United States or Hong Kong ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Acquet was informed of the situation by her mother whom she came to visit at Donnay, and on the 22d December, 1805, the coach from Rouen to Paris was attacked on the slope of Authevernes, at a distance of only three leagues from the Château of Tournebut.
Although its peaked roofs could be seen from the river above a thicket of low trees, Tournebut was off the main route of travel, whether by land or water, from Rouen to Paris.
Suspicion fell on the Château de Mussegros, situated about three leagues from Authevernes; but nobody then thought of Tournebut, the owners of which had been absent for seven months.
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.
Bonnoeil, who was at last delivered from police supervision, had to set out on foot for Tournebut; he walked the distance during the night, and arrived in the morning to find his mother already installed there and making an inspection of the despoiled old château which she had never thought to see again.
I lived three months in her house." "Rue Chanoinesse?" "No, not in the Rue Chanoinesse, where she did not live, any more than she was the saintly woman of Balzac's novel; but at her Château of Tournebut d'Aubevoye near Gaillon!"
These two men, so different in appearance and character, both aspired to play a great part and were instinctively jealous of each other. Their own personal feelings divided them. One was the lover of Mme. Acquet de Férolles, the other was the friend of Mme. de Combray, and the latter blamed her daughter for her misconduct, and had forbidden her ever to come back to Tournebut.
Tournebut, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was a perfect type of these old dwellings, where there were so many great halls and so few living rooms, and whose high slate roofs covered intricacies of framework forming lofts vast as cathedrals. It was said that its thick walls were pierced by secret passages and contained hiding-places that Louis de Marillac had formerly used.
As to the stealthy visitors at the tower, given the presence of d'Aché at Tournebut, it is highly probable that they were only passing by there to confer with him, taking his orders secretly in the woods without even appearing at the château, and then disappearing as mysteriously as they had come.
Although Louis XVIII's Jacobinism seems to have been the first thing that disillusioned the old royalist, she was none the less the Lady of Tournebut, and within the limits of her estate she could still believe that she had returned to the days before 1789. She still had her seat at church, and her name was to be found in 1819 inscribed on the bell at Aubevoye of which she was patroness.
Word Of The Day