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Updated: June 15, 2025
I speak in the name of our order, I speak for Frenchmen, I speak for France. If Detricand, Prince of Vaufontaine, be not secured in his right of succession to the dukedom of Bercy, France will not cease to protest till protest hath done its work. From France the duchy of Bercy came. It was the gift of a French king to a Frenchman, and she hath some claims upon the courtesy of the nations."
"What was that adventurer saying to you, Guida? In the suite of the Prince of Vaufontaine, my faith! What did he come here for?" Guida looked at him in surprise. She scarcely grasped the significance of the question. Before she had time to consider, he pressed it again, and without hesitation she told him all that had happened it was so very little, of course between Detricand and herself.
"Let me bandage the wound," she said eagerly. Her eyes were alight with compassion, certainly not because it was the dissipated French invader, M. Savary dit Detricand, no one knew that he was the young Comte de Tournay of the House of Vaufontaine, but because he was a wounded fellow-creature. She would have done the same for the poor beganne, Dormy Jamais, who still prowled the purlieus of St.
Suddenly there shot into Detricand's mind a suggestion, which, wild as it was, might after all belong to the grotesque realities of life. So he added with deliberation: "If alliance must still be kept with this evil government of France, then be sure there is no Vaufontaine who would care to inherit a duchy so discredited.
Now, returned from vagabondage, he was the valiant and honoured heir of the House of Vaufontaine, and heir-presumptive of the House of Bercy. True to his intention, Detricand had joined de la Rochejaquelein, the intrepid, inspired leader of the Vendee, whose sentiments became his own "If I advance, follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I fall, avenge me."
"I unseated Philip d'Avranche," he continued, "because he acquired the duchy through a misapprehension; because the claims of the House of Vaufontaine were greater. We belonged; he was an alien. He had a right to his adoption, he had no right to his duchy no real right in the equity of nations.
When the Duke entered upon him in the library, he was under the immediate influence of a stimulating talk with Philip d'Avranche and the chief officers of the duchy. With the memory of past feuds and hatreds in his mind, and predisposed against any Vaufontaine, his greeting was courteously disdainful, his manner preoccupied.
On the visitor announcing himself as a Vaufontaine, this curiosity gave place to as keen surprise; he was admitted with every mark of respect, and the gates closed behind him. "Has his Highness any visitors?" he asked as he dismounted. The porter nodded assent. "Who are they?" He slipped a coin into the porter's hand. "One of the family for so his Serene Highness calls him." "H'm, indeed!
But for himself, now heir to the principality of Vaufontaine, and therefrom, by reversion, to that of Bercy, it had no importance. He had but one passion now, and it burned clear and strong, it dominated, it possessed him. He would have given up any worldly honour to see it succeed. He had idled and misspent too many years, been vaurien and ne'er-do-well too long to be sordid now.
I know my course. . . . Even to-night," he added, "it shall be to-night." Two hours later Detricand, Prince of Vaufontaine, was closeted with General Grandjon-Larisse at a village half-way between the Republican army and the broken bands of the Vendee. As lads Detricand and Grandjon-Larisse had known each other well.
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