How long and by what paths he pursued his flight, he could not tell. But several hours afterwards, while he was wandering through the wooded hills of Charves, he espied two men, who sprang up and fled at his approach. In a terrible voice, he called after them: “Eh! you fellows! do you each want to earn a thousand pistoles? I am Lacheneur.” They paused when they recognized him, and Lacheneur saw that they were two of his former followers, both of them well-to-do farmers, whom it had been difficult to induce to join in the revolt. They happened to have with them some bread and a little brandy, and they gave both to the famished man. They sat down beside him on the grass, and while he was eating they related their misfortunes. Their connection with the conspiracy had been discovered, and soldiers were hunting for them, but they hoped to reach Italy with the help of a guide who was waiting for them at an appointed place. Lacheneur held out his hand. “Then I am saved,” said he. “Weak and wounded as I am, I should have perished, all alone.” But the two farmers did not take the hand he offered. “We ought to leave you,” said the younger man gloomily, “for you are the cause of our misfortunes. You deceived us, Monsieur Lacheneur.” The leader of the revolt dared not protest; the reproach was so well deserved. However, the other farmer gave his companion a peculiar glance and suggested that they might let Lacheneur accompany them all the same. So they walked on all three together, and that same evening, after nine hours journey through the mountains, they crossed the frontier. But, in the meanwhile, many and bitter had been the reproaches they had exchanged. On being closely questioned by his companions, Lacheneur, exhausted both in mind and body, finally admitted the insincerity of his promises, by means of which he had inflamed his followers’ zeal. He acknowledged that he had spread the report that Marie-Louise and the young king of Rome were concealed in Montaignac, and that it was a gross falsehood. He confessed that he had given the signal for the revolt without any chance of success, and without any precise means of action, leaving everything to chance. In short he confessed that nothing was real except the hatred, the bitter hatred he felt against the Sairmeuse family. A dozen times, at least, during this terrible confession, the peasants who accompanied him were on the point of hurling him over the precipice by the banks of which they walked. “So it was to gratify his own spite,” they thought, quivering with rage, “that he set every one fighting and killing each other--that he has ruined us and driven us into exile. We’ll see if he is to escape unpunished.”