"About six months after her return, the once-dreary château was filled with sudden life and bustle. Monsieur Maurice had returned, bringing with him a number of wild and reckless fellows like himself. These were all officers of his own regiment, except one very sad dog, worse even than the rest, Monsieur Louis Chateaufleur, captain of the _Gens d’armes Ecossois_, or first troop of the French gendarmerie. Nothing was heard of now but feasting, drinking, and desperate gambling within the château; hunting, hawking, shooting, frolics, and outrages of every sort committed out of it. The guests of De Mesmai were some of the wildest _roués_ about Paris—and the mess of the Duc de Choiseul’s regiment had produced many of them,—and a great commotion their appearance made in Besançon and the rural district of Quinsay. All the lamps in the former were sometimes broken in a single night, and the whole city involved in darkness; while these madcaps and their servants possessed themselves of the steeples, where they rang the alarum bells backwards, and rushed through the streets, crying ’Fire! murder! robbery and invasion!’ until the peaceable citizens were scared out of their seven senses. "Nor were their brawls and outrages confined to the night alone. The wig of Monsieur le Maire was dragged off and flung in his face, when he was passing through the Rue de l’Université. Swords were drawn in the lobbies of the theatre every night, and the gens d’armes were always beaten and insulted. Monsieur Chateaufleur, of the _gens d’armes Ecossois_, as a crowning outrage, carried off by force to the château a young milliner or grisette of the Rue de Paradis; and the citizens of Besançon were enraged beyond what I can describe at the insolencies of these young aristocrats, who were at once struck with terror and dismay when news arrived of the revolution which had broken out in Paris, and of the bloody tumults which had ensued there. De Mesmai armed his servants, and the inhabitants of the château kept close within its walls.