France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Fiction; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821 -- Fiction
The night was now too far advanced to undertake the expedition, and it
was postponed until the one following. In the meantime Roland remained
quietly in hiding in the captain’s room at the barracks that no one
might suspect his presence at Bourg nor its cause. The following night
he was to guide the expedition. In the course of the morrow, one of the
gendarmes, who was a tailor, agreed to make him a sergeant’s uniform. He
was to pass as a member of the brigade at Sons-le-Saulnier, and, thanks
to the uniform, could direct the search at the Chartreuse without being
recognized.
Everything happened as planned. Roland entered the barracks with the
captain about one o’clock, ascended to the latter’s room, where he slept
on a bed on the floor like a man who has just passed two days and two
nights in a post-chaise. The next day he restrained his impatience
by drawing a plan of the Chartreuse of Seillon for the captain’s
instruction, with which, even without Roland’s help, that worthy officer
could have directed the expedition without going an inch astray.
As the captain had but eighteen men under him, and it was not possible
to surround the monastery completely with that number, or rather, to
guard the two exits and make a thorough search through the interior,
and, as it would have taken three or four days to bring in all the men
of the brigade scattered throughout the neighborhood, the officer, by
Roland’s order, went to the colonel of dragoons, garrisoned at Bourg,
told him of the matter in hand, and asked for twelve men, who, with his
own, made thirty in all.
The colonel not only granted the twelve men, but, learning that
the expedition was to be commanded by Colonel Roland de Montrevel,
aide-de-camp to the First Consul, he proposed that he himself should
join the party at the head of his twelve men.
Roland accepted his co-operation, and it was agreed that the colonel (we
employ the words colonel and chief of brigade indifferently, both being
interchangeable terms indicating the same rank) and his twelve dragoons
should pick up Roland, the captain, and his eighteen men, the barracks
being directly on their road to the Chartreuse. The time was set for
eleven that night.
At eleven precisely, with military punctuality, the colonel of dragoons
and his twelve men joined the gendarmes, and the two companies, now
united in one, began their march. Roland, in his sergeant’s uniform,
made himself known to his brother colonel; but to the dragoons and
gendarmes he remained, as agreed upon, a sergeant detached from the
brigade at Sons-le-Saulnier. Only, as it might otherwise have seemed
extraordinary that a sergeant, wholly unfamiliar with these localities,
should be their guide, the men were told that Roland had been in his
youth a novice at Seillon, and was therefore better acquainted than most
persons with the mysterious nooks of the Chartreuse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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