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Updated: June 4, 2025
He had scarcely gone ten steps, however, when a musket-ball entered the head of his horse, which fell, entangling D'Harmental's leg. Instantly eight or ten cavaliers sprang upon him; he fired one pistol by hazard, and put the other to his head, to blow his brains out, but he had not time, for two musketeers seized him by the arms, and four others dragged him from beneath the horse.
The Abbe Brigaud, making signs that he heard perfectly, trod on D'Harmental's foot under the table, to hint that this was an opportunity for paying a compliment. "Madame," said the chevalier, who understood this appeal to his politeness perfectly, "we are doubly indebted to you; for you offer us not only an excellent breakfast, but a delightful concert."
"Let us go," said Valef, dismounting and throwing the reins to D'Harmental's valet, "for if they arrive at the rendezvous while we stand gossiping here, it will appear as though we had kept them waiting." "You are right," said D'Harmental; and, dismounting, he advanced toward the entrance of the wood, followed by his two companions.
And thinking that she might still be in time to warn D'Harmental of the danger which threatened him, Bathilde left Buvat confounded, darted to the door, flew down the staircase, cleared the street at two bounds, rushed up the stairs, and, breathless, terrified, dying, hurled herself against the door of D'Harmental's room, which, badly closed by the chevalier, yielded before her, exposing to her view the body of the captain stretched on the floor, and swimming in a sea of blood.
"You are right," said Bathilde, in a moved voice, and taking the paper from the hands of Nanette, "that paper is more important than I thought;" and she put D'Harmental's letter in the pocket of her apron. Five minutes after Nanette, who came in twenty times a day without any particular reason, went out as she had entered, and left Bathilde alone.
All the evening she had remained at the window to watch for D'Harmental, but had not seen him. It seemed to Bathilde that there must be some connection between Buvat's strange disappearance and the melancholy which she had remarked the day before in D'Harmental's face. Nanette was waiting at the door for Buvat and D'Harmental; she now waited for Buvat, and D'Harmental went up to Bathilde.
Everything was seen by a different light. D'Harmental's native aristocracy regained the ascendency. Bathilde was then nothing but the daughter of this man that is to say, a grisette: her beauty, her grace, her elegance, even her talents, were but an accident an error of nature something like a rose flowering on a cabbage-stalk.
In the midst of his recital, interrupted by the exclamation of poor Madame Denis and of Mesdemoiselles Athenais and Emilie, the abbe thought that he heard a cry in the next room, just at the time when he was relating D'Harmental's catastrophe; but as no one had paid any attention to the cry, and as he was not aware of Bathilde's being there, he had attached no importance to this noise, regarding the nature of which he might easily have been mistaken; moreover, Boniface, summoned in his turn, had entered at the moment, and, as the abbe had a particular fancy for Boniface, his entrance had naturally turned Brigaud's thoughts into a different channel.
This fear had in it something humiliating; Bathilde turned her eyes toward D'Harmental's window, but she saw D'Harmental looking at her with so much love through the glass, that she thought of nothing but looking at him in return, which she did for so long, that Buvat came forward to see what was attracting her attention; but D'Harmental, seeing him, let fall the curtain.
If he dares again to complain of his beautiful wife, we will prove to him, as clearly as possible, that he adores her without knowing it; and that she is the most innocent of women also without his knowing it." "Chevalier!" at this moment a sweet and flute-like voice whispered in D'Harmental's ear, while a little hand rested on his arm. "You see that I am wanted."
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