style="font-size:15px;"> “It shall be as you say, General; he shall hear nothing of this matter.”
“Go on, then.”
“Where had we got to, General?”
“We had got to your trarp, which you had put on your stomach, and you were saying that it was a first-rate trarp.”
“By my faith, General, that was a first-rate trarp!” It weighed a good ten pounds. What am I saying! fifteen pounds at least with its chain!
I put the chain over my wrist.
“And what happened that night?”
“That night? why, it was worse than ever! Generally, it was in her leather overshoes she came and kneaded my chest, but that night she came in her wooden sabots.”
“And she comes like this…?”
“Every blessed one of God’s nights, and it is making me quite thin; you can see for yourself, General, I am growing as thin as a lath. However, this morning I made up my mind.”
“And what did you decide upon, Mocquet?”
“Well, then, I made up my mind I would let fly at her with my gun.”
“That was a wise decision to come to. And when do you think of carrying it out?”
“This evening, or to-morrow at latest, General.”
“Confound it! And just as I was wanting to send you over to Villers-Hellon.”
“That won’t matter, General. Was it something that you wanted done at once?”
“Yes, at once.”
“Very well, then, I can go over to Villers-Hellon, – it’s not above a few miles, if I go through the wood – and get back here this evening; the journey both ways is only twenty-four miles, and we have covered a few more than that before now out shooting, General.”
“That’s settled, then; I will write a letter for you to give to M. Collard, and then you can start.”
“I will start, General, without a moment’s delay.”
My father rose, and wrote to M. Collard; the letter was as follows:
“My dear Collard,
“I am sending you that idiot of a keeper of mine, whom you know; he has taken into his head that an old woman nightmares him every night, and, to rid himself of this vampire, he intends nothing more nor less than to kill her.
“Justice, however, might not look favourably on this method of his for curing himself of indigestion, and so I am going to start him off to you on a pretext of some kind or other. Will you, also, on some pretext or other, send him on, as soon as he gets to you, to Danré, at Vouty, who will send him on to Dulauloy, who, with or without pretext, may then, as far as I care, send him on to the devil?
“In short, he must be kept going for a fortnight at least. By that time we shall have moved out of here and shall be at Antilly, and as he will then no longer be in the district of Haramont, and as his nightmare will probably have left him on the way, Mother Durand will be able to sleep in peace, which I should certainly not advise her to do if Mocquet were remaining anywhere in her neighbourhood.
“He is bringing you six brace of snipe and a hare, which we shot while out yesterday on the marshes of Vallue.
“A thousand-and-one of my tenderest remembrances to the fair Herminie, and as many kisses to the dear little Caroline.
An hour later Mocquet was on his way, and, at the end of three weeks, he rejoined us at Antilly.
“Well,” asked my father, seeing him reappear in robust health, “well, and how about Mother Durand?”
“Well, General,” replied Mocquet cheerfully, “I’ve got rid of the old mole; it seems she has no power except in her own district.”
VII
TWELVE years had passed since Mocquet’s nightmare, and I was now over fifteen years of age. It was the winter of 1817 to 1818; ten years before that date I had, alas! lost my father.
We no longer had a Pierre for gardener, a Hippolyte for valet, or a Mocquet for keeper; we no longer lived at the Château of Les Fossés or in the villa at Antilly, but in the market-place of Villers Cotterets, in a little house opposite the fountain, where my mother kept a bureau de tabac, selling powder and shot as well over the same counter.
As you have already read in my Mémoires, although still young, I was an enthusiastic sportsman. As far as sport went, however, that is according to the usual acceptation of the word, I had none, except when my cousin, M. Deviolaine, the ranger of the forest at Villers-Cotterets, was kind enough to ask leave of my mother to take me with him. I filled up the remainder of my time with poaching.
For this double function of sportsman and poacher I was well provided with a delightful single-barrelled gun, on which was engraven the monogram of the Princess Borghese, to whom it had originally belonged. My father had given it me when I was a child, and when, after his death, everything had to be sold, I implored so urgently to be allowed to keep my gun, that it was not sold with the other weapons, and the horses and carriages.
The most enjoyable time for me was the winter; then the snow lay on the ground, and the birds, in their search for food, were ready to come wherever grain was sprinkled for them. Some of my father’s old friends had fine gardens, and I was at liberty to go and shoot the birds there as I liked. So I used to sweep the snow away, spread some grain, and, hiding myself within easy gun-shot, fire at the birds, sometimes killing six, eight, or even ten at a time.
Then, if the snow lasted, there was another thing to look forward to, – the chance of tracing a wolf to its lair, and a wolf so traced was everybody’s property. The wolf, being a public enemy, a murderer beyond the pale of the law, might be shot at by all or anyone, and so, in spite of my mother’s cries, who dreaded the double danger for me, you need not ask if I seized my gun, and was first on the spot ready for sport.
The winter of 1817 to 1818 had been long and severe; the snow was lying a foot deep on the ground, and so hard frozen that it had held for a fortnight past, and still there were no tidings of anything.
Towards four o’clock one afternoon Mocquet called upon us; he had come to lay in his stock of powder. While so doing, he looked at me and winked with one eye. When he went out, I followed.
“What is it, Mocquet?” I asked, “tell me.”
“Can’t you guess, Monsieur Alexandre?”
“No, Mocquet.”
“You don’t guess, then, that if I come and buy powder here from Madame, your mother, instead of going to Haramont for it, – in short, if I walk three miles instead of only a quarter that distance, that I might possibly have a bit of a shoot to propose to you?”
“Oh, you good Mocquet! and what and where?”
“There’s a wolf, Monsieur Alexandre.”
“Not
