fear of this woman's writing indiscreetly to her husband that Mme. de Combray remained silent? But in any case, why the tower?

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

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

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and made an effort to resume, with the English minister, the intrigue that had just failed so miserably, Moreau having withdrawn at the last minute.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is pleasant to see M. de la Sicotière point out the confusion he alone experienced. But there is better to come! Here is a writer who gives us in two large volumes the history of Norman Chouannerie. There is little else spoken of in