“We should leave you,” said the younger man, gloomily, “for you are the cause of our misfortunes. You deceived us, Monsieur Lacheneur.”
He dared not protest, so just was the reproach.
“Nonsense! let him come all the same,” said the other, with a peculiar glance at his companion.
So they walked on, and that same evening, after nine hours of travelling on the mountains, they crossed the frontier.
But this long journey was not made without bitter reproaches, and even more bitter recriminations.
Closely questioned by his companions, Lacheneur, exhausted both in mind and body, finally admitted the insincerity of the promises with which he had inflamed the zeal of his followers. He acknowledged that he had spread the report that Marie-Louise and the young King of Rome were concealed in Montaignac, and that this report was a gross falsehood. He confessed that he had given the signal for the revolt without any chance of success, and without means of action, leaving everything to chance. In short, he confessed that nothing was real save his hatred, his implacable hatred of the Sairmeuse family.
A dozen times, at least, during this terrible avowal, the peasants who accompanied him were on the point of hurling him down the precipices upon whose verge they were walking.
“So it was to gratify his own spite,” they thought, quivering with rage, “that he sets everybody to fighting and killing one another—that he ruins us, and drives us into exile. We will see.”
The fugitives went to the nearest house after crossing the frontier.
It was a lonely inn, about a league from the little village of Saint-Jean-de-Coche, and was kept by a man named Balstain.