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Mme. de Combray, who was at last enlightened as to the kind of interest taken in her by Licquet, and awakened from the illusions that the detective had so cleverly nourished, had been able to communicate directly with her family.
Besides Margadel and Hingant, Mme. de Combray had oftenest sheltered Armand Gaillard, and his brother Raoul, whose death we have related.
The next day, December 31st, the exhibition on the scaffold of Mme. de Combray, Placène, Vannier, and Lerouge, all condemned to twenty-two years' imprisonment, was to take place. But when they went to the old Marquise's cell she was found in such a state of exasperation, fearful crises of rage being succeeded by deep dejection, that they had to give up the idea of removing her.
For many years, albeit and especially before his marriage M. Swann the younger came often to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the kind of society which his family had frequented, or that, under the sort of incognito which the name of Swann gave him among us, they were harbouring with the complete innocence of a family of honest innkeepers who have in their midst some distinguished highwayman and never know it one of the smartest members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
In short, that evening she was in a position to betray the Marquise's confidence to Licquet. She had learned that Mme. Acquet had assisted at many of the attacks on coaches, dressed as a man. Mme. de Combray dreaded nothing more than to have her daughter fall into the hands of the police. "If she is taken," she said, "she will accuse me."
Seeing the great woods that hug the outer wall so closely, one realises how well they lent themselves to the mysterious comings and goings, to the secret councils, to the rôle destined for it by Mme. de Combray, preparing the finest room for the arrival of the King or the Comte d'Artois, and in both the great and little château, arranging hiding-places, one of which alone could accommodate forty armed men.
He was very laconic, mentioned grave events which were preparing, and disappeared like a busy man. To prisoners everything is a reason for hope, and that night Mme. de Combray gave free course to her illusions. The following day she received through the woman Delaitre, a short letter from the honest "Captain" the man who had saved Mme.
Since the 'Meseglise way' was the shorter of the two that we used to take for our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for days of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Meseglise shewed an unduly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the fringe of Roussainville wood, so that we could, at any moment, run for shelter beneath its dense thatch of leaves.
But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Meseglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray to settle the division of my aunt Leonie's estate; for she had died at last, leaving both parties among her neighbours triumphant in the fact of her demise those who had insisted that her mode of life was enfeebling and must ultimately kill her, and, equally, those who had always maintained that she suffered from some disease not imaginary, but organic, by the visible proof of which the most sceptical would be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it; causing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors, but to that one a grief savage in its violence.
And for all that he was driving through a city of stone to immure himself in a house without grass or garden, what was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he owned, near Combray, where, at four in the afternoon, before coming to the asparagus-bed, thanks to the breeze that was wafted across the fields from Meseglise, he could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air as well beneath an arbour of hornbeams in the garden as by the bank of the pond, fringed with forget-me-not and iris; and where, when he sat down to dinner, trained and twined by the gardener's skilful hand, there ran all about his table currant-bush and rose.
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