Acquet had thus attained his wish; he had seduced Mlle. de Combray to make the marriage inevitable, and this accomplished, under pretext of preventing their sale, he caused the estates of the Combrays situated at Donnay near Falaise, and sequestrated by the emigration of Bonnoeil, to be conveyed to him.  Scarcely was this done when he began to pillage the property, turning everything into money, cutting down woods, and sparing neither thickets nor hedges.  “The domain of Donnay became a sort of desert in his hands.”  Stopped in his depredations by a complaint of his two brothers-in-law he tried to attack the will of the Marquis de Combray, pretending that his wife, a minor at the time of her father’s death, had been injured in the division of property.  This was to declare open war on the family he had entered, and to compel his wife to espouse his cause he beat her unmercifully.  A second daughter was born of this unhappy union, and even the children did not escape the brutality of their father.  A note on this subject, written by Mme. Acquet, is of heart-breaking eloquence: 

“M.  Acquet beat the children cruelly every day; he ill-treated me also unceasingly:  he often chastised them with sticks, which he always used when he made the children read; they were continually black and blue with the blows they received.  He gave me such a severe blow one day that blood gushed from my nose and mouth, and I was unconscious for some moments....  He went to get his pistols to blow out my brains, which he would certainly have done if people had not been present....  He was always armed with a dagger.”

In January, 1804, Mme. Acquet resolved to escape from this hell.  Profiting by her husband’s absence in La Veudee she wrote to him that she refused to live with him longer, and hastened to Falaise to ask a shelter from her brother Timoleon, who had lately returned to France.  Timoleon, in order to prevent a scandal, persuaded his sister to return to her husband’s house.  She took this wise advice, but refused to see M. Acquet, who, returning in haste and finding her barricaded in the chateau, called the justice of the peace of the canton of Harcourt, aided by his clerk and two gendarmes, to witness that his wife refused to receive him.  Having, one fine morning, “found her desk forced and all her papers taken,” she returned to Falaise, obtained a judgment authorising her to live with her brother, and lodged a petition for separation.

Things were at this point when the trial of Georges Cadoudal was in progress.  Acquet, exasperated at the resistance to his projects, swore that he would have signal vengeance on his wife and all the Combrays.  They were, unhappily, to give his hatred too good an opportunity of showing itself.