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Title: 'Monsieur Henri' A Foot-Note to French History Author: Louise Imogen Guiney Release Date: February 12, 2018 [EBook #56544] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 'MONSIEUR HENRI' *** Produced by Emmy, MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) This ebook is dedicated to EMMY friend, colleague, mentor, role model, who fell off the planet far too soon. “MONSIEUR HENRI” Cover De La Rochejaquelein Title page “MONSIEUR HENRI” A FOOT-NOTE TO FRENCH HISTORY BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PRINTERS & PUBLISHERS MDCCCXCII Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. TO MADAME MARIE-ANGE BONDROIT R.S.C.J. When you were first an exile, and at Elmhurst, I was a child. Six studious years we had together, many games, a tiff or two, much silent love. It is because I do not forget any of them, and because it may stand as a little token of an honorable and lifelong debt, that to you, my dear old friend, without asking your leave, I dedicate this book. “I have looked narrowly into this war of La Vendée, full as it is of scenes and faces; I have thought of it by day, and dreamed of it by night. It is not cold, commonplace war, waged for ambition and policy, nor for commercial advantage; it is a war deep-rooted in the soil and in the conscience of man; a war all for family and fatherland, in the antique impassioned way; a Homeric war, inspiring dread and admiration, pity and love.... Everything in it calls for the palette and the lyre.”—A Republican officer, quoted by Abbé Deniau, Histoire de la Guerre de la Vendée. “And mark you, undemonstrative men would have spoiled the situation. The finest action is the better for a piece of purple.”—Robert Louis Stevenson, in The English Admirals. S PREFACE. O little concerning the French provincial struggle of the eighteenth century has found an echo in our language, that the British Museum and the Bodleian Library have not three original references between them to add to the local archives (most of them, alas! still confused and uncatalogued), of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Madame de La Rochejaquelein’s beautiful Mémoires still serve as the basis for whatever may be said on the subject; and where I have differed from her by a hair, it has not been without reluctance, and the comparison of many oracles. I do not plead for pardon in treating an all-but-hallowed theme in a rather high-handed fashion, since every grain here has been painfully sifted and weighed, and the material, if not the proportioning of it, is true as truth. But in so treating it, I bore in mind that excision is the best safeguard against decay, that time throws away as rag and bobtail the political specifications thought to be precious, and that we must at once, and in the nobler sense, romanticize such dry facts as we mean shall live. It is always the character of the man which vitalizes the event; what did or did not happen is, ultimately, of minor importance beside the spectacle of a strong soul. A background may be blurred for the sake of a single figure. I tried, therefore, to paint a portrait, willing to abide by the hard saying of Northcote: “If a portrait have force, it will do for history.” To the Rev. Walter Elliott, editor of The Catholic World, who allows me thus to incorporate and remodel a sketch first contributed to its pages; to Monsieur le Curé and Monsieur le Vicaire of Saint-Aubin-de-Baubigné, who, for the sake of the immortal Red Handkerchief unknown to English literature, brightened my frosty travels in the old Bocage; to Madame la Comtesse de Chabot of Boissière; to Mademoiselle de Chabot, Henri’s young kinswoman and annalist, whose ardent researches have verified many of the data I give, and to Monsieur de Chabot, also, who drew for his sister’s soldierly book the admirable chart now kindly lent me for transmarine use, I return, this late, my faithful and ever affectionate thanks. L. I. G. London, 1891. vi vii B “MONSIEUR HENRI”: A FOOT-NOTE TO FRENCH HISTORY. EFORE a crowd of excited farmers, a young Frenchman, blond, enthusiastic, delicately-nurtured, made once this singular oration: “Friends! if my father were here, you would have confidence. As for me, I am only a boy, but I will prove that I deserve to lead you. When I advance, do you follow me; when I flinch, cut me down; when I fall, avenge me!” Then amid the cheers and tears of peasants, he sat in the great court-yard of his father’s abandoned house, and munched with them their coarse brown loaves. It was the first slight sign of his consecration to a cause. He had spoken famous words, hardly to be matched in history; words which have travelled far and wide, and proclaimed his spirit where his name is utterly unknown. Yesterday he was a carpet-knight; now, like “gallant Murray” in the song, “His gude sword he hath drawn it, And hath flung the sheath awa’.” There was no retrogression. Henri du Vergier de La Rochejaquelein, twenty years old, a little indolent hitherto, an athlete, a critic of horses and hounds, was suddenly shaken out of his velvet privacy into the rude lap of the Revolution. He was born in the village of Saint Aubin de Baubigné, near Châtillon-sur-Sèvre, in the broad-moated, wood- surrounded feudal castle of La Durbellière, on the thirtieth of August, 1772. He came of fighting stock. Among the ancestors of his name there were Crusaders, two warriors slain under Francis I. at Pavia, and a dear brother-in-arms of Henry of Navarre, who was wounded beside him on the battle-field of Arques. Henri’s father, the Marquis Henri- Louis-Auguste, died of the opening of an old scar in 1802, after able service in San Domingo, where he was defeated, with his English allies, by the blacks and the forces of Spain; his wife, a proprietress there, described in the parish books at home as “the high and powerful lady Constance-Lucie-Bonne de Caumont Dade,” was destined to survive her son also, but not long. They were the parents of two other sons and of four daughters, of all of whom it is perfect eulogy to say that they were alike. Henri, the second child and eldest boy, was intended for the military profession: while the supreme political storm was brewing he was completing his studies at Sorèze. This famous school in Lower Languedoc was just then, under the benignant rule of Dom Despaulx, in its prime. In the great plain under the shadow of Pepin’s Tower, the Benedictines could marshal their four hundred boys, in blue uniforms faced with red. Henri was probably something less than an enthusiast in botany and dancing (for all the arts had excellent show at Sorèze), but gentle as he was, he had no disrelish for the novitiate of war. He must have apprehended, even at the still college where, long after, the radical Republican, Père Lacordaire, set his bust to smile down upon the bent heads of the study hall, what strange transatlantic winds were already blowing over France. He looked forward always to a campaign, to spurs and sabres, and some mighty Jericho to assail. Courage he had as a birthright; the splendid animal nonchalance in face of danger, and, later, in a measure almost as ample, the fortitude of soul which “endures and is patient.” He went directly from school to Landrécy in 1785, joining the garrison as sub-lieutenant, his first commission being in the Royal Polish regiment, of which his father was then colonel. The marquis, a person of worth and fortune, had every reason to be pleased with his pretty cavalryman of thirteen, who had to get along as he could, without public favors, and who was treated with complimentary strictness. Henri became one of the constitutional guard at Versailles, which had replaced the household body-guard of Louis XVI., and six years later, when this was disbanded, he remained in Paris, by order of the King. His lodgings were in the Rue Jacob. On Friday, the terrible tenth of August, 1792, he was in the Tuileries, and narrowly escaped with his life; his companion, Charles D’Autichamp, crossing the bridge over the Seine, killed several men in his own defence. It is likely that Henri forced his way on a run through the great alley of the Champs Elysées, or found passage at the Queen’s garden-gate, where most who ventured were struck down; for he was not with those who went with Choiseul, sword in hand, on that ever-dramatic day, to join their master under the protection of the Assembly. Louis-Marie de Salgues, the young Marquis of Lescure, a cousin of the La Rochejaqueleins, reached Tours safely with his wife, along a road marshalled with forty thousand hostile troops; he owed his escape to the romantic gratitude of Thomassin, Parisian 1 2 3 4 5 6 commissary of police, whose pupil he had been. Haggard, wearied, wrought to the pitch of anxiety, they fled unawares into the heart of revolt and disturbance. La Durbellière was deserted; the family of La Rochejaquelein had emigrated, during the preceding December, to Germany; the parish had gone over to the will of the majority. Lescure, sheltered at his château of Clisson, in Boismé, Poitou, sent for his homeless kinsman. Thither, evading a series of perils, Henri went, stepping in among a strange huddled group of royalists: men of resources, like Bernard de Marigny, with his large joyousness of nature; men like the giddy, whimpering old Chevalier de La Cassaigne, who got the whole house into trouble by his officiousness, and whose name is often indulgently replaced by a blank; aristocrats, abbesses, notaries, old tutors, servants, distant relatives, and proscribed children, keeping vigil over the dying hopes of conservative France. Few rumors reached them of the fighting in Anjou; they ventured out into the roads but seldom, as the doors were jealously watched. They were of one heart and mind, undergoing agonies of suspense, and anon cheering one another with fireside tales, with indoor games and music. Marigny, the kind giant of a cousin, with his maskings and recitations, his mimicry of divers ages, conditions, and dialects, kept them alive with laughter. But Henri was the true centre of interest; all relied upon him, quiet and reserved as he was; from first to last he somehow made a moral brightness in the sombre lapses of those days. He was no courtier; “he had lived,” says the woman then Lescure’s bride, “but little in the world.” Here, through her, we have the earliest glimpse of his tall and comely figure, of his wheaten-yellow hair, his healthful color, his animated eyes, “his contour English rather than French.” Like a thunder-clap came the news of the King’s death. It had been provided that word should be sent to Clisson of any impending rescue. Not a hand worth counting had been raised to save him. Lescure and La Rochejaquelein looked at each other in profound grief and dismay; and among the twenty-five men in the château capable of bearing arms, the spark of desperate merriment flickered out. So they remained for months, in the midst of threats growing from day to day. Madame de Lescure was learning to ride, as an initiation into the possible life before her, and sat trembling upon the saddle, while her husband and Henri walked on either side over the greensward, supporting her, and comforting her tears. Henri began to be more moody and preoccupied, saying little. He traversed the country alone, often facing and surmounting danger with his consummate physical skill, sometimes hiding, or galloping madly to the woods. On one occasion gendarmes made a descent on Clisson, and carried off his favorite horse. They told Lescure that “the son of Monsieur de La Rochejaquelein was much more sharply suspected” than he was. “I do not see why,” Lescure replied, with his habitual directness; “we are relatives and fast friends; our opinions are quite the same.” Citizens were summoned to the defence of Bressuire. Lescure had been for four years back commandant of his parish of Boismé. Hourly he expected his orders to march against his insurgent neighbors: there seemed no way out of it. The men were holding a council of debate, determined, at least, to make a passive resistance when, early in April, the name of La Rochejaquelein was called to be drawn for the militia. On the track of this announcement followed a secret message, brought by a young peasant named Morin, from Henri’s unmarried aunt, living in retirement some miles away. Chollet had been taken; the people had arisen; there were wild hopes that the royalist faction might get the upperhand. The young peasant, eager and breathless, fixed his glance upon Henri. He spoke persuasively, with a fervor that seemed to thrill his whole body. “Sir, will you draw to-morrow for the militia, when your farmers are about to fight rather than be drafted? Come with us! The whole country-side looks to you; it will obey you.” “God wills it,” cried Peter the Hermit. He willed that God should will it, at any rate, and all Christendom took him at his word. The peasant boy had some spell beside eloquence, for Henri’s thinking was over. “Tell them that I will come,” he answered. That night, accompanied by one servant, a guide, and the tremulous Chevalier, afraid to stand his chances at Clisson, provided with a brace of pistols and carrying a stick, Henri mounted his horse and waved farewell. There were protestations, arguments, women’s prayers and tears; but he silently tightened his belt upon his pistols, and threw himself, at parting, into Lescure’s arms. “Then first came the eagle-look into his eyes” (says the gentle historian of La Vendée), “which never left them after.” Machecould, the Herbiers, and Chantonnay had already been seized by the insurgents, when Henri, racing across country to evade the Blues, reached the little army on the morrow of a nearly fatal victory at Chemillé, whose fruits had to be abandoned for lack of ammunition. He turned about and made another painful journey to Mademoiselle Anne- Henriette de La Rochejaquelein; and passed Easter there with her in the roomy house of charity at Saint Aubin, Le Rabot, which she had built in 1785; then, with a few young men, he hurried to the rebels’ quarters at Tiffanges, whither they had withdrawn. Stofflet, Bonchamp, D’Elbée, even Cathelineau, were disheartened; they had now but two pounds of powder; the shabby regiments were disbanding. Henri went back, brooding and restive, to Saint Aubin. It seemed as if opportunity, after all, had failed him. But the peasants found him, calling upon him as “Monsieur Henri!” a plain name which is historic now, and promising that in the course of a day a force of ten thousand men should join him. He urged them to gather at once by night, armed only, alas! with their cudgels, spits, hay-forks, scythes, and spades. They came in droves to the castle at Saint Aubin from Nueil, Rorthais, Echaubrognes, the Cerqueux, Saint Clémentin, Voultegon, Somloire, Etusson, Izernay. Quétineau’s trained division, three thousand strong, was before them. They had but two hundred muskets and sixty pounds of blasting powder, which Henri had discovered in a mason’s cellar. At dawn he took command, with the alarum on his lips. His gayety had come back; he had found his post. What he had to say fired itself in an epigram. He was a little pale, but very earnest, and his beautiful presence was another thousand men. He was only a boy, he said; but if he flinched they might, at least, cut him down; if he fell in battle, they would, at best, avenge him. And they stormed up together against the Aubiers on the seventeenth of April, 1793, as if in the first bustling act of a bright drama. 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 T HIS side-show of the great Revolution was a magnificent spectacle, and unique in the world’s annals. The seat of war, Vendée militaire, may be described roughly as being bounded on the north by the Loire from Saumur to the sea; on the west by the Atlantic; on the south by a line drawn from Sables d’Olonne across to Parthenay; and on the east by another line from Parthenay up again to Saumur. It was then comprised in some square leagues of old Anjou, Poitou, and Nantes; it is now divided into the four modern departments of Loire-Inférieure, Maine-et-Loire, Deux-Sèvres, and Vendée. The name Vendée, at first, indeed, minor and local, rose and spread after the affair at Challans on the twelfth of March, until it became representative of the people and their cause. And Vendée, once mentioned, means two things: the Marais, or low sea-coast district, a great meadow honey-combed with canals from the island of Bouin to Saint-Hilairie-de-Rie; and the inland Bocage, or thicket, in its own way quite as inaccessible. The latter, the centre of agitation, was settled by rugged, simple, honorable folk. It was glossy with woods of golden furze and pollard oaks, and broken everywhere with little hollows and little streams. It was a rough and arid place; it had few roads, and these were clayey and difficult; it was full of rocky pastures, hedge-rows, and trenches; dull in color, crabbed in outline, niggardly of distance. It had not a mountain nor any considerable landmark save the Hill of Larks. In the narrow flats it was all but impossible for the enemy to form; and utterly impossible for one detachment to communicate with another by signals. The puzzling Bocage was a glorious vantage-ground, however, for its own sons. The race which mastered it had great agility and nerve: Cæsar had called them invincible. They were not of a volatile humor, as were their compatriots in northern France; and yet they moved habitually in the very gravity and temperance of cheerfulness. The patriarchal life survived among them: the noble divided the proceeds of the land with his farmers; and he was his own steward, attending personally to business, and having for his tenants those with whom he had played as a boy. The ladies’ carriages were drawn by bullocks. On fête-days the wives and daughters of the hall danced with the peasants. After the Sunday services, among his devout flock the good curé read aloud the place of meeting for the week’s hunts. There were no feuds; a scandal was unheard of; a lawsuit was a twenty years’ wonder. The keys of the jail had taken to chronic rust. The shut-in Bocage had seen the beginnings of the national upheaval with but faint concern. Its own clergy were poor, its own gentry magnanimous; its liberties were entire; it had no great public abuses calling for reform. And through the outlying districts things were much the same. It was impossible, as Jeffrey wrote soon after in the Quarterly, to “revolutionize” a people so circumstanced. Innocent and happy as they were, it may be said of them that they had no history till the insurrection. It broke out in March of 1793, it was over in July of 1795; and those on its soil cannot speak of it yet without a throb of feeling. It was in the main, a religious war; one of the few since St. Louis’ in the thirteenth century, which has not disgraced the name; and the latest, indeed, known to general history. But it has been affirmed too often that the nobles and priests, active here as elsewhere for the losing cause, had roused the masses to revolt. M. Berthre de Bourniseaux, of Thouars, a Republican, says earnestly, that defensive war was produced by three causes, with none of which the influence of churchmen and kingsmen, as such, had anything to do. First, by the execrable tyranny of the Jacobins in worrying an intensely conservative section, which, in the proper Jacobinical jargon, was not “ripe” for the Revolution; second, by the foolish persistent persecution of their old faith in behalf of the goddess Reason—a thing borne long in silence and bewilderment, until the smouldering opposition sprang into the full stature of a blaze; third, by the forced levy of three hundred thousand men. On the twenty-first of January, 1791, Louis, after his usual hesitation, signed the decree authorizing the ejection of those vicars and curates who would not uphold the new civil constitution of the clergy. It may be believed that this stroke of national polity fell heavily in mid-France, where “priestcraft” had never figured as a word in any possible dictionary, and where the Roman obedience had been as perfectly established as the solar system in the popular mind. Says Lamartine: “The Revolution, until then exclusively political, became schism in the eyes of a portion of the clergy and the faithful. Among the bishops and priests, some took the civil oath, which was the guarantee of their lives; others refused to take it, or, having taken it, retracted. This gave rise to trouble in many a mind, to agitation of conscience, and to division in the temple. The great majority of parishes had now two ministers, the one a constitutional parson, salaried and protected by the state, the other refractory, refusing the oath, bereft of his income, driven from his sanctuary, and raising his altar in some clandestine chapel or in the open field. These rival upholders of the same worship excommunicated each other, one in the name of the Government, one in the name of the Pope and the Church.... The case was not actually, as it stood, persecution or civil war, but it was the sure prelude to both.... When war burst out, the Revolution had degenerated.” It was not until August that the report of the uprising in the provinces, and the full sense of its significance, were accredited at Paris. Simultaneously the air thickened with fierce rumors from Austria and Spain, and Dumouriez’s last watch-lights sputtered out upon the frontiers. While the attention of Europe was fixed for a moment on larger matters, the disbanding of ecclesiastics and the enrolling of conscripts engendered their natural sequence in ignored La Vendée, and the placid farm-country sprang forth prodigious, like a fireside spectre, menacing the fortunes of the house with a bloody hand. Let it be remembered, despite Carlyle’s random arrow at “simple people blown into flame and fury by theological and seignorial bellows,” that the nobles and the clergy, whatever may have been their desire, were too well informed to pit a forlorn corner of France against the united realm. Here, as in Paris, and for rival arguments exactly as apposite, the 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Revolution was a matter belonging to “the man on the street.” Against what they knew to be the spirit of rapine and injustice, the people, of themselves, arose. Their campaign had no intrigue, no pushing; it had absolute purity of intention. More perfectly than even the American civil war, this of La Vendée was fought on a moral principle, and on that solely, from the start. Every advantage possible was on the side of submission; the peasants would have been let alone and forgotten, presently had they been weaker, and wiser. Unable to foresee the majestic trend of events, not having in their own sore memories the germ of a verdict which was to reverse the world, they hit out, in the dark, against the local and the immediate wrong. Ignorant as they were, they were not ignorant of their jeopardized liberties. They opposed iniquitous laws for the sake of their own commune; their argument had premises impregnably sound. If they were mad, it must be added that they were right, too, in the fullest relative senses of earth and heaven. The titled gentry were compelled to join, in nearly every case, by their vehemence. D’Elbée, Bonchamp, Lescure, La Rochejaquelein, Charette, and many of the minor officers, were drawn from their very firesides, and urged into service. “You are no braver than we, but you know better how to manage,” so the frank fellows explained it to the lords. The priests, also, banished from their sad parishes for refusing the irregular oaths proposed by the Assembly, and cast adrift like the hill-side friars of Ireland, long held aloof from sanctioning the redress of arms. Nowhere, at any time, did they march nor combat with their flocks. When their bodies were found upon the field, it was manifest that they had been shot while ministering to the dying. Such, on this point, was the Vendean sensitiveness, and austere regard for the proprieties, that a young subdeacon discovered in the ranks was angrily and summarily dismissed. Not until the army was at Dol did the pastors ever attempt to “fanaticize” the soldiery by working upon their religious feeling as a means of reviving courage. Nor did the laymen ever waive towards them that which, in Turreau’s phrase, was their “blind and incurable attachment.” At a sign from some active Levite they actually disbanded during Holy Week of 1793. The Republican squadron, sent to quell the revolt, found the villages in dead quiet, and so returned north; but on Easter Monday the roads were alive again. Well was the Bocage called, by the earliest of its very few English critics, “the last land of romance in Europe.” The quarrel espoused for conscience’ sake had a child-like disinterestedness. What the men endured we know; the rewards they meant to ask for their success were these: that religion should be established, free of state interference; that the Bocage itself should be known as La Vendée, with a distinct administration; that the King should make it a visit, and retain a corps of Vendeans in his guard; and that the white flag should float forever from every steeple, in memory of the war! It is clear that they had little to wish for, and that they had no greed. Nor did they fight for glory, the dearest motive of their race. “There is no glory in civil war,” said Bonchamp, in what was, for once, too ascetic a generality. But they were dedicated souls; they bore themselves gently, gayly, without boast or spite; and they long continued to honor the obligations laid on them by the purest cause that ever drew sword. Their blows were struck for the independence of their religion, and only incidentally for the monarchy then identified with it. From the chivalrous conversation between the Marquis of Lescure and General Quétineau, then his prisoner, we learn that even Lescure would have rushed to the common defence had the Austrian made good his threat to pollute the soil of France. They failed, we say; yet what they fought for they secured: the liberty of the Church, and the restoration (temporary, as things are in France) of the government of their allegiance. Louis XVIII. was unworthy of their devotion. He was mean enough afterwards to reduce the pension granted by Napoleon himself to Madame de Bonchamp; to suspect the immeasurable loyalty of Madame de Lescure; to refuse admission to the portraits of Stofflet and Cathelineau when opening his gallery of generals at Saint Cloud, because, forsooth, they were but plebeians. In a hundred ways, by delayed recognitions, by temporizing, by denials, and by cringing to alien opinion (things deprecated with energy by the Abbé Deniau in his valuable work), he broke the faith of a too faithful party. Yet the praise the western subjects hoped for from the little Dauphin of 1793 they won from this man. “I owe my crown to the Vendeans,” he said, with the family characteristic of gracious speech. The peasants, therefore, driven to the wall, rebelled without forethought or plan; a desperate handful against the strength of new France. At remote points, with no concert whatever, hostilities began: on Sunday, March tenth, in Anjou, two days later in Lower Poitou; and months passed ere one knot of insurrectionists heard tidings of the other. With the populace at Maulevrier rose Stofflet, the swarthy game-keeper of the resident lord; Stofflet of the German accent, harsh and hard, big-nosed, unlettered, trusty, a keenly intelligent and masterful disciplinarian. But the noteworthiest leader was Jacques Cathelineau, “a painstaking, neighborly man,” wagoner, and vender of woollens. There had been a disturbance at Saint Florent over the drafting; the Government troops fired; the young recruits charged on their assailants and routed them, pillaging the municipality and burning the papers. Cathelineau of Pin-en- Mauges was kneading bread when he heard of it. “We must begin the war,” he murmured. His startled wife echoed his words, wailing: “Begin what war? Who will help you begin the war?” “God,” he answered quietly. Putting her aside, he wiped his arms, drew on his coat, and went out instantly to the market-place. That afternoon he attacked two Republican detachments and seized their ammunition, his small force augmenting on the march; in a few days it was one thousand strong, and carried Chollet. Cathelineau’s three brothers enlisted under his banner; in one short year all four were to be gathered into their stainless graves. He was called “the saint of Anjou,” and he deserved it; a man of truth, discretion, dignity, and sweetness, about whom the wounded crept to die. 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 T HOSE born in the purple had all the “tenderness with great spirit” of Plato’s elect race. They had the delicacy and high-mindedness of the primitive gentleman. A pleasant instance of the odd and fine retention of amenities in the cannon’s mouth, occurred before Nantes, where Stofflet, explosive as usual, found occasion to challenge Bonchamp. “No, sir,” said Bonchamp, “God and the King only have the disposal of my life, and our cause would suffer too greviously were it to be deprived of yours.” Friendships throve among them. Lescure, La Rochejaquelein, and Beauvolliers were closely attached to one another, as were Marigny and Perault. Preferments went wholly by natural nerve, intelligence, and a vote of deserts. There was no scheme of promotion to benefit those of gentle blood; the army, formed of a sudden, formed into a genuine democracy. “They never talked ‘equality’ in La Vendée.” But its first generalissimo, acclaimed with universal homage and good-will, was the peasant Cathelineau. No long- descended knight floated his own banner; as the Prince of Talmont had to be reminded at Fougères, the fleur-de-lys was sufficient for them all. Perfect confidence reigned. After the retaking of Châtillon, the young Dupérat, in company with three others, mischievously broke open the strong-box in Westermann’s carriage; there was presumptive evidence enough that they had taken money from it. A council ensued, and Dupérat, questioned by Lescure, denied that they had done so. His high character was known, and though the mystery was not cleared up, the proceedings were closed with an apology. Here, at Châtillon, pierced with twelve sabres, fell Beaurepaire, who had joined the “brigands” at eighteen. The Chevalier of Mondyon was a pretty lad of fourteen, a truant from his school. At the battle of Chantonnay the little fellow was placed next to a tall lieutenant, who, under the pretext of a wound, wished to withdraw. “I do not see that you are hurt, sir,” said the child; “and, as your departure would discourage the men, I will shoot you through the head if you stir.” And as he was quite capable of that Roman justice, the tall lieutenant stayed. De Langerie, two years Mondyon’s junior, had his pony killed under him in his first onset. Put at a safe and remote post, but without orders, he reappeared, during the hour, galloping back on a fresh horse to fight for the King. Duchaffault, at eleven, sent back to his mother, rode into the ranks again at Luçon, to die. Such were the boys of La Vendée. The Chevalier François-Athenase de Charette was first to lead the rebels in the wild marsh-lands of Lower Poitou. He had been a ship’s lieutenant. Despite the known laxity of his private conduct, Charette was a power. In matters of sense and courage he was equal to the best of his extraordinary colleagues, all of whom he was destined to outlive. He was twenty-eight years old when he took command at Machecould. Charles-Melchior Artus, Marquis of Bonchamp, was enrolled at the solemn inauguration of the war. He had seen service in India, and was in his early prime: a scholar, an accomplished tactician, and a man greatly beloved, whose name is yet in benediction. La Ville-Baugé, placed by force among the Blues (so called from the color of their coats, which under the kings had been white), abandoned them, and joined the insurgents at Thouars. He was a youth of marked steadiness and patience, dear to Lescure and to Henri. Gigot d’Elbée, late of the Dauphin cavalry, was forty years of age, already white-haired, of small and compact build. Possessed of many virtues, he was not a striking nor engaging character; his conceit, fortunately, harmed neither himself nor others. It was he who read sermons to his men, who carried with him the images of his patron saints, and who, above all, talked so much and so well of the wisdom which directs us, that the roguish congregation in camp fastened on him the nickname of “La Providence.” For Lescure, as for Cathelineau, the peasants had a veneration. Unselfish, contained and cool, versed admirably in military science, Lescure at twenty-six was a bookish recluse, with a heart all kindness, and a bearing somewhat lofty and austere. Born in 1766, in 1791 he had married his first cousin, Victoire, daughter of the fine mettlesome old Marquis of Donnissan. To this timid girl, who heroically followed her husband through the Vendean crisis (and who herself, years after, was to play a second illustrious role as the wife of Louis de La Rochejaquelein), we are beholden for the Mémoires, naïve and precious, which supply nearly every main detail of the long struggle, which persuaded out of life the ignorance and prejudice of its traducers, and which serve as the worthiest monument ever raised to the loving army, Catholic and Royal. 31 32 33 34 35 36 I N their curious dialect, the Vendeans had a verb, s’égailler, s’éparpiller, and they lived up to it. It meant scattering and sharp-shooting, every man for himself, in what we Americans might call the historic Lexington style. Each carried his cartridges in his pocket. If any complained of lack of powder, Henri had a pricking answer: “Well, my children, the Blues have plenty of it!” which reversed matters in five minutes. Bred in a hunting country, the King’s men were expert shots from boyhood. Farming weapons fixed on handles adorned the marching no-pay volunteers. Such guns as they had were put into the ablest hands; and wonderful musketeers they made, these hunters of Loroux and the Bocage. They crept behind walls and hedges, not firing, as did the troops of the line, at the height of a man, but aiming individually, and rarely missing, so that throughout an action their loss was but as one to five; they leaped garden terraces, and peered from the angles of strange little foot-paths, making sudden volleys and attacks, the chief usually foremost, the men eager and undrilled; or they ran forward by scores, fronting the hostile cannon, flinging themselves down at every explosion, and so creeping nearer and nearer, until they might grapple with the stupefied cannoneers hand to hand. This was their favorite strategy. More than one town was actually taken by savage wrestling and boxing, without a report of fire-arms at all. They lacked wagons, reserves, luggage; each carried his own rations. They travelled without a calendar, for that sanctioned by the Republic, and therefore, with Fabre d’Eglantine’s pretty fooleries of Floréal and Pluviose, cashiered, was the only one extant in France. They had thirty lively drums and no trumpets; when they wanted an inspiring noise they sang a hymn. Sentinels could not be trained; it seems incredible that they should have done for two years without pickets or patrols, except when the officers took turns at a necessary duty. But in this, as in other matters, the strong-minded rustics, who freely entered the ranks, reasoned, objected, fought shy, and were at once the solace and the despair of their commanders. A certain fatal independence was born in their blood. What chance, at any time and however valiant, has the army of momentary concurrence against the army of sworn obedience? Innocent of discipline, they were all but impossible to direct on an open plain. Every movement was a farce in tactics. A chief exercised his full authority according to the individual esteem in which he was held. This singular code, likely to be subversive of all authority elsewhere, was the only one which proud and willing Vendée could be brought to understand. “Such a general goes such a way,” the adjutant would call; “who goes with him?” And the tenants of his own seigneury, the guerilla vassals, would run with a shout after him, forming their lines by some convenient object—a house or a tree. Their Monsieur Henri had a formula borrowed unconsciously from the old war-cry of Gaston de Foix: “He who loves me follows me!” When he flashed down the front on his wonderful white horse, which the cheering peasants had christened the Fallowdeer, thinking nothing else could be so wild, so delicate, so amazingly swift, parish after parish rallied to him in a little cloud. The fashion of gathering in clans and bands, primitive as it was, had its advantages. Every one stood, in action, next another of his own estate or blood; and La Vendée was notoriously careful of its wounded and slain. Never were men more dependent on the nerve and sagacity of their leaders. A disabled officer dared not budge, or the crazy columns would give way. Lescure, unhorsed at Saumur, would have kept the troops ignorant of his hurt had not the boy Beauvolliers thrown himself upon him with a loud cry of lamentation and started a panic in the ranks. Charette being wounded long after at Dufour, his regiments dispersed like sheep. When Cathelineau of the shining brow fell in sight of his army, there was instant rout. At the recapture of Châtillon many a dissembler, sick and weak, rode forth in affected vigor, and so forced the splendid issue of the day. The cavalry bestrode steeds of divers eccentricities, but at the tails of one and all figured the enemy’s derided tri- color cockade. Ropes were stirrups to these gallant paladins, and their sabres hung by packthreads. They had small leisure for the conventions of the toilet: their hair and beards looked like Orson’s. The officers wore woollen blouses and gaiters, having, like the others, the little red consecrated heart sewed on their coats; they lacked at first any distinguishing dress. Neither they nor the privates received a sou for services; if a man were in want he asked for a disbursement, and, until supplies failed, he got it. Funds flowed into the general reservoir from the pockets of the gentry, and from a source as obvious—the rights of confiscation. The main army averaged twenty thousand men; at a pinch it could be doubled. Sobriety reigned in the camps, though it was the one considerable virtue to which the good peasants, un-French in most matters, were not blindly addicted. Considering the prohibition against the presence of women, it is surprising to find here and there undetected in the van some spotless amazon like Jeanne Robin, or the revered Renée Bordereau, or Dame de La Rochefoucauld, a cavalry captain, shot upon the Breton coast. Piety was universal. The scythe-bearing soldiery, meeting a wayside cross half-way to the battery, would doff hats and kneel an instant, then charge like fiends on the foe. The parishes sent carts to the road-side, laden with provisions for the passing cohorts. The women, children, and old men knelt in the cornfields, while the din went on afar off, to beseech the Lord of Hosts. At Laval and Chollet, where the sieges closed perforce in one mad scrimmage in the dark, the Vendeans fired wherever they heard an oath, surer than ever the Cromwellians were before them, that in that direction they could bag none but legitimate game. The peasants were so many big children; they had no adult comprehension of their momentous concerns, to which they gave themselves by spurts, with perfect disinterestedness, ardor, and zeal. After the first hint that the victory was 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44