These were the persons and means made use of by d’Ache in his new theatre of operations:  a poor hunchbacked girl was his council, and his army was composed of David the Intrepid.  He was, moreover, penniless.  At the beginning of the autumn Mme. de Combray sent him eight louis by Lanoe, a keeper who had been in her service, and who now occupied a small farm at Glatigny, near to Bretteville-sur-Dives.  Lanoe belonged to that rapacious type of peasant whom even a small sum of money never fails to attract.  Already he had on two occasions acted as guide to the Baron de Commarque and to Frotte when Mme. de Combray offered them shelter at Donnay.  For this he had been summoned before a military commission and spent nearly two years in prison, but this had no effect.  For three francs he would walk ten leagues and if he complained sufficiently of the dangers to which these missions exposed him the sum was doubled and he would go away satisfied.  In the middle of August he went to Mandeville to fetch d’Ache to Donnay, where he spent ten days and again passed three weeks at the end of September.  He was to have gone there again in December, but at the moment when he was preparing to start Bonnoeil suddenly appeared at Mandeville, having come to warn him not to venture there as Mme. de Combray had been accused of a crime and was on the point of being arrested.

* * * * *

It was not without vexation that Acquet saw his mother-in-law settling herself at his very door.  Keenly on the lookout for any means of annoying the Marquise, he was struck by the idea that if an incumbent were appointed to the vacant cure of Donnay, he would have to live at the parsonage, half of which belonged to the Commune, and that their being obliged to live in the same house would be a great inconvenience to Mme. de Combray.  This prospect charmed Acquet, and as he had several friends in high positions, among them the Baron Darthenay his neighbour at Meslay, who had lately been elected deputy for Calvados, he had small difficulty in getting a priest appointed.  A few days afterwards a cure, the Abbe Clerisse, arrived at Donnay, fully determined to carry out the duties of his ministry faithfully, and very far from foreseeing the tragic fate in store for him.

Mme. de Combray had made herself quite comfortable at the parsonage, which she considered in a manner her own property since she had furnished half the money for its purchase.  She now saw herself compelled to surrender a portion of it, which from the very first embittered her against the new arrival.  Acquet, for his part, feted his protege, and welcoming him cordially put him on his guard against the machinations of the Marquise, whom he represented as an inveterate enemy of the conciliatory government to which France owed the Concordat.  The Abbe Clerisse, who, from the construction of the house was obliged to use the rooms in common with Mme. de Combray, was not