"I think you understand only too well, Monsieur Augustin, otherwise La Vireville," said the chef de bataillon sternly. "Courtois, oblige me by reading out the description of the Chouan Augustin."
The sous-lieutenant read it out slowly and clearly—a damning document enough, not the old incorrect Government 'signalement,' but the one, drawn from the life, which Mlle. Angèle had penned that evening at Canterbury.
"The scar on the left cheek—put back that long hair of his!"
The wheel had come full circle. What he had had to submit to, in order to save Anne-Hilarion, months ago, had proved fatal to him himself now, as he had always known it would some day. Well, Anne could live without him.
"I do not think," observed the president, folding up the paper in front of him, "that there is anything more to say. Take him away. The next, sergeant!"
So La Vireville lost the throw, for the dice were loaded against him. He had no doubt that Mme. de Chaulnes had sent the 'signalement' down with him to Quiberon, and that the president had been ordered to keep it back till the last moment, as he had done, so that he could delude himself that after all he was going to escape. She had a pretty taste in vengeance, that old woman!
(3)
At half-past nine that night seventy of them were marched out to die. It was a beautiful and serene evening, light enough to slay by. Over the quiet waves the just risen moon made a wide golden highway. They went four abreast along the sandy track till they came, among the barley-fields at the edge of the sea, to a stony, uncultivated meadow with a fringe of wind-sloped and stunted trees behind one of its encircling stone walls. There they were halted and their sentences read to them, and after that stationed, thirty at a time, a few paces apart, against this low barrier. To each was told off a firing-party of four. La Vireville had been speculating how it would be done; at Auray he had heard that they had arranged otherwise. He himself was placed among the first thirty, the last but one of the line.
He had shaken hands with his right-hand neighbour, the Poitevin from Loyal-Emigrant, and was turning to the one remaining victim on his left, when his own four soldiers closed upon him. One of them drew out a handkerchief to bandage his eyes. Fortuné did not think it worth protesting that he should prefer not to be blindfolded, and submitted without a word to the operation. Another man held his unbound wrists, but La Vireville had no intention of struggling, though all the time he was thinking, "If I had a chance, even now, I would take it—were it only to spite that she-devil!" The handkerchief smelt strongly of brandy.
"Citizen," suddenly said a husky voice in his ear, and he felt the rough hands still fumbling behind his head with the knot of the handkerchief, which he was sure was already tied—"Citizen, we are very sorry, but it is the law. So if you have any money about you, give it to me now!"