(2)
L'Oiseleur did pay his call at the Hôtel de Courtomer, but, enormously to Laurent's disappointment, it was when he himself happened to be out. Mme de Courtomer reported that he had said he was on his way back to Brittany in a day or two, so Laurent concluded that the last picture he would have of him would be of his standing with the lady in green and silver under the filigree lamp, looking so deeply annoyed.
But two days later, as he chanced to walk down the Tuileries garden, he caught sight, amid a tolerable crowd, of two people in front of him who gave him a start. He saw only their backs; but one undoubtedly was L'Oiseleur's. Yet he had on his arm a lady who was obviously not Mme de Morsan. For one thing, she was not so tall—she only came up to her escort's shoulder; for another, from below her bonnet escaped a tendril of bright bronze; and for a third, Aymar de la Rocheterie's own head was bent down towards her in a way it had shown no sign of doing to Mme de Morsan. They were obviously talking very intimately—so intimately that the self-denying Laurent slackened his faster pace lest he should overtake them; and they were soon lost in the crowd.
Was that the real cousin, the heroine of the exploit at Chalais, the member of his family who shared his Northern blood—the lady whose unhappy marriage to a roué might very well have been the cause of his visit to England, the lady who had . . . perhaps . . . the charge of his heart?
This question Laurent asked of the unresponsive facade of the Tuileries as he strong-mindedly returned towards it. For the answer to it he would have to wait now till the spring . . . and the spring would be a deuced long time in coming.
(3)
But it was not. The winter—gay despite almost universal discontent—passed very swiftly in Paris. Laurent went out a great deal, and already the Aunts said that it was time he should think of marrying, particularly as his English grandfather, who died in the autumn, had left him nearly all his money. His mother laughed and replied, "Wait till he sees a lady he likes," to which Tante Clotilde responded: "Virginia, that is not the way things are done in France! It is your—our—duty to find a suitable match." And Mme de Courtomer promised that she would try.
Yet had she really made any matrimonial plans for her son they could hardly have been followed up that spring. The bombshell of Napoleon's landing at Cannes on March 1st would have cast them into as much confusion as it did the whole organization of the newly established regime. But Laurent's mind at least was not troubled by divided counsels; he was off to join the Royalists of the west. Nothing could stop him from seizing this unexpected chance of proving his loyalty, and Mesdames Tantes, at all events, were not likely to do anything in that direction. They gave him benedictions and scapulars. His mother tried not to show her heart. The leader of all others whom he longed to join was, of course, L'Oiseleur in Brittany—he imagined that he would spring at once to arms—but, not having heard anything of him since the autumn, and not knowing whether he himself would prove a welcome recruit, he abandoned the idea.
Moreover, directly it became known that the Duc de Bourbon was being sent to the Loire, it seemed plain to Laurent and all his like-minded friends that Vendée, and not Brittany, would prove the centre of resistance; and so, having had the good fortune to procure a personal introduction to the Vendean general, Comte Charles d'Autichamp, who held the military command at Angers, he and a few others set off thither, full of enthusiasm to lay their swords, through him, at the feet of the Duc d'Enghien's father.