The Chouans, Honoré de Balzac [red queen ebook txt] 📗

“Are you joking?” asked the other, catching his prisoner by the petticoat, as a butcher catches a calf that is trying to escape him.

“Let me see her, and I’ll set a price.”

The unfortunate creature was made to leave the coach and stand between the two Chouans, who each held a hand and looked at her as the Elders must have looked at Susannah.

“Will you take thirty francs in good coin?” said Marche-a-Terre, with a groan.

“Really?”

“Done?” said Marche-a-Terre, holding out his hand.

“Yes, done; I can get plenty of Breton girls for that, and choice morsels, too. But the coach; whose is that?” asked Pille-Miche, beginning to reflect upon his bargain.

“Mine!” cried Marche-a-Terre, in a terrible tone of voice, which showed the sort of superiority his ferocious character gave him over his companions.

“But suppose there’s money in the coach?”

“Didn’t you say, ‘Done’?”

“Yes, I said, ‘Done.’”

“Very good; then go and fetch the postilion who is gagged in the stable over there.”

“But if there’s money in the—”

“Is there any?” asked Marche-a-Terre, roughly, shaking Marie by the arm.

“Yes, about a hundred crowns.”

The two Chouans looked at each other.

“Well, well, friend,” said Pille-Miche, “we won’t quarrel for a female Blue; let’s pitch her into the lake with a stone around her neck, and divide the money.”

“I’ll give you that money as my share in d’Orgemont’s ransom,” said Marche-a-Terre, smothering a groan, caused by such sacrifice.

Pille-Miche uttered a sort of hoarse cry as he started to find the postilion, and his glee brought death to Merle, whom he met on his way.

Hearing the shot, Marche-a-Terre rushed in the direction where he had left Francine, and found her praying on her knees, with clasped hands, beside the poor captain, whose murder had deeply horrified her.

“Run to your mistress,” said the Chouan; “she is saved.”

He ran himself to fetch the postilion, returning with all speed, and, as he repassed Merle’s body, he noticed the Gars’ glove, which was still convulsively clasped in the dead hand.

“Oho!” he cried. “Pille-Miche has blundered horribly—he won’t live to spend his crowns.”

He snatched up the glove and said to Mademoiselle de Verneuil, who was already in the coach with Francine: “Here, take this glove. If any of our men attack you on the road, call out ‘Ho, the Gars!’ show the glove, and no harm can happen to you. Francine,” he said, turning towards her and seizing her violently, “you and I are quits with that woman; come with me and let the devil have her.”

“You can’t ask me to abandon her just at this moment!” cried Francine, in distress.

Marche-a-Terre scratched his ear and forehead, then he raised his head, and his mistress saw the ferocious expression of his eyes. “You are right,” he said; “I leave you with her one week; if at the end of that time you don’t come with me—” he did not finish the sentence, but he slapped the muzzle of his gun with the flat of his hand. After making the gesture of taking aim at her, he disappeared, without waiting for her reply.

No sooner was he gone than a voice, which seemed to issue from the lake, called, in a muffled tone: “Madame, madame!”

The postilion and the two women shuddered, for several corpses were floating near them. A Blue, hidden behind a tree, cautiously appeared.

“Let me get up behind the coach, or I’m a dead man. That damned cider which Clef-des-Coeurs would stop to drink cost more than a pint of blood. If he had done as I did, and made his round, our poor comrades there wouldn’t be floating dead in the pond.”

While these events were taking place outside the chateau, the leaders sent by the Vendeans and those of the Chouans were holding a council of war, with their glasses in their hands, under the presidency of the Marquis de Montauran. Frequent libations of Bordeaux animated the discussion, which, however, became more serious and important at the end of the meal. After the general plan of military operations had been decided on, the Royalists drank to the health of the Bourbons. It was at that moment that the shot which killed Merle was heard, like an echo of the disastrous war which these gay and noble conspirators were about to make against the Republic. Madame du Gua quivered with pleasure at the thought that she was freed from her rival; the guests looked at each other in silence; the marquis rose from the table and went out.

“He loved her!” said Madame du Gua, sarcastically. “Follow him, Monsieur de Fontaine, and keep him company; he will be as irritating as a fly if we let him sulk.”

She went to a window which looked on the courtyard to endeavor to see Marie’s body. There, by the last gleams of the sinking moon, she caught sight of the coach being rapidly driven down the avenue of apple-trees. Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s veil was fluttering in the wind. Madame du Gua, furious at the sight, left the room hurriedly. The marquis, standing on the portico absorbed in gloomy thought, was watching about a hundred and fifty Chouans, who, having divided their booty in the gardens, were now returning to finish the cider and the rye-bread provided for the Blues. These soldiers of a new species, on whom the monarchy was resting its hopes, dispersed into groups. Some drank the cider; others, on the bank before the portico, amused themselves by flinging into the lake the dead bodies of the Blues, to which they fastened stones. This sight, joined to the other aspects of the strange scene,—the fantastic dress, the savage expressions of the barbarous and uncouth gars,—was so new and so amazing to Monsieur de Fontaine, accustomed to the nobler and better-regulated appearance of the Vendean troops, that he seized the occasion to say to the Marquis de Montauran, “What do you expect to do with such brutes?”

“Not very much, my dear count,” replied the Gars.

“Will they ever be fit to manoeuvre before the enemy?”

“Never.”

“Can they understand or execute an order?”

“No.”

“Then what good will they be to you?”

“They will help me to plunge my sword into the entrails of the Republic,” replied the marquis in a thundering voice. “They will give me Fougeres in three days, and all Brittany in ten! Monsieur,” he added in a gentler voice, “start at once for La Vendee; if d’Auticamp, Suzannet, and the Abbe Bernier will act as rapidly as I do, if they’ll not negotiate with the First