At the age of eighteen, the young Count had received an appointment as sub-lieutenant in a regiment of dragoons, and had made it a point of honor to follow the emigrant Princes into exile.

Then Mme. de Dey faced the dangers of her cruel position.  She was rich, noble, and the mother of an Emigrant.  With the one desire to look after her son’s great fortune, she had denied herself the happiness of being with him; and when she read the rigorous laws in virtue of which the Republic was daily confiscating the property of Emigrants at Carentan, she congratulated herself on the courageous course that she had taken.  Was she not keeping watch over the wealth of her son at the risk of her life?  Later, when news came of the horrible executions ordered by the Convention, she slept, happy in the knowledge that her own treasure was in safety, out of reach of peril, far from the scaffolds of the Revolution.  She loved to think that she had followed the best course, that she had saved her darling and her darling’s fortunes; and to this secret thought she made such concessions as the misfortunes of the times demanded, without compromising her dignity or her aristocratic tenets, and enveloped her sorrows in reserve and mystery.  She had foreseen the difficulties that would beset her at Carentan.  Did she not tempt the scaffold by the very fact of going thither to take a prominent place?  Yet, sustained by a mother’s courage, she succeeded in winning the affection of the poor, ministering without distinction to everyone in trouble; and made herself necessary to the well-to-do, by providing amusements for them.

The procureur of the commune might be seen at her house, the mayor, the president of the “district,” and the public prosecutor, and even the judges of the Revolutionary tribunals went there.  The four first-named gentlemen were none of them married, and each paid court to her, in the hope that Mme. de Dey would take him for her husband, either from fear of making an enemy or from a desire to find a protector.

The public prosecutor, once an attorney at Caen, and the Countess’s man of business, did what he could to inspire love by a system of devotion and generosity, a dangerous game of cunning!  He was the most formidable of all her suitors.  He alone knew the amount of the large fortune of his sometime client, and his fervor was inevitably increased by the cupidity of greed, and by the consciousness that he wielded an enormous power, the power of life and death in the district.  He was still a young man, and, owing to the generosity of his behavior, Mme. de Dey was unable as yet to estimate him truly.  But, in despite of the danger of matching herself against Norman cunning, she used all the craft and inventiveness that Nature has bestowed on women to play off the rival suitors one against another.  She hoped, by gaining time, to emerge safe and sound from her difficulties at last; for at that time Royalists in the provinces flattered themselves with a hope, daily renewed, that the morrow would see the end of the Revolution—­a conviction that proved fatal to many of them.