It fell at length, and the old Chouan must have flushed with triumph when she heard that Bonaparte was crushed.  What a sudden change!  In less than a day, the prisoner became again the venerable Marquise de Combray, a victim to her devotion to the royal cause, a heroine, a martyr, a saint; while at the other end of Normandy, Acquet de Ferolles, who had at last decided to take in his three children, felt the ground tremble under his feet, and hurriedly made his preparations for flight.  In their eagerness to make themselves acceptable to the Combrays, people “who would not have raised a finger to help them when they were overwhelmed with misfortune,” now revealed to them things that had hitherto been hidden from them; and thus the Marquise and her sons learned how Senator Pontecoulant, out of hatred for Caffarelli, “whom he wished to ruin,” had undertaken, “with the aid of Acquet de Ferolles,” to hand over d’Ache to assassins.  Proscribed royalists emerged on all sides from the holes where they had been burrowing for the last fifteen years.  There was a spirit of retaliation in the air.  Every one was making up his account and writing out the bill.  In this home of the Chouannerie, where hatred ran rife and there were so many bitter desires for revenge, a terrible reaction set in.  The short notes, which the Marquise exchanged with her sons and servants during the last few days of her captivity, expressed neither joy at the Princes’ return nor happiness at her own restoration to liberty.  They might be summed up in these words:  “It is our turn now,” and the germ of the dark history of the Restoration and the revolutions which followed it is contained in the outpourings of this embittered heart, which nothing save vengeance could henceforth satisfy.

On Sunday, May 1st, 1814, at the hour when Louis XVIII was to enter Saint Ouen, the doors of the prison were opened for the Marquise de Combray, who slept the following night at her house in the Rue des Carmelites.  The next day at 1.30 p.m. she set out for Tournebut with Mlle. Querey; her bailiff, Leclerc, came as far as Rouen to fetch her in his trap.  All the public conveyances were overcrowded; on the roads leading to Paris there was an uninterrupted stream of vehicles of all sorts, of cavaliers and of foot passengers, all hurrying to see the King’s return to his capital.  Bonnoeil, who was at last delivered from police supervision, had to set out on foot for Tournebut; he walked the distance during the night, and arrived in the morning to find his mother already installed there and making an inspection of the despoiled old chateau which she had never thought to see again.  The astonishing reversions of fate make one think of the success which the opera “La Dame Blanche” had some years later.  This charming work sang their own history to these nobles who were still smarting, and recalled to them their ruined past.  The abandoned “Chateau d’Avenel,” the “poor Dame Marguerite” spinning in the deserted halls and dreaming of her masters, the mysterious being who watched over the destinies of the noble family, and the amusing revival of those last vestiges of feudal times, the bailiff, the bell in the turret, the gallant paladin, the knight’s banner—­all these things saddened our grandmothers by arousing the melancholy spectre of the good old times.