CHAPTER III
THE COMBRAYS
At the period of our story there existed in the department of the Eure, on the left bank of the Seine, beyond Gaillon, a large old manor-house, backed by the hill that extended as far as Andelys; it was called the Château de Tournebut. Although its peaked roofs could be seen from the river above a thicket of low trees, Tournebut was off the main route of travel, whether by land or water, from Rouen to Paris. Some fairly large woods separated it from the highroad which runs from Gaillon to Saint-Cyr-de-Vaudreuil, while the barges usually touched at the hamlet of Roule, where hacks were hired to take passengers and goods to the ferry of Muids, thereby saving them the long détour made by the Seine. Tournebut was thus isolated between these two much-travelled roads. Its principal façade, facing east, towards the river, consisted of two heavy turrets, one against the other, built of brick and stone in the style of Louis XIII, with great slate roofs and high dormer windows. After these came a lower and more modern building, ending with the chapel. In front of the château was an old square bastion forming a terrace, whose mossy walls were bathed by the waters of a large stagnant marsh. The west front which was plainer, was separated by only a few feet of level ground from the abrupt, wooded hill by which Tournebut was sheltered. A wall with several doors opening on the woods enclosed the château, the farm and the lower part of the park, and a wide morass, stretching from the foot of the terrace to the Seine, rendered access impossible from that side.
By the marriage of Geneviève de Bois-l'Evêque, Lady of Tournebut, this mansion had passed to the family of Marillac, early in the seventeenth century. The Marshal Louis de Marillac—uncle of Mme. Legras, collaborator of St. Vincent de Paul—had owned it from 1613 to 1631, and tradition asserted that during his struggle against Cardinal Richelieu he had established there a plant for counterfeiting money. To him was due the construction of the brick wing which remained unfinished, his condemnation to death for peculation having put a stop to the embellishments he had intended to make.
There are very few châteaux left in France like this romantic manor of a dead and gone past, whose stones have endured all the crises of our history, and to which each century has added a tower, or a legend. Tournebut, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was a perfect type of these old dwellings, where there were so many great halls and so few living rooms, and whose high slate roofs covered intricacies of framework forming lofts vast as cathedrals. It was said that its thick walls were pierced by secret passages and contained hiding-places that Louis de Marillac had formerly used.
In 1804 Tournebut was inhabited by the Marquise de Combray, born Geneviève de Brunelles, daughter of a President of the Cour des Comptes of Normandy. Her husband, Jean-Louis-Armand-Emmanuel Hélie de Combray, had died in 1784, leaving her with two sons and two daughters, and a great deal of property in the environs of Falaise, in the parishes of Donnay, Combray, Bonnœil and other places. Madame de Combray had inherited Tournebut from her mother, Madeleine Hubert, herself a daughter of a councillor in the Parliament of Normandy. Besides the château and the farm, which were surrounded by a park well-wooded with old trees, the domain included the woods that covered the hillside, at the extremity of which was an old tower, formerly a wind-mill, built over deep quarries, and called the "Tower of the Burned Mill," or "The Hermitage." It figures in the ancient plans of the country under the latter name, which it owes to the memory of an old hermit who lived in the quarries for many years and died there towards the close of the reign of Louis XV, leaving a great local reputation for holiness.
Mme. de Combray was of a "haughty and imperious nature; her soul was strong and full of energy; she knew how to brave danger and public opinion; the boldest projects did not frighten her, and her ambition was unbounded." Such is the picture that one of her most irreconcilable enemies has drawn of her, and we shall see that the principal traits were faithfully described. But to complete the resemblance one must first of all plead an extenuating circumstance: Madame de Combray was a fanatical royalist. Even that, however, would not make her story intelligible, if one did not make allowance for the Calvary that the faithful royalists travelled through so many years, each station of which was marked by disillusions and failures. Since the war on the nobles had begun in 1789, all their efforts at resistance, disdainful at first, stubborn later on, blundering always, had been pitifully abortive. Their rebuffs could no longer be counted, and there was some justification in that for the scornful hatred on the part of the new order towards a caste which for so many centuries had believed themselves to be possessed of all the talents. Many of them, it is true, had resigned themselves to defeat, but the Intransigeants continued to struggle obstinately; and to say truth, this tenacious attachment to the ghost of monarchy was not without grandeur.
From the very beginning of the Revolution the Marquise de Combray had numbered herself among the unchangeable royalists. Her husband, a timorous and quiet man, who employed in reading the hours that he did not consecrate to sleep, had long since abandoned to her the direction of the household and the management of his fortune. Widowhood had but strengthened the authority of the Marquise, who reigned over a little world of small farmers, peasants and servants, more timid, perhaps, than devoted.
She exacted complete obedience from her children. The eldest son, called the Chevalier de Bonnœil, after a property near the Château of Donnay, in the environs of Falaise, supported the maternal yoke patiently; he was an officer in the Royal Dragoons at the time of the Revolution. His younger brother, Timoléon de Combray, was of a less docile nature. On leaving the military school, as his father was just dead he solicited from M. de Vergennes a mission in an uncivilised country and set sail for Morocco. Timoléon was a liberal-minded man, of high intellectual culture, and a philosophical scepticism that fitted ill with the Marquise's authoritative temper; although a devoted and respectful man, it was to get away from his mother's tutelage that he expatriated himself. "Our diversity of opinion," he said later on, "has kept me from spending two consecutive months with her in seventeen years." From Morocco he went to Algiers and thence to Tunis and Egypt. He was about to penetrate to Tartary when he heard of the outbreak of the Revolution; and immediately started for France where he arrived at the beginning of 1791.
Of Mme. de Combray's two daughters the eldest had married, in 1787, at the age of twenty-two, Jacques-Philippe-Henri d'Houël; the youngest Caroline-Madeleine-Louise-Geneviève, was born in 1773, and consequently was only eleven years old when her father died. This child is the heroine of the drama we are about to relate.