M. de Varion had not yet
been tried, and the attempt to deliver him from prison need not be made
immediately. Time would be required in which I might form a satisfactory
plan of action in this matter. It would be necessary to employ all my
men in it, and to bring them secretly from Maury by night marches, but I
must not take the first step until the whole design should be complete
in my mind.
I suggested to mademoiselle that we first go to her father's house, in
Fleurier, where she might get such of her belongings as she wished to
take with her. But she desired to take no more along than was already in
the portmanteaus that her boys, Hugo and Pierre, carried with them on
their horses. She had come directly from Bourges with this baggage,
having been visiting an unmarried aunt, in that city, when news of her
father's arrest reached her.
When I questioned her as to her conduct on the reception of that news,
her face clouded, and she showed embarrassment and a wish to avoid the
subject. Nevertheless, she gave me answers, and I finally learned that
her purpose on leaving Bourges had been to seek the governor of the
province, immediately, and petition for her father's release. It was by
accident that she had met M. de la Chatre at the inn, where she had
stopped that her horses might be baited. My persistent, though
deferential, inquiries elicited from her, in a wavering voice, that she
had not previously possessed the governor's acquaintance; that her
entreaties had evoked only the governor's wrathful orders to depart from
the province on pain of sharing her father's fate; and that La Chatre had
refused to allow her even to see her father in his dungeon in the Chateau
of Fleurier.
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