De Manny looked at him, astonished at the tone, but the speaker's face was now in shadow from a neighbouring pillar.
"I understand that she was heart-broken—that they both were. But what makes you ask such a question? Have you anything against M. de Sombreuil?"
"Nothing whatever," replied the Chouan, shifting his wounded arm to a more comfortable position. "I pity him from the bottom of my heart. But the lady will marry someone else, you may be sure."
"Sombreuil will be difficult to replace, however," said de Manny meditatively, looking again at the young colonel of hussars, who had indeed every gift of mind and body to commend him both to man and woman.
La Vireville gave a smothered laugh. "Good heavens, man, have you not yet learnt that to a woman's heart no one is irreplaceable? She can always find somebody else . . . if she have not already found him," he added, almost inaudibly. "But it is half-past three; if you will excuse me I shall try to sleep a little." And, putting his head back against the stone, he closed his eyes.
The officer of Béon studied him for a moment, in the dim light, with a curiosity which even the desperate nature of their common situation could not blunt, before he, too, settled himself to snatch a little repose.
(2)
Next morning some charitable hand threw in a little bread through the ruined windows of St. Gildas. Later, the muster-roll was called, and the officers, separated from the men, were marched to the town prison, though some eighteen hundred émigrés were drafted off to Vannes and other places.
La Vireville was among those who remained at Auray, to witness the indefatigable devotion of the women of that town to the prisoners. These cooked for them, brought them food, running the gauntlet of the pleasantries of their guards, took messages for their families, and tried—in a few cases successfully—to smuggle them out of prison. The days passed. Time was punctuated by the summons to go before the military commission, by batches of twenty, every morning and evening. Few came back. Sombreuil, the old Bishop of Dol, and twenty priests were shot at Vannes on the twenty-eighth of July, just a week after the surrender, and it was abundantly clear that the capitulation, if it had ever existed save as a tragic misunderstanding, would not be observed. It was for this that they had given their paroles, that those who from fatigue had fallen out during the march from Quiberon had voluntarily come into Auray next morning and surrendered themselves. . . . Even before trial, therefore, they all prepared for death, and since, against all expectation, a priest was allowed them, they went to their last confessions in a little bare room at the top of the prison—the only room that could boast a chair.
One of the military commissions to try the prisoners sat over the market of Auray, that remarkable building with the great roof which La Vireville remembered well enough, having seen it when, at the head of his gars, he had helped to take the town a few short weeks before. But the other was in the little chapel of the Congrégation des Femmes, and it was here that he was tried, and condemned, as an émigré taken with arms in his hand. No reference was made by the tribunal to his exploits in the Chouannerie of Northern Brittany; it was not necessary.