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Updated: June 17, 2025
The priest was robed in his officiating vestments. The lighted tapers shed upon the ceiling a glow as soft as hope itself. She now recognized the two men who had bowed to her, the Comte de Bauvan and the Baron du Guenic, the witnesses chosen by Montauran. "You will not still refuse?" said the marquis.
"I am an emigre, condemned to death, and my name is Vicomte de Bauvan. Love of my country has brought me back to France to join my brother. I hope to be taken off the list of emigres through the influence of Madame de Beauharnais, now the wife of the First Consul; but if I fail in this, I mean to die on the soil of my native land, fighting beside my friend Montauran.
This despair, the lot of many men to whom women can only give esteem and friendship, was perhaps the unknown bond on which a strong intimacy was based that united the Comtes de Bauvan, de Granville, and de Serizy; for a common misfortune brings souls into unison quite as much as a common joy.
Barbette had scarcely time to drop the curtain of the bed and fold it about the girl before she was face to face with a fugitive Chouan. "Where can I hide, old woman? I am the Comte de Bauvan," said the new-comer. Mademoiselle de Verneuil quivered as she recognized the voice of the belated guest, whose words, still a secret to her, brought about the catastrophe of La Vivetiere.
"What are you laughing at?" asked the Comte de Bauvan. "At a soap-bubble which has burst," interposed Madame du Gua, gaily. "The marquis, if we are now to believe him, is astonished that his heart ever beat the faster for that girl who presumes to call herself Mademoiselle de Verneuil. You know who I mean." "That girl!" echoed the count. "Madame, the author of a wrong is bound to repair it.
Comte Octave de Bauvan understood that not merely was he in the way, but that Monsieur de Granville wanted an excuse for leaving his room. Madame de Serizy had not made the mistake of coming to the Palais de Justice in her handsome carriage with a blue hammer-cloth and coats-of-arms, her coachman in gold lace, and two footmen in breeches and silk stockings.
The Comtesse de Bauvan, to whom the Abbe Loraux explained the circumstances of the widow Bridau, promised, in case her manager should leave, to give the place to Agathe; meantime she stipulated that the widow should be taken as assistant, and receive a salary of six hundred francs. Poor Agathe, who was obliged to be at the office by ten in the morning, had scarcely time to get her dinner.
Alarmed at such enormous expense, and not imaging that her son could earn much money by painting naked women, she obtained, thanks to her confessor, the Abbe Loraux, a place worth seven hundred francs a year in a lottery-office belonging to the Comtesse de Bauvan, the widow of a Chouan leader.
At this instant the Comte Octave de Bauvan opened the door without knocking, and said to the Comte de Granville: "I have brought you a fair lady, my dear fellow, who did not know which way to turn; she was on the point of losing herself in our labyrinth " And Comte Octave led in by the hand the Comtesse de Serizy, who had been wandering about the place for the last quarter of an hour.
"He was an impertinent fool!" said Madame d'Espard in a hard tone. The judge's wife kept silence on hearing this sentence. "Though we failed in the matter of the Commission in Lunacy, it was not Camusot's fault, I shall never forget that," said the Marquise after a pause. "It was Lucien, Monsieur de Serizy, Monsieur de Bauvan, and Monsieur de Granville who overthrew us.
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