Mme. de Combray was of a “haughty and imperious nature; her soul was strong and full of energy; she knew how to brave danger and public opinion; the boldest projects did not frighten her, and her ambition was unbounded.”  Such is the picture that one of her most irreconcilable enemies has drawn of her, and we shall see that the principal traits were faithfully described.  But to complete the resemblance one must first of all plead an extenuating circumstance:  Madame de Combray was a fanatical royalist.  Even that, however, would not make her story intelligible, if one did not make allowance for the Calvary that the faithful royalists travelled through so many years, each station of which was marked by disillusions and failures.  Since the war on the nobles had begun in 1789, all their efforts at resistance, disdainful at first, stubborn later on, blundering always, had been pitifully abortive.  Their rebuffs could no longer be counted, and there was some justification in that for the scornful hatred on the part of the new order towards a caste which for so many centuries had believed themselves to be possessed of all the talents.  Many of them, it is true, had resigned themselves to defeat, but the Intransigeants continued to struggle obstinately; and to say truth, this tenacious attachment to the ghost of monarchy was not without grandeur.

From the very beginning of the Revolution the Marquise de Combray had numbered herself among the unchangeable royalists.  Her husband, a timorous and quiet man, who employed in reading the hours that he did not consecrate to sleep, had long since abandoned to her the direction of the household and the management of his fortune.  Widowhood had but strengthened the authority of the Marquise, who reigned over a little world of small farmers, peasants and servants, more timid, perhaps, than devoted.

She exacted complete obedience from her children.  The eldest son, called the Chevalier de Bonnoeil, after a property near the Chateau of Donnay, in the environs of Falaise, supported the maternal yoke patiently; he was an officer in the Royal Dragoons at the time of the Revolution.  His younger brother, Timoleon de Combray, was of a less docile nature.  On leaving the military school, as his father was just dead he solicited from M. de Vergennes a mission in an uncivilised country and set sail for Morocco.  Timoleon was a liberal-minded man, of high intellectual culture, and a philosophical scepticism that fitted ill with the Marquise’s authoritative temper; although a devoted and respectful man, it was to get away from his mother’s tutelage that he expatriated himself.  “Our diversity of opinion,” he said later on, “has kept me from spending two consecutive months with her in seventeen years.”  From Morocco he went to Algiers and thence to Tunis and Egypt.  He was about to penetrate to Tartary when he heard of the outbreak of the Revolution; and immediately started for France where he arrived at the beginning of 1791.