Honore de Balzac (7 page)

Laurence, who did good intelligently and never allowed herself to be
deceived, was held in the utmost respect by the peasantry although
she was an aristocrat. Her sex, name, and great misfortunes, also the
originality of her present life, contributed to give her authority over
the inhabitants of the valley of Cinq-Cygne. She was sometimes absent
for two days, attended by Gothard, but neither Monsieur nor Madame
d'Hauteserre questioned her, on her return, as to the reasons of
her absence. Please observe, however, that there was nothing odd or
eccentric about Laurence. What she was and what she did was masked, as
it were, by a feminine and even fragile appearance. Her heart was full
of extreme sensibility, though her head contained a stoical firmness
and the virile gift of resolution. Her clear-seeing eyes knew not how to
weep; but no one would have imagined that the delicate white wrist with
its tracery of blue veins could defy that of the boldest horseman. Her
hand, so noble, so flexible, could handle gun or pistol with the ease of
a practised marksman. She always wore when out of doors the coquettish
little cap with visor and green veil which women wear on horseback. Her
delicate fair face, thus protected, and her white throat tied with a
black cravat, were never injured by her long rides in all weathers.

Under the Directory and at the beginning of the Consulate, Laurence had
been able to escape the observation of others; but since the government
had become a more settled thing, the new authorities, the prefect of the
Aube, Malin's friends, and Malin himself had endeavored to undermine
her in the community. Her preoccupying thought was the overthrow of
Bonaparte, whose ambition and its triumphs excited the anger of her
soul,—a cold, deliberate anger. The obscure and hidden enemy of a man
at the pinnacle of glory, she kept her gaze upon him from the depths
of her valley and her forests, with relentless fixity; there were
times when she thought of killing him in the roads about Malmaison or
Saint-Cloud. Plans for the execution of this idea may have been the
cause of many of her past actions, but having been initiated, after the
peace of Amiens, into the conspiracy of the men who expected to make
the 18th Brumaire recoil upon the First Consul, she had thenceforth
subordinated her faculties and her hatred to their vast and well
laid scheme, which was to strike at Bonaparte externally by the vast
coalition of Russia, Austria, and Prussia (vanquished at Austerlitz) and
internally by the coalition of men politically opposed to each other,
but united by their common hatred of a man whose death some of them
were meditating, like Laurence herself, without shrinking from the word
assassination. This young girl, so fragile to the eye, so powerful to
those who knew her well, was at the present moment the faithful guide
and assistant of the exiled gentlemen who came from England to take part
in this deadly enterprise.

Fouche relied on the co-operation of the
emigres
everywhere beyond
the Rhine to lure the Duc d'Enghien into the plot. The presence of that
prince in the Baden territory, not far from Strasburg, gave much weight
later to the accusation. The great question of whether the prince really
knew of the enterprise, and was waiting on the frontier to enter France
on its success, is one of those secrets about which, as about several
others, the house of Bourbon has maintained an unbroken silence. As the
history of that period recedes into the past, impartial historians
will declare the imprudence, to say the least, of the Duc d'Enghien in
placing himself close to the frontier at a time when a vast conspiracy
was about to break forth, the secret of which was undoubtedly known to
every member of the Bourbon family.

The caution which Malin displayed in talking with Grevin in the open
air, Laurence applied to her every action. She met the emissaries and
conferred with them either at various points in the Nodesme forest, or
beyond the valley of the Cinq-Cygne, between the villages of Sezanne
and Brienne. Often she rode forty miles on a stretch with Gothard,
and returned to Cinq-Cygne without the least sign of weariness or
pre-occupation on her fair young face.

Some years earlier, Laurence had seen in the eyes of a little cow-boy,
then nine years old, the artless admiration which children feel for
everything that is out of the common way. She made him her page, and
taught him to groom a horse with the nicety and care of an Englishman.
She saw in the lad a desire to do well, a bright intelligence, and a
total absence of sly motives; she tested his devotion and found he had
not only mind but nobility of character; he never dreamed of reward. The
young girl trained this soul that was still so young; she was good to
him, good with dignity; she attached him to her by attaching herself
to him, and by herself polishing a nature that was half wild, without
destroying its freshness or its simplicity. When she had sufficiently
tested the almost canine fidelity she had nurtured, Gothard became her
intelligent and ingenuous accomplice. The little peasant, whom no one
could suspect, went from Cinq-Cygne to Nancy, and often returned before
any one had missed him from the neighborhood. He knew how to practise
all the tricks of a spy. The extreme distrust and caution his mistress
had taught him did not change his natural self. Gothard, who possessed
all the craft of a woman, the candor of a child, and the ceaseless
observation of a conspirator, hid every one of these admirable qualities
beneath the torpor and dull ignorance of a country lad. The little
fellow had a silly, weak, and clumsy appearance; but once at work he was
active as a fish; he escaped like an eel; he understood, as the dogs do,
the merest glance; he nosed a thought. His good fat face, both round and
red, his sleepy brown eyes, his hair, cut in the peasant fashion, his
clothes, and his slow growth gave him the appearance of a child of ten.

The two young d'Hauteserres and the twin brothers Simeuse, under the
guidance of their cousin Laurence, who had been watching over their
safety and that of the other
emigres
who accompanied them from
Strasburg to Bar-sur-Aube, had just passed through Alsace and Lorraine,
and were now in Champagne while other conspirators, not less bold,
were entering France by the cliffs of Normandy. Dressed as workmen the
d'Hauteserres and the Simeuse twins had walked from forest to forest,
guided on their way by relays of persons, chosen by Laurence during
the last three months from among the least suspected of the Bourbon
adherents living in each neighborhood. The
emigres
slept by day and
travelled by night. Each brought with him two faithful soldiers; one
of whom went before to warn of danger, the other behind to protect a
retreat. Thanks to these military precautions, this valuable detachment
had at last reached, without accident, the forest of Nodesme, which
was chosen as the rendezvous. Twenty-seven other gentlemen had entered
France from Switzerland and crossed Burgundy, guided towards Paris with
the same caution.

Monsieur de Riviere counted on collecting five hundred men, one hundred
of whom were young nobles, the officers of this sacred legion. Monsieur
de Polignac and Monsieur de Riviere, whose conduct as chiefs of this
advance was most remarkable, afterwards preserved an impenetrable
secrecy as to the names of those of their accomplices who were not
discovered. It may be said, therefore, now that the Restoration has made
matters clearer, that Bonaparte never knew the extent of the danger he
then ran, any more than England knew the peril she had escaped from
the camp at Boulogne; and yet the police of France was never more
intelligently or ably managed.

At the period when this history begins, a coward—for cowards are always
to be found in conspiracies which are not confined to a small number
of equally strong men—a sworn confederate, brought face to face with
death, gave certain information, happily insufficient to cover the
extent of the conspiracy, but precise enough to show the object of the
enterprise. The police had therefore, as Malin told Grevin, left the
conspirators at liberty, though all the while watching them, hoping to
discover the ramifications of the plot. Nevertheless, the government
found its hand to a certain extent forced by Georges Cadoudal, a man
of action who took counsel of himself only, and who was hiding in
Paris with twenty-five
chouans
for the purpose of attacking the First
Consul.

Laurence combined both hatred and love within her breast. To destroy
Bonaparte and bring back the Bourbons was to recover Gondreville and
make the fortune of her cousins. The two sentiments, one the counterpart
of the other, were sufficient, more especially at twenty-three years of
age, to excite all the faculties of her soul and all the powers of her
being. So, for the last two months, she had seemed to the inhabitants
of Cinq-Cygne more beautiful than at any other period of her life.
Her cheeks became rosy; hope gave pride to her brow; but when old
d'Hauteserre read the Gazette at night and discussed the conservative
course of the First Consul she lowered her eyes to conceal her
passionate hopes of the coming fall of that enemy of the Bourbons.

No one at the chateau had the faintest idea that the young countess had
met her cousins the night before. The two sons of Monsieur and Madame
d'Hauteserre had passed the preceding night in Laurence's own room,
under the same roof with their father and mother; and Laurence, after
knowing them safely in bed had gone between one and two o'clock in the
morning to a rendezvous with her cousins in the forest, where she hid
them in the deserted hut of a wood-dealer's agent. The following day,
certain of seeing them again, she showed no signs of her joy; nothing
about her betrayed emotion; she was able to efface all traces of
pleasure at having met them again; in fact, she was impassible.
Catherine, her pretty maid, daughter of her former nurse, and Gothard,
both in the secret, modelled their behavior upon hers. Catherine was
nineteen years old. At that age a girl is a fanatic and would let
her throat be cut before betraying a thought of one she loves. As for
Gothard, merely to inhale the perfume which the countess used in her
hair and among her clothes he would have born the rack without a word.

At the moment when Marthe, driven by the imminence of the peril, was
gliding with the rapidity of a shadow towards the breach of which
Michu had told her, the salon of the chateau of Cinq-Cygne presented a
peaceful sight. Its occupants were so far from suspecting the storm that
was about to burst upon them that their quiet aspect would have roused
the compassion of any one who knew their situation. In the large
fireplace, the mantel of which was adorned with a mirror with
shepherdesses in paniers painted on its frame, burned a fire such as
can be seen only in chateaus bordering on forests. At the corner of
this fireplace, on a large square sofa of gilded wood with a magnificent
brocaded cover, the young countess lay as it were extended, in an
attitude of utter weariness. Returning at six o'clock from the confines
of Brie, having played the part of scout to the four gentlemen whom she
guided safely to their last halting-place before they entered Paris, she
had found Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre just finishing their dinner.
Pressed by hunger she sat down to table without changing either her
muddy habit or her boots. Instead of doing so at once after dinner,
she was suddenly overcome with fatigue and allowed her head with its
beautiful fair curls to drop on the back of the sofa, her feet being
supported in front of her by a stool. The warmth of the fire had dried
the mud on her habit and on her boots. Her doeskin gloves and the little
peaked cap with its green veil and a whip lay on the table where she had
flung them. She looked sometimes at the old Boule clock which stood on
the mantelshelf between the candelabra, perhaps to judge if her four
conspirators were asleep, and sometimes at the card-table in front of
the fire where Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, the cure of Cinq-Cygne,
and his sister were playing a game of boston.

Even if these personages were not embedded in this drama, their
portraits would have the merit of representing one of the aspects of
the aristocracy after its overthrow in 1793. From this point of view,
a sketch of the salon at Cinq-Cygne has the raciness of history seen in
dishabille.

Monsieur d'Hauteserre, then fifty-two years of age, tall, spare,
high-colored, and robust in health, would have seemed the embodiment of
vigor if it were not for a pair of porcelain blue eyes, the glance of
which denoted the most absolute simplicity. In his face, which ended
in a long pointed chin, there was, judging by the rules of design,
an unnatural distance between his nose and mouth which gave him a
submissive air, wholly in keeping with his character, which harmonized,
in fact, with other details of his appearance. His gray hair, flattened
by his hat, which he wore nearly all day, looked much like a skull-cap
on his head, and defined its pear-shaped outline. His forehead, much
wrinkled by life in the open air and by constant anxieties, was flat and
expressionless. His aquiline nose redeemed the face somewhat; but the
sole indication of any strength of character lay in the bushy eyebrows
which retained their blackness, and in the brilliant coloring of his
skin. These signs were in some respects not misleading, for the worthy
gentlemen, though simple and very gentle, was Catholic and monarchical
in faith, and no consideration on earth could make him change his views.
Nevertheless he would have let himself be arrested without an effort
at defence, and would have gone to the scaffold quietly. His annuity of
three thousand francs kept him from emigrating. He therefore obeyed the
government
de facto
without ceasing to love the royal family and to
pray for their return, though he would firmly have refused to compromise
himself by any effort in their favor. He belonged to that class of
royalists who ceaselessly remembered that they were beaten and robbed;
and who remained thenceforth dumb, economical, rancorous, without
energy; incapable of abjuring the past, but equally incapable of
sacrifice; waiting to greet triumphant royalty; true to religion and
true to the priesthood, but firmly resolved to bear in silence
the shocks of fate. Such an attitude cannot be considered that of
maintaining opinions, it becomes sheer obstinacy. Action is the essence
of party. Without intelligence, but loyal, miserly as a peasant yet
noble in demeanor, bold in his wishes but discreet in word and
action, turning all things to profit, willing even to be made mayor of
Cinq-Cygne, Monsieur d'Hauteserre was an admirable representative of
those honorable gentlemen on whose brow God Himself has written the
word
mites
,—Frenchmen who burrowed in their country homes and let the
storms of the Revolution pass above their heads; who came once more to
the surface under the Restoration, rich with their hidden savings,
proud of their discreet attachment to the monarchy, and who, after 1830,
recovered their estates.