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Updated: May 16, 2025
As for me, if I have lingered too long by this old tower, it is because it suggested this book; and we owe some gratitude to these mute witnesses of a past which they keep in our remembrance. Victorien Sardou. The House of the Combrays
Ducolombier stayed in Rouen and set himself to examine the condition of the Combrays' fortune. Mme. de Combray had consented some years back to the sale of a part of her property, and Timoléon, in the hope of averting financial disaster and being of use to his mother by diminishing her responsibility, had succeeded in having a trustee appointed for her.
The very same day Louis XVIII signed a royal pardon, which the Court of Rouen ratified a few days later, by which Mme. de Combray's sentence was annulled. On September 5th the Marquise saw her wildest dream realised and was presented to the King a fact which was mentioned in the Moniteur of the following day. This signal favour rallied many to the Combrays.
They were all leagued against the common enemy, Acquet, whom they considered the cause of all their suffering. This man had returned from the Temple strengthened by the cowardly service he had rendered, and entered Donnay in triumph; he did not try to conceal his joy at all the catastrophes that had overtaken the Combrays, and treated them as vanquished enemies. The family held a council.
They promise that, once their case is decided, they will not again trouble Sieur Acquet de Férolles." The invectives were, to say the least, ill-timed. The Combrays had gone to law in order to force this man, whom they compared to the most celebrated assassins, to undertake the education of their sister's three children.
Acquet, exasperated at the resistance to his projects, swore that he would have signal vengeance on his wife and all the Combrays. They were, unhappily, to give his hatred too good an opportunity of showing itself. After passing three years in Rouen, Mme. de Combray returned to Tournebut in the spring of 1796, with her royalist passions and illusions as strong as ever.
A few facts gathered by the Combrays will serve to describe him. As an officer at Lille he was about to be imprisoned as the result of an odious accusation, but deserted and escaped to Belgium, not daring to join the army of the émigrés. He stopped at Mons, then went to the west of France, and became a Chouan, but politics had nothing to do with this act.
They took away the children, their father did not even know the place of their retreat, and the very persons who had abducted them came and asked him for the cost of their maintenance." This was his plea; to which the Combrays replied: "The fee of Mme.
A short way from the Church of Donnay there was an isolated house belonging to the brothers Buquet, who were devoted to the Combrays; Joseph, the shoemaker, had in the absence of Le Chevalier, been known as Mme.
In their eagerness to make themselves acceptable to the Combrays, people "who would not have raised a finger to help them when they were overwhelmed with misfortune," now revealed to them things that had hitherto been hidden from them; and thus the Marquise and her sons learned how Senator Pontécoulant, out of hatred for Caffarelli, "whom he wished to ruin," had undertaken, "with the aid of Acquet de Férolles," to hand over d'Aché to assassins.
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