Months afterwards he learned the truth—and assumed that Louis knew it, too. Madame d’Espaze had quarrelled some two months earlier with Lecorrier, and had left him for a former admirer, the Marquis de Beaulieu, a revolutionary noble who commanded the National Guard of Montaigu. When the peasants took Montaigu De Beaulieu was killed, and, since he was cordially detested, his château was sacked. His mistress fled, alone; it was said in the direction of Châtillon. Further than that nothing was known; neither how she came to have lost her horse, nor whose the hand, Royalist or Republican, that shot her, nor what she was doing so far away from Châtillon. There were moments when Gilbert wondered whether she could possibly have been making for Chantemerle—if indeed she had been aware of its proximity—but that he should not know now. Her name was never mentioned again between Louis and himself; but it was many days before he, at least, could pass a clump of bracken without expecting to see its yellow fronds entangled with a woman’s hair. CHAPTER XL THE FIGHT AT THE BRIDGE “To carry our faith like a blossom that’s thrust In a sword-hilt for token; To close up our ranks, when a comrade bites dust, And march on, unbroken.” “Monsieur d’Charette a dit à ceux d’Monfort, Monsieur d’Charette a dit à ceux d’Monfort ‘Frappez fort ; Le drapeau blanc défend contre la mort !’” —_Monsieur d’ Charette_. At half an hour after noon next day Louis-Henri-François de Marcé, with forty-eight years of service and two thousand five hundred men behind him, marched out of Chantonnay in the direction of Saint Fulgent, with the intention of completing his victory of the previous Sunday. At three o’clock he passed the river Lay on the pont du Gravereau, which had been cut by the peasants and subsequently repaired by his orders, after which he proceeded to repair a second bridge at the mill of La Rivière, a league further on. While his troops were thus occupied there appeared over the high and wooded ground in front of him a large body of armed men. The Republican general would have taken them for insurgents, had not the commissary of the Convention who accompanied him distinctly heard borne towards him on the breeze the surge of the Marseillaise, that sound dear to every good patriot, as he remarked to the veteran. It stamped them, he asserted, as the National Guard from Nantes, and De Marcé went on with his bridge-mending. On all sides, except to his rear, the heights surrounded him: it was an ill position to defend, but at the moment he was not thinking of defence.