If Mme. Acquet de Ferolles was really lacking in interest, it was because a great event had occurred in her own life.

Acquet knew that his wife’s suit for a separation must inevitably be granted.  The ill-treatment she had had to endure was only too well-known, and every one in Falaise took her part.  If Acquet lost the case, it would mean the end of the easy life he was leading at Donnay, and he not only wished to gain time but secretly hoped that his wife would commit some indiscretion that would regain for him if not the sympathies of the public, at least her loss of the suit which if won, would ruin him.  In order to carry out his Machiavellian schemes, he pretended that he wished to come to an understanding with the Combray family, and he despatched one of his friends to Mme. Acquet to open negotiations.  This friend, named Le Chevalier, was a handsome young man of twenty-five, with dark hair, a pale complexion and white teeth.  He had languishing eyes, a sympathetic voice and a graceful figure, inexhaustible good-humour, despite his melancholy appearance, and unbounded audacity.  As he was the owner of a farm in the Commune of Saint Arnould in the neighbourhood of Exmes, he was called Le Chevalier de Saint-Arnould, which gave him the position of a nobleman.  He was moreover related to the nobility.

Less has been written about Le Chevalier than about most of those who were concerned in the troubles in the west.  Nevertheless, his adventures deserve more than the few lines, often incorrect, devoted to him by some chroniclers of the revolt of the Chouans.  He was a remarkable personality, very romantic, somewhat of an enigma, and one who by a touch of gallantry and scepticism was distinguished from his savage and heroic companions.

Born with a generous temperament and deeply in love with glory, as he said, he was the son of a councillor, hammer-keeper to the corporation of the woods and forests of Vire.  A stay of several years in Paris where he took lessons from different masters as much in science as in the arts and foreign languages, had completed his education.  He returned to Saint Arnould in 1799, uncertain as to the choice of a career, when a chance meeting with Picot, chief of the Auge division, whose death was described at the beginning of this story, decided his vocation, and Le Chevalier became a royalist officer, less from conviction than from generous feelings which inclined him towards the cause of the vanquished and oppressed.  A pistol shot broke his left arm two or three days after he was enrolled, and he was scarcely cured of this wound when he again took the field and was implicated in the stopping of a coach.  Three of his friends were imprisoned, and when he himself was arrested, he succeeded in proving that on the very day of the attack, in the neighbourhood of Evreux, he was on a visit to a senator in Paris who had great friends among the authorities, and the magistrates were compelled