Chapter 8 - The Siege of the Vines
The arrest of Roland Monier was not the end of the drama; it was the signal for the valley to rise. The Monier family had held the land for two hundred years, and many of the small farmers in the lower valley owed their mortgages to Roland’s ledger. When the news spread that the master had been taken to the prison at Alès in iron chains, a group of twenty horsemen—led by Roland’s bailiff, a brutal man named Hector—gathered at the village tavern, their shotguns loaded with buckshot, their faces hidden behind black wool scarves.
"They’re going to burn the registry," Pierre, the young stable hand, whispered as he burst through the doors of the chapel rectory where de Vigny had established a temporary guard post.
Pierre had ridden all night from the estate, his horse covered in white foam. "Hector says if the royal deed is destroyed before the magistrate reaches Nîmes, the land must stay with the eldest surviving line by default under the old local custom. They’re coming with torches, Monsieur."
De Vigny did not flinch. He sat at the old wooden desk, his silver pen scratching across a sheet of official vellum. "Let them come," he said without looking up. "The law does not live in a piece of paper, Pierre. It lives in the execution of the sentence."
He turned to Élise, who was sitting by the window, a cup of chicory coffee untouched in her hands. Matéo was sleeping on a pile of wool coats in the corner, while Lucie was busy drawing small owls on the margins of an old newspaper.
"You must take the tilbury, Madame," de Vigny said, standing up and buckling his sword belt.
"My driver knows the track through the gorges of the Tarn. It is thirty kilometers longer, but it is limestone country; there are no villages to block the path. If I do not join you at the courthouse in Nîmes by Wednesday noon, you present this vellum to the military governor. He has two regiments of hussars who have been waiting for an excuse to clean the Cévennes of these mountain lords."
"And you?" Élise asked, her hand locking onto his wool sleeve. "You cannot stay here with four gendarmes, Monsieur. Hector has twenty men, and they know every stone of these hills."
"I am an officer of the Crown, Madame," de Vigny said, a strange, aristocratic pride illuminating his grey eyes as he drew his long steel sword, the blade catching the blue light of the morning mist through the window. "We do not run from the people who owe us taxes. Go now. Before the smoke reaches the valley."
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Élise did not argue. She lifted Matéo and took Lucie’s hand, stepping out into the rear courtyard where the black tilbury was waiting, its horses already harnessed and eager to run. As the carriage burst through the iron gates of the rectory, the first sounds of gunfire echoed from the southern ridge—the sharp, dry cracks of the mountain shotguns answering the heavy, rhythmic roar of the gendarmes’ service carbines.
The driver cracked his whip, the tilbury jumping forward onto the narrow, rocky trail that led into the high gorges, leaving the valley of the Moniers behind them in a cloud of grey dust and black smoke.
