The man who had just dealt Henri this blow was the last of those Villacourts who took their name from the domain and château of Villacourt, situated some three leagues from Saint-Mihiel, and owned by them from time immemorial.
In 1303 Ulrich de Villacourt was one of the three lords who set their seal to the will of Ferry, Duke of Lorraine, by order of that prince. Under Charles the Bold, Gantonnet de Villacourt, who had been taken prisoner by the Messinians, only regained his liberty by giving his word never to mount a battle-horse, nor to carry military weapons again. From that time forth he rode a mule, arrayed himself in buffalo-skin, carried a heavy iron bar, and returned to the fight bolder and more terrible than ever. Maheu de Villacourt married Gigonne de Malain and afterward Christine de Gliseneuve. His marble statue, between his two wives, was to be seen before the Revolution in the Church of the Grey Friars at Saint-Mihiel. Duke René allowed him to take eight hundred florins from the town of Ligny for the ransom that he had had to pay after the disastrous battle of Bulgnéville.
Remacle de Villacourt, Maheu's son, was killed in 1476, in the battle waged by Duke René before Nancy against Charles the Daring. Hubert de Villacourt, Remacle's sons, Seneschal of Barrois and Bailiff of Bassigny, followed Duke Antoine as standard-bearer in the Alsatian war, while his brother Bonaventure, a monk of the strict order of Saint-François, was made three times over the triennial Superior of his order, and confessor of Antoine and François, Dukes of Lorraine; and one of his sisters, Salmone, was appointed Abbess of Sainte Glossinde of Metz.
Jean-Marie de Villacourt served in the French army, and after the Landrecies day, the king made him a knight and embraced him. He was afterward captain of three hundred foot soldiers and Equerry of the King's stables, and was then appointed to the captaincy of Vaucouleurs and made Governor of Langres. He had married a sister of Jean de Chaligny, the celebrated gun-founder of Lorraine, who cast the famous culverin, twenty-two feet high. His brother Philibert was a cavalry captain under Charles IX. His brother Gaston made himself famous by his duels. It was he who killed Captain Chambrulard, with two sword-strokes, before four thousand persons assembled at the back of the Chartreux in Paris. Jean-Marie had another brother, Angus, who was Canon of Toul and Archdeacon of Tonnerrois, and a sister, Archange, who was Abbess of Saint-Maur, Verdun.
Then came Guillaume de Villacourt, who fought against Louis XIII. He was obliged to surrender with Charles de Lenoncourt, who was defending the town of Saint-Mihiel, and he shared his four years' captivity in the Bastille. His son, Mathias de Villacourt, married in 1656 Marie Dieudonnée, a daughter of Claude de Jeandelincourt, who opened the salt mine of Château-Salins. Mathias had fourteen children, ten of whom were killed in the service of Louis XIV: Charles, captain of the regiment of the Pont, killed in the siege of Philisbourg; Jean, killed in the battle of Nerwinde; Antoine, captain of the regiment of Normandie, killed in the siege of Fontarabie; Jacques, killed in the siege of Bellegarde, where he had gone by permission of the king; Philippe, captain of the grenadiers in the Dauphin's regiment, killed in the battle of Marsaille; Thibaut, captain in the same regiment, killed in the battle of Hochstett; Pierre-François, commander in the Lyonnais regiment, killed in the battle of Fleurus; Claude-Marie, commander in the Périgord regiment, killed in the passage of the Hogue; Edme, lieutenant in his brother's company, killed at his side in the same affair, and Gerard, Knight of the Order of Saint-Jean of Jerusalem, killed in 1700, in a conflict between four galleys of Christians and a Turkish man-of-war. Of the three daughters of Charles-Mathias, Lydie married the Seigneur de Majastre, Governor of Epinal, and the other two, Berthe and Phœbé, died unmarried.
The eldest of the sons of Charles-Mathias, Louis-Aimé de Villacourt, who served eighteen years and retired from service after the battle of Malplaquet, died in 1702. His son left Villacourt, settled down in Paris, threw himself into the life of the capital, and so got rid of the remainder of a fortune which had already been encroached upon by the loss of a lawsuit between his father and the d'Haraucourts. He endeavoured to recover his losses at the gaming-table, got into debt, and returned to Villacourt with a wife from Carrouge who had kept a gambling house in Paris. He died in 1752, owning very little besides the walls of the château, and leaving a name less famous and less honourable than his father's had been. He had two children by his marriage, a daughter and a son. The daughter became maid of honour to the Empress-Queen, the son remained at Villacourt, leading a low, coarse life as a country gentleman. On the abolition of privileges in 1790 he gave up his rank and lived on a friendly and equal footing with the peasants until he died in 1792. His son Jean, lieutenant in the regiment of the Royal-Liégeois in 1787, was in the Nancy affair. He emigrated, went through the campaigns of 1792 to 1801 in Mirabeau's legion, which was then commanded by Roger de Damas, and in the Bourbon grenadiers in Condé's army. On the thirteenth of August, 1796, he was wounded on the head in the Oberkamlach battle. In 1802 he returned to France, bringing with him a wife he had married in Germany, who died after bearing him four children, four sons. He had become weak in intellect, almost childish in fact, from the result of his wound, and after his wife's death there was no one to regulate the household expenses. Disorder gradually crept in, he kept open table and took to drinking, until at last he was obliged to sell what little land he had round the château. Finally the château itself began to crumble away. He could not have it repaired, as he had no money to pay the workmen. The wind could be felt through the cracks, and the rain came in. The family were obliged to give up one room after another, taking refuge where the roof was still sound. He himself was indifferent to all this; after drinking two or three glasses of brandy he would take his seat in what used to be the kitchen garden, on a stone bench near a meridian, the figures of which had worn away, and there he would get quite cheerful in the sunshine, calling to people over the hedge to come in and drink with him. Decay and poverty, however, made rapid strides in the château. There was nothing left of all the old silver but a salad-bowl, which was used for the food of a horse called Brouska, that the exile had brought with him from Germany, and which was now allowed to roam in liberty through the rooms on the ground-floor.
The four sons grew up as the château went to decay, accustomed to wind, rain, and roughing it. They were entirely neglected and abandoned by their father, and their only education consisted of a few lessons from the parish priest. From living like the peasants, and mixing with them in their work and games, they gradually became regular peasants themselves, and the roughest and strongest in the country round. When their father died the four brothers, by common consent, made over to a land agent the remaining stones of their château in return for a few pounds, with which to pay their most pressing debts, and an annuity of twenty pounds, which was to be paid until the death of the last of the four. They then took up their abode in the forest, which joined their estate, and lived there with the wood-cutters and in the same way as they did, making a regular den of their hut, and living there with their sweethearts or wives, peopling the forest with a half-bred race, in which the Villacourts were crossed with nature, noblemen mated with children of the forest, whose language, even, was no longer French. Some of Jean de Villacourt's old comrades in arms had tried, on his death, to do something for his children. They were interested in this name, which had been so great and had now fallen so low. In 1826 the youngest of the boys, who was scarcely more than sixteen, was brought to Paris. The little savage was clothed and presented to the Duchesse d'Angoulême: he appeared three or four times in the salons of the Minister of War, who was related to his family, and who was very anxious to do something for him; but at the end of a week, feeling stifled in these drawing-rooms, and ill at ease in his clothes, he had escaped like a little wolf, gone straight back to his hiding-place, and had not come out of it again for years.
Of these four Villacourts, he was the only one left at the end of twenty years. His three brothers died one after the other, and all by violent deaths; one from drunkenness, the second from illness, and the other from blows he had received in a skirmish. All three had been struck down suddenly, snatched as it were from the midst of life. Living among the bastards they had left, this last of the Villacourts was looked up to in the forest as the chieftain of a clan until 1854, when the game laws came into force. All the regulations and the supervision, the trials, fines, confiscations, and liabilities connected with the chase, which had now become his very life, and the fear of giving way to his anger some day and of putting a bullet into one of the keepers, disgusted him with this part of the world, with France, and with this land which was no longer his own.
It occurred to him to go to America in order to be quite free, and to be able to hunt in untrodden fields where no gun license was necessary. He went to Paris to set sail from Havre, but he had not enough money for the voyage. He then fell back on Africa, but there he found a second France with laws, gendarmes, and forest-keepers. He tried working a grant of land, and then a clearing, but that kind of labour did not suit him. The country and the climate tried him, and the burning heat of the sun and soil began to take effect on his robust health. At the end of two years he returned to France.
On going back to his log-hut at Motte-Noire he found a newspaper there, the only thing which had come for him during his absence. It was a number of the Moniteur and was more than a year old. He tore it up to light his pipe, and, just as he was twisting it, caught sight of a red-pencil mark. He opened it out again and read the marked paragraph: