Two years later Mme. de Combray had still no other shelter at Donnay, and it was to this parsonage that she brought d'Aché. They arrived there on the evening of July 17th. A long stay in this conspicuous house, which was always exposed to the hateful espionage of Acquet, was out of the question for the exile. He nevertheless spent a fortnight there, without trying to hide himself, even going so far as to hunt, and receive several visits, among others one from Mme. Acquet, who came from Falaise to see her mother, and thus met d'Aché for the first time. At the beginning of August he quitted Donnay, and Mme. de Combray accompanied him as far as the country château of a neighbour, M. Descroisy, where he passed one night. At break of day he set out on horseback in the direction of Bayeux, Mme. de Combray alone knowing where he went.
In this neighbourhood d'Aché had the choice of several places of refuge. He was closely connected by ties of friendship with the family of Duquesnay de Monfiquet who lived at Mandeville near Trévières. M. de Monfiquet, a thoroughly loyal but quite unimportant nobleman, having emigrated at the outbreak of the Revolution, his estate at Mandeville had been sequestrated and his château pillaged and half demolished. Mme. de Monfiquet, a clever and energetic woman, being left with six daughters unprovided for, took refuge with the d'Aché's at Gournay, where she spent the whole period of the Terror. Madame d'Aché even kept Henriette, one of the little girls who was ill-favoured and hunchbacked but remarkably clever, with her for five years.
Monsieur de Monfiquet, returning from abroad in the year VII, and having somewhat reorganised his little estate at Mandeville, lived there in poverty with his family in the hope that brighter days would dawn for them with the return of the monarchy. On all these grounds d'Aché was sure of finding not only a safe retreat but congenial society. The few persons who were acquainted with what passed at Mandeville were convinced that Mlle. Henriette possessed a great influence over the exile, and that she had been his mistress for a long time. According to general opinion he made her his confidant and she helped him like a devoted admirer. In fact she arranged several other hiding-places for him in the neighbourhood of Trévières in case of need;—one at the mill at Dungy, another with M. de Cantelou at Lingèvres, and a third at a tanner's named La Pérandeère at Bayeux. And to escort him in his flights she secured a man of unparalleled audacity who had been a brigand in the district for ten years, and who had to avenge the death of his two brothers, who had fallen into an ambush and been shot at Bayeux in 1796. People called him David the Intrepid. Having been ten times condemned to death and certain of being shot as soon as he was caught, David had no settled abode. On stormy nights he would embark in a boat which he steered himself, and, sure of not being overtaken, he would reach England where he used to act as an agent for the emigrants. They say that he was not without influence with the entourage of the Comte d'Artois. When he stayed in France he lodged with an old lady former housekeeper to a Councillor of the Parliament of Normandy, who lived alone in an old house in Bayeux and to whom he had been recommended by Mlle. Henriette de Monfiquet. David did not take up much room. When he arrived he set in motion a contrivance of his own by which two steps of the principal staircase were raised, and slipping into the cavity thus made, he quickly replaced everything. All the gendarmes in Calvados could have gone up and down this staircase without suspecting that a man was hidden in the house, where, however, he was never looked for.
These were the persons and means made use of by d'Aché in his new theatre of operations: a poor hunchbacked girl was his council, and his army was composed of David the Intrepid. He was, moreover, penniless. At the beginning of the autumn Mme. de Combray sent him eight louis by Lanoë, a keeper who had been in her service, and who now occupied a small farm at Glatigny, near to Bretteville-sur-Dives. Lanoë belonged to that rapacious type of peasant whom even a small sum of money never fails to attract. Already he had on two occasions acted as guide to the Baron de Commarque and to Frotté when Mme. de Combray offered them shelter at Donnay. For this he had been summoned before a military commission and spent nearly two years in prison, but this had no effect. For three francs he would walk ten leagues and if he complained sufficiently of the dangers to which these missions exposed him the sum was doubled and he would go away satisfied. In the middle of August he went to Mandeville to fetch d'Aché to Donnay, where he spent ten days and again passed three weeks at the end of September. He was to have gone there again in December, but at the moment when he was preparing to start Bonnœil suddenly appeared at Mandeville, having come to warn him not to venture there as Mme. de Combray had been accused of a crime and was on the point of being arrested.
It was not without vexation that Acquet saw his mother-in-law settling herself at his very door. Keenly on the lookout for any means of annoying the Marquise, he was struck by the idea that if an incumbent were appointed to the vacant curé of Donnay, he would have to live at the parsonage, half of which belonged to the Commune, and that their being obliged to live in the same house would be a great inconvenience to Mme. de Combray. This prospect charmed Acquet, and as he had several friends in high positions, among them the Baron Darthenay his neighbour at Meslay, who had lately been elected deputy for Calvados, he had small difficulty in getting a priest appointed. A few days afterwards a curé, the Abbé Clérisse, arrived at Donnay, fully determined to carry out the duties of his ministry faithfully, and very far from foreseeing the tragic fate in store for him.
Mme. de Combray had made herself quite comfortable at the parsonage, which she considered in a manner her own property since she had furnished half the money for its purchase. She now saw herself compelled to surrender a portion of it, which from the very first embittered her against the new arrival. Acquet, for his part, fêted his protégé, and welcoming him cordially put him on his guard against the machinations of the Marquise, whom he represented as an inveterate enemy of the conciliatory government to which France owed the Concordat. The Abbé Clérisse, who, from the construction of the house was obliged to use the rooms in common with Mme. de Combray, was not long in noticing the mysterious behaviour of the occupants. There were conferences conducted in whispers, visitors who arrived at night and left at dawn, secret comings and goings, in short, all the strange doings of a houseful of conspirators, so that the good curé one day took Lanoë aside and recommended him to be prudent, "predicting that he would get himself into serious difficulties if he did not quit the service of the Marquise as soon as possible." Mme. de Combray, in her exasperation, called the Abbé "Concordataire," an epithet which, from her, was equivalent to renegade. She had the imprudence to add that the reign of the "usurper would not last forever, and that the princes would soon return at the head of an English army and restore everything." In her wrath she left the parsonage, making a great commotion, and went to beg shelter from her farmer Hébert, who lived in a cottage used as a public house, called La Bijude, where the road from Harcourt met that from Cesny. Acquet was triumphant. The astonished Abbé remained passive; and as ill luck would have it, fell ill and died a few days afterwards. A report was circulated, emanating from the château, that he had died of grief caused by Mme. de Combray. Then people began to talk in whispers about a certain basket of white wine with which she had presented the poor priest. A week later all those who sided with Acquet were convinced that the Marquise had poisoned the Abbé Clérisse, "after having been imprudent enough to take him into her confidence." Feeling ran high in the village. Acquet affected consternation. The authorities, no doubt informed by him, began making investigations when a nephew of the Marquise, M. de Saint Léonard, Mayor of Falaise, who was on very good terms with the Court, came down to hush up the affair and impose silence on the mischief-makers.
This first bout between Acquet de Férolles and the family de Combray resulted in d'Aché's being forbidden the house of his old friend. Feeling herself in the clutches of an enemy who was always on the watch, she did not dare to expose to denunciation a man on whose head the fate of the monarchy rested. D'Aché did not come to La Bijude the whole winter. Mme. de Combray lived there alone with her son Bonnœil and the farmer Hébert. She had the house done up and repainted, but it distressed her to be so meanly lodged, and she regretted the lofty halls and the quiet of Tournebut. At the beginning of Lent, 1806, she sent Lanoë for the last time to Mandeville to arrange with d'Aché some means of correspondence, and with Bonnœil she again started for Gaillon, determined never again to set foot on her estates in Lower Normandy as long as her son-in-law reigned there, and thoroughly convinced that the fast approaching return of the King would avenge all the humiliations she had lately endured. She had, moreover, quarrelled with her daughter, who had only come to Donnay twice during her mother's stay, and had there displayed only a very moderate appreciation of d'Aché's plans, and had seemed entirely uninterested in the annoyance caused to the Marquise, and her exodus to La Bijude.
If Mme. Acquet de Férolles was really lacking in interest, it was because a great event had occurred in her own life.
Acquet knew that his wife's suit for a separation must inevitably be granted. The ill-treatment she had had to endure was only too well-known, and every one in Falaise took her part. If Acquet lost the case, it would mean the end of the easy life he was leading at Donnay, and he not only wished to gain time but secretly hoped that his wife would commit some indiscretion that would regain for him if not the sympathies of the public, at least her loss of the suit which if won, would ruin him. In order to carry out his Machiavellian schemes, he pretended that he wished to come to an understanding with the Combray family, and he despatched one of his friends to Mme. Acquet to open negotiations. This friend, named Le Chevalier, was a handsome young man of twenty-five, with dark hair, a pale complexion and white teeth. He had languishing eyes, a sympathetic voice and a graceful figure, inexhaustible good-humour, despite his melancholy appearance, and unbounded audacity. As he was the owner of a farm in the Commune of Saint Arnould in the neighbourhood of Exmes, he was called Le Chevalier de Saint-Arnould, which gave him the position of a nobleman. He was moreover related to the nobility.