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Updated: June 26, 2025
Just as I emerged from the court of the Bastille, some one touched me, and said, 'Pardon me, Madame, and, looking round, I saw M. Darpent, with his hat in his hand. 'Madame, he entreated, 'is it possible to you to come to poor M. d'Aubepine? I have fetched her to her husband, but there will be piteous work when his wound is visited, and she will need all the support that can be given to her.
Even he had never been allowed to be out of sight of his tutor, and he knew none of these pleasures so freely enjoyed by my brothers; while as to his sister Cecile, she had been carried from her nurse to a convent, and had thence been taken at fourteen to be wedded to the grandson and heir of the Count d'Aubepine, who kept the young couple under their own eye at their castle in the Bocage.
Mademoiselle insisted on knowing who it was, and there was only too much time, for, in spite of our impatience and the deadly need, we could only move at a foot's pace through the ghastly procession we were meeting. The answer came back 'It is the Count d'Aubepine. He would bleed to death before he could be carried home, so M. Darpent has had him carried into his sister's house.
And it was a vain alarm; for, as M. Darpent assured her, M. d'Aubepine was not conspicuous enough to have become a mark for public hatred. She was a little affronted by the assurance, but we appeased her, and as the tumult was beginning to die away, M. Darpent took his leave, promising my mother to let her know of any measure taken on the morrow.
My husband insisted that he should write to ask the pardon of his grandfather, and on that condition engaged to introduce him to the Duke and to the lieutenant-colonel of his regiment. M. de Bellaise then inquired anxiously after the health of our uncle, who, on the death of his wife, had retired to his own estate at Nid de Merle, close to the Chateau d'Aubepine.
He doffed his hat with the heavy white plume, and bowed his greeting to the ladies and clergymen, but both the young Frenchmen, after a military salute, hastily dismounted and knelt on one knee, while he sprang from his horse, and then, making the sign of the Cross over his son, raised him, and folding him in his arms pressed him to his breast and kissed him on each cheek, not without tears, then repeated the same greeting with young D'Aubepine.
Running about the country, it appeared, like a farmer's wife rather than a lady of quality, and stirring up the poor against their lords. It was well known that all the English were seditious. See what they had done to their king; and here was I, beginning the same work. Had not the Count's intendant at Chateau d'Aubepine thrown in his teeth what Madame de Bellaise did and permitted?
And how is he looking? So it was of her husband, not her brother, that she was thinking. I gave me a pang, and yet I could not wonder; and alas, d'Aubepine had not given me any message at all for her.
A fine religion that! as I told my mother when M. d'Aubepine came in foaming at the mouth about it; though Eustace would have persuaded me that it was not just to measure a whole Church by one priest.
Maurice d'Aubepine never ceased to love his own mother, but as a sort of saint in a shrine, and he used to say that when he went to see her he always felt more as if he had been worshipping than making a visit.
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