The House of the Combrays | Page 4

broke it off and the door opened with a
great noise. My mother and the servant rushed to the bureau, pushed
and dragged it to the door, whilst some men came out of the cellar,
walked to the door, grumbling, opened it, saw the drawbridge up,

unfastened the rope and let it fall down with a loud bang, and then the
voices grew fainter till they disappeared in the wood. But go to sleep
after all that! We stayed there waiting for the dawn, and though all
danger was over, not daring to speak aloud!
"At last the day broke. We moved the bureau, and my mother, brave as
ever, went down first, carrying a candle. The yawning trap-door
exposed the black hole of a cellar, the entrance door was wide open and
the bridge down. We called the gardener, who did not answer, and
whose hut was empty. My mother did not wait till afternoon this time,
but jumped on her donkey and went down to the château.
"Mme. de Combray was dressing. She expected my mother and knew
her object in coming so well that without waiting for her to tell her
story, she flew out like most people, who, having no good reason to
give, resort to angry words, and cried as soon as she entered the room:
"'You are mad; mad enough to be shut up! You take my house for a
resort of bandits and counterfeiters! I am sorry enough that I ever
brought you here!'
"'And I that I ever came!'
"'Very well, then--go!'
"'I am going to-morrow. I came to tell you so.'
"'A safe return to you!' On which Mme. de Combray turned her back,
and my mother retraced her steps to the tower in a state of exasperation,
fully determined to take the boat for Paris without further delay.
"Early next morning we made ready. The gardener was at the door with
his cart, coming and going for our luggage, while the servant put the
soup on the table. My mother took only two or three spoonfuls and I
did the same, as I hate soup. The servant alone emptied her plate! We
went down to Roule where the gardener had scarcely left us when the
servant was seized with frightful vomiting. My mother and I were also
slightly nauseated, but the poor girl retained nothing, happily for her,

for we returned to Paris convinced that the gardener, being left alone
for a moment, had thrown some poison into the soup."
"And did nothing happen afterwards?"
"Nothing."
"And you heard nothing more from Tournebut?"
"Nothing, until 1808, when we learned that the mail had been attacked
and robbed near Falaise by a band of armed men commanded by Mme.
de Combray's daughter, Mme. Acquet de Férolles, disguised as a hussar!
Then, that Mme. Acquet had been arrested as well as her lover (Le
Chevalier), her husband, her mother, her lawyer and servants and those
of Mme. de Combray at Tournebut; and finally that Mme. de Combray
had been condemned to imprisonment and the pillory, Mme. Acquet,
her lover, the lawyer (Lefebre) and several others, to death."
"And the husband?"
"Released; he was a spy."
"Was your mother called as a witness?"
"No, happily, they knew nothing about us. Besides, what would she
have said?"
"Nothing, except that the people who frightened you so much, must
surely have belonged to the band; that they had forced the trap-door,
after a nocturnal expedition, on which they had been pursued as far as a
subterranean entrance, which without doubt led to the cellar."
After we had chatted a while on this subject Moisson wished me
good-night, and I took up Balzac's chef d'oeuvre and resumed my
reading. But I only read a few lines; my imagination was wandering
elsewhere. It was a long distance from Balzac's idealism to the realism
of Moisson, which awakened in me memories of the stories and
melodramas of Ducray-Duminil, of Guilbert de Pixérecourt--"Alexis,

ou la Maisonette dans les Bois," "Victor, ou l'Enfant de la Forêt,"--and
many others of the same date and style so much discredited nowadays.
And I thought that what caused the discredit now, accounted for their
vogue formerly; that they had a substratum of truth under a mass of
absurdity; that these stories of brigands in their traditional haunts,
forests, caverns and subterranean passages, charmed by their likelihood
the readers of those times to whom an attack on a coach by
highwaymen with blackened faces was as natural an occurrence as a
railway accident is to us, and that in what seems pure extravaganza to
us they only saw a scarcely exaggerated picture of things that were
continually happening under their eyes. In the reports published by M.
Félix Rocquain we can learn the state of France during the