The moonlight was now enveloping like a
luminous mist the valley of Couesnon. Certainly a woman whose heart
was burdened with a despised love would be sensitive to the melancholy
which that soft brilliancy inspires in the soul, by the weird
appearance it gives to objects and the colors with which it tints the
streams.
The silence was presently broken by the braying of a donkey. Marie
went quickly back to the hut, and the party started. Galope-Chopine,
armed with a double-barrelled gun, wore a long goatskin, which gave
him something the look of Robinson Crusoe. His blotched face, seamed
with wrinkles, was scarcely visible under the broad-brimmed hat which
the Breton peasants still retain as a tradition of the olden time;
proud to have won, after their servitude, the right to wear the former
ornament of seignorial heads. This nocturnal caravan, protected by a
guide whose clothing, attitudes, and person had something patriarchal
about them, bore no little resemblance to the Flight into Egypt as we
see it represented by the sombre brush of Rembrandt. Galope-Chopine
carefully avoided the main-road and guided the two women through the
labyrinth of by-ways which intersect Brittany.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil then understood the Chouan warfare. In
threading these complicated paths, she could better appreciate the
condition of a country which when she saw it from an elevation had
seemed to her so charming, but into which it was necessary to
penetrate before the dangers and inextricable difficulties of it could
be understood.
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