Chouans -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English
“I will trust you, Corentin,” cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil, much
moved. She bowed her head gently towards him and smiled with a kindness
not unmixed with surprise, as she saw an expression of melancholy
tenderness on his face.
“What an enchanting creature!” thought Corentin, as he left the house.
“Shall I ever get her as a means to fortune and a source of delight? To
fling herself at my feet! Oh, yes, the marquis shall die! If I can’t get
that woman in any other way than by dragging her through the mud, I’ll
sink her in it. At any rate,” he thought, as he reached the square
unconscious of his steps, “she no longer distrusts me. Three hundred
thousand francs down! she thinks me grasping! Either the offer was a
trick or she is already married to him.”
Corentin, buried in thought, was unable to come to a resolution. The
fog which the sun had dispersed at mid-day was now rolling thicker and
thicker, so that he could hardly see the trees at a little distance.
“That’s another piece of ill-luck,” he muttered, as he turned slowly
homeward. “It is impossible to see ten feet. The weather protects the
lovers. How is one to watch a house in such a fog? Who goes there?” he
cried, catching the arm of a boy who seemed to have clambered up the
dangerous rocks which made the terrace of the Promenade.
“It is I,” said a childish voice.
“Ah! the boy with the bloody foot. Do you want to revenge your father?”
said Corentin.
“Yes,” said the child.
“Very good. Do you know the Gars?”
“Yes.”
“Good again. Now, don’t leave me except to do what I bid you, and you
will obey your mother and earn some big sous--do you like sous?”
“Yes.”
“You like sous, and you want to kill the Gars who killed your
father--well, I’ll take care of you. Ah! Marie,” he muttered, after a
pause, “you yourself shall betray him, as you engaged to do! She is too
violent to suspect me--passion never reflects. She does not know the
marquis’s writing. Yes, I can set a trap into which her nature will
drive her headlong. But I must first see Hulot.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil and Francine were deliberating on the means of
saving the marquis from the more than doubtful generosity of Corentin
and Hulot’s bayonets.
“I could go and warn him,” said the Breton girl.
“But we don’t know where he is,” replied Marie; “even I, with the
instincts of love, could never find him.”
After making and rejecting a number of plans Mademoiselle de Verneuil
exclaimed, “When I see him his danger will inspire me.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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