[CHAPTER XXI]
CITIZEN FRANÇOIS GOULIN
Mademoiselle Rotrou, or rather, Diane de Fargas, fell into a profound revery after leaving Châteaubriant. In the state of her heart at that time, it was, or so she thought, insensible to all tender sentiments, particularly love. But beauty, refinement, and courtesy will always exercise upon a woman of breeding a sufficient influence to make her dream if not love.
Mademoiselle de Fargas, therefore, dreamed of her fellow-traveller, and for the first time a suspicion occurred to her. She began to ask herself how it was that a man so amply protected by the triple signature of Barras, Rewbell, and La Reveillière-Lepaux should evince such an unconquerable repugnance toward the agent of a government which had honored him with such noteworthy confidence.
She forgot that she herself, whose sympathies were far from being with the Revolutionary government, was travelling under the same protection; and even supposing Monsieur d'Argentan to be an aristocrat, which she surmised to be the case from some words he let fall during their last interview, it was possible that, under the stress of circumstances like hers, he had availed himself of a protection which he was somewhat ashamed to claim.
Then, too, she noticed that Monsieur d'Argentan, when he dismounted from his horse, always removed a valise from the saddle whose weight seemed somewhat disproportionate to its size.
Although the young man was strong and vigorous, as if to divert suspicion he often carried it with one hand, as he would a valise containing a mere change of clothing. But it taxed his strength far more than he was willing to have it appear.
Was he carrying money? If so, he was a curious kind of tax-gatherer, to be carrying money from Paris to Vitré, instead of sending it from Vitré to Paris.
While the constant revolution of the wheel of Fortune made it difficult to determine such matters accurately, Mademoiselle de Fargas was too familiar with the different rounds of the social ladder not to know that it was unusual to find an insignificant tax-collector of an obscure canton at the furthest extremity of France, who rode like an English gentleman and expressed himself with the courtesy which had about it the indelible perfume of gentle birth. And this was especially noticeable toward the close of a period when everybody had put on a varnish of vulgarity to please the powers that were.
She asked herself—without a flutter of the heart, however—who the unknown could be, and what motive had induced him to travel with a passport that was certainly not his own.