one. And this uneasiness is manifest in contemporary
memoirs and correspondence. More of the courtiers of the new regime than
one imagines were as sceptical as Mme. Mere, economising her revenues
and saying to her mocking daughters, "You will perhaps be very glad of
them, some day!" In view of a possible catastrophe many of these kept
open a door for retreat towards the Bourbons, and vaguely encouraged
hopes of assistance that could only be depended on in case of their
success, but which the royalists believed in as positive and immediate.
As to the disaster which might bring it about, they hoped for its early
coming, and promised it to the impatient Chouans--the disembarkation of
an Anglo-Russian army--the rising of the West--the entrance of Louis
XVIII into his good town of Paris--and the return of the Corsican to his
island! Predictions that were not so wild after all. Ten years later it
was an accomplished fact in almost all its details. And what are ten
years in politics? Frotte, Georges, Pichegru, d'Ache, would only have
had to fold their arms. They would have seen the Empire crumble by its
own weight.

We made these reflections on returning to the chateau while looking at
the terrace in the setting sun, at the peaceful winding of the Seine and
the lovely autumn landscape that Mme. de Combray and d'Ache had so often
looked at, at the same place and hour, little foreseeing the sad fate
the future had in store for them.

The misfortunes of the unhappy woman--the deplorable affair of Quesnay
where the coach with state funds was attacked by Mme. Acquet's men, for
the profit of the royalist exchequer and of Le Chevalier; the
assassination of d'Ache, sold to the imperial police by La Vaubadon, his
mistress, and the cowardly Doulcet de Pontecoulant, who does not boast
of it in his "Memoires,"--have been the themes of several tales,
romances and novels, wherein fancy plays too great a part, and whose
misinformed authors, Hippolyte Bonnelier, Comtesse de Mirabeau,
Chennevieres, etc., have taken great advantage of the liberty used in
works of imagination. There is only one reproach to be made--that they
did not have the genius of Balzac. But we may criticise more severely
the so-called historical writings about Mme. de Combray, her family and
residences, and the Chateau of Tournebut which M. Homberg shows us
flanked by four feudal towers, and which MM. Le Prevost and Bourdon say
was demolished in 1807.

Mme. d'Abrantes,