee in you the source of endless, incessant pleasure, or because I
find in your soul those precious qualities which make a man forever
love the one woman? I do not know the cause, but this I know--that my
love for you is boundless. I know I can no longer live without you.
Yes, life would be unbearable unless you are ever with me."

"Ever with you!"

"Ah! Marie, will you not understand me?"

"You think to flatter me by the offer of your hand and name," she
said, with apparent haughtiness, but looking fixedly at the marquis as
if to detect his inmost thought. "How do you know you would love me
six months hence? and then what would be my fate? No, a mistress is
the only woman who is sure of a man's heart; duty, law, society, the
interests of children, are poor auxiliaries. If her power lasts it
gives her joys and flatteries which make the trials of life endurable.
But to be your wife and become a drag upon you,--rather than that, I
prefer a passing love and a true one, though death and misery be its
end. Yes, I could be a virtuous mother, a devoted wife; but to keep
those instincts firmly in a woman's soul the man must not marry her in
a rush of passion. Besides, how do I know that you will please me
to-morrow? No, I will not bring evil upon you; I leave Brittany," she
said, observing hesitation in his eyes. "I return to Fougeres now,
where you cannot come to me--"

"I can! and if to-morrow you see smoke on the rocks of Saint-Sulpice
you will know that I shall be with you at night, your lover, your
husband,--what you will that I be to you; I brave all!"

"Ah! Alphonse, you love me well," she said, passionately, "to risk
your life before you give it to me."

He did not answer; he looked at her and her eyes fell; but he read in
her ardent face a passion equal to his own, and he held out his arms
to her. A sort of madness overcame her, and she let herself fall
softly on his breast, resolved to yield to him, and turn this yielding
to great results,--staking upon it her future happiness, which would
become more certain if she came victorious from this crucial test. But
her head had scarcely touched her lover's shoulder when a slight noise
was heard without. She tore herself from his arms as if suddenly
awakened, and sprang from the cottage. Her coolness came back to her,
and she thought of the situation.

"He might have accepted me and scorned me," she reflected. "Ah! if I
could think that, I would kill him. But not yet!" she added, catching
sight of Beau-Pied, to whom she made a sign which the soldier was
quick to understand. He turned on his heel, pretending to have seen
nothing. Mademoiselle de Verneuil re-entered the cottage, putting her
finger to her lips to enjoin silence.

"They are there!" she whispered in a frightened voice.

"Who?"

"The Blues."

"Ah! must I die without one kiss!"

"Take it," she said.

He caught her to him, cold and unresisting, and gathered from her lips
a kiss of horror and of joy, for while it was the first, it might also
be the last. Then they went together to the door and looked cautiously
out. The marquis saw Gudin and his men holding the paths leading to
the valley. Then he turned to the line of gates where the first rotten
trunk was guarded by five men. Without an instant's pause he jumped on
the barrel of cider and struck a hole through the thatch of the roof,
from which to spring upon the rocks behind the house; but he drew his
head hastily back through the gap he had made, for Hulot was on the
height; his retreat was cut off in that direction. The marquis turned
and looked at his mistress, who uttered a cry of despair; for she
heard the tramp of the three detachments near the house.

"Go out first," he said; "you shall save me."

Hearing the words, to her all-glorious, she went out and stood before
the door. The marquis loaded his musket. Measuring with his eye the
space between the door of the hut and the old rotten trunk where seven
men stood, the Gars fired into their midst and sprang forward
instantly, forcing a passage through them. The three troops rushed
towards the opening through which he had passed, and saw him running
across the field with incredible celerity.

"Fire! fire! a thousand devils! You're not Frenchmen! Fire, I say!"
called Hulot.

As he shouted these words from the height above, his men and Gudin's
fired a volley, which was fortunately ill-aimed. The marquis reached
the gate of the next field, but as he did so he was almost caught by
Gudin, who was close upon his heels. The Gars redoubled his speed.
Nevertheless, he and his pursuer reached the next barrier together;
but the marquis dashed his musket at Gudin's head with so good an aim
that he stopped his rush. It is impossible to depict the anxiety
betrayed by Marie, or the interest of Hulot and his troops as they
watched the scene. They all, unconsciously or silently, repeated the
gestures which they saw the runners making. The Gars and Gudin reached
the little wood together, but as they did so the latter stopped and
darted behind a tree. About twenty Chouans, afraid to fire at a
distance lest they should kill their leader, rushed from the copse and
riddled the tree with balls. Hulot's men advanced at a run to save
Gudin, who, being without arms, retreated from tree to tree, seizing
his opportunity as the Chouans reloaded. His danger was soon over.
Hulot and the Blues met him at the spot where the marquis had thrown
his musket. At this instant Gudin perceived his adversary sitting
among the trees and out of breath, and he left his comrades firing at
the Chouans, who had retreated behind a lateral hedge; slipping round
them, he darted towards the marquis with the agility of a wild animal.
Observing this manoeuvre the Chouans set up a cry to warn their leader;
then, having fired on the Blues and their contingent with the gusto of
poachers, they boldly made a rush for them; but Hulot's men sprang
through the hedge which served them as a rampart and took a bloody
revenge. The Chouans then gained the road which skirted the fields and
took to the heights which Hulot had committed the blunder of
abandoning. Before the Blues had time to reform, the Chouans were
entrenched behind the rocks, where they could fire with impunity on
the Republicans if the latter made any attempt to dislodge them.

While Hulot and his soldiers went slowly towards the little wood to
meet Gudin, the men from Fougeres busied themselves in rifling the
dead Chouans and dispatching those who still lived. In this fearful
war neither party took prisoners. The marquis having made good his
escape, the Chouans and the Blues mutually recognized their respective
positions and the uselessness of continuing the fight; so that both
sides prepared to retreat.

"Ha! ha!" cried one of the Fougeres men, busy about the bodies,
"here's a bird with yellow wings."

And he showed his companions a purse full of gold which he had just
found in the pocket of a stout man dressed in black.

"What's this?" said another, pulling a breviary from the dead man's
coat.

"Communion bread--he's a priest!" cried the first man, flinging the
breviary on the ground.

"Here's a wretch!" cried a third, finding only two crowns in the
pockets of the body he was stripping, "a cheat!"

"But he's got a fine pair of shoes!" said a soldier, beginning to pull
them off.

"You can't have them unless they fall to your share," said the
Fougeres man, dragging the dead feet away and flinging the boots on a
heap of clothing already collected.

Another Chouan took charge of the money, so that lots might be drawn
as soon as the troops were all assembled. When Hulot returned with
Gudin, whose last attempt to overtake the Gars was useless as well as
perilous, he found about a score of his own men and thirty of the
contingent standing around eleven of the enemy, whose naked bodies
were thrown into a ditch at the foot of the bank.

"Soldiers!" cried Hulot, sternly. "I forbid you to share that
clothing. Form in line, quick!"

"Commandant," said a soldier, pointing to his shoes, at the points of
which five bare toes could be seen on each foot, "all right about the
money, but those boots," motioning to a pair of hobnailed boots with
the butt of his gun, "would fit me like a glove."

"Do you want to put English shoes on your feet?" retorted Hulot.

"But," said one of the Fougeres men, respectfully, "we've divided the
booty all through the war."

"I don't prevent you civilians from following your own ways," replied
Hulot, roughly.

"Here, Gudin, here's a purse with three louis," said the officer who
was distributing the money. "You have run hard and the commandant
won't prevent your taking it."

Hulot looked askance at Gudin, and saw that he turned pale.

"It's my uncle's purse!" exclaimed the young man.

Exhausted as he was with his run, he sprang to the mound of bodies,
and the first that met his eyes was that of his uncle. But he had
hardly recognized the rubicund face now furrowed with blue lines, and
seen the stiffened arms and the gunshot wound before he gave a stifled
cry, exclaiming, "Let us be off, commandant."

The Blues started. Hulot gave his arm to his young friend.

"God's thunder!" he cried. "Never mind, it is no great matter."

"But he is dead," said Gudin, "dead! He was my only relation, and
though he cursed me, still he loved me. If the king returns, the
neighborhood will want my head, and my poor uncle would have saved
it."

"What a fool Gudin is," said one of the men who had stayed behind to
share the spoils; "his uncle was rich, and he hasn't had time to make
a will and disinherit him."

The division over, the men of Fougeres rejoined the little battalion
of the Blues on their way to the town.

* * * * *

Towards midnight the cottage of Galope-Chopine, hitherto the scene of
life without a care, was full of dread and horrible anxiety. Barbette
and her little boy returned at the supper-hour, one with her heavy
burden of rushes, the other carrying fodder for the cattle. Entering
the hut, they looked about in vain for Galope-Chopine; the miserable
chamber never looked to them as large, so empty was it. The fire was
out, and the darkness, the silence, seemed to tell of some disaster.
Barbette hastened to make a blaze, and to light two /oribus/, the name
given to candles made of pitch in the region between the villages of
Amorique and the Upper Loire, and still used beyond Amboise in the
Vendomois districts. Barbette did these things with the slowness of a
person absorbed in one overpowering feeling. She listened to every
sound. Deceived by the whistling of the wind she went often to the
door of the hut, returning sadly. She cleaned two beakers, filled them
with cider, and placed them on the long table. Now and again she
looked at her boy, who watched the baking of the buckwheat cakes, but
did not speak to him. The lad's eyes happened to rest on the nails
which usually held his father's duck-gun, and Barbette trembled as she
noticed that the gun was gone. The silence was broken only by the
lowing of a cow or the splash of the cider as it dropped at regular
intervals from the bung of the cask. The poor woman sighed while she
poured into three brown earthenware porringers a sort of soup made of
milk, biscuit broken into bits, and boiled chestnuts.

"They must have fought in the field next to the Berandiere," said the
boy.

"Go and see," replied his mother.

The child ran to the place where the fighting had, as he said, taken
place. In the moonlight he found the heap of bodies, but his father
was not among them, and he came back whistling joyously, having picked
up several five-franc pieces trampled in the mud and overlooked by the
victors. His mother was sitting on a stool beside the fire, employed
in spinning flax. He made a negative sign to her, and then, ten
o'clock having struck from the tower of Saint-Leonard, he went to bed,
muttering a prayer to the holy Virgin of Auray. At dawn, Barbette, who
had not closed her eyes, gave a cry of joy, as she heard in the
distance a sound she knew well of hobnailed shoes, and soon after
Galope-Chopine's scowling face presented itself.

"Thanks to Saint-Labre," he said, "to whom I owe a candle, the Gars is
safe. Don't forget that we now owe three candles to the saint."

He seized a beaker of cider and emptied it at a draught without
drawing breath. When his wife had served his soup and taken his gun
and he himself was seated on the wooden bench, he said, looking at the
fire: "I can't make out how the Blues got here. The fighting was at
Florigny. Who the devil could have told them that the Gars was in our
house; no one knew it but he and the handsome garce and we--"

Barbette turned white.

"They made me believe they were the gars of Saint-Georges," she said,
trembling, "it was I who told them the Gars was here."

Galope-Chopine turned pale himself and dropped his porringer on the
table.

"I sent the boy to warn you," said Barbette, frightened, "didn't you
meet him?"

The Chouan rose and struck his wife so violently that she dropped,
pale as death, upon the bed.

"You cursed woman," he said, "you have killed me!" Then seized with
remorse, he took her in his arms. "Barbette!" he cried, "Barbette!
--Holy Virgin, my hand was too heavy!"

"Do you think," she said, opening her eyes, "that Marche-a-Terre will
hear of it?"

"The Gars will certainly inquire who betrayed him."

"Will he tell it to Marche-a-Terre?"

"Marche-a-Terre and Pille-Miche were both at Florigny."

Barbette breathed a little easier.

"If they touch a hair of your head," she cried, "I'll rinse their
glasses with vinegar."

"Ah! I can't eat," said Galope-Chopine, anxiously.

His wife set another pitcher full of cider before him, but he paid no
heed to it. Two big tears rolled from the woman's eyes and moistened
the deep furrows of her withered face.

"Listen to me, wife; to-morrow morning you must gather fagots on the
rocks of Saint-Sulpice, to the right and Saint-Leonard and set fire to
them. That is a signal agreed upon between the Gars and the old rector
of Saint-Georges who is to come and say mass for him."

"Is the Gars going to Fougeres?"

"Yes, to see his handsome garce. I have been sent here and there all
day about it. I think he is going to marry her and carry her off; for
he told me to hire horses and have them ready on the road to
Saint-Malo."

Thereupon Galope-Chopine, who was tired out, went to bed for an hour
or two, at the end of which time he again departed. Later, on the
following morning, he returned, having carefully fulfilled all the
commissions entrusted to him by the Gars. Finding that Marche-a-Terre
and Pille-Miche had not appeared at the cottage, he relieved the
apprehensions of his wife, who went off, reassured, to the rocks of
Saint-Sulpice, where she had collected the night before several piles
of fagots, now covered with hoarfrost. The boy went with her, carrying
fire in a broken wooden shoe.

Hardly had his wife and son passed out of sight behind the shed when
Galope-Chopine heard the noise of men jumping the successive barriers,
and he could dimly see, through the fog which was growing thicker, the
forms of two men like moving shadows.

"It is Marche-a-Terre and Pille-Miche," he said, mentally; then he
shuddered. The two Chouans entered the courtyard and showed their
gloomy faces under the broad-brimmed hats which made them look like
the figures which engravers introduce into their landscapes.

"Good-morning, Galope-Chopine," said Marche-a-Terre, gravely.

"Good-morning, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre," replied the other, humbly.
"Will you come in and drink a drop? I've some cold buckwheat cake and
fresh-made butter."

"That's not to be refused, cousin," said Pille-Miche.

The two Chouans entered the cottage. So far there was nothing alarming
for the master of the house, who hastened to fill three beakers from
his huge cask of cider, while Marche-a-Terre and Pille-Miche, sitting
on the polished benches on each side of the long table, cut the cake
and spread it with the rich yellow butter from which the milk spurted
as the knife smoothed it. Galope-Chopine placed the beakers full of
frothing cider before his guests, and the three Chouans began to eat;
but from time to time the master of the house cast side-long glances
at Marche-a-Terre as he drank his cider.

"Lend me your snuff-box," said Marche-a-Terre to Pille-Miche.

Having shaken several pinches into the palm of his hand the Breton
inhaled the tobacco like a man who is making ready for serious
business.

"It is cold," said Pille-Miche, rising to shut the upper half of the
door.

The daylight, already dim with fog, now entered only through the
little window, and feebly lighted the room and the two seats; the
fire, however, gave out a ruddy glow. Galope-Chopine refilled the
beakers, but his guests refused to drink again, and throwing aside
their large hats looked at him solemnly. Their gestures and the look
they gave him terrified Galope-Chopine, who fancied he saw blood in
the red woollen caps they wore.

"Fetch your axe," said Marche-a-Terre.

"But, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, what do you want it for?"

"Come, cousin, you know very well," said Pille-Miche, pocketing his
snuff-box which Marche-a-Terre returned to him; "you are condemned."

The two Chouans rose together and took their guns.

"Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, I never said one word about the Gars--"

"I told you to fetch your axe," said Marche-a-Terre.

The hapless man knocked against the wooden bedstead of his son, and
several five-franc pieces rolled on the floor. Pille-Miche picked them
up.

"Ho! ho! the Blues paid you in new money," cried Marche-a-Terre.

"As true as that's the image of Saint-Labre," said Galope-Chopine, "I
have told nothing. Barbette mistook the Fougeres men for the gars of
Saint-Georges, and that's the whole of it."

"Why do you tell things to your wife?" said Marche-a-Terre, roughly.

"Besides, cousin, we don't want excuses, we want your axe. You are
condemned."

At a sign from his companion, Pille-Miche helped Marche-a-Terre to
seize the victim. Finding himself in their grasp Galope-Chopine lost
all power and fell on his knees holding up his hands to his slayers in
desperation.

"My friends, my good friends, my cousin," he said, "what will become
of my little boy?"

"I will take charge of him," said Marche-a-Terre.

"My good comrades," cried the victim, turning livid. "I am not fit to
die. Don't make me go without confession. You have the right to take
my life, but you've no right to make me lose a blessed eternity."

"That is true," said Marche-a-Terre, addressing Pille-Miche.

The two Chouans waited a moment in much uncertainty, unable to decide
this case of conscience. Galope-Chopine listened to the rustling of
the wind as though he still had hope. Suddenly Pille-Miche took him by
the arm into a corner of the hut.

"Confess your sins to me," he said, "and I will tell them to a priest
of the true Church, and if there is any penance to do I will do it for
you."

Galope-Chopine obtained some respite by the way in which he confessed
his sins; but in spite of their number and the circumstances of each
crime, he came finally to the end of them.

"Cousin," he said, imploringly, "since I am speaking to you as I would
to my confessor, I do assure you, by the holy name of God, that I have
nothing to reproach myself with except for having, now and then,
buttered my bread on both sides; and I call on Saint-Labre, who is
there over the chimney-piece, to witness that I have never said one
word about the Gars. No, my good friends, I have not betrayed him."

"Very good, that will do, cousin; you can explain all that to God in
course of time."

"But let me say good-bye to Barbette."

"Come," said Marche-a-Terre, "if you don't want us to think you worse
than you are, behave like a Breton and be done with it."

The two Chouans seized him again and threw him on the bench where he
gave no other sign of resistance than the instinctive and convulsive
motions of an animal, uttering a few smothered groans, which ceased
when the axe fell. The head was off at the first blow. Marche-a-Terre
took it by the hair, left the room, sought and found a large nail in
the rough casing of the door, and wound the hair about it; leaving the
bloody head, the eyes of which he did not even close, to hang there.

The two Chouans then washed their hands, without the least haste, in a
pot full of water, picked up their hats and guns, and jumped the gate,
whistling the "Ballad of the Captain." Pille-Miche began to sing in a
hoarse voice as he reached the field the last verses of that rustic
song, their melody floating on the breeze:--

"At the first town
Her lover dressed her
All in white satin;

"At the next town
Her lover dressed her
In gold and silver.

"So beautiful was she
They gave her veils
To wear in the regiment."

The tune became gradually indistinguishable as the Chouans got further
away; but the silence of the country was so great that several of the
notes reached Barbette's ear as she neared home, holding her boy by
the hand. A peasant-woman never listens coldly to that song, so
popular is it in the West of France, and Barbette began,
unconsciously, to sing the first verses:--

"Come, let us go, my girl,
Let us go to the war;
Let us go, it is time.

"Brave captain,
Let it not trouble you,
But my daughter is not for you.

"You shall not have her on earth,
You shall not have her at sea,
Unless by treachery.

"The father took his daughter,
He unclothed her
And flung her out to sea.

"The captain, wiser still,
Into the waves he jumped
And to the shore he brought her.

"Come, let us go, my girl,
Let us go to the war;
Let us go, it is time.

"At the first town
Her lover dressed her,"
Etc., etc.

As Barbette reached this verse of the song, where Pille-Miche had
begun it, she was entering the courtyard of her home; her tongue
suddenly stiffened, she stood still, and a great cry, quickly
repressed, came from her gaping lips.

"What is it, mother?" said the child.

"Walk alone," she cried, pulling her hand away and pushing him
roughly; "you have neither father nor mother."

The child, who was rubbing his shoulder and weeping, suddenly caught
sight of the thing on the nail; his childlike face kept the nervous
convulsion his crying had caused, but he was silent. He opened his
eyes wide, and gazed at the head of his father with a stupid look
which betrayed no emotion; then his face, brutalized by ignorance,
showed savage curiosity. Barbette again took his hand, grasped it
violently, and dragged him into the house. When Pille-Miche and
Marche-a-Terre threw their victim on the bench one of his shoes,
dropping off, fell on the floor beneath his neck and was afterward
filled with blood. It was the first thing that met the widow's eye.

"Take off your shoe," said the mother to her son. "Put your foot in
that. Good. Remember," she cried, in a solemn voice, "your father's
shoe; never put on your own without remembering how the Chouans filled
it with his blood, and /kill the Chouans/!"

She swayed her head with so convulsive an action that the meshes of
her black hair fell upon her neck and gave a sinister expression to
her face.

"I call Saint-Labre to witness," she said, "that I vow you to the
Blues. You shall be a soldier to avenge your father. Kill, kill the
/Chouans/, and do as I do. Ha! they've taken the head of my man, and I
am going to give that of the Gars to the Blues."

She sprang at a bound on the bed, seized a little bag of money from a
hiding-place, took the hand of the astonished little boy, and dragged
him after her without giving him time to put on his shoe, and was on
her way to Fougeres rapidly, without once turning her head to look at
the home she abandoned. When they reached the summit of the rocks of
Saint-Sulpice Barbette set fire to the pile of fagots, and the boy
helped her to pile on the green gorse, damp with hoarfrost, to make
the smoke more dense.

"That fire will last longer than your father, longer than I, longer
than the Gars," said Barbette, in a savage voice.

While the widow of Galope-Chopine and her son with his bloody foot
stood watching, the one, with a gloomy expression of revenge, the
other with curiosity, the curling of the smoke, Mademoiselle de
Verneuil's eyes were fastened on the same rock, trying, but in vain,
to see her lover's signal. The fog, which had thickened, buried the
whole region under a veil, its gray tints obscuring even the outlines
of the scenery that was nearest the town. She examined with tender
anxiety the rocks, the castle, the buildings, which loomed like
shadows through the mist. Near her window several trees stood out
against this blue-gray background; the sun gave a dull tone as of
tarnished silver to the sky; its rays colored the bare branches of the
trees, where a few last leaves were fluttering, with a dingy red. But
too many dear and delightful sentiments filled Marie's soul to let her
notice the ill-omens of a scene so out of harmony with the joys she
was tasting in advance. For the last two days her ideas had undergone
a change. The fierce, undisciplined vehemence of her passions had
yielded under the influence of the equable atmosphere which a true
love gives to life. The certainty of being loved, sought through so
many perils, had given birth to a desire to re-enter those social
conditions which sanction love, and which despair alone had made her
leave. To love for a moment only now seemed to her a species of
weakness. She saw herself lifted from the dregs of society, where
misfortune had driven her, to the high rank in which her father had
meant to place her. Her vanity, repressed for a time by the cruel
alternations of hope and misconception, was awakened and showed her
all the benefits of a great position. Born in a certain way to rank,
marriage to a marquis meant, to her mind, living and acting in the
sphere that belonged to her. Having known the chances and changes of
an adventurous life, she could appreciate, better than other women,
the grandeur of the feelings which make the Family. Marriage and
motherhood with all their cares seemed to her less a task than a rest.
She loved the calm and virtuous life she saw through the clouds of
this last storm as a woman weary of virtue may sometimes covet an
illicit passion. Virtue was to her a new seduction.

"Perhaps," she thought, leaving the window without seeing the signal
on the rocks of Saint-Sulpice, "I have been too coquettish with him
--but I knew he loved me! Francine, it is not a dream; to-night I
shall be Marquise de Montauran. What have I done to deserve such
perfect happiness? Oh! I love him, and love alone is love's reward.
And yet, I think God means to recompense me for taking heart through
all my misery; he means me to forget my sufferings--for you know,
Francine, I have suffered."

"To-night, Marquise de Montauran, you, Marie? Ah! until it is done I
cannot believe it! Who has told him your true goodness?"

"Dear child! he has more than his handsome eyes to see me with, he has
a soul. If you had seen him, as I have, in danger! Oh! he knows how to
love--he is so brave!"

"If you really love him why do you let him come to Fougeres?"

"We had no time to say one word to each other when the Blues surprised
us. Besides, his coming is a proof of love. Can I ever have proofs
enough? And now, Francine, do my hair."

But she pulled it down a score of times with motions that seemed
electric, as though some stormy thoughts were mingling still with the
arts of her coquetry. As she rolled a curl or smoothed the shining
plaits she asked herself, with a remnant of distrust, whether the
marquis were deceiving her; but treachery seemed to her impossible,
for did he not expose himself to instant vengeance by entering
Fougeres? While studying in her mirror the effects of a sidelong
glance, a smile, a gentle frown, an attitude of anger, or of love, or
disdain, she was seeking some woman's wile by which to probe to the
last instant the heart of the young leader.

"You are right, Francine," she said; "I wish with you that the
marriage were over. This is the last of my cloudy days--it is big with
death or happiness. Oh! that fog is dreadful," she went on, again
looking towards the heights of Saint-Sulpice, which were still veiled
in mist.

She began to arrange the silk and muslin curtains which draped the
window, making them intercept the light and produce in the room a
voluptuous chiaro-scuro.

"Francine," she said, "take away those knick-knacks on the
mantelpiece; leave only the clock and the two Dresden vases. I'll fill
those vases myself with the flowers Corentin brought me. Take out the
chairs, I want only this sofa and a fauteuil. Then sweep the carpet,
so as to bring out the colors, and put wax candles in the sconces and
on the mantel."

Marie looked long and carefully at the old tapestry on the walls.
Guided by her innate taste she found among the brilliant tints of
these hangings the shades by which to connect their antique beauty
with the furniture and accessories of the boudoir, either by the
harmony of color or the charm of contrast. The same thought guided the
arrangement of the flowers with which she filled the twisted vases
which decorated her chamber. The sofa was placed beside the fire. On
either side of the bed, which filled the space parallel to that of the
chimney, she placed on gilded tables tall Dresden vases filled with
foliage and flowers that were sweetly fragrant. She quivered more than
once as she arranged the folds of the green damask above the bed, and
studied the fall of the drapery which concealed it. Such preparations
have a secret, ineffable happiness about them; they cause so many
delightful emotions that a woman as she makes them forgets her doubts;
and Mademoiselle de Verneuil forgot hers. There is in truth a
religious sentiment in the multiplicity of cares taken for one beloved
who is not there to see them and reward them, but who will reward them
later with the approving smile these tender preparations (always so
fully understood) obtain. Women, as they make them, love in advance;
and there are few indeed who would not say to themselves, as
Mademoiselle de Verneuil now thought: "To-night I shall be happy!"
That soft hope lies in every fold of silk or muslin; insensibly, the
harmony the woman makes about her gives an atmosphere of love in which
she breathes; to her these things are beings, witnesses; she has made
them the sharers of her coming joy. Every movement, every thought
brings that joy within her grasp. But presently she expects no longer,
she hopes no more, she questions silence; the slightest sound is to
her an omen; doubt hooks its claws once more into her heart; she
burns, she trembles, she is grasped by a thought which holds her like
a physical force; she alternates from triumph to agony, and without
the hope of coming happiness she could not endure the torture. A score
of times did Mademoiselle de Verneuil raise the window-curtain, hoping
to see the smoke rising above the rocks; but the fog only took a
grayer tone, which her excited imagination turned into a warning. At
last she let fall the curtain, impatiently resolving not to raise it
again. She looked gloomily around the charming room to which she had
given a soul and a voice, asking herself if it were done in vain, and
this thought brought her back to her preparations.

"Francine," she said, drawing her into a little dressing-room which
adjoined her chamber and was lighted through a small round window
opening on a dark corner of the fortifications where they joined the
rock terrace of the Promenade, "put everything in order. As for the
salon, you can leave that as it is," she added, with a smile which
women reserve for their nearest friends, the delicate sentiment of
which men seldom understand.

"Ah! how sweet you are!" exclaimed the little maid.

"A lover is our beauty--foolish women that we are!" she replied gaily.

Francine left her lying on the ottoman and went away convinced that,
whether her mistress were loved or not, she would never betray
Montauran.

* * * * *

"Are you sure of what you are telling me, old woman?" Hulot was saying
to Barbette, who had sought him out as soon as she had reached
Fougeres.

"Have you got eyes? Look at the rocks of Saint-Sulpice, there, my good
man, to the right of Saint-Leonard."

Corentin, who was with Hulot, looked towards the summit in the
direction pointed out by Barbette, and, as the fog was beginning to
lift, he could see with some distinctness the column of white smoke
the woman told of.

"But when is he coming, old woman?--to-night, or this evening?"

"My good man," said Barbette, "I don't know."

"Why do you betray your own side?" said Hulot, quickly, having drawn
her out of hearing of Corentin.

"Ah! general, see my boy's foot--that's washed in the blood of my man,
whom the Chouans have killed like a calf, to punish him for the few
words you got out of me the other day when I was working in the
fields. Take my boy, for you've deprived him of his father and his
mother; make a Blue of him, my good man, teach him to kill Chouans.
Here, there's two hundred crowns,--keep them for him; if he is
careful, they'll last him long, for it took his father twelve years to
lay them by."

Hulot looked with amazement at the pale and withered woman, whose eyes
were dry.

"But you, mother," he said, "what will become of you? you had better
keep the money."

"I?" she replied, shaking her head sadly. "I don't need anything in
this world. You might bolt me into that highest tower over there"
(pointing to the battlements of the castle) "and the Chouans would
contrive to come and kill me."

She kissed her boy with an awful expression of grief, looked at him,
wiped away her tears, looked at him again, and disappeared.

"Commandant," said Corentin, "this is an occasion when two heads are
better than one. We know all, and yet we know nothing. If you
surrounded Mademoiselle de Verneuil's house now, you will only warn
her. Neither you, nor I, nor your Blues and your battalions are strong
enough to get the better of that girl if she takes it into her head to
save the /ci-devant/. The fellow is brave, and consequently wily; he
is a young man full of daring. We can never get hold of him as he
enters Fougeres. Perhaps he is here already. Domiciliary visit?
Absurdity! that's no good, it will only give them warning."

"Well," said Hulot impatiently, "I shall tell the sentry on the Place
Saint-Leonard to keep his eye on the house, and pass word along the
other sentinels, if a young man enters it; as soon as the signal
reaches me I shall take a corporal and four men and--"

"--and," said Corentin, interrupting the old soldier, "if the young
man is not the marquis, or if the marquis doesn't go in by the front
door, or if he is already there, if--if--if--what then?"

Corentin looked at the commandant with so insulting an air of
superiority that the old soldier shouted out: "God's thousand
thunders! get out of here, citizen of hell! What have I got to do with
your intrigues? If that cockchafer buzzes into my guard-room I shall
shoot him; if I hear he is in a house I shall surround that house and
take him when he leaves it and shoot him, but may the devil get me if
I soil my uniform with any of your tricks."

"Commandant, the order of the ministers states that you are to obey
Mademoiselle de Verneuil."

"Let her come and give them to me herself and I'll see about it."

"Well, citizen," said Corentin, haughtily, "she shall come. She shall
tell you herself the hour at which she expects the /ci-devant/.
Possibly she won't be easy till you do post the sentinels round the
house."

"The devil is made man," thought the old leader as he watched Corentin
hurrying up the Queen's Staircase at the foot of which this scene had
taken place. "He means to deliver Montauran bound hand and foot, with
no chance to fight for his life, and I shall be harrassed to death
with a court-martial. However," he added, shrugging his shoulders,
"the Gars certainly is an enemy of the Republic, and he killed my poor
Gerard, and his death will make a noble the less--the devil take him!"

He turned on the heels of his boots and went off, whistling the
Marseillaise, to inspect his guard-rooms.

* * * * *

Mademoiselle de Verneuil was absorbed in one of those meditations the
mysteries of which are buried in the soul, and prove by their thousand
contradictory emotions, to the woman who undergoes them, that it is
possible to have a stormy and passionate existence between four walls
without even moving from the ottoman on which her very life is burning
itself away. She had reached the final scene of the drama she had come
to enact, and her mind was going over and over the phases of love and
anger which had so powerfully stirred her during the ten days which
had now elapsed since her first meeting with the marquis. A man's step
suddenly sounded in the adjoining room and she trembled; the door
opened, she turned quickly and saw Corentin.

"You little cheat!" said the police-agent, "when will you stop
deceiving? Ah, Marie, Marie, you are playing a dangerous game by not
taking me into your confidence. Why do you play such tricks without
consulting me? If the marquis escapes his fate--"

"It won't be your fault, will it?" she replied, sarcastically.
"Monsieur," she continued, in a grave voice, "by what right do you
come into my house?"

"Your house?" he exclaimed.

"You remind me," she answered, coldly, "that I have no home. Perhaps
you chose this house deliberately for the purpose of committing
murder. I shall leave it. I would live in a desert to get away from--"

"Spies, say the word," interrupted Corentin. "But this house is
neither yours nor mine, it belongs to the government; and as for
leaving it you will do nothing of the kind," he added, giving her a
diabolical look.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil rose indignantly, made a few steps to leave
the room, but stopped short suddenly as Corentin raised the curtain of
the window and beckoned her, with a smile, to come to him.

"Do you see that column of smoke?" he asked, with the calmness he
always kept on his livid face, however intense his feelings might be.

"What has my departure to do with that burning brush?" she asked.

"Why does your voice tremble?" he said. "You poor thing!" he added, in
a gentle voice, "I know all. The marquis is coming to Fougeres this
evening; and it is not with any intention of delivering him to us that
you have arranged this boudoir and the flowers and candles."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil turned pale, for she saw her lover's death in
the eyes of this tiger with a human face, and her love for him rose to
frenzy. Each hair on her head caused her an acute pain she could not
endure, and she fell on the ottoman. Corentin stood looking at her for
a moment with his arms folded, half pleased at inflicting a torture
which avenged him for the contempt and the sarcasms this woman had
heaped upon his head, half grieved by the sufferings of a creature
whose yoke was pleasant to him, heavy as it was.

"She loves him!" he muttered.

"Loves him!" she cried. "Ah! what are words? Corentin! he is my life,
my soul, my breath!" She flung herself at the feet of the man, whose
silence terrified her. "Soul of vileness!" she cried, "I would rather
degrade myself to save his life than degrade myself by betraying him.
I will save him at the cost of my own blood. Speak, what price must I
pay you?"

Corentin quivered.

"I came to take your orders, Marie," he said, raising her. "Yes,
Marie, your insults will not hinder my devotion to your wishes,
provided you will promise not to deceive me again; you must know by
this time that no one dupes me with impunity."

"If you want me to love you, Corentin, help me to save him."

"At what hour is he coming?" asked the spy, endeavoring to ask the
question calmly.

"Alas, I do not know."

They looked at each other in silence.

"I am lost!" thought Mademoiselle de Verneuil.

"She is deceiving me!" thought Corentin. "Marie," he continued, "I
have two maxims. One is never to believe a single word a woman says to
me--that's the only means of not being duped; the other is to find
what interest she has in doing the opposite of what she says, and
behaving in contradiction to the facts she pretends to confide to me.
I think that you and I understand each other now."

"Perfectly," replied Mademoiselle de Verneuil. "You want proofs of my
good faith; but I reserve them for the time when you give me some of
yours."

"Adieu, mademoiselle," said Corentin, coolly.

"Nonsense," said the girl, smiling; "sit down, and pray don't sulk;
but if you do I shall know how to save the marquis without you. As for
the three hundred thousand francs which are always spread before your
eyes, I will give them to you in good gold as soon as the marquis is
safe."

Corentin rose, stepped back a pace or two, and looked at Marie.

"You have grown rich in a very short time," he said, in a tone of
ill-disguised bitterness.

"Montauran," she continued, "will make you a better offer still for
his ransom. Now, then, prove to me that you have the means of
guaranteeing him from all danger and--"

"Can't you send him away the moment he arrives?" cried Corentin,
suddenly. "Hulot does not know he is coming, and--" He stopped as if
he had said too much. "But how absurd that you should ask me how to
play a trick," he said, with an easy laugh. "Now listen, Marie, I do
feel certain of your loyalty. Promise me a compensation for all I lose
in furthering your wishes, and I will make that old fool of a
commandant so unsuspicious that the marquis will be as safe at
Fougeres as at Saint-James."

"Yes, I promise it," said the girl, with a sort of solemnity.

"No, not in that way," he said, "swear it by your mother."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil shuddered; raising a trembling hand she made
the oath required by the man whose tone to her had changed so
suddenly.

"You can command me," he said; "don't deceive me again, and you shall
have reason to bless me to-night."

"I will trust you, Corentin," cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil, much
moved. She bowed her head gently towards him and smiled with a
kindness not unmixed with surprise, as she saw an expression of
melancholy tenderness on his face.

"What an enchanting creature!" thought Corentin, as he left the house.
"Shall I ever get her as a means to fortune and a source of delight?
To fling herself at my feet! Oh, yes, the marquis shall die! If I
can't get that woman in any other way than by dragging her through the
mud, I'll sink her in it. At any rate," he thought, as he reached the
square unconscious of his steps, "she no longer distrusts me. Three
hundred thousand francs down! she thinks me grasping! Either the offer
was a trick or she is already married to him."

Corentin, buried in thought, was unable to come to a resolution. The
fog which the sun had dispersed at mid-day was now rolling thicker and
thicker, so that he could hardly see the trees at a little distance.

"That's another piece of ill-luck," he muttered, as he turned slowly
homeward. "It is impossible to see ten feet. The weather protects the
lovers. How is one to watch a house in such a fog? Who goes there?" he
cried, catching the arm of a boy who seemed to have clambered up the
dangerous rocks which made the terrace of the Promenade.

"It is I," said a childish voice.

"Ah! the boy with the bloody foot. Do you want to revenge your
father?" said Corentin.

"Yes," said the child.

"Very good. Do you know the Gars?"

"Yes."

"Good again. Now, don't leave me except to do what I bid you, and you
will obey your mother and earn some big sous--do you like sous?"

"Yes."

"You like sous, and you want to kill the Gars who killed your father
--well, I'll take care of you. Ah! Marie," he muttered, after a pause,
"you yourself shall betray him, as you engaged to do! She is too
violent to suspect me--passion never reflects. She does not know the
marquis's writing. Yes, I can set a trap into which her nature will
drive her headlong. But I must first see Hulot."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil and Francine were deliberating on the means
of saving the marquis from the more than doubtful generosity of
Corentin and Hulot's bayonets.

"I could go and warn him," said the Breton girl.

"But we don't know where he is," replied Marie; "even I, with the
instincts of love, could never find him."

After making and rejecting a number of plans Mademoiselle de Verneuil
exclaimed, "When I see him his danger will inspire me."

She thought, like other ardent souls, to act on the spur of the
moment, trusting to her star, or to that instinct of adroitness which
rarely, if ever, fails a woman. Perhaps her heart was never so wrung.
At times she seemed stupefied, her eyes were fixed, and then, at the
least noise, she shook like a half-uprooted tree which the woodsman
drags with a rope to hasten its fall. Suddenly, a loud report from a
dozen guns echoed from a distance. Marie turned pale and grasped
Francine's hand. "I am dying," she cried; "they have killed him!"

The heavy footfall of a man was heard in the antechamber. Francine
went out and returned with a corporal. The man, making a military
salute to Mademoiselle de Verneuil, produced some letters, the covers
of which were a good deal soiled. Receiving no acknowledgment, the
Blue said as he withdrew, "Madame, they are from the commandant."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil, a prey to horrible presentiments, read a
letter written apparently in great haste by Hulot:--

"Mademoiselle--a party of my men have just caught a messenger from
the Gars and have shot him. Among the intercepted letters is one
which may be useful to you and I transmit it--etc."

"Thank God, it was not he they shot," she exclaimed, flinging the
letter into the fire.

She breathed more freely and took up the other letter, enclosed by
Hulot. It was apparently written to Madame du Gua by the marquis.

"No, my angel," the letter said, "I cannot go to-night to La
Vivetiere. You must lose your wager with the count. I triumph over
the Republic in the person of their beautiful emissary. You must
allow that she is worth the sacrifice of one night. It will be my
only victory in this campaign, for I have received the news that
La Vendee surrenders. I can do nothing more in France. Let us go
back to England--but we will talk of all this to-morrow."

The letter fell from Marie's hands; she closed her eyes, and was
silent, leaning backward, with her head on a cushion. After a long
pause she looked at the clock, which then marked four in the
afternoon.

"My lord keeps me waiting," she said, with savage irony.

"Oh! God grant he may not come!" cried Francine.

"If he does not come," said Marie, in a stifled tone, "I shall go to
him. No, no, he will soon be here. Francine, do I look well?"

"You are very pale."

"Ah!" continued Mademoiselle de Verneuil, glancing about her, "this
perfumed room, the flowers, the lights, this intoxicating air, it is
full of that celestial life of which I dreamed--"

"Marie, what has happened?"

"I am betrayed, deceived, insulted, fooled! I will kill him, I will
tear him bit by bit! Yes, there was always in his manner a contempt he
could not hide and which I would not see. Oh! I shall die of this!
Fool that I am," she went on laughing, "he is coming; I have one night
in which to teach him that, married or not, the man who has possessed
me cannot abandon me. I will measure my vengeance by his offence; he
shall die with despair in his soul. I did believe he had a soul of
honor, but no! it is that of a lackey. Ah, he has cleverly deceived
me, for even now it seems impossible that the man who abandoned me to
Pille-Miche should sink to such back-stair tricks. It is so base to
deceive a loving woman, for it is so easy. He might have killed me if
he chose, but lie to me! to me, who held him in my thoughts so high!
The scaffold! the scaffold! ah! could I only see him guillotined! Am I
cruel? He shall go to his death covered with caresses, with kisses
which might have blessed him for a lifetime--"

"Marie," said Francine, gently, "be the victim of your lover like
other women; not his mistress and his betrayer. Keep his memory in
your heart; do not make it an anguish to you. If there were no joys in
hopeless love, what would become of us, poor women that we are? God,
of whom you never think, Marie, will reward us for obeying our
vocation on this earth,--to love, and suffer."

"Dear," replied Mademoiselle de Verneuil, taking Francine's hand and
patting it, "your voice is very sweet and persuasive. Reason is
attractive from your lips. I should like to obey you, but--"

"You will forgive him, you will not betray him?"

"Hush! never speak of that man again. Compared with him Corentin is a
noble being. Do you hear me?"

She rose, hiding beneath a face that was horribly calm the madness of
her soul and a thirst for vengeance. The slow and measured step with
which she left the room conveyed the sense of an irrevocable
resolution. Lost in thought, hugging her insults, too proud to show
the slightest suffering, she went to the guard-room at the Porte
Saint-Leonard and asked where the commandant lived. She had hardly
left her house when Corentin entered it.

"Oh, Monsieur Corentin," cried Francine, "if you are interested in
this young man, save him; Mademoiselle has gone to give him up because
of this wretched letter."

Corentin took the letter carelessly and asked,--

"Which way did she go?"

"I don't know."

"Yes," he said, "I will save her from her own despair."

He disappeared, taking the letter with him. When he reached the street
he said to Galope-Chopine's boy, whom he had stationed to watch the
door, "Which way did a lady go who left the house just now?"

The boy went with him a little way and showed him the steep street
which led to the Porte Saint-Leonard. "That way," he said.

At this moment four men entered Mademoiselle de Verneuil's house,
unseen by either the boy or Corentin.

"Return to your watch," said the latter. "Play with the handles of the
blinds and see what you can inside; look about you everywhere, even on
the roof."

Corentin darted rapidly in the direction given him, and thought he
recognized Mademoiselle de Verneuil through the fog; he did, in fact,
overtake her just as she reached the guard-house.

"Where are you going?" he said; "you are pale--what has happened? Is
it right for you to be out alone? Take my arm."

"Where is the commandant?" she asked.

Hardly had the words left her lips when she heard the movement of
troops beyond the Porte Saint-Leonard and distinguished Hulot's gruff
voice in the tumult.

"God's thunder!" he cried, "I never saw such fog as this for a
reconnaissance! The Gars must have ordered the weather."

"What are you complaining of?" said Mademoiselle de Verneuil, grasping
his arm. "The fog will cover vengeance as well as perfidy.
Commandant," she added, in a low voice, "you must take measures at
once so that the Gars may not escape us."

"Is he at your house?" he asked, in a tone which showed his amazement.

"Not yet," she replied; "but give me a safe man and I will send him to
you when the marquis comes."

"That's a mistake," said Corentin; "a soldier will alarm him, but a
boy, and I can find one, will not."

"Commandant," said Mademoiselle de Verneuil, "thanks to this fog which
you are cursing, you can surround my house. Put soldiers everywhere.
Place a guard in the church to command the esplanade on which the
windows of my salon open. Post men on the Promenade; for though the
windows of my bedroom are twenty feet above the ground, despair does
sometimes give a man the power to jump even greater distances safely.
Listen to what I say. I shall probably send this gentleman out of the
door of my house; therefore see that only brave men are there to meet
him; for," she added, with a sigh, "no one denies him courage; he will
assuredly defend himself."

"Gudin!" called the commandant. "Listen, my lad," he continued in a
low voice when the young man joined him, "this devil of a girl is
betraying the Gars to us--I am sure I don't know why, but that's no
matter. Take ten men and place yourself so as to hold the cul-de-sac
in which the house stands; be careful that no one sees either you or
your men."

"Yes, commandant, I know the ground."

"Very good," said Hulot. "I'll send Beau-Pied to let you know when to
play your sabres. Try to meet the marquis yourself, and if you can
manage to kill him, so that I sha'n't have to shoot him judicially,
you shall be a lieutenant in a fortnight or my name's not Hulot."

Gudin departed with a dozen soldiers.

"Do you know what you have done?" said Corentin to Mademoiselle de
Verneuil, in a low voice.

She made no answer, but looked with a sort of satisfaction at the men
who were starting, under command of the sub-lieutenant, for the
Promenade, while others, following the next orders given by Hulot,
were to post themselves in the shadows of the church of Saint-Leonard.

"There are houses adjoining mine," she said; "you had better surround
them all. Don't lay up regrets by neglecting a single precaution."

"She is mad," thought Hulot.

"Was I not a prophet?" asked Corentin in his ear. "As for the boy I
shall send with her, he is the little gars with a bloody foot;
therefore--"

He did not finish his sentence, for Mademoiselle de Verneuil by a
sudden movement darted in the direction of her house, whither he
followed her, whistling like a man supremely satisfied. When he
overtook her she was already at the door of her house, where
Galope-Chopine's little boy was on the watch.

"Mademoiselle," said Corentin, "take the lad with you; you cannot have
a more innocent or active emissary. Boy," he added, "when you have
seen the Gars enter the house come to me, no matter who stops you;
you'll find me at the guard-house and I'll give you something that
will make you eat cake for the rest of your days."

At these words, breathed rather than said in the child's ear, Corentin
felt his hand squeezed by that of the little Breton, who followed
Mademoiselle de Verneuil into the house.

"Now, my good friends, you can come to an explanation as soon as you
like," cried Corentin when the door was closed. "If you make love, my
little marquis, it will be on your winding-sheet."

But Corentin could not bring himself to let that fatal house
completely out of sight, and he went to the Promenade, where he found
the commandant giving his last orders. By this time it was night. Two
hours went by; but the sentinels posted at intervals noticed nothing
that led them to suppose the marquis had evaded the triple line of men
who surrounded the three sides by which the tower of Papegaut was
accessible. Twenty times had Corentin gone from the Promenade to the
guard-room, always to find that his little emissary had not appeared.
Sunk in thought, the spy paced the Promenade slowly, enduring the
martyrdom to which three passions, terrible in their clashing, subject
a man,--love, avarice, and ambition. Eight o'clock struck from all the
towers in the town. The moon rose late. Fog and darkness wrapped in
impenetrable gloom the places where the drama planned by this man was
coming to its climax. He was able to silence the struggle of his
passions as he walked up and down, his arms crossed, and his eyes
fixed on the windows which rose like the luminous eyes of a phantom
above the rampart. The deep silence was broken only by the rippling of
the Nancon, by the regular and lugubrious tolling from the belfries,
by the heavy steps of the sentinels or the rattle of arms as the guard
was hourly relieved.

"The night's as thick as a wolf's jaw," said the voice of Pille-Miche.

"Go on," growled Marche-a-Terre, "and don't talk more than a dead
dog."

"I'm hardly breathing," said the Chouan.

"If the man who made that stone roll down wants his heart to serve as
the scabbard for my knife he'll do it again," said Marche-a-Terre, in
a low voice scarcely heard above the flowing of the river.

"It was I," said Pille-Miche.

"Well, then, old money-bag, down on your stomach," said the other,
"and wriggle like a snake through a hedge, or we shall leave our
carcasses behind us sooner than we need."

"Hey, Marche-a-Terre," said the incorrigible Pille-Miche, who was
using his hands to drag himself along on his stomach, and had reached
the level of his comrade's ear. "If the Grande-Garce is to be believed
there'll be a fine booty to-day. Will you go shares with me?"

"Look here, Pille-Miche," said Marche-a-Terre stopping short on the
flat of his stomach. The other Chouans, who were accompanying the two
men, did the same, so wearied were they with the difficulties they had
met with in climbing the precipice. "I know you," continued
Marche-a-Terre, "for a Jack Grab-All who would rather give blows than
receive them when there's nothing else to be done. We have not come
here to grab dead men's shoes; we are devils against devils, and sorrow
to those whose claws are too short. The Grande-Garce has sent us here

to save the Gars. He is up there; lift your dog's nose and see that
window above the tower."

Midnight was striking. The moon rose, giving the appearance of white
smoke to the fog. Pille-Miche squeezed Marche-a-Terre's arm and
silently showed him on the terrace just above them, the triangular
iron of several shining bayonets.

"The Blues are there already," said Pille-Miche; "we sha'n't gain
anything by force."

"Patience," replied Marche-a-Terre; "if I examined right this morning,
we must be at the foot of the Papegaut tower between the ramparts and
the Promenade,--that place where they put the manure; it is like a
feather-bed to fall on."

"If Saint-Labre," remarked Pille-Miche, "would only change into cider
the blood we shall shed to-night the citizens might lay in a good
stock to-morrow."

Marche-a-Terre laid his large hand over his friend's mouth; then an
order muttered by him went from rank to rank of the Chouans suspended
as they were in mid-air among the brambles of the slate rocks.
Corentin, walking up and down the esplanade had too practiced an ear
not to hear the rustling of the shrubs and the light sound of pebbles
rolling down the sides of the precipice. Marche-a-Terre, who seemed to
possess the gift of seeing in darkness, and whose senses, continually
in action, were acute as those of a savage, saw Corentin; like a
trained dog he had scented him. Fouche's diplomatist listened but
heard nothing; he looked at the natural wall of rock and saw no signs.
If the confusing gleam of the fog enabled him to see, here and there,
a crouching Chouan, he took him, no doubt, for a fragment of rock, for
these human bodies had all the appearance of inert nature. This danger
to the invaders was of short duration. Corentin's attention was
diverted by a very distinct noise coming from the other end of the
Promenade, where the rock wall ended and a steep descent leading down
to the Queen's Staircase began. When Corentin reached the spot he saw
a figure gliding past it as if by magic. Putting out his hand to grasp
this real or fantastic being, who was there, he supposed, with no good
intentions, he encountered the soft and rounded figure of a woman.

"The devil take you!" he exclaimed, "if any one else had met you,
you'd have had a ball through your head. What are you doing, and where
are you going, at this time of night? Are you dumb? It certainly is a
woman," he said to himself.

The silence was suspicious, but the stranger broke it by saying, in a
voice which suggested extreme fright, "Ah, my good man, I'm on my way
back from a wake."

"It is the pretended mother of the marquis," thought Corentin. "I'll
see what she's about. Well, go that way, old woman," he replied,
feigning not to recognize her. "Keep to the left if you don't want to
be shot."

He stood quite still; then observing that Madame du Gua was making for
the Papegaut tower, he followed her at a distance with diabolical
caution. During this fatal encounter the Chouans had posted themselves
on the manure towards which Marche-a-Terre had guided them.

"There's the Grande-Garce!" thought Marche-a-Terre, as he rose to his
feet against the tower wall like a bear.

"We are here," he said to her in a low voice.

"Good," she replied, "there's a ladder in the garden of that house
about six feet above the manure; find it, and the Gars is saved. Do
you see that small window up there? It is in the dressing-room; you
must get to it. This side of the tower is the only one not watched.
The horses are ready; if you can hold the passage over the Nancon, a
quarter of an hour will put him out of danger--in spite of his folly.
But if that woman tries to follow him, stab her."

Corentin now saw several of the forms he had hitherto supposed to be
stones moving cautiously but swiftly. He went at once to the
guard-room at the Porte Saint-Leonard, where he found the commandant
fully dressed and sound asleep on a camp bed.

"Let him alone," said Beau-Pied, roughly, "he has only just lain
down."

"The Chouans are here!" cried Corentin, in Hulot's ear.

"Impossible! but so much the better," cried the old soldier, still
half asleep; "then he can fight."

When Hulot reached the Promenade Corentin pointed out to him the
singular position taken by the Chouans.

"They must have deceived or strangled the sentries I placed between
the castle and the Queen's Staircase. Ah! what a devil of a fog!
However, patience! I'll send a squad of men under a lieutenant to the
foot of the rock. There is no use attacking them where they are, for
those animals are so hard they'd let themselves roll down the
precipice without breaking a limb."

The cracked clock of the belfry was ringing two when the commandant
got back to the Promenade after giving these orders and taking every
military precaution to seize the Chouans. The sentries were doubled
and Mademoiselle de Verneuil's house became the centre of a little
army. Hulot found Corentin absorbed in contemplation of the window
which overlooked the tower.

"Citizen," said the commandant, "I think the /ci-devant/ has fooled
us; there's nothing stirring."

"He is there," cried Corentin, pointing to the window. "I have seen a
man's shadow on the curtain. But I can't think what has become of that
boy. They must have killed him or locked him up. There! commandant,
don't you see that? there's a man's shadow; come, come on!"

"I sha'n't seize him in bed; thunder of God! He will come out if he
went in; Gudin won't miss him," cried Hulot, who had his own reasons
for waiting till the Gars could defend himself.

"Commandant, I enjoin you, in the name of the law to proceed at once
into that house."

"You're a fine scoundrel to try to make me do that."

Without showing any resentment at the commandant's language, Corentin
said coolly: "You will obey me. Here is an order in good form, signed
by the minister of war, which will force you to do so." He drew a
paper from his pocket and held it out. "Do you suppose we are such
fools as to leave that girl to do as she likes? We are endeavoring to
suppress a civil war, and the grandeur of the purpose covers the
pettiness of the means."

"I take the liberty, citizen, of sending you to--you understand me?
Enough. To the right-about, march! Let me alone, or it will be the
worse for you."

"But read that," persisted Corentin.

"Don't bother me with your functions," cried Hulot, furious at
receiving orders from a man he regarded as contemptible.

At this instant Galope-Chopine's boy suddenly appeared among them like
a rat from a hole.

"The Gars has started!" he cried.

"Which way?"

"The rue Saint-Leonard."

"Beau-Pied," said Hulot in a whisper to the corporal who was near him,
"go and tell your lieutenant to draw in closer round the house, and
make ready to fire. Left wheel, forward on the tower, the rest of
you!" he shouted.

To understand the conclusion of this fatal drama we must re-enter the
house with Mademoiselle de Verneuil when she returned to it after
denouncing the marquis to the commandant.

When passions reach their crisis they bring us under the dominion of
far greater intoxication than the petty excitements of wine or opium.
The lucidity then given to ideas, the delicacy of the high-wrought
senses, produce the most singular and unexpected effects. Some persons
when they find themselves under the tyranny of a single thought can
see with extraordinary distinctness objects scarcely visible to
others, while at the same time the most palpable things become to them
almost as if they did not exist. When Mademoiselle de Verneuil
hurried, after reading the marquis's letter, to prepare the way for
vengeance just as she had lately been preparing all for love, she was
in that stage of mental intoxication which makes real life like the
life of a somnambulist. But when she saw her house surrounded, by her
own orders, with a triple line of bayonets a sudden flash of light
illuminated her soul. She judged her conduct and saw with horror that
she had committed a crime. Under the first shock of this conviction
she sprang to the threshold of the door and stood there irresolute,
striving to think, yet unable to follow out her reasoning. She knew so
vaguely what had happened that she tried in vain to remember why she
was in the antechamber, and why she was leading a strange child by the
hand. A million of stars were floating in the air before her like
tongues of fire. She began to walk about, striving to shake off the
horrible torpor which laid hold of her; but, like one asleep, no
object appeared to her under its natural form or in its own colors.
She grasped the hand of the little boy with a violence not natural to
her, dragging him along with such precipitate steps that she seemed to
have the motions of a madwoman. She saw neither persons nor things in
the salon as she crossed it, and yet she was saluted by three men who
made way to let her pass.

"That must be she," said one of them.

"She is very handsome," exclaimed another, who was a priest.

"Yes," replied the first; "but how pale and agitated--"

"And beside herself," said the third; "she did not even see us."

At the door of her own room Mademoiselle de Verneuil saw the smiling
face of Francine, who whispered to her: "He is here, Marie."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil awoke, reflected, looked at the child whose
hand she held, remembered all, and replied to the girl: "Shut up that
boy; if you wish me to live do not let him escape you."

As she slowly said the words her eyes were fixed on the door of her
bedroom, and there they continued fastened with so dreadful a
fixedness that it seemed as if she saw her victim through the wooden
panels. Then she gently opened it, passed through and closed it behind
her without turning round, for she saw the marquis standing before the
fireplace. His dress, without being too choice, had the look of
careful arrangement which adds so much to the admiration which a woman
feels for her lover. All her self-possession came back to her at the
sight of him. Her lips, rigid, although half-open, showed the enamel
of her white teeth and formed a smile that was fixed and terrible
rather than voluptuous. She walked with slow steps toward the young
man and pointed with her finger to the clock.

"A man who is worthy of love is worth waiting for," she said with
deceptive gaiety.

Then, overcome with the violence of her emotions, she dropped upon the
sofa which was near the fireplace.

"Dear Marie, you are so charming when you are angry," said the
marquis, sitting down beside her and taking her hand, which she let
him take, and entreating a look, which she refused him. "I hope," he
continued, in a tender, caressing voice, "that my wife will not long
refuse a glance to her loving husband."

Hearing the words she turned abruptly and looked into his eyes.

"What is the meaning of that dreadful look?" he said, laughing. "But
your hand is burning! oh, my love, what is it?"

"Your love!" she repeated, in a dull, changed voice.

"Yes," he said, throwing himself on his knees beside her and taking
her two hands which he covered with kisses. "Yes, my love--I am thine
for life."

She pushed him violently away from her and rose. Her features
contracted, she laughed as mad people laugh, and then she said to him:
"You do not mean one word of all you are saying, base man--baser than
the lowest villain." She sprang to the dagger which was lying beside a
flower-vase, and let it sparkle before the eyes of the amazed young
marquis. "Bah!" she said, flinging it away from her, "I do not respect
you enough to kill you. Your blood is even too vile to be shed by
soldiers; I see nothing fit for you but the executioner."

The words were painfully uttered in a low voice, and she moved her
feet like a spoilt child, impatiently. The marquis went to her and
tried to clasp her.

"Don't touch me!" she cried, recoiling from him with a look of horror.

"She is mad!" said the marquis in despair.

"Mad, yes!" she repeated, "but not mad enough to be your dupe. What
would I not forgive to passion? but to seek to possess me without
love, and to write to that woman--"

"To whom have I written?" he said, with an astonishment which was
certainly not feigned.

"To that chaste woman who sought to kill me."

The marquis turned pale with anger and said, grasping the back of a
chair until he broke it, "If Madame du Gua has committed some
dastardly wrong--"

Mademoiselle de Verneuil looked for the letter; not finding it she
called to Francine.

"Where is that letter?" she asked.

"Monsieur Corentin took it."

"Corentin! ah! I understand it all; he wrote the letter; he has
deceived me with diabolical art--as he alone can deceive."

With a piercing cry she flung herself on the sofa, tears rushing from
her eyes. Doubt and confidence were equally dreadful now. The marquis
knelt beside her and clasped her to his breast, saying, again and
again, the only words he was able to utter:--

"Why do you weep, my darling? there is no harm done; your reproaches
were all love; do not weep, I love you--I shall always love you."

Suddenly he felt her press him with almost supernatural force. "Do you
still love me?" she said, amid her sobs.

"Can you doubt it?" he replied in a tone that was almost melancholy.

She abruptly disengaged herself from his arms, and fled, as if
frightened and confused, to a little distance.

"Do I doubt it?" she exclaimed, but a smile of gentle meaning was on
her lover's face, and the words died away upon her lips; she let him
take her by the hand and lead her to the salon. There an altar had
been hastily arranged during her absence. The priest was robed in his
officiating vestments. The lighted tapers shed upon the ceiling a glow
as soft as hope itself. She now recognized the two men who had bowed
to her, the Comte de Bauvan and the Baron du Guenic, the witnesses
chosen by Montauran.

"You will not still refuse?" said the marquis.

But at the sight she stopped, stepped backward into her chamber and
fell on her knees; raising her hands towards the marquis she cried
out: "Pardon! pardon! pardon!"

Her voice died away, her head fell back, her eyes closed, and she lay
in the arms of her lover and Francine as if dead. When she opened her
eyes they met those of the young man full of loving tenderness.

"Marie! patience! this is your last trial," he said.

"The last!" she exclaimed, bitterly.

Francine and the marquis looked at each other in surprise, but she
silenced them by a gesture.

"Call the priest," she said, "and leave me alone with him."

They did so, and withdrew.

"My father," she said to the priest so suddenly called to her, "in my
childhood an old man, white-haired like yourself, used to tell me that
God would grant all things to those who had faith. Is that true?"

"It is true," replied the priest; "all things are possible to Him who
created all."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil threw herself on her knees before him with
incredible enthusiasm.

"Oh, my God!" she cried in ecstasy, "my faith in thee is equal to my
love for him; inspire me! do here a miracle, or take my life!"

"Your prayer will be granted," said the priest.

Marie returned to the salon leaning on the arm of the venerable old
man. A deep and secret emotion brought her to the arms of her lover
more brilliant than on any of her past days, for a serenity like that
which painters give to the martyrs added to her face an imposing
dignity. She held out her hand to the marquis and together they
advanced to the altar and knelt down. The marriage was about to be
celebrated beside the nuptial bed, the altar hastily raised, the
cross, the vessels, the chalice, secretly brought thither by the
priest, the fumes of incense rising to the ceiling, the priest
himself, who wore a stole above his cassock, the tapers on an altar in
a salon,--all these things combined to form a strange and touching
scene, which typified those times of saddest memory, when civil
discord overthrew all sacred institutions. Religious ceremonies then
had the savor of the mysteries. Children were baptized in the chambers
where the mothers were still groaning from their labor. As in the
olden time, the Saviour went, poor and lowly, to console the dying.
Young girls received their first communion in the home where they had
played since infancy. The marriage of the marquis and Mademoiselle de
Verneuil was now solemnized, like many other unions, by a service
contrary to the recent legal enactments. In after years these
marriages, mostly celebrated at the foot of oaks, were scrupulously
recognized and considered legal. The priest who thus preserved the
ancient usages was one of those men who hold to their principles in
the height of the storm. His voice, which never made the oath exacted
by the Republic, uttered no word throughout the tempest that did not
make for peace. He never incited, like the Abbe Gudin, to fire and
sword; but like many others, he devoted himself to the still more
dangerous mission of performing his priestly functions for the souls
of faithful Catholics. To accomplish this perilous ministry he used
all the pious deceptions necessitated by persecution, and the marquis,
when he sought his services on this occasion, had found him in one of
those excavated caverns which are known, even to the present day, by
the name of "the priest's hiding-place." The mere sight of that pale
and suffering face was enough to give this worldly room a holy aspect.

All was now ready for the act of misery and of joy. Before beginning
the ceremony the priest asked, in the dead silence, the names of the
bride.

"Marie-Nathalie, daughter of Mademoiselle Blanche de Casteran, abbess,
deceased, of Notre-Dame de Seez, and Victor-Amedee, Duc de Verneuil."

"Where born?"

"At La Chasterie, near Alencon."

"I never supposed," said the baron in a low voice to the count, "that
Montauran would have the folly to marry her. The natural daughter of a
duke!--horrid!"

"If it were of the king, well and good," replied the Comte de Bauvan,
smiling. "However, it is not for me to blame him; I like Charette's
mistress full as well; and I shall transfer the war to her--though
she's not one to bill and coo."

The names of the marquis had been filled in previously, and the two
lovers now signed the document with their witnesses. The ceremony then
began. At that instant Marie, and she alone, heard the sound of
muskets and the heavy tread of soldiers,--no doubt relieving the guard
in the church which she had herself demanded. She trembled violently
and raised her eyes to the cross on the altar.

"A saint at last," said Francine, in a low voice.

"Give me such saints, and I'll be devilishly devout," added the count,
in a whisper.

When the priest made the customary inquiry of Mademoiselle de
Verneuil, she answered by a "yes" uttered with a deep sigh. Bending to
her husband's ear she said: "You will soon know why I have broken the
oath I made never to marry you."

After the ceremony all present passed into the dining-room, where
dinner was served, and as they took their places Jeremie, Marie's
footman, came into the room terrified. The poor bride rose and went to
him; Francine followed her. With one of those pretexts which never
fail a woman, she begged the marquis to do the honors for a moment,
and went out, taking Jeremie with her before he could utter the fatal
words.

"Ah! Francine, to be dying a thousand deaths and not to die!" she
cried.

This absence might well be supposed to have its cause in the ceremony
that had just taken place. Towards the end of the dinner, as the
marquis was beginning to feel uneasy, Marie returned in all the pomp
of a bridal robe. Her face was calm and joyful, while that of Francine
who followed her had terror imprinted on every feature, so that the
guests might well have thought they saw in these two women a fantastic
picture by Salvator Rosa, of Life and Death holding each other by the
hand.

"Gentlemen," said Marie to the priest, the baron, and the count, "you
are my guests for the night. I find you cannot leave Fougeres; it
would be dangerous to attempt it. My good maid has instructions to
make you comfortable in your apartments. No, you must not rebel," she
added to the priest, who was about to speak. "I hope you will not
thwart a woman on her wedding-day."

An hour later she was alone with her husband in the room she had so
joyously arranged a few hours earlier. They had reached that fatal bed
where, like a tomb, so many hopes are wrecked, where the waking to a
happy life is all uncertain, where love is born or dies, according to
the natures that are tried there. Marie looked at the clock. "Six
hours to live," she murmured.

"Can I have slept?" she cried toward morning, wakening with one of
those sudden movements which rouse us when we have made ourselves a
promise to wake at a certain hour. "Yes, I have slept," she thought,
seeing by the light of the candles that the hands of the clock were
pointing to two in the morning. She turned and looked at the sleeping
marquis, lying like a child with his head on one hand, the other
clasping his wife's hand, his lips half smiling as though he had
fallen asleep while she kissed him.

"Ah!" she whispered to herself, "he sleeps like an infant; he does not
distrust me--me, to whom he has given a happiness without a name."

She touched him softly and he woke, continuing to smile. He kissed the
hand he held and looked at the wretched woman with eyes so sparkling
that she could not endure their light and slowly lowered her large
eyelids. Her husband might justly have accused her of coquetry if she
were not concealing the terrors of her soul by thus evading the fire
of his looks. Together they raised their charming heads and made each
other a sign of gratitude for the pleasures they had tasted; but after
a rapid glance at the beautiful picture his wife presented, the
marquis was struck with an expression on her face which seemed to him
melancholy, and he said in a tender voice, "Why sad, dear love?"

"Poor Alphonse," she answered, "do you know to what I have led you?"

"To happiness."

"To death!"

Shuddering with horror she sprang from the bed; the marquis,
astonished, followed her. His wife motioned him to a window and raised
the curtain, pointing as she did so to a score of soldiers. The moon
had scattered the fog and was now casting her white light on the
muskets and the uniforms, on the impassible Corentin pacing up and
down like a jackal waiting for his prey, on the commandant, standing
still, his arms crossed, his nose in the air, his lips curling,
watchful and displeased.

"Come, Marie, leave them and come back to me."

"Why do you smile? I placed them there."

"You are dreaming."

"No."

They looked at each other for a moment. The marquis divined the whole
truth, and he took her in his arms. "No matter!" he said, "I love you
still."

"All is not lost!" cried Marie, "it cannot be! Alphonse," she said
after a pause, "there is hope."

At this moment they distinctly heard the owl's cry, and Francine
entered from the dressing-room.

"Pierre has come!" she said with a joy that was like delirium.

The marquise and Francine dressed Montauran in Chouan clothes with
that amazing rapidity that belongs only to women. As soon as Marie saw
her husband loading the gun Francine had brought in she slipped
hastily from the room with a sign to her faithful maid. Francine then
took the marquis to the dressing-room adjoining the bed-chamber. The
young man seeing a large number of sheets knotted firmly together,
perceived the means by which the girl expected him to escape the
vigilance of the soldiers.

"I can't get through there," he said, examining the bull's-eye window.

At that instant it was darkened by a thickset figure, and a hoarse
voice, known to Francine, said in a whisper, "Make haste, general,
those rascally Blues are stirring."

"Oh! one more kiss," said a trembling voice beside him.

The marquis, whose feet were already on the liberating ladder, though
he was not wholly through the window, felt his neck clasped with a
despairing pressure. Seeing that his wife had put on his clothes, he
tried to detain her; but she tore herself roughly from his arms and he
was forced to descend. In his hand he held a fragment of some stuff
which the moonlight showed him was a piece of the waistcoat he had
worn the night before.

"Halt! fire!"

These words uttered by Hulot in the midst of a silence that was almost
horrible broke the spell which seemed to hold the men and their
surroundings. A volley of balls coming from the valley and reaching to
the foot of the tower succeeded the discharges of the Blues posted on
the Promenade. Not a cry came from the Chouans. Between each discharge
the silence was frightful.

But Corentin had heard a fall from the ladder on the precipice side of
the tower, and he suspected some ruse.

"None of those animals are growling," he said to Hulot; "our lovers
are capable of fooling us on this side, and escaping themselves on the
other."

The spy, to clear up the mystery, sent for torches; Hulot,
understanding the force of Corentin's supposition, and hearing the
noise of a serious struggle in the direction of the Porte
Saint-Leonard, rushed to the guard-house exclaiming: "That's true,
they won't separate."

"His head is well-riddled, commandant," said Beau-Pied, who was the
first to meet him, "but he killed Gudin, and wounded two men. Ha! the
savage; he got through three ranks of our best men and would have
reached the fields if it hadn't been for the sentry at the gate who
spitted him on his bayonet."

The commandant rushed into the guard-room and saw on a camp bedstead a
bloody body which had just been laid there. He went up to the supposed
marquis, raised the hat which covered the face, and fell into a chair.

"I suspected it!" he cried, crossing his arms violently; "she kept
him, cursed thunder! too long."

The soldiers stood about, motionless. The commandant himself
unfastened the long black hair of a woman. Suddenly the silence was
broken by the tramp of men and Corentin entered the guardroom,
preceding four soldiers who bore on their guns, crossed to make a
litter, the body of Montauran, who was shot in the thighs and arms.
They laid him on the bedstead beside his wife. He saw her, and found
strength to clasp her hand with a convulsive gesture. The dying woman
turned her head, recognized her husband, and shuddered with a spasm
that was horrible to see, murmuring in a voice almost extinct: "A day
without a morrow! God heard me too well!"

"Commandant," said the marquis, collecting all his strength, and still
holding Marie's hand, "I count on your honor to send the news of my
death to my young brother, who is now in London. Write him that if he
wishes to obey my last injunction he will never bear arms against his
country--neither must he abandon the king's service."

"It shall be done," said Hulot, pressing the hand of the dying man.

"Take them to the nearest hospital," cried Corentin.

Hulot took the spy by the arm with a grip that left the imprint of his
fingers on the flesh.

"Out of this camp!" he cried; "your business is done here. Look well

at the face of Commander Hulot, and never find yourself again in his
way if you don't want your belly to be the scabbard of his blade--"

And the older soldier flourished his sabre.

"That's another of the honest men who will never make their way," said
Corentin to himself when he was some distance from the guard-room.

The marquis was still able to thank his gallant adversary by a look
marking the respect which all soldiers feel for loyal enemies.

* * * * *

In 1827 an old man accompanied by his wife was buying cattle in the
market-place of Fougeres. Few persons remembered that he had killed a
hundred or more men, and that his former name was Marche-a-Terre. A
person to whom we owe important information about all the personages
of this drama saw him there, leading a cow, and was struck by his
simple, ingenuous air, which led her to remark, "That must be a worthy
man."

As for Cibot, otherwise called Pille-Miche, we already know his end.
It is likely that Marche-a-Terre made some attempt to save his comrade
from the scaffold; possibly he was in the square at Alencon on the
occasion of the frightful tumult which was one of the events of the
famous trial of Rifoel, Briond, and la Chanterie.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Berthier, Alexandre
The Gondreville Mystery

Brigaut, Major
Pierrette

Casteran, De
The Seamy Side of History
Jealousies of a Country Town
Beatrix
The Peasantry

Cibot, Jean (alias Pille-Miche)
The Seamy Side of History

Corentin
The Gondreville Mystery
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
The Middle Classes

Esgrignon, Charles-Marie-Victor-Ange-Carol, Marquis d' (or Des Grignons)
Jealousies of a Country Town

Falcon, Jean (alias Beaupied or Beau-Pied)
The Muse of the Department
Cousin Betty

Ferdinand
Beatrix

Fontaine, Comte de
Modeste Mignon
The Ball at Sceaux
Cesar Birotteau
The Government Clerks

Fouche, Joseph
The Gondreville Mystery
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Guenic, Gaudebert-Calyste-Charles, Baron du
Beatrix

Hulot (Marshal)
The Muse of the Department
Cousin Betty

La Billardiere, Athanase-Jean-Francois-Michel, Baron Flamet de
Cesar Birotteau
The Government Clerks

Leroi, Pierre
The Seamy Side of History
Jealousies of a Country Town

Loudon, Prince de
Modeste Mignon

Louis XVIII., Louis-Stanislas-Xavier
The Seamy Side of History
The Gondreville Mystery
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
The Ball at Sceaux
The Lily of the Valley
Colonel Chabert
The Government Clerks

Montauran, Marquis Alphonse de
Cesar Birotteau

Montauran, Marquis de (younger brother of Alphonse de)
The Seamy Side of History
Cousin Betty

Stael-Holstein (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker) Baronne de
Louis Lambert
Letters of Two Brides

Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice de
The Gondreville Mystery
The Thirteen
Letters of Two Brides
Gaudissart II.

Troisville, Guibelin, Vicomte de
The Seamy Side of History
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Peasantry

Valois, Chevalier de
Jealousies of a Country Town

Verneuil, Duc de
Jealousies of a Country Town

Vissard, Charles-Amedee-Louis-Joseph Rifoel, Chevalier du
The Seamy Side of History