e, Mme. Acquet had entreated so pitifully that a woman who was
there had gone to fetch Collin, one of the servants at La Bijude; Mme.
de Combray's daughter had returned with him to Falaise, on one of the
farmer's horses. She dared not go to the house in the Rue du Tripot, and
therefore stopped with an honest woman named Chauvel, who did the
washing for the Combray family. She was drawn there by the fact that the
son, Victor Chauvel, was one of the gendarmes who had been at Donnay the
night before, and she wanted to find out from him if the Buquets had
denounced her.

She went to the Chauvels' under pretence of getting Captain Manginot's
address. The gendarme was at supper. He was a man of thirty-six, an old
hussar, and a good fellow, but although married and the father of three
children, known as a "gadder, and fond of the sex." "When women are
around, Chauvel forgets everything," his comrades used to say. He now
saw Mme. Acquet for the first time, and to her questions replied that
her name had indeed been mentioned, and that Manginot, who was at the
"Grand-Ture," was looking for her. The young woman began to cry. She
implored Mme. Chauvel to keep her, promised to pay her, and appealed to
her pity, so that the washerwoman was touched. She had an attic in the
third story, some bedding was thrown on the floor, and from that place
Mme. Acquet wrote to tell her mother that she had found a safe retreat.

It was very safe indeed, and one can understand that she did not feel
the need of telling too precisely the conditions of the hospitality she
was given. Is it necessary to insist on the sort of relations
established from the moment of her arrival at the Chauvels, between the
poor woman whose fear of capture killed every other feeling and the
soldier on whom her fate depended? Chauvel had only to say one word to
insure her arrest; she yielded to him, he held his tongue and the
existence which then began for them both was so miserable and so tragic
that it excites more pity than disgust. Mme. Acquet had only one
thought--to escape the scaffold; Chauvel had only one wish--to keep this
unexpected mistress, more dear because he sacrificed for her his career,
his honour and perhaps his life. At first things went calmly enough. No
warrant had been issued for the fugitive, and in the evening she used to
go out disguised with Chauvel. Soon she grew bolder and walked in broad
daylight in the streets of Falaise. On the 15th of August L