The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon. Alexandre Dumas

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СКАЧАТЬ performed her invention with no want of modesty yet without a hint of constraint as no theater bayadère or professional actress has demonstrated since. Beneath the undulations of the supple cashmere cloth, she was able to reveal her charms at the same time she was pretending to hide them.

      The dance lasted nearly a quarter of an hour and ended in a crescendo of applause, to which the First Consul added his own. At his signal, the entire room exploded in bravos. Amidst the boisterous praise, Vestris seemed to be walking on air as he took full credit for all that poetry of form and movement, of expression and attitude.

      Once the gavotte had finished, a servant in livery whispered a few words to the Comtesse de Sourdis, to which she responded, “Open the drawing room.”

      Two doors slid open, and in the marvelously elegant drawing room, brightly lit, two men of the law were seated at a table lit by two candelabras, between which the marriage contract was awaiting the signatures with which it would soon be honored. The only people authorized to enter the drawing room were the twenty or so who would be signing the contract, which would first be read aloud for the benefit of the other wedding guests.

      As the contract was being read, a second lackey in livery entered. As unobtrusively as he could, he slipped over to the Comte de Sainte-Hermine and in a whisper said, “Monsieur le Chevalier de Mahalin asks to speak to you at this very moment.”

      “Have him wait,” said Sainte-Hermine, who was standing attendant in the small study at one side of the drawing room.

      “Monsieur le Comte, he says that he must see you at this very instant. Even if you were to have the pen in your hand, he would request that you lay it down on the table and come to see him before you sign … oh, there he is at the door.”

      With what looked like a gesture of despair, the count joined the Chevalier outside the drawing room. Few people noticed the discreet exit, and those who did were unaware of its unfortunate significance.

      After the contract had been read, Bonaparte, always in a hurry to finish what was under way, as eager to leave the Tuileries when he was there as he was to return when he was out, picked up the pen that was lying on the table. Without wondering whether he should be the first to sign, he hastily placed his signature on the contract, and then, just as four years later he would take the crown from the pope’s hands and place it himself on Josephine’s head, he handed his wife the pen.

      Josephine signed, then passed the pen to Mademoiselle de Sourdis, who instinctively looked around worriedly, but in vain, for the Comte de Sainte-Hermine. Filled with anxiety, she signed her name and tried to hide her concern. But it was the Comte’s turn next to sign.

      A murmur disturbed the drawing room as heads turned in search of the bridegroom. Soon there was no choice but to call out for him. Only there was no answer.

      For a long moment, in surprised silence, the guests looked at each other, all of them, wondering what could have happened to the count at the very moment his presence was indispensable and his absence a complete lapse of etiquette.

      Finally someone mentioned that during the reading of the contract, a young well-dressed stranger had appeared in the dorway to the drawing room and had exchanged a few whispered words with the count before leading him off, more like his executioner than his friend.

      Still, the count might not have left the house. Madame de Sourdis rang for a servant and ordered him to organize a search for the absent bridegroom. For several minutes, amidst the buzz of six hundred stunned wedding guess, servants could be heard calling out to each other from one floor to the next.

      Then one of the servants thought to ask the coachmen out in the courtyard if they had seen two young men. Several of them had, as it happened. They’d noticed that one of the young men had been hatless in spite of the rain. They reported that the two men had rushed down the steps and leaped into a carriage, shouting, “To the stagecoach house!” and the carriage had galloped off. One of the coachmen was certain he had recognized the young man without a hat: It was the Comte de Sainte-Hermine.

      The guests looked at each other in stupefaction. Then, out of the silence, they heard a voice shout: “The carriage and escort for the First Consul!” They all respectfully allowed Monsieur and Madame Bonaparte, along with Madame Louis Bonaparte, to pass. And as soon as they had left, pandemonium struck.

      Everyone rushed from the elegant rooms of Madame de Sourdis’s grand house as if there were a fire.

      Neither Madame de Sourdis nor Claire, however, had any inclination to stop them. Fifteen minutes later they found themselves alone.

      Madame de Sourdis, with a painful cry, rushed to her daughter’s side. Claire was trembling, about to faint. “Oh, Mother, Mother!” she cried, bursting into sobs as she collapsed into the countess’s arms, “it is just what the prophetess predicted! My widowhood has begun.”

       XXIII The Burning Brigades

      WE SHOULD EXPLAIN why Mademoiselle de Sourdis’s fiancé disappeared so incomprehensibly just as the marriage contract was to be signed. For the guests, his disappearance was the cause for surprise; for the countess, it prompted all sorts of speculations, each new one more improbable than the last. For her daughter, it elicited incessant tears.

      We have seen that Fouché summoned the Chevalier de Mahalin to his office the day before news of his dismissal was to be publicly announced. Hoping to get back his ministry, Fouché then planned with Mahalin the organization of burning brigades in the West.

      The bands of incendiaries had soon begun to appear, and already they had left their mark. Scarcely two weeks after the Chevalier had left Paris, it was learned that two landowners had been burned, one in Buré and the other in Saulnaye. Again, terror was spreading throughout the Morbihan.

      For five years civil war had raged in that unfortunate region, but even in the midst of its most horrible outrages against humanity, never had such banditry as this been practiced. To find robbery and torture of the kind that accompanied these burnings, one had to go back to the worst days of Louis XV and to the horrors of religious discrimination under Louis XIV.

      Terror came in bands of ten, fifteen, or twenty men who seemed to rise out of the earth and move like shadows over the land, following ravines, leaping across stiles; and any peasants who had ventured out late in the night had to hide behind trees or throw themselves facedown behind hedges, or else fall prey to the brigands. Then, suddenly, through a half-open window or a poorly closed door, they would burst into some farmhouse or chateau and, taking the servants by surprise, bind them up. Next, they would light a fire in the middle of the kitchen; they’d drag the master or mistress of the house over to it and lay their victim down on the floor with his feet to the flames until pain forced him to reveal where his money was hidden. Sometimes they would then free their prisoner. Other times, once they’d got the money, if they feared they might be identified, they would stab, hang, or bludgeon to death the unfortunate they had robbed.

      After the third or fourth episode of that kind, after the authorities had indeed confirmed the fires and murders, the rumor began to spread, at first secretly, then quite openly, that Cadoudal himself strode at the head of those gangs. The brigands and their leader always wore masks, but some who had seen the largest of the bands stalk through the night were sure they had recognized the leader as George Cadoudal—by his size, by his bearing, and especially by his large round head.

      This СКАЧАТЬ