The House of the Combrays | Page 8

as
Mme. Mère, 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? Frotté, Georges, Pichegru, d'Aché, 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 château 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'Aché 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'Aché, sold to the imperial police by La
Vaubadon, his mistress, and the cowardly Doulcet de Pontécoulant,
who does not boast of it in his "Mémoires,"--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, Chennevières, 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 Château of Tournebut which M.
Homberg shows us flanked by four feudal towers, and which MM. Le
Prévost and Bourdon say was demolished in 1807.
Mme. d'Abrantès, with her usual veracity, describes the luxurious
furniture and huge lamps in the "labyrinths of Tournebut, of which one
must, as it were, have a plan, so as not to lose one's way." She shows us
Le Chevalier, crucifix in hand, haranguing the assailants in the wood of
Quesnay (although he was in Paris that day to prove an alibi), and
gravely adds, "I know some one who was in the coach and who alone
survived, the seven other travellers having been massacred and their
bodies left on the road." Now there was neither coach nor travellers,
and no one was killed!
M. de la Sicotière's mistakes are still stranger. At the time that he was
preparing his great work on "Frotté and the Norman Insurrections," he
learned from M. Gustave Bord that I had some special facts concerning
Mme. de Combray, and wrote to ask me about them. I sent him a
résumé of Moisson's story, and asked him to verify its correctness. And
on that he went finely astray.
Mme. de Combray had two residences besides her house at Rouen; one
at Aubevoye, where she had lived for a long while, the other thirty
leagues away, at Donnay, in the department of Orne, where she no
longer went, as her son-in-law had settled himself there. Two towers

have the same name of Tournebut; the one at Aubevoye is ours; the
other, some distance from Donnay, did not belong to Mme. de
Combray.
Convinced solely by the assertions of MM. Le Prévost and Bourdon
that in 1804 the Château of Aubevoye and its tower no longer existed,
and that Mme. de Combray occupied Donnay at that date, M. de la
Sicotière naturally mistook one Tournebut for the other, did not
understand a single word of Moisson's story, which he treated as a
chimera, and in his book acknowledges my communications in this
disdainful note:
"Confusion has arisen in many minds between the two Tournebuts, so
different, however, and at such a distance from each other, and has
given birth to many strange and romantic legends; inaccessible retreats
arranged for outlaws and bandits in the old tower, nocturnal apparitions,
innocent victims paying with their lives the misfortune of having
surprised the secrets of these terrible guests...."
It is pleasant to see M. de la Sicotière point out the confusion he alone
experienced. But there is better to come! Here is a writer who gives us
in two large volumes the history of