The Best Works of Balzac. Оноре де Бальзак

La Pelerine you will still see—”

      The young emigre made a movement at the name which Marie alone noticed.

      “What is La Pelerine?” she asked hastily, interrupting the captain’s description of Breton topography.

      “It is the summit of a mountain,” said Merle, “which gives its name to the Maine valley through which we shall presently pass. It separates this valley from that of Couesnon, at the end of which is the town of Fougeres, the chief town in Brittany. We had a fight there last Vendemiaire with the Gars and his brigands. We were escorting Breton conscripts, who meant to kill us sooner than leave their own land; but Hulot is a rough Christian, and he gave them—”

      “Did you see the Gars?” she asked. “What sort of man is he?”

      Her keen, malicious eyes never left the so-called vicomte’s face.

      “Well, mademoiselle,” replied Merle, nettled at being always interrupted, “he is so like citizen du Gua, that if your friend did not wear the uniform of the Ecole Polytechnique I could swear it was he.”

      Mademoiselle de Verneuil looked fixedly at the cold, impassible young man who had scorned her, but she saw nothing in him that betrayed the slightest feeling of alarm. She warned him by a bitter smile that she had now discovered the secret so treacherously kept; then in a jesting voice, her nostrils dilating with pleasure, and her head so turned that she could watch the young man and yet see Merle, she said to the Republican: “That new leader gives a great deal of anxiety to the First Consul. He is very daring, they say; but he has the weakness of rushing headlong into adventures, especially with women.”

      “We are counting on that to get even with him,” said the captain. “If we catch him for only an hour we shall put a bullet in his head. He’ll do the same to us if he meets us, so par pari—”

      “Oh!” said the emigre, “we have nothing to fear. Your soldiers cannot go as far as La Pelerine, they are tired, and, if you consent, we can all rest a short distance from here. My mother stops at La Vivetiere, the road to which turns off a few rods farther on. These ladies might like to stop there too; they must be tired with their long drive from Alencon without resting; and as mademoiselle,” he added, with forced politeness, “has had the generosity to give safety as well as pleasure to our journey, perhaps she will deign to accept a supper from my mother; and I think, captain,” he added, addressing Merle, “the times are not so bad but what we can find a barrel of cider for your men. The Gars can’t have taken all, at least my mother thinks not—”

      “Your mother?” said Mademoiselle de Verneuil, interrupting him in a tone of irony, and making no reply to his invitation.

      “Does my age seem more improbable to you this evening, mademoiselle?” said Madame du Gua. “Unfortunately I was married very young, and my son was born when I was fifteen.”

      “Are you not mistaken, madame?—when you were thirty, perhaps.”

      Madame du Gua turned livid as she swallowed the sarcasm. She would have liked to revenge herself on the spot, but was forced to smile, for she was determined at any cost, even that of insult, to discover the nature of the feelings that actuated the young girl; she therefore pretended not to have understood her.

      “The Chouans have never had a more cruel leader than the Gars, if we are to believe the stories about him,” she said, addressing herself vaguely to both Francine and her mistress.

      “Oh, as for cruel, I don’t believe that,” said Mademoiselle de Verneuil; “he knows how to lie, but he seems rather credulous himself. The leader of a party ought not to be the plaything of others.”

      “Do you know him?” asked the emigre, quietly.

      “No,” she replied, with a disdainful glance, “but I thought I did.”

      “Oh, mademoiselle, he’s a malin, yes a malin,” said Captain Merle, shaking his head and giving with an expressive gesture the peculiar meaning to the word which it had in those days but has since lost. “Those old families do sometimes send out vigorous shoots. He has just returned from a country where, they say, the ci-devants didn’t find life too easy, and men ripen like medlars in the straw. If that fellow is really clever he can lead us a pretty dance. He has already formed companies of light infantry who oppose our troops and neutralize the efforts of the government. If we burn a royalist village he burns two of ours. He can hold an immense tract of country and force us to spread out our men at the very moment when we want them on one spot. Oh, he knows what he is about.”

      “He is cutting his country’s throat,” said Gerard in a loud voice, interrupting the captain.

      “Then,” said the emigre, “if his death would deliver the nation, why don’t you catch him and shoot him?”

      As he spoke he tried to look into the depths of Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s soul, and one of those voiceless scenes the dramatic vividness and fleeting sagacity of which cannot be reproduced in language passed between them in a flash. Danger is always interesting. The worst criminal threatened with death excites pity. Though Mademoiselle de Verneuil was now certain that the lover who had cast her off was this very leader of the Chouans, she was not ready to verify her suspicions by giving him up; she had quite another curiosity to satisfy. She preferred to doubt or to believe as her passion led her, and she now began deliberately to play with peril. Her eyes, full of scornful meaning, bade the young chief notice the soldiers of the escort; by thus presenting to his mind triumphantly an image of his danger she made him feel that his life depended on a word from her, and her lips seemed to quiver on the verge of pronouncing it. Like an American Indian, she watched every muscle of the face of her enemy, tied, as it were, to the stake, while she brandished her tomahawk gracefully, enjoying a revenge that was still innocent, and torturing like a mistress who still loves.

      “If I had a son like yours, madame,” she said to Madame du Gua, who was visibly frightened, “I should wear mourning from the day when I had yielded him to danger; I should know no peace of mind.”

      No answer was made to this speech. She turned her head repeatedly to the escort and then suddenly to Madame du Gua, without detecting the slightest secret signal between the lady and the Gars which might have confirmed her suspicions on the nature of their intimacy, which she longed to doubt. The young chief calmly smiled, and bore without flinching the scrutiny she forced him to undergo; his attitude and the expression of his face were those of a man indifferent to danger; he even seemed to say at times: “This is your chance to avenge your wounded vanity—take it! I have no desire to lessen my contempt for you.”

      Mademoiselle de Verneuil began to study the young man from the vantage-ground of her position with coolness and dignity; at the bottom of her heart she admired his courage and tranquillity. Happy in discovering that the man she loved bore an ancient title (the distinctions of which please every woman), she also found pleasure in meeting him in their present situation, where, as champion of a cause ennobled by misfortune, he was fighting with all the faculties of a strong soul against a Republic that was constantly victorious. She rejoiced to see him brought face to face with danger, and still displaying the courage and bravery so powerful on a woman’s heart; again and again she put him to the test, obeying perhaps the instinct which induces a woman to play with her victim as a cat plays with a mouse.

      “By virtue of what law do you put the Chouans to death?” she said to Merle.

      “That of the 14th of last Fructidor, which outlaws the insurgent departments and proclaims martial law,” replied the Republican.

      “May I ask why I have the honor to attract your eyes?” she said presently to the young chief, who was attentively watching her.

      “Because of a feeling which a man of honor cannot express to any woman, no matter who she is,” replied the Marquis de Montauran, in a low voice, bending down to her. “We live in times,” he said aloud, “when women do the work of the executioner and wield the axe with even better effect.”

      She looked at de Montauran fixedly; then, delighted to be attacked