Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/76

48 times; sometimes it was a sorry one, sometimes the part of a heroine. The Royalist cause found no more devoted and active emissaries than among such women as these.

In expiation of the errors of devotion, or for the mischances of the false position in which these heroines of their cause were placed, perhaps none suffered so bitterly as the lady at that moment seated on the slab of granite by the wayside; yet even in her despair she could not but admire the noble pride and the loyalty of the young chief. Insensibly she fell to musing deeply. Bitter memories awoke that made her look longingly back to early and innocent days, and regret that she had not fallen a victim to this Revolution, whose progress such weak hands as hers could never stay.

The coach, which had counted for something in the Chouan attack, had left the village of Ernée some moments before the two parties began skirmishing. Nothing reveals the character of a country more clearly than its means of communication. Looked at in this light, the coach deserves special attention. The Revolution itself was powerless to destroy it; it is going yet in our own day.

"When Turgot resumed the monopoly of conveyance of passengers throughout France, which Louis XIV. had granted to a company, he started the fresh enterprise which gave his name to the coaches or turgotines; and then out into the provinces went the old chariots of Messrs. de Vousges, Chauteclaire, and the widow Lacombe, to do service upon the highways. One of these miserable vehicles came and went between Mayenne and Fougères. They were called turgotines out of pure perversity and by way of antiphrasis; perhaps a dislike for the minister who started the innovation, or a desire to mimic Paris, suggested the appellation.

This turgotine was a crazy cabriolet, with two enormous wheels; its back seat, which scarcely afforded room for two fairly stout people, served also as a box for carrying the mails. Some care was required not to overload the feeble