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Updated: May 7, 2025
Bruslart arrived at his mistress's house at night, his belt bristling with pistols and poniards, and "always ready for a desperate hand-to-hand fight." Together with this swaggerer Mme. de Vaubadon received a certain Ollendon, a Chouan of doubtful reputation, who was said to have gone over to the police through need of money.
"Don't you think," asked Cadoudal, laughing, "that it might be as well, in any case, to ask him?" "True," said Roland. "Well, colonel, be so good as to mount your horse, make yourself known to him, and deliver my proposal." "Very well," replied Roland. "The colonel's horse," said Cadoudal, motioning to the Chouan who was watching it. The man led it up.
One morning, after the opening of the court-room and before the arrival of the judges, Pille-Miche, a famous Chouan, sprang over the balustrade into the middle of the crowd, elbowing right and left, 'charging like a wild boar, as Bordin told me, through the frightened people.
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.
The commandant, who was studying him, took note of this apparent insensibility, and remarked to Gerard: "That fool is not so clever as he means to be! It is far from easy to read the face of a Chouan, but the fellow betrays himself by his anxiety to show his nerve. Ha! ha! if he had only pretended fear I should have taken him for a stupid brute. He and I might have made a pair!
The agent provocateur has at all times been a favourite tool of continental Governments: but rarely has a more finished specimen of the class been seen than Méhée de la Touche. After plying the trade of an assassin in the September massacres of 1792, and of a Jacobin spy during the Terror, he had been included by Bonaparte among the Jacobin scapegoats who expiated the Chouan outrage of Nivôse.
Pille-Miche turned several times sharply to look at his victim, as children do when they try to guess, by the conscious expression of the comrade who has hidden an article, whether they are nearer to or farther away from it. D'Orgemont pretended to be alarmed when the Chouan tapped the ovens, which sounded hollow, and seemed to wish to play upon his eager credulity.
An immense cask of cider, under the bung of which Mademoiselle de Verneuil noticed a pool of yellow mud, which had decomposed the flooring, although it was made of scraps of granite conglomerated in clay, proved that the master of the house had a right to his Chouan name, and that the pints galloped down either his own throat or that of his friends.
He was a born ruler, whether he turned to literature or politics, and he appointed himself "Marshal of Letters," just as he might have aspired to be prime minister to the king. After the publication of The Last Chouan, Balzac's literary activity became prodigious.
None but those who knew the Chouan well could have distinguished him from the tangle of branches of which he seemed a part.
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