At Montaigu Maître Courtin learned that his trip was useless; the department had just been placed under military authority. The sub-prefect advised the mayor of La Logerie to go to Aigrefeuille and get his instructions from the general, who was there at that moment.
Dermoncourt, fully occupied with the movement of his columns, and having, as a brave and loyal soldier, little liking for men of Courtin's character, received the latter's denunciations, made under the guise of necessary information, with an abstracted air, and, in fact, showed a coldness to the mayor of La Logerie which greatly chilled that functionary's hopes. Nevertheless the general accepted a proposal which Courtin made him, to put a garrison in the château de la Logerie; for the position seemed to him an excellent one from which to hold the whole region in hand, from Machecoul to Saint Colombin.
Heaven owed the farmer some compensation for the general's want of sympathy, and, with its usual justice, soon bestowed it.
As he left the house which served as headquarters, Maître Courtin was approached by a man whom he had no recollection of ever having met, but who, nevertheless, showed him the utmost civility and a friendliness that was altogether touching. This individual was a man about thirty years of age, dressed in black clothes, the cut of which resembled that of priestly garments worn in a city. His forehead was low, his nose hooked like the beak of a bird of prey. His lips were thin; and yet, in spite of their thinness, they were prominent, owing to a peculiar formation of the jaw; his pointed chin protruded at an angle which was more than sharp; his hair, of a leaden black, was plastered along his temples, and his gray eyes, often dropped, seemed to see through his winking eyelids. It was the countenance of a Jesuit grafted on the face of a Jew.
A few words said by this unknown man to Courtin appeared to remove the distrust with which the latter was inclined to receive advances which seemed to him at first suspicious. He even accepted with a good grace an invitation to dinner at the hôtel Saint-Pierre, which the stranger gave him; and after two hours passed tête-à-tête in a private room, where the individual we have described ordered the table to be laid, such mutual sympathy had been developed that they treated each other, Courtin and he, as old friends; exchanging, when they parted, many shakings of the hand, while the mayor of La Logerie, as he struck his spurs into his pony's flanks, promised his new acquaintance that he should not be long without hearing from him.
Toward nine o'clock that evening Maître Courtin was jogging along, with the tail of his beast toward Aigrefeuille and its nose toward La Logerie; he seemed quite lively and joyous, and was flirting his whip by its leather handle right and left on the flanks of his little steed, with a jollity and ease that were not characteristic of him.
Maître Courtin's brain was evidently larded with couleur-de-rose ideas. He was thinking how on the morrow he should have, at a stone's throw from his farm, a detachment of fifty soldiers, whose presence would relieve him of anxiety, not only about the consequences of what he had done, but also about those of certain things that he wanted to do; he was thinking, too, that in his capacity as mayor he could use those fifty bayonets according to the needs of his private animosities. This idea gratified his self-love and his hatred together.
But, seductive as this idea of a Pretorian guard which could, if cleverly managed, be turned into his private guard, might be, it was surely not sufficient to give Maître Courtin--a practical man if ever there was one--his present exuberant satisfaction.
The mysterious unknown had no doubt dazzled his eyes with something more than the glitter of an ephemeral glory,--in fact, it was neither more nor less than piles of gold and silver which Maître Courtin was beholding in his mind's eye through the mists of the future, and toward which he was mechanically stretching out his hand with a smile of covetousness.
Under the control of these agreeable hallucinations, and somewhat hazy from the fumes of wine which his is new friend had poured for him generously, Maître Courtin let himself drop into a state of gentle somnolence; his body swayed to right and left, according to the caprices of his ambling pony, until at last, the quadruped having stumbled over a stone, Maître Courtin pitched forward and remained doubled over on the pommel of his saddle.