He found the town of Sonnay-le-Loir, and General Ratoneau himself, in a state of considerable agitation. The excellent Prefect was very ill. He was never a strong man physically, and the nervous irritation caused by such a colleague as Ratoneau might have been partly the cause of his present collapse. Sorely against his will he had listened to Ratoneau's fresh argument, and had consented to stop a whole string of political arrests by forwarding the marriage the General had set his heart upon. His own personal danger, if he had defied the General, would have been by no means small. Simon was right; Ratoneau could have represented his mild measures in such a light as to ruin him, along with those Angevin gentlemen whom he was trying by gentle means to reconcile with the Empire. At that precise moment he could not even punish the man he suspected of betraying him. Ratoneau had protected his tool so far as to leave him nameless; but in any case, from the imperial point of view, a man who denounced Chouans was doing his duty. As to the fact of sending up Mademoiselle de Sainfoy's name to the Emperor and suggesting for her the very husband whom her father had refused to accept--the chief sin, in the eyes of that day, was the unfriendly action towards her father. The whole system was odious; it appeared more or less so, according to the degree of refinement in the officials who had to work it; yet it came from the Emperor, and could not be entirely set aside; also every marriage, in one way or another, was an arranged thing; it must suit family politics, if not the interests of the Empire. Nothing strange from the outside--and all the world would look at it so--in the marriage of the Comte de Sainfoy's daughter with the local General of division. The lady's unwillingness was a mere detail, of which the laws of society would take no cognizance. The sentimental view which called such a marriage sacrilege was absurd, after all, and the Prefect knew it. Indeed, after the first, the thought of Hélène's face did not trouble him so much as that of the _coup de patte_ in store for her father, the stealthy blow to come from himself, the old, the trusted fellow-countryman. But the injury to Hervé de Sainfoy weighed lightly, after all, when balanced with the arrest and ruin of Joseph de la Marinière and possibly his young nephew, as well as of Monsieur des Barres, Monsieur de Bourmont, the Messieurs d'Ombré, and other men more or less suspected of conspiring against the Empire. Even if this, perhaps deserved, had been all! but the Prefect knew very well that an enemy such as Ratoneau would not be satisfied without his own degradation.