In reality it had been accepted by the majority of the population as a government of expediency, which would provisionally secure threatened interests, but whose duration was anything but certain. It was too evident that the Empire was Napoleon, as the Consulate had been Bonaparte—that everything rested on the head of one man. If an infernal machine removed him, royalty would have a good opportunity. His life was not the only stake; his luck itself was very hazardous. Founded on victory, the Empire was condemned to be always victorious. War could undo what war had done. And this uneasiness is manifest in contemporary memoirs and correspondence. More of the courtiers of the new régime than one imagines were as sceptical as Mme. Mère, economising her revenues and saying to her mocking daughters, "You will perhaps be very glad of them, some day!" In view of a possible catastrophe many of these kept open a door for retreat towards the Bourbons, and vaguely encouraged hopes of assistance that could only be depended on in case of their success, but which the royalists believed in as positive and immediate. As to the disaster which might bring it about, they hoped for its early coming, and promised it to the impatient Chouans—the disembarkation of an Anglo-Russian army—the rising of the West—the entrance of Louis XVIII into his good town of Paris—and the return of the Corsican to his island! Predictions that were not so wild after all. Ten years later it was an accomplished fact in almost all its details. And what are ten years in politics? Frotté, Georges, Pichegru, d'Aché, would only have had to fold their arms. They would have seen the Empire crumble by its own weight.
We made these reflections on returning to the château while looking at the terrace in the setting sun, at the peaceful winding of the Seine and the lovely autumn landscape that Mme. de Combray and d'Aché had so often looked at, at the same place and hour, little foreseeing the sad fate the future had in store for them.
The misfortunes of the unhappy woman—the deplorable affair of Quesnay where the coach with state funds was attacked by Mme. Acquet's men, for the profit of the royalist exchequer and of Le Chevalier; the assassination of d'Aché, sold to the imperial police by La Vaubadon, his mistress, and the cowardly Doulcet de Pontécoulant, who does not boast of it in his "Mémoires,"—have been the themes of several tales, romances and novels, wherein fancy plays too great a part, and whose misinformed authors, Hippolyte Bonnelier, Comtesse de Mirabeau, Chennevières, etc., have taken great advantage of the liberty used in works of imagination. There is only one reproach to be made—that they did not have the genius of Balzac. But we may criticise more severely the so-called historical writings about Mme. de Combray, her family and residences, and the Château of Tournebut which M. Homberg shows us flanked by four feudal towers, and which MM. Le Prévost and Bourdon say was demolished in 1807.
Mme. d'Abrantès, with her usual veracity, describes the luxurious furniture and huge lamps in the "labyrinths of Tournebut, of which one must, as it were, have a plan, so as not to lose one's way." She shows us Le Chevalier, crucifix in hand, haranguing the assailants in the wood of Quesnay (although he was in Paris that day to prove an alibi), and gravely adds, "I know some one who was in the coach and who alone survived, the seven other travellers having been massacred and their bodies left on the road." Now there was neither coach nor travellers, and no one was killed!
M. de la Sicotière's mistakes are still stranger. At the time that he was preparing his great work on "Frotté and the Norman Insurrections," he learned from M. Gustave Bord that I had some special facts concerning Mme. de Combray, and wrote to ask me about them. I sent him a résumé of Moisson's story, and asked him to verify its correctness. And on that he went finely astray.
Mme. de Combray had two residences besides her house at Rouen; one at Aubevoye, where she had lived for a long while, the other thirty leagues away, at Donnay, in the department of Orne, where she no longer went, as her son-in-law had settled himself there. Two towers have the same name of Tournebut; the one at Aubevoye is ours; the other, some distance from Donnay, did not belong to Mme. de Combray.
Convinced solely by the assertions of MM. Le Prévost and Bourdon that in 1804 the Château of Aubevoye and its tower no longer existed, and that Mme. de Combray occupied Donnay at that date, M. de la Sicotière naturally mistook one Tournebut for the other, did not understand a single word of Moisson's story, which he treated as a chimera, and in his book acknowledges my communications in this disdainful note:
"Confusion has arisen in many minds between the two Tournebuts, so different, however, and at such a distance from each other, and has given birth to many strange and romantic legends; inaccessible retreats arranged for outlaws and bandits in the old tower, nocturnal apparitions, innocent victims paying with their lives the misfortune of having surprised the secrets of these terrible guests...."
It is pleasant to see M. de la Sicotière point out the confusion he alone experienced. But there is better to come! Here is a writer who gives us in two large volumes the history of Norman Chouannerie. There is little else spoken of in his book than disguises, false names, false papers, ambushes, kidnappings, attacks on coaches, subterranean passages, prisons, escapes, child spies and female captains! He states himself that the affair of the Forest of Quesnay was "tragic, strange and mysterious!" And at the same time he condemns as "strange" and "romantic" the simplest of all these adventures—that of Moisson! He scoffs at his hiding-places in the roofs of the old château, and it is precisely in the roofs of the old château that the police found the famous refuge which could hold forty men with ease. He calls the retreats arranged for the outlaws and bandits "legendary," at the same time that he gives two pages to the enumeration of the holes, vaults, wells, pits, grottoes and caverns in which these same bandits and outlaws found safety! So that M. de la Sicotière seems to be laughing at himself!
I should reproach myself if I did not mention, as a curiosity, the biography of M. and Mme. de Combray, united in one person in the "Dictionaire Historique" (!!!) of Larousse. It is unique of its kind. Names, places and facts are all wrong. And the crowning absurdity is that, borne out by these fancies, fragments are given of the supposed Mémoires that Félicie (!) de Combray wrote after the Restoration—forgetting that she was guillotined under the Empire!