第32章

"These last echoes of the civil war made much less noise than you would imagine, accustomed as we are now to the frightful publicity given by the press to every trial, even the least important, whether political or individual.The system of the Imperial government was that of all absolute governments.The censor allowed nothing to be published in the matter of politics except accomplished facts, and those were travestied.If you will take the trouble to look through files of the 'Moniteur' and the other newspapers of that time, even those of the West, you will not find a word about the four or five criminal trials which cost the lives of sixty or eighty 'brigands.'

The term /brigands/, applied during the revolutionary period to the Vendeans, Chouans, and all those who took up arms for the house of Bourbon, was afterwards continued judicially under the Empire against all royalists accused of plots.To some ardent and loyal natures the emperor and his government were the enemy; any form of warfare against them was legitimate.I am only explaining to you these opinions, not justifying them.

"Now," he said, after one of those pauses which are necessary in such long narratives, "if you realize how these royalists, ruined by the civil war of 1793, were dominated by violent passions, and how some exceptional natures (like that of Madame de la Chanterie's son-in-law and his friend) were eaten up with desires of all kinds, you may be able to understand how it was that the acts of brigandage which their political views justified when employed against the government in the service of the good cause, might in some cases be committed for personal ends.

"The younger of the two men had been for some time employed in collecting the scattered fragments of Chouannerie, and was holding them ready to act at an opportune moment.There came a terrible crisis in the Emperor's career when, shut up in the island of Lobau, he seemed about to give way under the combined and simultaneous attack of England and Austria.This was the moment for the Chouan uprising; but just as it was about to take place, the victory of Wagram rendered the conspiracy in the provinces powerless.

"This expectation of exciting civil war in Brittany, La Vendee, and part of Normandy, coincided in time with the final wreck of the baron's fortune; and this wreck, coming at this time, led him to undertake an expedition to capture funds of the government which he might apply to the liquidation of the claims upon his property.But his wife and friend refused to take part in applying to private interests the money taken by armed force from the Receiver's offices and the couriers and post-carriages of the government,--money taken, as they thought, justifiably by the rules of war to pay the regiments of 'refractories' and Chouans, and purchase the arms and ammunition with which to equip them.At last, after an angry discussion in which the young leader, supported by the wife, positively refused to hand over to the husband a portion of the large sum of money which the young leader had seized for the benefit of the royal armies from the treasury of the West, the baron suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, to avoid arrest for debt, having no means left by which to ward it off.Poor Madame de la Chanterie was wholly ignorant of these facts;but even they are nothing to the plot still hidden behind these preliminary facts.

"It is too late to-night," said Monsieur Alain, looking at his little clock, "to go on with my narrative, which would take me, in any case, a long time to finish in my own words.Old Bordin, my friend, whose management of the famous Simeuse case had won him much credit in the royalist party, and who pleaded in the well-known criminal affair called that of the Chauffeurs de Mortagne, gave me, after I was installed in this house, two legal papers relating to the terrible history of Madame de la Chanterie and her daughter.I kept them because Bordin died soon after, before I had a chance to return them.

You shall read them.You will find the facts much more succinctly stated than I could state them.Those facts are so numerous that Ishould only lose myself in the details and confuse them, whereas in those papers you have them in a legal summary.To-morrow, if you come to me, I will finish telling you all that relates to Madame de la Chanterie; for you will then know the general facts so thoroughly that I can end the whole story in a few words."