Combray family; France -- History -- Consulate and First Empire, 1799-1815
Certain of the inhabitants of Saint-Lo still remember the tall old man,
always gloomy and with a pale complexion, who seemed to have only one
idea, and who, to the last day of his life, loved and defended the woman
to whom he had given his name. As for Foison, the murderer, he was made
a lieutenant and received the cross of the Legion of Honour. Caffarelli,
to whose lot it fell to present it to him, excused himself on a plea of
necessary absence. M. Lance, the Secretary-General for the prefecture,
who was obliged to take his place, could not, as he bestowed the
decoration, refrain "from letting him observe the disgust he felt for
his person, and the shame he experienced at seeing the star of the brave
thus profaned." M. Lance was dismissed at the instance of Foison, who,
soon afterwards, was made an officer, and despatched to the army in
Spain, whither his reputation had preceded him. Tradition assures us
that an avenger had reserved for him a death similar to d'Ache's, and
that he was found on the road one morning pierced with bullets. Nothing
is farther from the truth. Foison became a captain and lived till 1843.
D'Ache's family, which returned to Gournay after Georges Cadoudal's
execution, was disturbed afresh at Mme. de Combray's arrest. As we have
said before, Licquet had had Jean Baptiste de Caqueray (who had married
Louise d'Ache in 1806) brought handcuffed into Rouen, but had scarcely
examined him. "Caqueray," he wrote, "is quite innocent; he quarrelled
with his father-in-law;" and he dismissed him with this remark: "If only
he had known the prey he was allowing to escape!" Up to 1814 Caqueray
did not again attract the attention of the police. At the Restoration he
was made a captain of gendarmes. His wife Louise d'Ache was in 1815
appointed lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Bourbon, by whom she had in
part been brought up, being on her mother's side the niece of the gentle
Vicomte de Roquefeuille, who had previously "consoled the Duchess so
tenderly for the desertion of her inconstant husband." Louise d'Ache
died in 1817, and her sister Alexandrine, who was unmarried, was in her
turn summoned to the Princess, and took the title of Comtesse d'Ache. In
spite of the Princes' favour, Caqueray remained a captain of gendarmes
till he left the service in 1830. It was only then made known that in
1804, at the time of Querelle's disclosures and of the journey
undertaken by Savary to Biville, to surprise a fourth landing of
conspirators, it was he, Jean-Baptiste de Caqueray, who, warned by a
messenger from Georges that "all were compromised," started from Gournay
on horseback, reached the farm of La Poterie in twelve hours, crossed
three lines of gendarmes, and signalled to the English brig which was
tacking along the coast, to stand out to sea. Caqueray immediately
remounted his horse, endured the fire of an ambuscade, flung himself
into the forest of Eu, and succeeded in reaching Gournay before his
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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