The Marquis de Souday gained the banks of the Loire and found a
fisherman who was willing to take him to Saint-Gildas. A frigate hove
in sight,--an English frigate. For a few more louis the fisherman
consented to put the marquis aboard of her. Once there, he was safe.
Two or three days later the frigate hailed a three-masted merchantman,
which was heading for the Channel. She was Dutch. The marquis asked to
be put aboard of her; the English captain consented. The Dutchman
landed him at Rotterdam. From Rotterdam he went to Blankenbourg, a
little town in the duchy of Brunswick, which Louis XVIII. had chosen
for his residence.
The marquis now prepared to execute Charette's last instructions. When
he reached the château Louis XVIII. was dining; this was always a
sacred hour to him. The ex-page was told to wait. When dinner was over
he was introduced into the king's presence.
He related the events he had seen with his own eyes, and, above all,
the last catastrophe, with such eloquence that his Majesty, who was
not impressionable, was enough impressed to cry out:--
"Enough, enough, marquis! Yes, the Chevalier de Charette was a brave
servant; we are grateful to him."
He made the messenger a sign to retire. The marquis obeyed; but as he
withdrew he heard the king say, in a sulky tone:--
"That fool of a Souday coming here and telling me such things after
dinner! It is enough to upset my digestion!"
The marquis was touchy; he thought that after exposing his life for
six months it was a poor reward to be called a fool by him for whom he
had exposed it. One hundred louis were still in his pocket, and he
left Blankenbourg that evening, saying to himself:--
"If I had known that I should be received in that way I wouldn't have
taken such pains to come."
He returned to Holland, and from Holland he went to England. There
began a new phase in the existence of the Marquis de Souday. He was
one of those men who are moulded by circumstances,--men who are strong
or weak, brave or pusillanimous, according to the surroundings among
which fortune casts them. For six months he had been at the apex of
that terrible Vendéan epic; his blood had stained the gorse and the
moors of upper and lower Poitou; he had borne with stoical fortitude
not only the ill-fortune of battle, but also the privations of that
guerilla warfare, bivouacking in snow, wandering without food, without
clothes, without shelter, in the boggy forests of La Vendée. Not once
had he felt a regret; not a single complaint had passed his lips.
And yet, with all these antecedents, when isolated in the midst of
that great city of London, where he wandered sadly regretting the
excitements of war, he felt himself without courage in presence of
enforced idleness, without resistance under ennui, without energy to
overcome the wretchedness of exile. This man, who had bravely borne
the attacks and pursuits of the infernal columns of the Blues, could
not bear up against the evil suggestions which came of idleness. He
sought pleasure everywhere to fill the void in his existence caused by
the absence of stirring vicissitudes and the excitements of a deadly
struggle.
Now such pleasures as a penniless exile could command were not of a
high order; and thus it happened that, little by little, he lost his
former elegance and the look and manner of gentleman as his tastes
deteriorated. He drank ale and porter instead of champagne, and
contented himself with the bedizened women of the Haymarket and Regent
Street,--he who had chosen his first loves among the duchesses.
Soon the looseness of his principles and the pressure of his needs
drove him into connections from which his reputation suffered. He
accepted pleasures when he could not pay for them; his companions in
debauchery were of a lower class than himself. After a time his own
class of _émigrés_ turned away from him, and by the natural drift of
things, the more the marquis found himself neglected by his rightful
friends, the deeper he plunged into the evil ways he had now entered.
He had been leading this existence for about two years, when by chance
he encountered, in an evil resort which he frequented, a young
working-girl, whom one of those infamous women who infest London had
enticed from her poor home and produced for the first time. In spite
of the changes which ill-luck and a reckless life had produced in the
marquis, the poor girl perceived the remains of a gentleman still in
him. She flung herself at his feet, and implored him to save her from
an infamous life, for which she was not meant, having always been good
and virtuous till then.
The young girl was pretty, and the marquis offered to take her with
him. She threw herself on his neck and promised him all her love and
the utmost devotion. Without any thought of doing a good action the
marquis defeated the speculation on Eva's beauty,--the girl was named
Eva. She kept her word, poor, faithful creature that she was; the
marquis was her first and last and only love.
The matter was a fortunate thing for both of them. The marquis was
getting very tired of cock-fights and the acrid fumes of beer, not to
speak of frays with constables and loves at street-corners. The
tenderness of the young girl rested him; the possession of the pure
child, white as the swans which are the emblem of Brittany, his own
land, satisfied his vanity. Little by little, he changed his course of
life, and though he never returned to the habits of his own class, he
did adopt a life which was that of a decent man.
He went to live with Eva on the upper floor of a house in Piccadilly.
She was a good workwoman, and soon found employment with a milliner.
The marquis gave fencing-lessons. From that time they lived on the
humble proceeds of their employments, finding great happiness in a
love which had now become powerful enough to gild their poverty.
Nevertheless, this love, like all things mortal, wore out in the end,
though not for a long time. Happily for Eva, the emotions of the
Vendéan war and the frantic excitements of London hells had used up
her lover's superabundant sap; he was really an old man before his
time. The day on which the marquis first perceived that his love for
Eva was waning, the day when her kisses were powerless, not to satisfy
him but to rouse him, habit had acquired such an influence over him
that even had he sought distractions outside his home he no longer had
the force or the courage to break a connection in which his
selfishness still found the monotonous comforts of daily life.
The former _viveur_, whose ancestors had possessed for three centuries
the power of life and death in their province, the ex-_brigand_, the
aide-de-camp to the _brigand_ Charette, led for a dozen years the
dull, precarious, drudging life of a humble clerk, or a mechanic more
humble still.
Heaven had long refrained from blessing this illegitimate marriage;
but at last the prayers which Eva had never ceased to offer for twelve
years were granted. The poor woman became pregnant, and gave birth to
twin daughters. But alas! a few hours of the maternal joys she had so
longed for were all that were granted to her. She died of puerperal
fever.
Eva's tenderness for the Marquis de Souday was as deep and warm at the
end of twelve years' devotion as it was in the beginning of their
intercourse; yet her love, great as it was, did not prevent her from
recognizing that frivolity and selfishness were at the bottom of her
lover's character. Therefore she suffered in dying not only the
anguish of bidding an eternal farewell to the man she had loved so
deeply, but the terror of leaving the future of her children in his
hands.
This loss produced impressions upon the marquis which we shall
endeavor to reproduce minutely, because they seem to us to give a
distinct idea of the nature of the man who is destined to play an
important part in the narrative we are now undertaking.
He began by mourning his companion seriously and sincerely. He could
not help doing homage to her good qualities and recognizing the
happiness which he owed to her affection. Then, after his first grief
had passed away, he felt something of the joy of a schoolboy when he
gets out of bounds. Sooner or later his name, rank, and birth must
have made it necessary for him to break the tie. The marquis felt
grateful to Providence for relieving him of a duty which would
certainly have distressed him.
This satisfaction, however, was short-lived. Eva's tenderness, the
continuity, if we may say so, of the care and attention she had given
him, had spoilt the marquis; and those cares and attentions, now that
he had suddenly lost them, seemed to him more essential to his
happiness than ever. The humble chambers in which they had lived
became, now that the Englishwoman's fresh, pure voice no longer
enlivened them, what they were in reality,--miserable lodging-rooms;
and, in like manner, when his eyes sought involuntarily the silky hair
of his companion lying in golden waves upon the pillow, his bed was
nothing more than a wretched pallet. Where could he now look for the
soft petting, the tender attention to all his wants, with which, for
twelve good years, Eva had surrounded him. When he reached this stage
of his desolation the marquis admitted to himself that he could never
replace them. Consequently, he began to mourn poor Eva more than ever,
and when the time came for him to part with his little girls, whom he
sent into Yorkshire to be nursed, he put such a rush of tenderness
into his grief that the good country-woman, their foster-mother, was
sincerely affected.
After thus separating from all that united him with the past, the
Marquis de Souday succumbed under the burden of his solitude; he
became morose and taciturn. As his religious faith was none too solid,
he would probably have ended, under the deep disgust of life which now
took possession of him, by jumping into the Thames, if the catastrophe
of 1814 had not happened just in time to distract him from his
melancholy thoughts. Re-entering France, which he had never hoped to
see again, the Marquis de Souday very naturally applied to Louis
XVIII., of whom he had asked nothing during his exile in return for
the blood he had shed for him. But princes often seek pretexts for
ingratitude, and Louis XVIII. was furnished with three against his
former page: first, the tempestuous manner in which he had announced
to his Majesty Charette's death,--an announcement which had in fact
troubled the royal digestion; secondly, his disrespectful departure
from Blankenbourg, accompanied by language even more disrespectful
than the departure itself; and thirdly (this was the gravest pretext),
the irregularity of his life and conduct during the emigration.
Much praise was bestowed upon the bravery and devotion of the former
page; but he was, very gently, made to understand that with such
scandals attaching to his name he could not expect to fulfil any
public functions. The king was no longer an autocrat, they told him;
he was now compelled to consider public opinion; after the late period
of public immorality it was necessary to introduce a new and more
rigid era of morals. How fine a thing it would be if the marquis were
willing to sacrifice his own personal ambitions to the necessities of
the State.
In short, they persuaded him to be satisfied with the cross of
Saint-Louis, the rank and pension of a major of cavalry, and to take
himself off to eat the king's bread on his estate at Souday,--the sole
fragment recovered by the poor _émigré_ from the wreck of the enormous
fortune of his ancestors.
What was really fine about all this was that these excuses and
hypocrisies did not hinder the Marquis de Souday from doing his
duty,--that is, from leaving his poor castle to defend the white flag
when Napoleon made his marvellous return from Elba. Napoleon fell
again, and for the second time the marquis re-entered Paris with the
legitimate princes. But this time, wiser than he was in 1814, he
merely asked of the restored monarchy for the place of Master of
Wolves to the arrondissement of Machecoul,--an office in the royal
gift which, being without salary or emolument, was willingly accorded
to him.
Deprived during his youth of a pleasure which in his family was an
hereditary passion, the marquis now devoted himself ardently to
hunting. Always unhappy in a solitary life, for which he was totally
unfitted, yet growing more and more misanthropic as the result of his
political disappointments, he found in this active exercise a
momentary forgetfulness of his bitter memories. Thus the position of
Master of Wolves, which gave him the right to roam the State forests
at will, afforded him far more satisfaction than his ribbon of
Saint-Louis or his commission as major of cavalry.
So the Marquis de Souday had been living for two years in the mouldy
little castle we lately described, beating the woods day and night
with his six dogs (the only establishment his slender means
permitted), seeing his neighbors just enough to prevent them from
considering him an absolute bear, and thinking as little as he could
of his past wealth and his past fame, when one morning, as he was
starting to explore the north end of the forest of Machecoul, he met
on the road a peasant woman carrying a child three or four years old
on each arm.
The marquis instantly recognized the woman and blushed as he did so.
It was the nurse from Yorkshire, to whom he had regularly for the last
thirty-six months neglected to pay the board of her two nurslings. The
worthy woman had gone to London, and there made inquiries at the
French legation. She had now reached Machecoul with the assistance of
the French minister, who of course did not doubt that the Marquis de
Souday would be most happy to recover his two children.
The singular part of it is that the ambassador was not entirely
mistaken. The little girls reminded the marquis so vividly of his poor
Eva that he was seized with genuine emotion; he kissed them with a
tenderness that was not assumed, gave his gun to the Englishwoman,
took his children in his arms, and returned to the castle with this
unlooked-for game, to the utter stupefaction of the cook, who
constituted his whole household, and who now overwhelmed him with
questions as to the singular accession thus made to the family.
These questions alarmed the marquis. He was only thirty-nine years of
age, and vague ideas of marriage still floated in his head; he
regarded it as a duty not to let a name and house so illustrious as
that of Souday come to an end in his person. Moreover, he would not
have been sorry to turn over to a wife the management of his household
affairs, which was odious to him. But the realization of that idea
would, of course, be impossible if he kept the little girls in his
house.
He saw this plainly, paid the Englishwoman handsomely, and the next
day despatched her back to her own country.
During the night he had come to a resolution which, he thought, would
solve all difficulties. What was that resolution? We shall now see.