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M. Houssaye is possessed with a passionate desire to become a member of the French Academy. Well, why should he not sit where Taine does not and where Sardou does? His History of the Forty-first Fauteuil, one of the brightest and wittiest of his works, will probably avail, not to open the doors to him, but to bar them against him.
At the beginning of spring, he returned to La Houssaye to await the moment for the invasion of England. This expedition, which was regarded as chimerical, was, however, on the point of realisation.
This conspiracy, as absurd as it was criminal, was, moreover, supported by many of the discontented nobles who had never pardoned Henry for the suppression of the League; and, wild as such a project cannot fail to appear in these days, we have the authority of Amelot de la Houssaye for the fact that the Comte d'Auvergne had induced Philip by a secret treaty to promise his assistance in placing Henri de Bourbon, the son of Henri IV and Madame de Verneuil, on the throne of France, to the detriment of the legitimate offspring of Marie de Medicis.
Concerning your private life, these men often write more like malicious enemies than friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers. It is most necessary to defend you from your friends from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur.
A few hours afterwards, he heard of the sudden death of M. de Tourville, and attributing it to his having taken a portion of the simulated cordial, he, La Houssaye, fearful of consequences, hastily and secretly changed his abode.
There you would have been with perhaps a couple of thousand wounded and as many French prisoners, and Napoleon with 60,000 men or so, and Ney with as many more, and Houssaye with his cavalry division, all in your rear cutting you off from the sea. What would have been your course then?" A general silence fell upon the officers. "Is that so?" the colonel asked at last.
We told her all our adventures and pleasures. She wept when she heard that the Countess de la Houssaye had not forgotten her. "You will see her," said Suzanne. "She will come to see you, without a doubt." "Ah, Heaven prevent it! Our destinies are too unlike now. Me perhaps the Countess Madelaine might welcome affectionately; but Joseph? Oh, no!
Saint-Victor, who puffs the books of Arsene Houssaye, won't write articles on mine, finding it too bad. There you are. Theo is away, and no one, absolutely no one takes my defense. Another story: yesterday Raphael and Michel Levy listened to the reading of the fairy play. Applause, enthusiasm. I saw the moment during the reading in which the contract was going to be signed.
I have been assured by generals who were in Masséna's division at the time that this incident actually occurred, and, nine years later, I was at the château of La Houssaye, when Marshal Augereau entertained the Emperor and all the marshals and I heard them joking with Masséna about the new method of retreat which he had used on this occasion.
As the troops of 7th Corps were not concentrated in an encampment, Marshal Augereau's presence in Brest was of very little use; so he was given permission to spend the rest of the summer and the autumn at his fine estate of La Houssaye, near Tournan, in Brie. I even suspect that the Emperor preferred to have him there rather than in the depths of Brittany at the head of a large army.
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