He proved to be such a clever tactician, that though Mme. Acquet had for some time been suing for a separation, he managed to live on the Combray estates; fortifying his position by means of a store of quotations drawn, as occasion demanded, from the Common Law of Normandy, the Revolutionary Laws and the Code Napoleon.  To deal with these questions in detail would be wearisome and useless.  Suffice it to say that at the period at which we have arrived, all that Mme. Acquet had to depend upon was a pension of 2,000 francs which the court had granted to her on August 1, 1804, for her maintenance pending a definite decision.  She lived alone at the Hotel de Combray in the Rue du Trepot at Falaise, a very large house composed of two main buildings, one of which was vacant owing to the absence of Timoleon who had settled in Paris.  Mme. de Combray had undertaken to assist with her granddaughters’ education, and they had been sent off to a school kept by a Mme. du Saussay at Rouen.

Foreseeing that this state of things could not last forever, Acquet, despite Bonnoeil’s oft-repeated protests, continued to devastate Donnay, so as to get all he could out of it, cutting down the forests, chopping the elms into faggots, and felling the ancient beeches.  The very castle whose facade but lately reached to the end of the stately avenue, suffered from his devastations.  It was now nothing but a ruin with swing-doors and a leaking roof.  Here Acquet had reserved a garret for himself, abandoning the rest of the house to the ravages of time and the weather.  Shut up in this ruin like a wild beast in his lair, he would not permit the slightest infringement of what he called his rights.  Mme. de Combray wished to spend the harvest season of 1803 at the chateau, where the happiest years of her life had been passed, and where all her children had grown up, but Acquet made the bailiff turn her out, and the Marquise took refuge in the village parsonage, which had been sold at the time of the Revolution as national property, and for which she had supplied half the money, when the Commune bought it back, to restore it to its original purpose.  Since no priest had yet been appointed she was able to take up her residence there, to the indignation of her son-in-law, who considered this intrusion as a piece of bravado.

Two years later Mme. de Combray had still no other shelter at Donnay, and it was to this parsonage that she brought d’Ache.  They arrived there on the evening of July 17th.  A long stay in this conspicuous house, which was always exposed to the hateful espionage of Acquet, was out of the question for the exile.  He nevertheless spent a fortnight there, without trying to hide himself, even going so far as to hunt, and receive several visits, among others one from Mme. Acquet, who came from Falaise to see her mother, and thus met d’Ache for the first time.  At the beginning of August he quitted Donnay, and Mme. de Combray accompanied him as far as the country chateau of a neighbour, M. Descroisy, where he passed one night.  At break of day he set out on horseback in the direction of Bayeux, Mme. de Combray alone knowing where he went.