On the 12th the police force at Villers-Cotterets received orders to search the countryside; it had been reported that the fugitives had been seen in the direction of Ferté-Milon.
We saw the police pass by, and we knew the object of their expedition, through a friend of mine, named Stanislas Leloir, the son of an old sergeant who had been killed near Villers-Cotterets during the campaign of 1814.
It may well be believed that all this news—whether from Paris or from Compiègne or la Fère—put our little hole of a town into a great ferment. The epithet of Bonapartist, now used definitely as an accusation, sounded more often than ever in my ears, but under the circumstances my mother had strongly urged upon me not to resist it. I therefore let them call me Bonapartist as much as they liked. At night, gangs of street boys, twenty-five to thirty in number, would collect, open the doors of suspected persons, come right into the house and shout out "Vive le roi!": compelling the inmates to shout with them. Ten times a night our door, which opened on the street, would be assailed by hooligans in this way, and their cries sounded in our ears with an angry persistence which was most disquieting.
By day everybody collected in the squares. Villers-Cotterets, being on the high road from Paris to Mézières, by way of Soissons and Laon, is one of the vital arteries which feed Northern France; numberless carriages, diligences and couriers use it; each often bringing some bit of special news not given us in the papers. It was by these means we learnt, on the 13th and 14th March, of Napoleon's entry into Grenoble and Lyons, to which the papers either did not refer at all, or which they only mentioned to contradict.
Thus, on the 14th, we learnt that Napoleon had entered Lyons, that the comte d'Artois, even as the duc d'Orléans, had been forced to return without an army; and, suddenly, we heard a great noise towards the end of the rue de Largny. As the street forms a perfectly straight line, we turned to look in the direction from whence the noise came; we saw three carriages, harnessed like post-chaises and escorted by a strong piquet of police.
Everybody rushed towards these conveyances. In each carriage sat a general officer between two policemen, and besides these six policemen, seated opposite the three prisoners, were six more as escort.
The carriages came at a fast trot. So long as they were in the rue de Largny, which is quite wide, they were able to keep up the pace, but, when they reached the entrance to the rue de Soissons, a narrow and uneven street, they were obliged to go slower, on account of the hindrances they met.
We had asked and found out, in the meantime, that these general officers were the brothers Lallemand, for whom the police had been set to hunt the day before; that they had found them about six o'clock that morning, near a little village called Mareuil, riding on worn-out horses; they were harassed by a journey of three days' duration across country and through woodland, and had given themselves up without much show of resistance.
The two brothers Lallemand were in the first two carriages; the third, so far as I can recollect, was occupied by an ordinary aide-de-camp, captain, or orderly officer.