was an accomplished fact in almost all its details. And what are ten
years in politics? Frotté, Georges, Pichegru, d'Aché, would only have
had to fold their arms. They would have seen the Empire crumble by its
own weight.

We made these reflections on returning to the château while looking at
the terrace in the setting sun, at the peaceful winding of the Seine and
the lovely autumn landscape that Mme. de Combray and d'Aché had so often
looked at, at the same place and hour, little foreseeing the sad fate
the future had in store for them.

The misfortunes of the unhappy woman--the deplorable affair of Quesnay
where the coach with state funds was attacked by Mme. Acquet's men, for
the profit of the royalist exchequer and of Le Chevalier; the
assassination of d'Aché, sold to the imperial police by La Vaubadon, his
mistress, and the cowardly Doulcet de Pontécoulant, who does not boast
of it in his "Mémoires,"--have been the themes of several tales,
romances and novels, wherein fancy plays too great a part, and whose
misinformed authors, Hippolyte Bonnelier, Comtesse de Mirabeau,
Chennevières, etc., have taken great advantage of the liberty used in
works of imagination. There is only one reproach to be made--that they
did not have the genius of Balzac. But we may criticise more severely
the so-called historical writings about Mme. de Combray, her family and
residences, and the Château of Tournebut which M. Homberg shows us
flanked by four feudal towers, and which MM. Le Prévost and Bourdon say
was demolished in 1807.

Mme. d'Abrantès, with her usual veracity, describes the luxurious
furniture and huge lamps in the "labyrinths of Tournebut, of which one
must, as it were, have a plan, so as not to lose one's way." She shows