The Chouans by Honoré de Balzac (open ebook txt) 📕

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