But why was Mme. Moisson accommodated there without being taken into her hostess’s confidence?  If Mme. de Combray wished to avert suspicion by having two women and a child there, she might have told them so; and if she thought Mme. Moisson too excitable to hear such a confession, she should not have exposed her to nocturnal mysteries that could only tend to increase her excitement!  When Phelippeaux was questioned, during the trial of Georges Cadoudal, about Moisson’s father, who had disappeared, he replied that he lived in the street and island of Saint-Louis near the new bridge; that he was an engraver and manager of a button factory; that Mme. Moisson had a servant named R. Petit-Jean, married to a municipal guard.  Was it through fear of this woman’s writing indiscreetly to her husband that Mme. de Combray remained silent?  But in any case, why the tower?

However this may be, the exactness of Moisson’s reminiscences was proved.  But the trap-door had not been forced, as he believed, by Chouans fleeing after some nocturnal expedition.  This point was already decided by the first documents that Lenotre had collected for this present work.  There was no expedition of the sort in the neighbourhood of Tournebut during the summer of 1804.  They would not have risked attracting attention to the chateau where was hidden the only man whom the Chouans of Normandy judged capable of succeeding Georges, and whom they called “Le Grand Alexandre”—­the Vicomte Robert d’Ache.  Hunted through Paris like all the royalists denounced by Querelle, he had managed to escape the searchers, to go out in one of his habitual disguises when the gates were reopened, to get to Normandy by the left bank of the Seine and take refuge with his old friend at Tournebut, where he lived for fourteen months under the name of Deslorieres, his presence there never being suspected by the police.

He was certainly, as well as Bonnoeil, Mme. de Combray’s eldest son, one of the three guests with whom Moisson took supper on the evening of his arrival.  The one who was always playing cards or tric-trac with the Marquise, and whom she called her lawyer, might well have been d’Ache himself.  As to the stealthy visitors at the tower, given the presence of d’Ache at Tournebut, it is highly probable that they were only passing by there to confer with him, taking his orders secretly in the woods without even appearing at the chateau, and then disappearing as mysteriously as they had come.

For d’Ache in his retreat still plotted and made an effort to resume, with the English minister, the intrigue that had just failed so miserably, Moreau having withdrawn at the last minute.  The royalist party was less intimidated than exasperated at the deaths of the Duke d’Enghien, Georges and Pichegru, and did not consider itself beaten even by the proclamation of the Empire, which had not excited in the provinces—­above all in the country—­the enthusiasm announced in the official reports.