A Sheaf of Bluebells

by Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy

It was the aspect of the interior of the château which had wrung from Mme. la Marquise de Mortain that cry of bitter sorrow. Fourteen years!!! She herself had been staying at Courson when her brother was at last compelled to dismiss all his servants, and to flee from the country, as many an aristocrat had done already in order to save not so much himself as his family—his young children—from the terrible doom which daily appeared more inevitable. Baudouin de Courson was then a widower, his daughter Fernande was a mere baby. He himself intended and did join the army of the Princes at Coblentz, together with Arnould de Mortain, his brother-in-law; Mme. la Marquise, with her son Laurent and with little Fernande de Courson, found refuge and hospitality in England, as many fugitive Royalists had already done; and the Château de Courson remained for a while under the care of old Matthieu Renard and of his wife Annette—faithful servants of the family.

M. de Courson had left some money with them to cover the strictly necessary expenses of upkeep, and he promised to send them more from time to time. He was so sure that this abominable Revolution would not last. God and the Allied Powers would soon avenge the murder of King Louis, and sweep the country clean from all these assassins and cut-throats. He would restore the Dauphin to the throne of his fathers and the loyal adherents of their King to their lands!

Fourteen years had gone by since then. Military autocracy had succeeded the excesses of tyrannical democracy; the Directorate had supplanted the Republic; the Consulate had followed, and now Napoleon Bonaparte, the son of an obscure Corsican citizen, was Emperor of the French—conqueror of half Europe, master of the world—and the cause of the Bourbons appeared more hopeless than it had ever been before. Even the truculent Vendeans—the Royalists of Brittany and Normandy—had been pacified. It was no use fighting any longer. Cadoudal, the invincible champion of a lost cause, had perished on the scaffold, and his scattered followers were having recourse to robbery, arson and pillage, in order to collect funds for their needs, since England had ceased to pour money and treasure into their bottomless coffers.

Matthieu Renard and Annette, his wife, had long since been forced to abandon the château. No money was forthcoming from Coblentz or from England. Food was dear and Matthieu still vigorous. He took up work with the farmers and cultivators who had supplanted his aristocratic masters on the domain of Courson. The decree of the National Convention of the 1st of February, '92, had finally dispossessed of their lands those émigrés who did not choose to return to France; the land and farms were sold for the benefit of the State. Worthy bourgeois and peasants settled down on them and planted their cabbages in the former well-preserved enclosures of M. le Comte's pleasure grounds. Alone, the vast château, with its reception-rooms in enfilade, its numerous state-bedrooms, elaborate servants' quarters, stablings and coach-houses, proved unsaleable. It remained the property of the nation until the day when the soldier-Emperor with a stroke of his pen restored it to its original owners.

It was little more now than an empty husk—swept clean by ruthless, thieving hands of every relic from the past—stripped of every object of value. When M. le Comte arrived, the tricolour flag was still waving on its staff up aloft, and across the stone façade was writ in large letters the great Republican device: "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!"

Mme. la Marquise de Mortain, who accompanied her brother on his return to his home, as she had done in exile, had the flag torn down and the device erased; but it would take months of labour and a mint of money to restore the château to its former splendour; and labour was scarce these days when the Grand Army, fighting half Europe risen in coalition against the Corsican usurper, was taking heavy toll of the manhood of the country and winning undying laurels at Marengo and Austerlitz, in Italy and in Prussia. And even labour was less scarce than money.

Mme. la Marquise, wandering through the dismantled salons and through the dank apartments eaten into by rust and damp, did not cry, nor did she wring her hands, but the hatred which had burned in her heart for fourteen years against the persecutors of her caste and the murderers of her King stirred within her with renewed violence, and she registered an oath that all the energy, the strength and the cunning which she possessed would more than ever be devoted to the undoing of the usurper and the triumph of the cause of her King.

"And for this," she said to M. le Comte de Courson, who had viewed his devastated patrimony in moodiness and silence, "for this the château is admirably situated. The country round seems more lonely than it ever was before, the woods are more dense, the moors more inaccessible. The spies of that infamous Bonaparte can never penetrate to our villages. We are within easy reach of Brest and of the English agents, and the whole country is seething with revolt against the tyranny of militarism, the dearness of food, the excessive taxation. We have not come here, Baudouin," she continued vehemently, "in order to lament and to sit still under crying injustice and the rule of a base-born usurper. We have come in order to do and to fight. It is going to be war to the knife in Normandy once again, and let the Corsican and his crowd look to themselves. Cadoudal's bomb failed—daggers, poisons have failed.... Bonaparte is surrounded and guarded by the most astute and the most unscrupulous police the world has ever known. Well, we'll bribe his guard and outwit his police. Never for one single hour of the day or night shall the usurper feel that his life is safe from lurking executioners! Daggers? poisons? We'll try them all again in turn. He has stuck at nothing—we'll stick at nothing; an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; we'll meet murder with murder and pillage with pillage. And, in the meanwhile, we'll fight—fight to the last man—fight with every resource at our command. Money we must have ... we'll loot and we'll rob and we'll burn.... They are all bandits, those revolutionary cut-throats; well, we'll be bandits, too, and cut-throats and assassins if need be, and we'll not cry 'peace' or 'halt' until Louis XVIII., by the grace of God, has come into his own again."

Later in the day, fired by her own enthusiasm, lashed into fury by the sight of her ruined childhood's home, Mme. la Marquise was still making wild plans for the coming guerrilla campaign against the Corsican and his army. M. de Courson tried to pacify her with a few counsels of prudence.

"At any rate, for the moment, my dear Denise," he said, "we must not brusque matters. We must let Joseph de Puisaye and Prigent make their plans quietly. Enough that for the moment they know that this house is at their disposal...."