And this brigandage was rampant everywhere.  There was so little safety in the Midi from Marseilles to Toulon and Toulouse that one could not travel without an escort.  In the Var, the Bouches-du-Rhone, Vaucluse, from Digne and Draguignan, to Avignon and Aix, one had to pay ransom.  A placard placed along the roads informed the traveller that unless he paid a hundred francs in advance, he risked being killed.  The receipt given to the driver served as a passport.  Theft by violence was so much the custom that certain villages in the Lower Alps were openly known as the abode of those who had no other occupation.  On the banks of the Rhone travellers were charitably warned not to put up at certain solitary inns for fear of not reappearing therefrom.  On the Italian frontier they were the “barbets”; in the North the “garroteurs”; in the Ardeche the “bande noire”; in the Centre the “Chiffoniers”; in Artois, Picardie, the Somme, Seine-Inferieure, the Chartrain country, the Orleanais, Loire-Inferieure, Orne, Sarthe, Mayenne, Ille-et-Vilaine, etc., and Ile-de-France to the very gates of Paris, but above all in Calvados, Finistere and La Manche where royalism served as their flag, the “chauffeurs” and the bands of “Grands Gars” and “Coupe et Tranche,” which under pretence of being Chouans attacked farms or isolated dwellings, and inspired such terror that if one of them were arrested neither witness nor jury could be found to condemn him.  Politics evidently had nothing to do with these exploits; it was a private war.  And the Chouans professed to wage it only against the government.  So long as they limited themselves to fighting the gendarmes or national guards in bands of five or six hundred, to invading defenceless places in order to cut down the trees of liberty, burn the municipal papers, and pillage the coffers of the receivers and school-teachers—­(the State funds having the right to return to their legitimate owner, the King), they could be distinguished from professional malefactors.  But when they stopped coaches, extorted ransom from travellers and shot constitutional priests and purchasers of the national property, the distinction became too subtle.  There was no longer any room for it in the year VIII and IX when, vigorous measures having almost cleared the country of the bands of “chauffeurs” and other bandits who infested it, the greater number of those who had escaped being shot or guillotined joined what remained of the royalist army, last refuge of brigandage.

In such a time Moisson’s adventure was not at all extraordinary.  We can only accuse it of being too simple.  It was the mildest scene of a huge melodrama in which he and his mother had played the part of supers.  But slight as was the episode, it had all the attraction of the unknown for me.  Of Tournebut and its owners I knew nothing.  Who, in reality, was this Mme. de Combray, sanctified by Balzac?  A fanatic, or an intriguer?—­And her daughter Mme. Acquet?  A heroine or a