he name and title of General Lebret; of medium stature,
with red hair and beard, and cold steel-coloured eyes. Introduced to
Mme. de Combray by Lemercier, he admitted that his real name was Louis
Acquet d'Hauteporte, Chevalier de Ferolles. He had come to Rouen, he
said, to transmit the orders of the Princes to Mallet de Crecy, who
commanded for the King in Upper Normandy.

We can judge of the welcome the Chevalier received. Mme. de Combray, her
daughters, the nuns and the Chartreux friars used all their ingenuity to
satisfy the slightest wish of this man, who modestly called himself "the
agent general of His Majesty." They arranged a hiding-place for him in
the safest part of the house, and Pere Lemercier blessed it. Acquet
stayed there part of the day, and in the evening joined in the usual
pursuits of the household, and related the story of his adventures by
way of entertainment.

According to him, he possessed large estates in the environs of the
Sables-d'Olonne, of which place he was a native. An officer in the
regiment of Brie infantry before the Revolution, being at Lille in 1791
he had taken advantage of his nearness to the frontier to incite his
regiment to insurrection and emigrate to Belgium. He had then put
himself at the disposal of the Princes, and had enlisted men for the
royal army in Veudee, Poitou and Normandy, helping priests to emigrate,
and saving whole villages from the fury of the blues. He named Charette,
Frotte and Puisaye as his most intimate friends, and these names
recalled the chivalrous times of the wars in the west in which he had
taken a glorious part. Sometimes he disappeared for several days, and on
his return from these mysterious absences, would let it be known that he
had just accomplished some great deed, or brought a dangerous mission to
a successful termination. In this way the Chevalier Acquet de Ferolles
had become the idol of the little group of naive royalists among whom he
had found refuge. He had bravely served _the cause_; he plumed himself
on having merited the surname of "_toutou_ of the Princes," and in Mme.
de Combray's dazzled eyes this was equal to any number of references.

Acquet was in reality an adventurer. If we were to take account here of
all the evil deeds he is credited with, we should be suspected of
wantonly blackening the character of this melodramatic figure. A few
facts gathered by the Combrays will serve to describe him. As an officer
at Lille he was a