A broken leg is not commonly a source of satisfaction to the friends of the sufferer, but it is undeniable that Gilbert’s injury did appear in something of this light to M. des Graves and to Louis. So September drew to a close in less agitating circumstances. It was true that any day might still see soldiers coming up the avenue to hunt for the proscribed priest—for whom they had already searched the three months’ empty _presbytère_—that he had to remain closely hidden, that he was absolutely at the mercy of the denunciation of malice or the indiscretion of devotion. Above all, there was the danger that the authorities should see fit to instal a “constitutional” in the cure—a move which would inevitably have led to the detection of M. des Graves. But the supply of _assermentés_ was fortunately running short, and Chantemerle, being a small village, was evidently to remain (theoretically) priestless. Louis, who really did serve in a measure as M. des Graves’ means of communication with his parish, was driven one day to suggest that he himself should seek orders from the constitutional Bishop of Luçon, and should settle at the _presbytère_. When Monseigneur de Mercy, the dispossessed prelate, came to his own again, he could declare the orders invalid, and the Vicomte could resume his status as a layman without prejudice. Louis’ spirit of persiflage could not be imagined as wholly deserting him even in the article of death, but for some time now his gaiety had appeared to his companion to be a little flagging. The inaction was indeed fretting him horribly. He seemed to himself to have dropped out from the contest, he whose ardent royalism had already gone near to cost him his life. Gilbert and he appeared to have changed places; and what would he not give to join La Rouërie too! And when, at the end of August, came the news of Longwy, when, at the beginning of September, Verdun had opened its gates to Brunswick and the _émigrés_, he abandoned the attempt to conceal his impatience. The Princes and the exiles were once more on French soil, would soon be marching on Paris—and he was not with them. Again he accused himself of deserting his comrades, for D’Aubeville was in the invading ranks, the others still in the prisons whence he might have been helping to deliver them. . . . But that ideal at least could never have known realisation. Almost simultaneously with the news of Verdun came the tidings of the September massacres, a red flood which swept away De Périgny and all the rest with whom Louis had laughed and gamed and plotted. Jasmin, when he arrived, had furnished terrible details of gutters running ankle-deep in blood, of harpies dancing wild measures on the cart-loads of mutilated corpses. And in the smoke of Valmy, a little later, vanished the illusive hopes of the _émigrés_. That throw was played and lost. Yet to a man of Saint-Ermay’s temperament it was poor consolation to have staked nothing on it.