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

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      Yet the rumor kept growing. More and more people claimed they had recognized George, and soon Le Journal de Paris officially announced that Cadoudal, in spite of his promise not to be the first to open hostilities—Cadoudal who had disbanded his Royalist forces—had now scraped together fifty or so bandits with whom he was terrorizing the countryside.

      In London, Cadoudal himself might not have happened upon the article in Le Journal de Paris, but a friend showed it to him. He took the official announcement as an accusation against him, and he saw the accusation as a flagrant attack on his honor and loyalty.

      “Very well,” he said, “by attacking me the French authorities have broken the pact we swore between us. They were unable to kill me with gun and sword, so now they are trying to kill me with calumny. They want war, and war they shall have.”

      That very evening George embarked on a fishing boat. Five days later it landed him on the French coast, between Port-Louis and the Quiberon peninsula.

      At the same time, two other men, Saint-Régeant and Limoëlan, were also leaving London to go to Paris. As they would be traveling through Normandy, they’d enter the country by the cliffs near Biville. They had spent one hour with George the day they left, to receive their instructions. Limoëlan had considerable experience in the intrigues of civil war, and Saint-Régeant was a former naval officer, skilled and resourceful, a sea pirate who had become a land pirate.

      It was on such lost men—rather than the likes of Guillemot and Sol de Grisolles—that Cadoudal was now forced to depend to execute his plans. In any case, it was clear that his goals and theirs were one and the same.

      This is what transpired.

      Near the end of April 1804, at about five in the afternoon, a man wrapped in a greatcoat galloped into the courtyard of the Plescop farm owned by Jacques Doley. A wealthy farmer, Doley lived there with his sixty-year-old mother-in-law and his thirty-year-old wife, with whom he had two children: one a boy of ten, the other a girl of seven. He had ten servants, both men and women, who helped him run the farm.

      The man in the greatcoat asked to speak to the master of the house and closed himself up in the milk room with him for a half hour, but then failed to reappear. Jacques Doley came back out of the room alone.

      During dinner, everyone noticed how quiet and preoccupied Jacques seemed to be. Several times his wife spoke to him, but he did not answer. After the meal, when the children tried to play with him as they usually did, he gently pushed them away.

      In Brittany, as you know, the servants eat at the master’s table. On that day, they too noticed how sad Doley was, and found it surprising because by nature he was quite jovial. Just a few days before, the Château de Buré had been burned, and that is what the servants were talking quietly about during the meal. As Doley listened to them, he raised his head a few times as if he were about to ask something, but each time without interrupting them. From time to time, though, the old mother made the sign of the cross, and near the end of the servants’ tale, Madame Doley, no longer able to control her fear, moved closer to her husband.

      By eight in the evening, it was completely dark. That was when all of the servants usually retired, some to the barn, some to the stables, but Doley seemed to be trying to delay them, as he gave them a series of orders that kept them from leaving. Also, now and then he would glance at the two or three double-barreled shotguns hanging on nails above the fireplace, like a man who would rather have them in hand.

      Soon, however, each servant had left in turn, and the old woman went to put the children in their cribs, which stood between their parents’ bed and the outside wall. She returned from the bedroom to kiss her daughter and son-in-law good-night, then went to her own bed in a little cabinet attached to the kitchen.

      Doley and his wife retired to the bedroom, which was separated from the kitchen by a glass door. Its two windows, protected by tightly closed oak shutters, opened out onto the garden. Near the top of the shutters, two small diamond-shaped openings admitted daylight even when the shutters were closed.

      Although it was the time that Madame Doley, like all farm people, normally got undressed and went to bed, that evening, some vague worry troubled her out of her routine. She did finally get into her nightclothes, but before she’d actually get into bed she insisted that her husband check all the doors to be sure they were securely locked.

      The farmer agreed, shrugging his shoulders like a man who thinks it is an unnecessary precaution. The first door he checked was the one that led from the kitchen to the milk room, but since it had only a few openings for light and no outside entrance, she did not disagree when her husband said, “To get in there, anyone would have to come in through the kitchen, and we have been in the kitchen all afternoon.”

      He checked the courtyard gate; it was firmly locked with an iron bar and two bolts. The window too was secure. The door of the bake house had only one lock, but it was an oak door and a prison lock. Finally, there was the garden door, but to get to it, you would have to scale a ten-foot-high wall or break down the courtyard door, itself impregnable.

      Somewhat reassured, Madame Doley went back into the bedroom but she still couldn’t keep from trembling. Doley sat down at his desk and pretended to be looking over his papers. Yet, whatever power he had over himself, he was unable to hide his worry, and the slightest sound would give him a start.

      If he had begun to worry because of what he had learned during the day, he indeed had valid reasons. Roughly one hour from Plescop, a band of about twenty men was leaving the woods near Meucon and starting across open fields. Four were on horseback, riding in front like a vanguard and wearing uniforms of the Gendarmerie Nationale. The fifteen or sixteen others following on foot were not in uniform, and they were armed with guns and pitchforks. They were trying their best not to be seen. They stuck to the hedgerow, walked along ravines, crawled up hillsides, and got closer and closer to Plescop. Soon they were only a hundred paces away. They stopped to hold council.

      One of the men moved out from the band and circled his way around to the farm. The others waited. They could hear a dog barking, but they could not tell if it came from inside the farm or a neighboring house.

      The scout came back. He had walked around the farmhouse but had found no way in. Again they held council. They decided that they would have to force their way in.

      They advanced. They stopped only when they reached the wall. That’s when they realized that the barking dog was on the wall’s other side, in the garden.

      They started toward the gate. On its side, so did the dog, barking even more ferociously. They had been discovered; their element of surprise was lost.

      The four horsemen in gendarme uniforms went to the gate, while the bandits on foot pressed themselves back against the wall. Now sticking its nose under the gate, the dog was barking desperately.

      A voice called out, a man’s voice: “What’s the matter, Blaireau? What’s wrong, old boy?”

      The dog turned toward the voice and howled plaintively.

      Another voice called out from a little farther away, a woman’s voice: “You are not going to open the gate, I hope!”

      “And why not?” the man’s voice asked.

      “Because it could be brigands, you imbecile!”

      Both voices went quiet.

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