“‘Monsieur le Comte,’ he said, ‘you know that the Company of Jehu, so painfully smitten by the loss of its four leaders, and especially your brother, is beginning to reform. Its leader is the famous Laurent, though beneath that ordinary name hides one of the most aristocratic family names of the South. Our captain is reserving an important place in his army for you, and he has sent me to ask if you would like, by joining us, to keep the promise given by your brother.’
“‘Monsieur le Chevalier,’ I answered, ‘I would be lying if I told you that I have much enthusiasm for the life of a wandering cavalier, but as I did promise my brother, and as my brother promised me to your cause, I am ready.’
“‘Shall I tell you, then, where we are meeting?’ asked the Chevalier de Mahalin. ‘Or are you coming now with me?’
“‘I am coming now with you, monsieur.’
“I had a trusty servant named Saint-Bris. He had served my brother too, and I installed him in our house and left him master of it all, making him really more my steward than my servant. That done, I gathered up my weapons, climbed on my horse, and rode off.
“We were to meet Laurent somewhere between Vizille and Grenoble. In two days’ time, we were there.
“Laurent, our chief, was truly worthy of his reputation. He was like one of those men to whose baptism fairies are invited, and each one blesses him with a virtuous quality, but there’s always one fairy who’s been overlooked and he arrives to burthen the infant with the one defect that counterbalances all of his virtues. Laurent had been endowed with that beauty typical of the South and typically masculine: brilliant eyes, lustrous dark hair, and a thick dark beard, his fiercely handsome face tempered by a charming blend of kindness, strength, and affability. Left on his own when he was scarcely beyond his tumultuous youth, he lacked a solid formal education, but he was worldly-wise, and he possessed a nobleman’s grace and politesse, as well as a charismatic quality that naturally attracted people to his fold. But he was also unusually violent and quick-tempered. As much as his gentleman’s education normally kept him within acceptable boundaries, he would still frequently, suddenly, explode; and an angry Laurent, the imperfect Laurent, appeared to be no longer of humankind. And the rumor would spread, wherever he happened to be: ‘Laurent is angry; men will die.’
“Justice was as concerned about Laurent’s band as it had been about Saint-Hermine’s group. Large forces were deployed. Laurent and seventy-one of his men were captured and sent to Yssingeaux in the Haute-Loire to answer for their actions before a special court convened expressly for their trial.
“But Bonaparte was still in Egypt then. Power resided in weak hands, and the little town of Yssingeaux treated Laurent and his band more like a garrison than like prisoners. The prosecution was timid, the witnesses were ineffectual, the defense was bold. It was led by Laurent himself, who took responsibility for everything. His seventy-one companions were acquitted; he was sentenced to death.
“Laurent returned to the prison as nonchalantly as he had left. By then, the supreme beauty with which Nature had endowed him, the corporal recommendation, as Montaigne has called it, had already produced its effect. Every woman in Yssingeaux felt sorry for him, and for more than a few of them, pity had transferred itself into a much more tender feeling. Such was the case of the jailer’s daughter, although Laurent was not aware of it.
“Two hours after midnight, Laurent’s cell door opened as it had for Pierre de Médicis, and the girl from Yssingeaux, like the girl in Ferrare, spoke these sweet words: ‘Non temo nulla, bentivoglio!’ (‘Have no fear, I love you!’) His angel savior had seen him only through the prison bars, but his magnetic seductive powers had touched her heart and ruled her senses. A few words were exchanged; so were rings. And Laurent walked free.
“A horse was waiting in a neighboring village, she’d told him, and there she would meet him. Dawn broke. As he fled through the shadows, Laurent caught a glimpse of the executioner and his helpers setting up the deadly machine. For he was supposed to be executed at ten that morning, the execution having been rushed to take place only one day after the sentencing so as to coincide with market day, when everyone from the neighboring villages would be in Yssingeaux. Of course, when the sun’s first rays struck the guillotine in the square, and when the identity of the illustrious prisoner who’d climb the steps to the platform became known, no one was giving any more thought to the market.
“Waiting in the nearby village, Laurent worried not for himself but for the woman who had saved him. Laurent became impatient. Several times he rode out toward Yssingeaux, each time riding closer to the town, to try to get information, but without success. Finally, caught up in the heat of the moment, he lost his head: He assumed that his savior had herself been captured and that she, as his accomplice, would in his place be climbing the scaffold to the guillotine. So he rides into town, his horse spurred to a gallop, and as he passes by, people shout in astonishment when they realize that the man they were expecting to see guillotined is riding free on horseback. He rides past the gendarmes who’d been posted to escort him from his cell; he reaches the square where the scaffold awaits him, and espying the woman he’s looking for, he pushes his way to her, reaches down, pulls her up behind him, and gallops off to the cheers of the whole town. All those who had come to applaud his head as it fell were now applauding his flight, his escape, his salvation.
“That is what our leader was like, the leader who followed my brother. Such was the man under whose tutelage I learned to fight.
“For three months I lived daily under the strain of our battles and at night I slept wrapped up in my coat, my hand on my gun, pistols in my belt. Then the rumor of a truce began to spread. I came to Paris, promising to return to my companions at the first call. I came because I had seen you once—please excuse my frankness—and I needed, I yearned, to see you again.
“I did of course see you again, but if by chance your eyes happened to fall on me, you surely remember my face betrayed my deep sadness, my unconcern, and I might even say my apparent distaste for all of life’s pleasures. For how indeed, given the precarious position in which I found myself—obeying not my own conscience but another fatal, absolute, imperious power that exposed me to the possibility of being wounded if not killed in a stagecoach attack, or, even worse, being captured—how could I dare say to a lovely, sweet girl, the flower of the world in which she blossoms and the laws of which she accepts, how could I dare say to her: ‘I love you. Are you willing to accept a husband who has placed himself outside the law, for whom the greatest happiness possible is to be shot dead in cold blood?’
“No, I could not declare my love. I had to be content just to be able to see you, to be intoxicated by the sight of you, to be where you were likely to be, and all the while pray that God would accomplish a miracle, that the rumored truce would become real peace, though I hardly dared to hope.
“Finally, about four or five days ago, the newspapers announced that Cadoudal had come to Paris, that he had met with the First Consul. The same evening the same newspapers reported that the Breton general had given his word to no longer attempt any action against France, if the First Consul, for his part, would take no further action against Brittany or against him.
“The next day”—Hector pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket—“the next day I received this circular letter written in Cadoudal’s own hand:
“‘Because a protracted war seems to be a misfortune for France and ruin for my region, I free you from your oath of loyalty to me. I shall never call you back unless the French government should fail to keep the promise it gave to me and that I accepted in your name.
“‘If there should happen to be some treason hidden beneath a hypocritical peace, I would not hesitate to call once more on your fidelity, and your fidelity, I am sure, would respond.’
“You can imagine my joy when I received this leave. Once again I would be in control of my own person; no longer was I promised by the word of my father and my two brothers to a monarchy that I knew only through my family’s devotion and through the misfortunes that devotion had brought down upon our house. I was twenty-three years old;