Honore de Balzac by An Historical Mystery_The Gondreville Mystery

seem in times of peril to share
their masters' thought.
    While the young countess was hesitating to follow Marthe, and asking
explanations, Michu, from his vantage-ground watched the closing in of
the gendarmes and understood their plan. He grew desperate as time
went by and the countess did not come to him. A squad of gendarmes were
marching along the park wall and stationing themselves as sentinels,
each man being near enough to communicate with those on either side of
them, by voice and eye. Michu, lying flat on his stomach, his ear to
earth, gauged, like a red Indian, by the strength of the sounds the time
that remained to him.
    "I came too late!" he said to himself. "Violette shall pay dear for
this! what a time it took to make him drunk! What can be done?"
    He heard the detachment that was coming through the forest reach the
iron gates and turn into the main road, where before long it would meet
the squad coming up from the other direction.
    "Still five or six minutes!" he said.
    At that instant the countess appeared. Michu took her with a firm hand
and pushed her into the covered way.
    "Keep straight before you! Lead her to where my horse is," he said to
his wife, "and remember that gendarmes have ears."
    Seeing Catherine, who carried the hat and whip, and Gothard leading the
mare, the man, keen-witted in presence of danger, bethought himself of
playing the gendarmes a trick as useful as the one he had just played
Violette. Gothard had forced the mare to mount the bank.
    "Her feet muffled! I thank thee, boy," exclaimed the bailiff.
    Michu let the mare follow her mistress and took the hat, gloves, and
whip from Catherine.
    "You have sense, boy, you'll understand me," he said. "Force your own
horse up here, jump on him, and draw the gendarmes after you across the
fields towards the farm; get the whole squad to follow you—And you,"
he added to Catherine, "there are other gendarmes coming up on the road
from Cinq-Cygne to Gondreville; run in the opposite direction to the one
Gothard takes, and draw them towards the forest. Manage so that we shall
not be interfered with in the covered way."
    Catherine and the boy, who were destined to give in this affair such
remarkable proofs of intelligence, executed the manoeuvre in a way to
make both detachments of gendarmes believe that they held the game. The
dim light of the moon prevented the pursuers from distinguishing the
figure, clothing, sex, or number of those they followed. The pursuit was
based on the maxim, "Always arrest those who are escaping,"—the folly
of which saying was, as we have seen, energetically declared by Corentin
to the corporal in command. Michu, counting on this instinct of
the gendarmes, was able to reach the forest a few moments after the
countess, whom Marthe had guided to the appointed place.
    "Go home now," he said to Marthe. "The forest is watched and it is
dangerous to remain here. We need all our freedom."
    Michu unfastened his horse and asked the countess to follow him.
    "I shall not go a step further," said Laurence, "unless you give me some
proof of the interest you seem to have in us—for, after all, you are
Michu."
    "Mademoiselle," he answered, in a gentle voice; "the part I am playing
can be explained to you in two words. I am, unknown to the Marquis de
Simeuse and his brother, the guardian of their property. On this subject
I received the last instructions of their late father and their dear
mother, my protectress. I have played the part of a virulent Jacobin to
serve my dear young masters. Unhappily, I began this course too late;
I could not save their parents." Here, Michu's voice broke down. "Since
the young men emigrated I have sent them regularly the sums they needed
to live upon."
    "Through the house of Breintmayer of Strasburg?" asked the countess.
    "Yes, mademoiselle; the correspondents of Monsieur Girel of Troyes, a
royalist who, like me, made himself for good reasons, a Jacobin. The
paper which your farmer picked up one evening