At la Chartre, where we rested to bait our horse and to eat ourselves, we were met with an answering wave of rumor—Bretons in their thousands were marching inland from the coast. Here was a match for our own brigands, and I do not know who looked the more discomfited, Robert or myself. The brigands I had already doubted for some hours… but Bretons? Had we not already heard earlier in the year that in the west they were refusing to pay the salt tax, and many granaries had been pillaged and burned? The tocsin was ringing in la Chartre, and there was all the confusion and commotion that we had witnessed the day before at la Ferté-Bernard.
“How did you hear the news here in la Chartre?” my brother asked at the inn, as we sat down to our first mouthful since leaving le Chesne-Bidault early that morning. The innkeeper, who hardly knew whether to serve us or barricade his house from the approaching Bretons, informed us that the change-coach from Le Mans had reported it soon after seven o’clock that morning.
“They had the news from the Paris diligence late last night,” said the innkeeper. “Brigands are traveling south from the capital, Bretons are marching from the coast. Between the two we shall be annihilated.”
The driver of that diligence, I thought, had done his work well. We had now come full circle. The original rumor, breathed upon the air at Dreux, had gathered momentum.
“Now,” I said to my brother, “are you satisfied?” And I told the distraught innkeeper that we had come that day from beyond Mondoubleau and had seen no brigands on the road.
“Perhaps not, madame,” answered the man. “Brigands or Bretons, they are all the same, and will show small mercy to folk like us. But it is not only strangers who are uttering threats, but our own peasants too. The same change-coach that brought the news this morning brought information also that the carriage of two deputies of the aristocracy had been flung into the river at Savigné-l’Evêque, and the deputies themselves would have lost their lives had not someone in the neighborhood offered them asylum.”
Savigné-l’Evêque was the final stopping place, after Bonnétable, for the Paris diligence before Le Mans.
“What were the names of the deputies?” asked my brother.
“The comte de Montesson and the marquis de Vassé,” replied the innkeeper.
Both names were familiar to me by hearsay. They were deputies who had become unpopular in Le Mans because of their hostility to the Third Estate. Here, then, was an assault that could not be blamed on either brigands, Bretons, or the fertile imagination of the driver of the Paris diligence.
“Strange,” murmured Robert. “The marquis de Vassé is a member of the Lodge of Parfait Estime. I should have thought…”
He left his sentence unfinished. Whether he meant to imply that Freemasons should come unscathed through times of trouble I did not know, but it occurred to me that both rumors and revolutions might be among those things which rebound very frequently upon the heads of those who start them.
La Chartre, with its sounding tocsin and agitated crowds, was no place in which to linger, and we were soon on the road again, past Marçon and through Dissay, and the lush rolling countryside of my mother’s Touraine opened out on either side of us, the ripe corn golden in the light of the setting sun. Here were no black-faced brigands or swarthy Bretons, but the bent bodies of the harvesters scything their wheat and barley—for they were earlier with the harvest here than we were in the forest.
We drove out of the village of St. Christophe to my mother’s small farm property l’Antinière, lying in a hollow, surrounded by its orchard and few acres; and although it was by now late in the evening my mother and her helpers were still out in the fields. I recognized her tall figure on the skyline. My brother hallooed, and we saw her turn and gaze down the field to the carriole, then slowly she began to walk down the field towards us, her hand above her head in recognition.
“I did not know,” exclaimed young Jacques, surprised, “that my grandmother worked in the fields like a peasant.”
In a moment she was with us, and I had climbed down from the carriole and was in her arms crying—whether from fatigue or joy or relief I did not know. In her arms was security, all that was stable of our old world, which had been so disrupted; against her heart was refuge from my own fears of the present, my own doubts of the future.
“That’s enough, now, that’s enough,” she said, holding me close, and then releasing me with a pat on the shoulder as if I were a child younger than Jacques. “If you have come all the way from le Chesne-Bidault you are hungry, thirsty, and tired. We will see what Berthe can produce for us in the house. Jacques, you have grown. Robert, you look more irresponsible than ever. What are you doing here, and what is it all about?”
Yes, she had heard of the disturbances in Paris. She had heard that the first two Orders were making trouble for the Third Estate.
“What can you expect from people like that?” she asked. “They have had things their own way too long, and find it unpleasant to be challenged by others.”
No, she knew nothing of the storming of the Bastille on the 14th of July, nor had she been warned against brigands.
“If any black-faced vagrants show their faces in this neighborhood, they will get more than they bargained for,” she said.
She looked at the fork leaning against her barn, and I believe she would have faced an army with this weapon, turning it from her door armed with the fork only, and her own determination.
By the time we had finished our explanations, she and Berthe between them had laid the table in the kitchen and spread a meal before our eyes—a great side of home-cured pork, and cheese, and bread baked in the oven, and even a bottle of home-brewed wine to wash it all down.
“So…,” said my mother, sitting in her customary place at the head of the table, making me fancy we were under her supervision once again at the glass-house. “The National Assembly have the situation in hand and the King has promised a new Constitution. Why, then, so much commotion? Everybody should be well pleased.”
“You forget the first two Orders,” replied Robert, “the aristocracy and the clergy. They will not accept this without a struggle.”
“Let them struggle,” said my mother. “Meantime we can gather in the harvest. Wipe your mouth, Jacques, after drinking.”
Robert told her about the plots of the aristocracy, the six thousand brigands ravaging the countryside. My mother remained unmoved.
“We have come through the hardest winter in living memory,” she said. “Naturally there are vagrants wandering about demanding work. I employed three myself last week, and fed them too. They appeared grateful. If the Paris prisons have been opened, as you say, then people like you have all the more reason to remain in the capital now they have gone. The place should be more tranquil.”
Whatever were the rumors my brother had brought with him those many miles from Paris to la Ferté-Bernard and beyond, they had no effect upon the imperturbability of l’Antinière.
Robert had succeeded once in breaking down my mother’s reserve, when he was imprisoned for fraud in La Force. He would not do so again, not even with the news of a revolution.
“As to you, Sophie,” she said, fixing her eyes upon me in her usual direct fashion, “you have no business to be here at all with your baby due in eight weeks’ time.”
“I had hoped,” I murmured, greatly daring, “that I might stay here with you and have the baby at l’Antinière.”
“Out of the question,” replied my mother. “Your place is with your husband at le Chesne-Bidault—besides, who would look after the families in your absence? I have never heard of such a thing. I will keep Jacques, if Robert wishes—the air is better here than in Paris, and I can feed him well, despite the hardships of the past months.”
As always, she was in command of the situation and setting us to rights; even Robert was hard put to it to defend his action in leaving Paris. That he had done so for the greater security of his son did not impress my mother.
“I wonder
you did not think of the security of your boutique,” she remarked, “if the Palais-Royal is now the center of activity you describe. I should fear for my stock. Have you left anyone in charge?”
She accepted with raised eyebrows his reply that the boutique was being looked after by friends.
“I am glad to hear it,” she said. “It is in times of trouble that we depend upon our friends. A few years ago they were lacking when you most needed them. Perhaps this revolution will change all that.”
“Since my patron the duc d’Orléans will probably mediate between the King and the people of Paris, and become lieutenant-general of the kingdom, I sincerely hope so,” replied my brother.
They faced each other across the table, the pair of them, like a couple of fighting cocks, and I have little doubt they would have been at it until midnight had not a new sound, familiar now to me but new to my mother, caused her to lift her head and listen.
“Hark!” she said. “Who in the world would be ringing the church bell at this time of the evening?”
The tocsin was sounding across the fields from St. Christophe. Jacques, tired by now and overwrought, burst into tears and ran to my side. “It’s the brigands,” he said, “the brigands have followed us from Paris.”
Even Robert looked astonished. We had seen no one to speak to when we had driven through the village earlier. My mother rose to her feet and called out to the cowman in the yard outside.
“See that the animals are within and all secure,” she said. “And you had better bolt your own door too before going to bed.”
She turned herself, and bolted the door of the house behind her.
“Brigands or not,” she said, “there is no sense in being unprepared. The curé would never have given orders for the church bell to ring an alarm had he not received a warning of some sort. Word must have come through Château-du-Loir from Le Mans.”
I was wrong to have expected peace even at l’Antinière. The driver of that diligence had done his work too well. Rumor and revolution had caught up with us once more.
10
We remained at St. Christophe with my mother on Monday and Tuesday, and on Wednesday the 22nd of July, no brigands having been seen in our immediate neighborhood, my brother decided to delay our return no further; but, instead of retracing our route through la Chartre and St. Calais, to go west by way of Le Mans, and there obtain the latest news from Paris.
“If the Electors in Le Mans have formed a committee to take over the municipality, Pierre will somehow be connected with it, we can be sure of that,” said Robert, “and they will be in touch with the capital. I suggest we waste no further time here but leave at once.”
I was reluctant to do so, but I felt I had no choice. My mother plainly thought it my duty to go back to le Chesne-Bidault, and I would rather face a thousand brigands than her disapproval. I had no qualms for young Jacques, who was already my mother’s shadow, and was so eager to be out in the fields helping with the harvest that he could barely spare the few minutes necessary to bid his father goodbye.
Whether, as Pierre used to say, we are watched over by the Great Architect of the Universe, or, as my mother taught me, by the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints, I shall always think it providential and merciful that whoever plans our destiny hides our future from us. None of us knew that the little boy of eight years old would be twenty-two before he saw his father again, and how bitter the encounter would be. As for my mother, this was the last time she was to hold her son in her arms.
“You have lost your Cathie,” she said to him. “Hold fast to what is left.”
“Nothing is left,” my brother replied. “That is why I brought you my son.”
He was not smiling now, and he looked his forty years. Could his air of detachment be a façade after all? None of us knew how much of his youth had gone into the grave with Cathie.
“I will take great care of him,” said my mother. “I wish I could believe you will take equal care of yourself.”
We mounted the carriole and drove up the hill from l’Antinière onto the road. Looking back, we saw grandmother and grandson standing there hand in hand waving to us, and it was as though they represented all that was steadfast and enduring in past and future, while our own generation—Robert’s and mine—lacked stability, and was at the mercy of events which might prove too strong for all of us.
“We are only a short distance from Chérigny, where I was born,” said Robert, pointing left with his whip. “The marquis de Cherbon left no heir. I forgot to ask my mother who owns it now.”
“Our cousins, the Renvoisés, still maintain the foundry after a fashion,” I told him. “We can go and call on them, if you like.”
Robert shook his head. “No,” he said, “what’s past is past. But the thought of that château and all it stands for will be with me until I die.”
He whipped the horse to a smarter pace, and even now, I thought, I do not know whether my brother speaks from envy or nostalgia, whether the château of Chérigny was something he wished to possess, or to destroy.
We came to the market town of Château-du-Loir, and immediately we were in the midst of rumor and counter-rumor. There were crowds standing beneath the mairie, and people were shouting, “Vive la nation… Vive le Tiers Etat” in a bewildered fashion, as though the very words themselves served as a charm to ward off danger.
It was market day, and there must have been some trouble, for stalls were overturned and chickens scattering in all directions, with several women weeping and one, bolder than her companions, shaking her fist at a group of men running towards the mairie.
Our carriole, strange to the town, became the center of attention, and we were at once surrounded and asked our business, while one fellow seized hold of the horse’s bridle, jerking it and forcing the poor animal backwards, shouting to us as he did so, “Are you for the Third Estate?”
“Certainly,” answered my brother, “I’m cousin to a deputy. Let my horse alone.” And he pointed to the rose and blue cockade that he had brought with him in the diligence from Paris, and had remembered to fix on the roof of the carriole.
“Put it in your hat, then, where everyone can see it,” cried the man, and if Robert had not done so forthwith I believe they would have dragged him from his seat, though whether any of them knew the meaning of the words Third Estate, or what the colors stood for, was another matter. We were then asked why we traveled and whither we were bound—Robert had an answer for every question—but when he told them Le Mans another fellow in the crowd advised us to turn around and go back again to St. Christophe.
“Le Mans is surrounded on all sides by brigands,” he told us. “They are ten thousand strong in the forest of Bonnétable. Every parish between here and the city has been alerted.”
“We’ll take the risk all the same,” said Robert. “I am due to attend a meeting of Electors there this evening.”
The word Electors had a great effect. The crowd fell back, and we were allowed to proceed. Someone called after us on no account to give a lift to any wandering friar who might be traveling on our road, as brigands disguised in monks’ garb had been seen in all parts of the country. The old fear came upon me once again, and when we were away from the town and on the road to Le Mans I thought to see dark-robed friars behind each tree, or waiting in ambush beyond the rise of every hill.
“Why should the brigands dress as monks or friars? What would be the sense of it?” I asked my brother.
“Every sense in the world,” he answered calmly. “A man so disguised could gain an entry into any house he cared, beg his bread, say his prayers, and then murder the inhabitants.”
Perhaps, like poor Cathie three months before, my pregnancy made me more nervous and imaginative than I otherwise would be, but I longed with all my heart to be back again with my mother and Jacques. The nearer we came to Le Mans through the long day, the more evident it was that the inhabitants of every parish were in the grip of fear. Villages were either dead a
nd silent, with closed doors, and faces staring down at us like ghosts from upper windows, or, as in Château-du-Loir, in a state of ferment, with the tocsin ringing and the people at once surrounding us to ask for news.
Twice, three times, during the journey we perceived groups of men ahead of us on the road who at first sight appeared to be, must be, the dreaded brigands; and Robert, as a precaution, drew the carriole into the side under cover of the trees in the hope that we should escape notice. Each time we were observed and the groups came tearing down the road to question us, and they would prove to be bands of armed villagers, patrolling between parishes, much as Michel and François would be doing from le Chesne-Bidault. Each group had heard some fresh rumor—châteaux were being burned to the ground and their owners forced to fly for their lives, the town of la Ferté-Bernard was in flames. The brigands were marching that day upon Le Mans, the comte d’Artois had not left the country after all but was advancing with twenty thousand English soldiers to lay waste the whole of France.
When late that afternoon we approached the outskirts of Le Mans, I was prepared to find the city razed to the ground, or the streets running blood—anything but the unnatural calm pervading, and our sudden unceremonious forced descent from the carriole.
We were stopped at the entrance to the city by sentries of the Dragons de Chartres and ourselves and the carriole searched, and we were only allowed to proceed into the center of the town after Robert had given Pierre’s name as surety. We were then ordered to go to the hôtel de ville and report our arrival to the officials there.
“Organization at last,” murmured Robert in my ear. “But what else would one expect from their colonel, the comte de Valence, a personal friend of the duc d’Orléans?”
I did not care who was their colonel. The sight of men in uniform gave me confidence. Surely with this regiment in charge of the city’s safety the brigands would not dare to advance further?