DC 
 
 ZiS 
 
 
 L^GrS 
 
 m 
 
 "MONSIEUR HENRI 
 
 ^Vaj"' 
 
 
 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 ®^ji.-P.^ iw«s¥ 1 » 
 
 Shelf „L3G:d 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
''MONSIEUR HENRI" 
 
 A FOOT-NOTE TO 
 FRENCH HISTORY BY 
 LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 
 
 
 NEW YORK HARPER 6- BROTHERS 
 PRINTERS 6- PUBLISHERS MDCCCXCII 
 
DC 212 
 
 .LsGrS 
 
 Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
TO 
 
 MADAME MARIE-ANGE BONDROIT 
 R.S.CJ. 
 
 When you were first an exile, and at Elm- 
 hurst, 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 Vendue, 
 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 im- 
 passioned 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 Abbe Deniau, Histoire de la Guerre de 
 la Vendee. 
 
 "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 A dmirals. 
 
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 uncata- 
 logued), of the Bibliotheque Nationale. 
 Madame de La Rochejaquelein's beauti- 
 ful Memoires 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 weigh- 
 ed, and the material, if not the propor- 
 tioning 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 Mon- 
 sieur le Cure and Monsieur le Vicaire of 
 Saint-Aubin-de-Baubigne, who, for the 
 sake of the immortal Red Handkerchief 
 unknown to English literature, bright- 
 ened my frosty travels in the old Bo- 
 cage ; to Madame la Comtesse de Chabot 
 of Boissiere ; 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 re- 
 turn, this late, my faithful and ever affec- 
 tionate thanks. L, I. G. 
 
 London, 1891. 
 
"MONSIEUR HENRI": 
 
 A FOOT-NOTE TO FRENCH HISTORY. 
 
 lEFORE a crowd of excited 
 farmers, a young French- 
 man, 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 aban- 
 doned 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 Mur- 
 ray " 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 Revo- 
 lution. 
 
 He was born in the village of Saint 
 Aubin de Baubigne, near Chatillon-sur- 
 Sevre, in the broad-moated, wood-sur- 
 rounded feudal castle of La Durbelliere, 
 on the thirtieth of August, 1772. He 
 
came of fighting stock. Among the an- 
 cestors of his name there were Crusad- 
 ers, 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 Do- 
 mingo, 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 Con- 
 stance-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 com- 
 
pleting his studies at Soreze. This fa- 
 mous 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 uni- 
 forms faced with red. Henri was prob- 
 ably something less than an enthusiast 
 in botany and dancing (for all the arts 
 had excellent show at Soreze), but gentle 
 as he was, he had no disrelish for the 
 novitiate of war. He must have appre- 
 hended, even at the still college where, 
 long after, the radical Republican, Pere 
 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 look- 
 ed forward always to a campaign, to 
 spurs and sabres, and some mighty Jer- 
 icho to assail. Courage he had as a 
 birthright; the splendid animal non- 
 
5 
 
 chalance in face of danger, and, later, in 
 a measure almost as ample, the forti- 
 tude of soul which " endures and is pa- 
 tient." He went directly from school to 
 Landrecy 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 com- 
 plimentary 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 dis- 
 banded, 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, cross- 
 ing 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 Elysees, 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 Sal- 
 gues, the young Marquis of Lescure, a 
 cousin of the La Rochejaqueleins, reach- 
 ed 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 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 dis- 
 turbance. La Durbelliere was deserted ; 
 
the family of La Rochejaqueleiii had emi- 
 grated, during the preceding December, 
 to Germany ; the parish had gone over to 
 the will of the majority. Lescure, shel- 
 tered at his chateau of Clisson, in Bois- 
 me, Poitou, sent for his homeless kins- 
 man. Thither, evading a series of perils, 
 Henri went, stepping in among a strange 
 huddled group of royalists i men of re- 
 sources, 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, nota- 
 ries, old tutors, servants, distant rela- 
 tives, and proscribed children, keeping 
 vigil over the dying hopes of conserva- 
 tive 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 in- 
 door 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 dis- 
 may ; and among the twenty-five men in 
 the chateau 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 learn- 
 ing to ride, as an initiation into the pos- 
 sible life before her, and sat trembling 
 upon the saddle, while her husband and 
 Henri walked on either side over the 
 greensward, supporting her, and comfort- 
 ing 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 de- 
 scent on Clisson, and carried off his fa- 
 
vorite horse. They told Lescure that 
 "the son of Monsieur de La Rocheja- 
 quelein was much more sharply suspec- 
 ted " than he was. " I do not see why,'' 
 Lescure replied, with his habitual direct- 
 ness ; "we are relatives and fast friends; 
 our opinions are quite the same." 
 
 Citizens were summoned to the de- 
 fence of Bressuire. Lescure had been 
 for four years back commandant of his 
 parish of Boisme. 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 call- 
 ed to be drawn for the militia. On the 
 track of this announcement followed a 
 secret message, brought by a young peas- 
 ant named Morin, from Henri's unmar- 
 ried aunt, living in retirement some miles 
 away. Chollet had been taken ; the peo- 
 
pie 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 think- 
 ing was over. " Tell them that I will 
 come," he answered. That night, ac- 
 companied 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, ar- 
 guments, 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 Vendee), "which 
 never left them after." 
 
 Machecould, the Herbiers, and Chan- 
 tonnay 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 Chemille, whose fruits 
 had to be abandoned for lack of ammu- 
 nition. He turned about and made an- 
 other 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 hur- 
 ried to the rebels' quarters at Tiffanges, 
 
whither they had withdrawn. Stofflet, 
 Bonchamp, D'Elbee, even Cathehneau, 
 were disheartened; they had now but 
 two pounds of powder ; the shabby reg- 
 iments were disbanding. Henri went 
 back, brooding and restive, to Saint Au- 
 bin. It seemed as if opportunity, after 
 all, had failed him. But the peasants 
 found him, calling upon him as " Mon- 
 sieur Henri !" a plain name which is his- 
 toric 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 Clementin, Voultegon, Somloire, 
 Etusson, Izernay. Quetineau's trained di- 
 vision, three thousand strong, was before 
 them. They had but two hundred mus- 
 kets 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 thous- 
 and 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 Au- 
 biers on the seventeenth of April, 1793, 
 as if in the first bustling act of a bright 
 drama. 
 
 t 
 
f 
 
 HIS side-show of the great 
 Revolution was a magnifi- 
 cent spectacle, and unique 
 in the world's annals. The 
 seat of war, Vendee inili- 
 taire, 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 Parthe- 
 nay ; 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 de- 
 partments of Loire-Inferieure, Maine-et- 
 Loire, Deux-Sevres, and Vendee. The 
 name Vendee, at first, indeed, minor and 
 
i6 
 
 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 Vendee, once men- 
 tioned, means two things : the Marais, or 
 low sea-coast district, a great meadow 
 honey-combed with canals from the isl- 
 and of Bouin to Saint-Hilairie-de-Rie; 
 and the inland Bocage, or thicket, in its 
 own way quite as inaccessible. The lat- 
 ter, 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 consid- 
 erable landmark save the Hill of Larks. 
 In the narrow fiats it was all but impos- 
 
sible for the enemy to form ; and utterly- 
 impossible for one detachment to com- 
 municate with another by signals. The 
 puzzling Bocage was a glorious van- 
 tage-ground, however, for its own sons. 
 The race which mastered it had great 
 agility and nerve : Caesar had called 
 them invincible. They were not of a 
 volatile humor, as were their compat- 
 riots 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 per- 
 sonally to business, and having for 
 his tenants those with whom he had 
 played as a boy. The ladies' carriages 
 were drawn by bullocks. On fete-days 
 the wives and daughters of the hall 
 danced with the peasants. After the 
 Sunday services, among his devout flock 
 
the good curi 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' won- 
 der. The keys of the jail had taken to 
 chronic rust. The shut-in Bocage had 
 seen the beginnings of the national up- 
 heaval with but faint concern. Its own 
 clergy were poor, its own gentry mag- 
 nanimous ; its liberties were entire ; it 
 had no great public abuses calling for 
 reform. And through the outlying dis- 
 tricts things were much the same. It 
 was impossible, as Jeffrey wrote soon 
 after in the Quarterly, to "revolution- 
 ize" a people so circumstanced. Inno- 
 cent 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 dis- 
 graced the name ; and the latest, in- 
 deed, 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. Ber- 
 thre de Bourniseaux, of Thouars, a 
 Republican, says earnestly, that defen- 
 sive w^ar was produced by three causes, 
 with none of which the influence of 
 churchmen and kingsmen, as such, had 
 anything to do. First, by the execra- 
 ble tyranny of the Jacobins in worry- 
 ing an intensely conservative section, 
 which, in the proper Jacobinical jargon, 
 was not " ripe " for the Revolution ; sec- 
 ond, by the foolish persistent persecu- 
 tion 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, 
 1 791, Louis, after his usual hesitation, 
 signed the decree authorizing the ejec- 
 tion of those vicars and curates who 
 would not uphold the new civil consti- 
 tution of the clergy. It may be believed 
 that this stroke of national polity fell 
 heavily in mid -France, where "priest- 
 craft " 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 polit- 
 ical, 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 guar- 
 antee 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 ma- 
 jority of parishes had now two minis- 
 ters, the one a constitutional parson, 
 salaried and protected by the state, the 
 other refractory, refusing the oath, be- 
 reft of his income, driven from his sanct- 
 uary, and raising his altar in some clan- 
 destine chapel or in the open field. These 
 rival upholders of the same worship ex- 
 communicated 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, per- 
 secution 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 accred- 
 ited at Paris. Simultaneously the air 
 thickened with fierce rumors from Aus- 
 tria and Spain, and Dumouriez's last 
 
watch - lights sputtered out upon the 
 frontiers. While the attention of Eu- 
 rope was fixed for a moment on larger 
 matters, the disbanding of ecclesiastics 
 and the enrolling of conscripts engen- 
 dered their natural sequence in ignored 
 La Vendee, 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 
 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. 
 
23 
 
 Their campaign had no intrigue, no push- 
 ing ; it had absolute purity of intention. 
 More perfectly than even the American 
 civil war, this of La Vendee was fought 
 on a moral principle, and on that solely, 
 from the start. Every advantage possible 
 was on the side of submission ; the peas- 
 ants would have been let alone and for- 
 gotten, presently had they been weaker, 
 and wiser. Unable to foresee the majes- 
 tic 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 in- 
 iquitous 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 
 
24 
 
 compelled to join, in nearly every case, 
 by their vehemence. D'Elbee, Bon- 
 champ, 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 Assem- 
 bly, and cast adrift like the hill-side friars 
 of Ireland, long held aloof from sanction- 
 ing 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 man- 
 ifest that they had been shot while min- 
 istering to the dying. Such, on this point, 
 was the Vendean sensitiveness, and aus- 
 tere 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 suc- 
 cess were these : that religion should be 
 established, free of state interference; 
 
that the Bocage itself should be known 
 as La Vendee, with a distinct adminis- 
 tration ; 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 mem- 
 ory 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 ded- 
 icated souls ; they bore themselves gen- 
 tly, gayly, without boast or spite ; and 
 they long continued to honor the ob- 
 ligations laid on them by the purest 
 cause that ever drew sword. Their 
 blows were struck for the independ- 
 ence of their religion, and only inci- 
 dentally for the monarchy then identi- 
 fied with it. From the chivalrous con- 
 versation between the Marquis of Les- 
 
27 
 
 cure and General Quetineau, then his 
 prisoner, we learn that even Lescure 
 would have rushed to the common de- 
 fence 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 govern- 
 ment of their allegiance. Louis XVIII. 
 was unworthy of their devotion. He 
 was mean enough afterwards to reduce 
 the pension granted by Napoleon him- 
 self to Madame de Bonchamp ; to sus- 
 pect the immeasurable loyalty of Ma- 
 dame de Lescure ; to refuse admission 
 to the portraits of Stofflet and Catheli- 
 neau when opening his gallery of gen- 
 erals at Saint Cloud, because, forsooth, 
 they were but plebeians. In a hundred 
 ways, by delayed recognitions, by tempo- 
 rizing, by denials, and by cringing to alien 
 opinion (things deprecated with energy 
 
28 
 
 by the Abbe Deniau in his valuable 
 work), he broke the faith of a too faith- 
 ful party. Yet the praise the western 
 subjects hoped for from the little Dau- 
 phin of 1793 they v/on 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, hostil- 
 ities began : on Sunday, March tenth, in 
 Anjou, two days later in Lower Poitou ; 
 and months passed ere one knot of in- 
 surrectionists heard tidings of the other. 
 With the populace at Maulevrier rose 
 Stofiflet, the swarthy game-keeper of the 
 resident lord ; Stofflet of the German ac- 
 cent, harsh and hard, big-nosed, unlet- 
 tered, trusty, a keenly intelligent and 
 masterful disciplinarian. But the note- 
 
29 
 
 worthiest leader was Jacques Cathe- 
 lineau, "a painstaking, neighborly man," 
 wagoner, and vender of woollens. 
 There had been a disturbance at Saint 
 Florent over the drafting ; the Gov- 
 ernment troops fired ; the young re- 
 cruits 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 quiet- 
 ly. Putting her aside, he wiped his 
 arms, drew on his coat, and went out 
 instantly to the market-place. That af- 
 ternoon he attacked two Republican de- 
 tachments and seized their ammunition, 
 his small force augmenting on the 
 march ; in a few days it was one thou- 
 sand strong, and carried ChoUet. Cath- 
 
3° 
 
 elineau'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. 
 
HOSE born in the purple 
 had all the "tenderness with 
 great spirit " of Plato's elect 
 race. They had the deli- 
 cacy and high-mindedness 
 of the primitive gentleman. A pleasant 
 instance of the odd and fine retention of 
 amenities in the cannon's mouth, occur- 
 red before Nantes, where Stoffiet, explo- 
 sive as usual, found occasion to challenge 
 Bonchamp. " No, sir," said Bonchamp, 
 "God and the King only have the dis- 
 posal of my life, and our cause would 
 suffer too greviously were it to be de- 
 prived of yours." Friendships throve 
 among them. Lescure, La Rochejaque- 
 lein, and Beauvolliers were closely at- 
 tached 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 pro- 
 motion to benefit those of gentle blood ; 
 the army, formed of a sudden, formed 
 into a genuine democracy. " They never 
 talked ' equality ' in La Vendee." But its 
 first generalissimo, acclaimed with uni- 
 versal homage and good-will, was the 
 peasant Cathelineau. No long-descend- 
 ed knight floated his own banner ; as the 
 Prince of Talmont had to be reminded 
 at Fougeres, th.Qjieiir-de-lys was sufficient 
 for them all. Perfect confidence reigned. 
 After the retaking of Chatillon, the 
 young Duperat, 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 Duperat, questioned 
 by Lescure, denied that they had done 
 so. His high character was known, and 
 
33 
 
 though the mystery was not cleared up, 
 the proceedings were closed with an 
 apology. Here, at Chatillon, 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 lieuten- 
 ant, 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 capa- 
 ble of that Roman justice, the tall lieu- 
 tenant 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 
 
 3 
 
to his mother, rode into the ranks again 
 at Lugon, to die. Such were the boys of 
 La Vendee. 
 
 The Chevaher Frangois-Athenase de 
 Charette was first to lead the rebels in 
 the wild marsh-lands of Lower Poitou. 
 He had been a ship's lieutenant. De- 
 spite 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 Mache- 
 could. Charles-Melchior Artus, Marquis 
 of Bonchamp, was enrolled at the sol- 
 emn 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-Bauge, 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'Elbee, 
 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, fortu- 
 nately,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, con- 
 gregation in camp fastened on him the 
 nickname of " La Provide7ice." For Les- 
 cure, 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 kind- 
 
36 
 
 ness, and a bearing somewhat lofty and 
 austere. Born in 1766, in 1791 he had 
 married his first cousin, Victoire, daugh- 
 ter 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 illus- 
 trious role as the wife of Louis de La 
 Rochejaquelein), we are beholden for 
 the Memoires, naive 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 worth- 
 iest monument ever raised to the loving 
 army, Catholic and Royal. 
 
N their curious dialect, the 
 Vendeans had a verb, sega- 
 iller, s'eparpiller, and they 
 lived up to it. It meant 
 scattering and sharp-shoot- 
 ing, every man for himself, in what we 
 Americans might call the historic Lex- 
 ington style. Each carried his car- 
 tridges in his pocket. If any com- 
 plained 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 htmting country, the King's men 
 were expert shots from boyhood. Farm- 
 ing 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 aim- 
 ing 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 grap- 
 ple 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 
 
39 
 
 a calendar, for that sanctioned by the 
 Republic, and therefore, with Fabred'Eg- 
 lantine's pretty fooleries of Flordal and 
 Pluviose, cashiered, was the only one 
 extant in France. 
 
 They had thirty lively drums and no 
 trumpets ; when they wanted an inspir- 
 ing noise they sang a hymn. Sentinels 
 could not be trained ; it seems incred- 
 ible that they should have done for two 
 years without pickets or patrols, except 
 when the officers took turns at a nec- 
 essary duty. But in this, as in other 
 matters, the strong-minded rustics, who 
 freely entered the ranks, reasoned, ob- 
 jected, fought shy, and were at once the 
 solace and the despair of their com- 
 manders. 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 ac- 
 cording 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 Vendee 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, form- 
 ing their lines by some convenient object 
 — a house or a tree. Their Monsieur 
 Henri had a formula borrowed uncon- 
 sciously from the old war-cry of Gas- 
 ton 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 amaz- 
 
ingly swift, parish after parish raUied 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 Vendee 
 was notoriously careful of its wounded 
 and slain. Never were men more de- 
 pendent on the nerve and sagacity of 
 their leaders. A disabled officer dared 
 not budge, or the crazy columns would 
 give way. Lescure, unhorsed at Sau- 
 mur, would have kept the troops igno- 
 rant of his hurt had not the boy Beauvol- 
 liers 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 regi- 
 ments dispersed like sheep. When Cath- 
 elineau of the shining brow fell in sight 
 of his army, there was instant rout. At 
 the recapture of Chatillon many a dis- 
 sembler, 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 lei- 
 sure for the conventions of the toilet: 
 their hair and beards looked like Or- 
 son'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 dis- 
 tinguishing dress. Neither they nor the 
 privates received a sou for services ; if a 
 man were in want he asked for a dis- 
 bursement, 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 aver- 
 aged 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. Consider- 
 ing the prohibition against the presence 
 of women, it is surprising to find here and 
 there undetected in the van some spot- 
 less amazon like Jeanne Robin, or the re- 
 vered Renee Bordereau, or Dame de La 
 Rochefoucauld, a cavalry captain, shot 
 upon the Breton coast. Piety was uni- 
 versal. The scythe - bearing soldiery, 
 meeting a wayside cross half-way to the 
 battery, would doff hats and kneel an in- 
 stant, 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 Cromwelhans were before 
 them, that in that direction they could 
 bag none but legitimate game. 
 
 The peasants were so many big chil- 
 dren ; 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 
 theirs, they hastened to ring the church- 
 bells, and make bonfires of the papers of 
 the administration — proceedings which, 
 according to Madame de Lescure, af- 
 forded them unfailing amusement. They 
 went into action like a black whirlwind, 
 with roundelays or litanies on their lips, 
 and the continuous battle-cry: "The 
 King for us, all the same !" They frol- 
 icked about the famous twelve-pounder 
 they had named Marie -Jeanne ; they 
 kissed its ornate brazen rim ; they buried 
 
45 
 
 its inscriptions of Richelieu's era in 
 flowers and ribbons ; they lost it with 
 mopings, and they recaptured it with 
 salvos of joy. "Above all things, boys, 
 we must get Marie-Jeanne back !" cried 
 La Rochejaquelein on a certain occasion. 
 " The best runner among you, that's 
 the man for her !" There was no reason 
 whatever for such special devotion : it 
 was pure fun on all sides. They were 
 never under arms for more than a few 
 consecutive days. The gathering to- 
 gether was a sensational sight. The 
 church -bells clanged for a signal, the 
 windmills gesticulated, horns were blown 
 on the hills; and proprietor, farmer, 
 peasant, with sticks and hunting -guns, 
 came threading the hedges, and running 
 in many a long dark line through the 
 waving crops into the village market- 
 place. The troops were repeatedly dis- 
 persing and rallying, giving their chiefs 
 endless worry and chagrin. They fought, 
 
46 
 
 like Spenser's angels, " all for love, and 
 nothing for reward." But they left the 
 ranks when they chose ; after a success, 
 rather than after a defeat, they would 
 scatter to their homes like so much this- 
 tle-down in the air, and it was hopeless 
 to try to follow up an advantage gained. 
 It was when difficulties were suspended 
 that, in the wisdom of their villageous 
 heads, they hurried off, one to his wife, 
 and one to his farm, and one to his mer- 
 chandise. No general was baffled and 
 angered oftener by this freak than Henri. 
 The valor of the Vendeans was incompar- 
 able, though one might borrow a musical 
 metaphor and add that it swerved too 
 easily from pitch. And it is noteworthy, 
 as by a paradox, that whenever they 
 wavered it was not, at least, through 
 dread of any personal hardship. They 
 were often ragged and hungry, but they 
 did not play truant for that. They soon 
 underwent horrible poverty and distress. 
 
47 
 
 and lacked food and clothes. The 
 picked men of a company long marched 
 in grotesque dominos out of sacked 
 playhouses, in lawyers' gowns, even in 
 furniture-stuffs and draperies. The chiv- 
 alric De Verteuil was found dead on the 
 field equipped in two petticoats, one 
 about his neck, the other about his 
 waist: as noble armor, perhaps, as offi- 
 cer ever wore. Frequently, when ammu- 
 nition was in abundance, the unaccount- 
 able army was overcome ; and as often, 
 without a carabine among six, it swept 
 everything before it. Napoleon was the 
 first to see — all the world sees now — 
 how little was wanted to secure their 
 ultimate triumph ; how drill, a few kegs 
 of powder, a few observant, able, cool 
 heads where the exiles were congregat- 
 ed, and the prestige and authority of 
 some royal name, might have built up 
 again, it may be in justice, the ancient 
 fabric surely in justice pulled down. 
 
48 
 
 They had no fair play. "Yet these 
 same men, by bravery and enthusiasm, 
 and by knowledge developed of short 
 experience, conquered a part of France, 
 obtained an honorable peace, and de- 
 fended their cause with more glory and 
 success than did the leagued allies." 
 
 As we get away from the grim ethics 
 of history the aesthetics of it take shape 
 and color, and give us an abstract pleas- 
 ure from the centres of thought and 
 pain. There is an unspeakable attract- 
 iveness, despite all, in the image of these 
 turbulent years — an almost Arabian be- 
 guilement, as of something which never 
 need be true. The course of events is 
 like a romantic drama, full of " points," 
 of poses, of electric surprises ; the dia- 
 logue flows in alexandrines ; the crises 
 are settled in the nick of time. The 
 talk is the rhetoric of hearts sincere, but 
 French. The devoted Marquis of Don- 
 nissan breaks in upon two duelling 
 
49 
 
 swords : " ' What ! the Lord Christ par- 
 dons his executioners, and a soldier of 
 the Christian army tries to slay his com- 
 rade ?' At these words they drop their 
 swords and embrace each other !" Or, 
 after the terrible battle of Mans, and not 
 long before her little daughter's birth, 
 Madame de Lescure, hemmed in the 
 choked streets of the city, catches in de- 
 spair at the hand of a gentle-faced young 
 trooper pushing by : " Sir, have pity on 
 a poor woman who cannot go on. Help 
 me !" Whereupon the young trooper 
 weeps some feverish tears : " What can 
 I do ? I am a woman also !" Or that 
 charming impostor, the pseudo-bishop of 
 Agra, stands up before the serried lines, 
 and sheds upon them such prose as 
 Matthew Arnold should praise forever : 
 ''Race antique etfidele des serviteursde 7ios 
 rozSypz'eux zelateiirs du trone et de Vautel, 
 etifants de la Ve?tdee, marckez, cojnbattez, 
 triomphez! C'estDieu qui vous Vordonne." 
 
HE sportsman Count of La 
 Rochejaquelein had it all 
 his own way at the Aubiers. 
 He took the town, and 
 captured large supplies, and 
 gleefully perched upon the cemetery wall, 
 fired no less than two hundred telling 
 shots. Thence he rode by night to Bon- 
 champ and D'Elbee, and to the weary 
 allies of Anjou, bringing aid and arms ; 
 and, as a gift not least, the contagious 
 cheer that was in him. When he had 
 fulfilled his public duty, but not before 
 that, he flew to the rescue of his friends. 
 Scarcely had Henri left Clisson, in the 
 spring, when Lescure and all his family 
 were seized as suspects, and conducted 
 to Bressuire, but forgotten there when 
 
fear caused an evacuation of the borough. 
 Henri himself easily carried it, and burst 
 in upon them at the chateau, crying that 
 he had freed them. By a comical incon 
 sistency, great numbers of the Republican 
 inhabitants rushed for protection back 
 to Clisson, as soon as Citizen Lescure, 
 walking a free man from Bressuire, had 
 entered the gates. That godly gentle- 
 man made bashful Henri kiss every 
 woman among them, to ease their fears 
 of the "monster" whom they believed 
 him to be. 
 
 Six victories, due to Henri's restless 
 energy, followed in swift succession. 
 Though his growth, in all things, was 
 steadily towards reasonableness and the 
 golden mean, his chief early character- 
 istic was hare-brained intrepidity; a 
 habit of confronting too near, pursuing 
 too far, " combating with giants," as old 
 Burton says of his warrior, " running 
 first upon a breach, and, as another 
 
52 
 
 Phillipus, riding into the thickest of his 
 enemies." He was wholly without fear, 
 and often, at first, without foresight ; and 
 it took many bitter denials and reverses 
 to teach him the pardonableness of de- 
 liberation and second thought in others. 
 But while he lived, wherever he went, he 
 was a force. He was of the stuff of Ho- 
 mer's joyous men. His decisive fashion 
 swayed elder and better soldiers. His 
 troops were his for risks such as no gen- 
 eral else besought them to run ; every 
 day he won their hearts anew by some 
 spurt of daring, some astonishing fooling 
 with death or failure. Many a dragoon 
 was cut down with his sabre ; horses 
 were slain under him again and again. 
 It is said of him that he never took a 
 prisoner without offering him a single 
 fight, sword to sword. This laughing 
 audacity of his had no cant in it. It was 
 the metal of which he was made, that 
 which he lived by, the blameless outcome 
 
53 
 
 of himself : a thing to sadden and exas- 
 perate his companions, and fill them 
 with foreboding. Pilgrim-shells are 
 quartered upon the arms of his house, 
 "the scallop-shells of quiet," as the poet 
 sings. A more sarcastic advice for the 
 La Rochejaqueleins it would be impos- 
 sible to conceive ! 
 
 As the close study of the Vendeans 
 brings to mind the character of the 
 Scotch Highlanders, great at an onset, 
 with not a whit more native knowledge 
 of the common etiquette of war, so Hen- 
 ri himself, in sober simplicity of nature, 
 in the firm thoroughness of all he had to 
 do, even in the agreeable accident of 
 personal beauty, is not unlike a much- 
 maligned man who lived a century be- 
 fore him : John Graham of Claverhouse, 
 the never-to-be-forgotten " deil o' Dun- 
 dee." Claverhouse had a habit of curl- 
 ing his hair on papers ; and one learns, 
 with the same sensation, that Henri had 
 
54 
 
 one of those singular antipathies no ef- 
 fort of will can correct. At Pontorson, 
 while Madame de Lescure was sewing in a 
 room, with a tame black-and-gray squirrel 
 in her lap, he came in, and backed against 
 the door, pale and trembling. The sight 
 of a squirrel, as he said with a laugh, gave 
 him a feeling of invincible terror ! His 
 friend asked him to stroke the little 
 creature. He did so, shaking in every 
 limb, and avowing his weakness with 
 great good-humor. He was never much 
 of a talker. Discussions were intolerable 
 to him. If called upon in council, he 
 would speak his mind briefly, overcom- 
 ing an extreme diffidence ; and having 
 done, he withdrew, or worse, fell asleep. 
 No one was more humane at battle's 
 end ; but, nevertheless, Henri's element 
 was battle. His Paradise was like the 
 heathen board, where, after the combat 
 and the chase, he might sit at the " red 
 right hand of Odin ;" and the masterly 
 
rider looked forward to a life where he 
 might play soldier forever. " When the 
 King " (Louis XVII.) " is on the throne," 
 he confided to his cousin Lescure, " I 
 shall ask for a regiment of hussars, a 
 regiment always on the gallop." It was 
 his whole desire of guerdon. 
 
 Lescure had also the Roman devoted- 
 ness : any morning he stood ready to 
 outdo Curtius and Horatius. In the 
 rout of Moulin-aux-Chevres he drew the 
 hostile squadrons from the pursuit of the 
 frantic Vendeans by calling their atten- 
 tion to himself and to La Rochejaquelein 
 by name. At Thouars he gained the 
 bridge of Vrine alone, amid a shower 
 of balls. He returned to his dispirited 
 band with exhortations ; one emboldened 
 comrade followed him to the second 
 charge. But on the instant Henri ar- 
 rived with Forestier, to join Lescure and 
 fire the lagging troops, as the celestial 
 armies are fabled to have fought at need 
 
56 
 
 for the old commonwealths. Here, this 
 same day, mounted on the shoulders of 
 a gigantic peasant named Texier, one of 
 the most useful men in the ranks, Henri 
 broke the mouldy coping of the fortress 
 wall, and through the breach hurled 
 stones at the flying Blues. His course 
 henceforward is to be tracked in these 
 flashing incidents, deeds compacted of 
 demonic sense and wit. Pauvert de- 
 picts him breaking the tri-color lines 
 outside Argenton merely by whistling 
 through, with two friends in his train, 
 like a blast of wind. At Chateau-Gontier 
 he seized and bore the colors ; there and 
 elsewhere, wherever he moved, bullets 
 ploughed the ground under him, and sent 
 up a puff of dust to his spurs. While 
 his weary infantry slept, he was known 
 to watch for them, in an exposed biv- 
 ouac, and turn his idleness to account 
 by picking cartridges for his poorer 
 " children " out of the wealthy pockets 
 
57 
 
 of the adjacent slain. He and Stofflet 
 reconnoitred the streets of hostile Cha- 
 tillon by night, on all fours, the sentinel 
 refraining from challenging the passage 
 of the big dogs they were supposed to 
 be. Observe the tricks of a generalis- 
 simo, on whose safety the balance of 
 empire hung ! He was a lad ; he did not 
 know his value ; but what he did know 
 was that nobody could manage these 
 indispensable lesser manoeuvres so ex- 
 quisitely as himself. " Quel gaz'llard f" 
 shouted those who at first held back 
 from this incorrigible, superculpable, 
 adorable, business-like creature of a 
 Henri ; " qtcel gazllardf" At the siege 
 of Saumur, at a wavering moment of the 
 assault, he flung his hat into the in- 
 trenchments. " Who will fetch that for 
 me.^" he cried, as certain of his response 
 as was the great Conde, or Essex before 
 Cadiz in 1596. Of course, with his usual 
 verve, he leaped towards it himself, and 
 
the crowd rushed after him as one. In 
 the same engagement he saved the Hfe 
 of his loyal Ville-Bauge, struck from his 
 stirrups while loading Henri's pieces for 
 him ; as at Antrain, during the twenty- 
 two hours' battle, and with a call for 
 much greater adroitness, he saved that 
 of La Roche Saint Andre. 
 
 The central event of this period was 
 the five days' victory at Saumur. By 
 Cathelineau's order a Te Deu7n was sung 
 in the church, the captured flags, rent 
 with balls and black with smoke and 
 blood, dipping to the chancel floor at 
 every sound of the Holy Name. Such 
 a spectacle put them all in an exalted 
 mood. Henri was found at a window, 
 meekly musing over their fortunes : he, 
 the deliverer, who placed elsewhere the 
 primal credit of the deliverance. The 
 garrison here was left to his charge, 
 much to his disrelish. "They make a 
 veteran of me !" he said, ruefully, for the 
 
59 
 
 affairs he loved were going on outside. 
 The inaction of the time told on his 
 men, quite as discerning as himself, and 
 far less dutiful ; despite the fifteen sous 
 a day which, as the first Vendean bribe, 
 were offered them to remain, they per- 
 ceived that there was nothing more to 
 fear, and slipped away to their homes. 
 Soon but nine were left, and with them 
 Henri departed gloomily, carrying his 
 cannon, and at Thouars, since not a 
 cannoneer came back to relieve him, 
 burying it in the river. Lugon, too, was 
 lost. Having got astray during the ac- 
 tion, he arrived but in time to cover the 
 retreat. At Martigne, where D'Elbee 
 was in command, and again at Vihiers, 
 while Henri was off recruiting, his name 
 had to be cited constantly to encourage 
 the soldiers, though he was absent from 
 the field. 
 
 He stood in a valley path, giving or- 
 ders, during an obstinate fight at Mar- 
 
6o 
 
 tigne - Briand. A ball struck his right 
 hand, shattering the thumb and glanc- 
 ing to the elbow. He did not stir, nor 
 even drop his pistol. " See if my elbow 
 bleeds much," he said to his companion. 
 " No, M'sieu Henri." " Then it is only 
 a broken thumb," he replied, and went 
 on directing the troops. It proved to be 
 an ugly and dangerous wound ; it de- 
 prived him, during the month of Sep- 
 tember, of his share of three signal vic- 
 tories won by " the devils in sabots " 
 under Bonchamp at Torfou, Montaigu, 
 and Saint Fulgent. Not long after, be- 
 fore Laval, his arm limp and swollen in 
 a sling, Henri was attacked on a lonely 
 road by a powerful foot -soldier. He 
 seized the fellow by the collar with his 
 left hand, and so managed his horse with 
 his legs that his struggling assailant was 
 unable to draw upon him. A dozen 
 Vendeans ran up, eager to kill the man 
 who menaced their general. He forbade 
 
it, as he was sure to do. But he check- 
 mated his Goliath with his tongue. " Go 
 back to the RepubHcans," he told him; 
 " say that you were alone with the chief 
 of the brigands, who had but one arm to 
 use and no weapons, and that you could 
 not get the better of him." 
 
 In addition to his dark blue great-coat 
 and his wide hat, Henri wore anything 
 which he found available, and chose, for 
 his distinctive mark, red handkerchiefs 
 of immemorial Chollet make about his 
 head and neck, and another about his 
 waist to hold his pistols. It is striking 
 to find him, the soul of conservatism, in 
 the identical dress of the Cordeliers, 
 "the red brothers of Danton," cravatted 
 and girdled in their Paris fashion, and 
 flaunting the bonnet rouge. The appro- 
 priation of the hated color must have 
 been of malice prepense, as a bit of not 
 illegal bravado, and a slap of exquisite 
 fun at the tailorish pomp and circum- 
 
62 
 
 stance of war. Henri made a mountain 
 guy of himself to some purpose. Among 
 the Blues at Fontenay it quickly became 
 a universal order to fire at the Red Hand- 
 kerchief. The other leaders were un- 
 able to persuade him to doff it. " They 
 know me by that," was his aggravating 
 answer, "and besides, it is so comfort- 
 able!" But they adorned themselves 
 quickly with the same insignia, and saved 
 him from the sharp-shooters. Such was 
 the origin of the officers' earliest uni- 
 form ; and with their flapping boots, 
 their huge swords, and these floating 
 flame-colored gingham plaids, they must 
 indeed have resembled the " brigands " 
 of their enemies' fancy. Henri con- 
 tinued to take pride in his Chollet tur- 
 ban, and was apt to consider a hat, ex- 
 cept on festal occasions, as a piece of 
 tautology. Later, after the conference 
 at Fougeres, he adopted the white sash, 
 with its famous little black knot. 
 
f 
 
 HOSE officers and civic ad- 
 herents who encompassed 
 the royal family at Paris, 
 between the tragic forsak- 
 ing of Versailles and the 
 dawn of the regicide year, were, as well 
 they knew, standing under oak-boughs 
 in a gathering storm. Event was tread- 
 ing on the heels of event; every hour 
 was oracular ; it was impossible not to 
 forecast the morrow, and to dread or defy 
 it, as habit might prompt. Through the 
 charged and purple air strange figures 
 were passing : Mirabeau, borne dead to 
 the Pantheon, to be eldest of its sleep- 
 ers ; Lafayette, with brave step and smile 
 of compromise, riding through the blue 
 national guards; the Queen, appearing 
 in white on balconies, calm before mobs, 
 
X 
 
 64 
 
 with her firm 'fair arm about her httle 
 son ; Barbaroux and Roland escorting 
 Madame as she goes reluctantly from 
 her happy dream-time in the garret of 
 the dingy Rue Saint Jacques into place 
 and authority; Camille Desmoulins, ever 
 sauntering loose-haired, with a soiled roll 
 of writing, and a sarcasm not unsweet 
 upon his tongue ; the Cheniers ; Vergni- 
 aud ; Westermann, with his hard, tena- 
 cious intelligence not yet amply employ- 
 ed ; and Robespierre, " the last word of 
 the Revolution, which, thus early, no man 
 could read ;" regal maskers, flown to the 
 frontiers and snared at Varennes, and 
 marched back to the capital amid din of 
 sabres ; couriers arriving with verifica- 
 tions of the butcheries at Avignon, and 
 bishops departing, after a rapturous Te 
 Deu7n in the cathedral, each to his seeth- 
 ing diocese ; stout foreigners drinking in 
 the Faubourg Saint Honore, and darkly 
 prognosticating ruin for this whole wild 
 
65 
 
 smithy where so much old iron was being 
 lighted and beaten into new uses ; Mail- 
 lard and his murder-men of the Abbaye, 
 walking yet peaceably, but looming on 
 the horizon like huge dripping spectres 
 of the worst that was to be ; — such was 
 the panorama, such the France, all of 
 which Henri de La Rochejaquelein liter- 
 ally saw, and part of which, belying the 
 adage, he was not. He, too, had been at 
 the Cafe Valois ; he, too, had watched on 
 the quays the gaming soldiers his col- 
 leagues, and the knowing tri-color de- 
 moiselles ; and heard through his lonely 
 windows, by night, the mounting chorus 
 
 of 
 
 "Amour sacre de la patrie, 
 Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs /" 
 
 the legacy of immortal song which a 
 Royalist had given to the Republic for- 
 ever. But these externals had no real 
 hold upon him. He was no searcher of 
 the deep roots nor the forward-stretch- 
 
ing tendrils of circumstance. He went 
 across the lesser Doomsday as a child 
 across the hostile streets of a city, 
 thinking always, but not of the obvious 
 things. What he saw through the medi- 
 um of his sequestered soul were reeking 
 sedition, experiments blundering and 
 caring not whom they hurt, principles 
 despoiling the world of quiet and gentle- 
 ness and "the unbought grace of life;" 
 and he moved, indeed, towards Burke's 
 own curious inference, that the Revolu- 
 tion was criminal because it was unman- 
 nerly. He took no time to philosophize 
 when the one blameless and disadvan- 
 taged Bourbon needed his sword ; it was 
 nothing to him that pent - up rights, 
 burst abroad, were about to vindicate 
 themselves terribly and justly in " immo- 
 lating a generation to make way for an 
 idea," while he saw, far more clearly, his 
 order injured, his religion handicapped, 
 and the old ideals taught him at his 
 
67 
 
 mother's knee swept into the universal 
 dust -heap. There were hundreds of 
 honorable lives lil^e his, impelled by the 
 same hurrying conscientiousness, form- 
 ing on either side of the great struggle 
 from 1789 to 1792: the men who repre- 
 sented the early beauty of the Revolu- 
 tion, while yet it was a " child of many 
 prayers." No apology (in the primitive 
 nor in the perverted sense of the word) 
 need be made for their opposing courses, 
 so soon to be defined ; it is enough if we 
 wise landsmen of posterity know the 
 great current and whither it tends, and 
 that we perceive, near shore, the forceful 
 counter-current pushing backward vic- 
 toriously, if but for an hour, and recog- 
 nize that both are one clear water, and 
 that the same Hand suffers them to flow. 
 Henri went home, not to ponder much, 
 but to grieve a little and then to fight : 
 to fight the strength of the equinoctial 
 tide, even as it proved. 
 
68 
 
 With every foot of the Bocage he be- 
 came acquainted; he travelled it over 
 and over ; he was spun like a thread of 
 destiny into and around its level fields 
 and farms ; he crossed and re-crossed its 
 fords ; he lost and won its towns ; he 
 held its fortunes for a year in the hollow 
 of his hand ; his grave, like his birth, 
 was in its bosom. It is small wonder 
 that a species of folk-lore, in his own 
 neighborhood, has, in three generations, 
 grown up around him, which makes it a 
 difficult thing to disentangle what is true 
 of him from what might as well be true : 
 for the French are not given, even in 
 their gossip, to incongruities. Every 
 rustic, who, having served under Henri, 
 lived to startle a more prosaic world 
 with his reminiscences, had anecdotes to 
 tell of him really vital and precious ; and 
 the travellers who were able to gather 
 them at first hand, like Monsieur Eugene 
 Genoude and Viscount Francis Walsh, 
 
69 
 
 are yet to be envied. It is known from 
 oral report how he would run any risk 
 for a charge of his, were he, in particu- 
 lar, a child or a coward ; or how he 
 would deny himself bread while one 
 mouth hungered near him ; how he was 
 a fatal apparition, looming bare-headed 
 from the saddle, pistol in hand, to those 
 who encountered him in a charge : for 
 he had a sure aim, and no genteel mis- 
 givings as to his present duty. Picked 
 out for the object of many raids, he had 
 the strength of nerve to save himself 
 repeatedly, by blowing out the brains of 
 a dozen. When he achieved an admitted 
 advantage, he seemed to overflow in- 
 stantly with his native kindness and 
 compassion. His military career was 
 less one of thought and command than 
 of manual killing and sparing : and in 
 that particular he belonged with the 
 ancient world, with Gideon and with 
 Hector. The endless patience which he 
 
brought to bear on his heart-breaking 
 circumstance and his ungovernable mass 
 of men, out -soars praise. Not once, 
 among the contradiction, the disorder, 
 the stupidity which he deplored, was he 
 anything but just. This autumnal sweet- 
 ness of his character, which he seemed 
 to have inherited in full at Lescure's 
 death, was its first and last distinction. 
 It helped him, at an age when moods 
 alternate with the pendulum, to take 
 prosperity without pride, trials without 
 a plaint. Young in every, fibre, he had 
 not a trace of the severity of youth, its 
 raw dominance, its hasty partial will. 
 
 As he takes the eye from among the 
 striking figures in Madame de La Roche- 
 jaquelein's Mejiioires, so, alive, he com- 
 pelled the interest of on-lookers and of 
 commentators who were foes. Jomini, 
 in his Histoire Critique, turns to him with 
 insistent admiration. Kleber's reports 
 are filled with notes on his scientific 
 
skill. It was the opinion of Sempre, af- 
 ter the Vendean repulse at Granville and 
 the ensuing movement which almost 
 cancelled it, that "Xenophon himself 
 was not half so clever as this vagabond." 
 And Napoleon, the man whose attribute 
 it was to know men, dictating to General 
 Montholon at Saint Helena, used a sig- 
 nificant exclamation : " What might he 
 not have become !" Henri's large close 
 mental grasp, his delighting straightfor- 
 ward talk, his prompt deed, were all of 
 a piece ; and they won his great contem- 
 porary from the outset. Nor had the 
 latter forgotten, when the crown was 
 upon his head, to invent every means to 
 gain the coveted adherence of Louis de 
 La Rochejaquelein, who was much of the 
 same mould. 
 
 Henri, unlike Lescure and Bonchamp, 
 was no scholar : one might guess as 
 much from his handwriting, always too 
 indolent and free. To one book, how- 
 
ever, he clung, and after carrying it 
 about for an interrupted rereading, he 
 would put it under his pillow : this was 
 a Life of Turenne. His age and his 
 country were surfeited with learned and 
 poetic persons ; while they were writing 
 things worthy to be read, he, as Sir Wal- 
 ter Scott would put it, was doing things 
 worthy to be written ; he was breathing 
 abroad something of the Greece crystal- 
 izing silently in Andre Chenier's brain. 
 Shall we ascribe it to immunity from the 
 giant literature which was the prelude 
 of the Revolution that he was a very 
 simple youth indeed, that he believed in 
 God, and was strict {''severe'' is Madame 
 de La Rochejaquelein's word) in matters 
 touching his conscience ? " He knew 
 me at Saumur, when I came on with 
 Cathelineau," a peasant told a stranger, 
 " and he spoke to me : ' Hov,^ well it 
 goes with us !' ' Yes, yes, so it does,' I 
 replied, 'thanks to you, M'sieu Henri !' 
 
 \ 
 
' Thanks unto God !' was what he said." 
 His own success, wonderful in the ex- 
 treme to him, he preferred to charge 
 upon supernatural agencies. When he 
 galloped into the guns, and caught no 
 one admiring him visibly, he took occa- 
 sion to make the sign of the cross ; the 
 bigger the danger, the bigger the gest- 
 ure, according to tradition. Nothing 
 was mere mechanism with him ; he was 
 a scorner of exaggeration. His relig- 
 iousness was in the current of his blood. 
 It alone kept him to the end an optimist : 
 one able to leap into the chasm beyond, 
 without ever having had a single specu- 
 lation about it, nor a single dread. 
 
4. 
 
 HE autumn of 1793, when 
 the red flag was floating at 
 the altar of the Fatherland, 
 when the tombs at Saint 
 Denis were rifled of their 
 kingly dust, and some hearts were yet 
 aching for the fallen Gironde, — this 
 memorable autumn was marked in the 
 west by the choc on the heights about 
 Chollet, and the tragedy of the passage 
 of the Loire. During the first attack 
 D'Elbee and Lescure were borne help- 
 less from the field. The ensuing night 
 a council of war was held, Stofflet 
 and Henri begging for leave to defend 
 the town, and Bonchamp persistently 
 pleading for an expedition across the 
 river, in the hope of obtaining succor 
 
75 
 
 and new strength from the Bretons, and 
 of opening a northern seaport to the ex- 
 pected co-operation of England. While 
 the debate was yet seething, the second 
 clash came, and Bonchamp was struck 
 down. It was a terrific battle : forty 
 thousand peasants against forty -five 
 thousand tried and trained soldiers of 
 the line. " They fought like tigers," 
 brave Kleber wrote to the Convention, 
 '•' but our lions beat them." Before day- 
 break on the seventeenth of October, 
 without any order of advance, and 
 against the impassioned efforts of Henri 
 and other generals, panic set in, and the 
 air was rent with a league of cries. Then 
 began the mad rush for the Loire, and an 
 exodus comparable to nothing human 
 but that of the Tartar tribes. The man- 
 oeuvre, suggested but a little while before 
 as a safeguard, was adopted in complete 
 despair, and the retreat deteriorated into 
 a migration. Countless families emptied 
 
76 
 
 themselves into the rebel camp ; a horde 
 of poor creatures, including the entire 
 population of Chollet and the near bor- 
 oughs, flew to the common centre ; 
 women, babes, the aged, the sick, the 
 fearful, hung darkening over the army, 
 like summer insects over a pool. Once 
 it had started, nothing could hold back 
 the onward pressure of such numbers. 
 Four thousand men were detached un- 
 der Talmont and sent to clear the banks 
 at Saint Florent. A whole people, their 
 homes burning behind them, thrown 
 upon pauperism, inevitable separation, 
 and the rigors of the coming winter, the 
 Republican hosts advancing from all 
 sides to exterminate them ; Bonchamp, 
 on whose persuasion the fatal move was 
 undertaken, on whose prudence the oth- 
 ers relied, known to be dying ; Lescure, 
 who had been wounded at La Trem- 
 blaye in the midst of his squadrons, dy- 
 ing also ; the bewildered, groaning mul- 
 
titude dropping, like the pallid passen- 
 gers of the Styx, into the river-boats, and 
 struggling from island to island; — what 
 a spectacle ! The great tears of anger 
 and sorrow stood thick in Henri's eyes. 
 When a march could be formed, the foot- 
 soldiery, with the cannon, were placed 
 at the head, and the cavalry and picked 
 men brought up the rear. Between 
 them were the fifty thousand drags, 
 stumbling along in a lunacy of terror, 
 and in a muffled roar bewailing their 
 bitter fate, and calling on Heaven for 
 "mercy. The habit of their enemies was 
 invariably to attack the van or the rear : 
 — a mistake which, more than anything 
 else, prorogued the inevitable end. 
 
 Cathelineau, the first, and, next to 
 Charette, the ablest commander-in-chief 
 of the Vendeans, having been mortally 
 wounded before the gates of Nantes, 
 D'Elbee, by his skilful policy at Chatil- 
 lon, had himself appointed to the sue- 
 
78 
 
 cession. It was the work of an obstinate 
 cabal ; Bonchamp, by every claim, de- 
 served the election. But after the pas- 
 sage of the Loire, D'Elbee, in the con- 
 fusion, was not to be found. Lescure, 
 besought, in his bed, to take matters into 
 his own hands, immediately proposed 
 that the officer best-beloved by all divi- 
 sions of the army, and best-known to 
 them,Henri de La Rochejaquelein,should 
 be nominated to the vacant generalship. 
 "As for me, should I recover," added 
 Lescure, " you know I cannot quarrel 
 with Henri. I shall be his aide-de-camp." 
 The little senate met at Laval. Henri, 
 never willing to push himself forward, 
 dissented hotly. As advocate against 
 his own claims, he made his longest 
 speech. He represented that he had 
 neither age nor experience, that he was 
 merely a fighter, that he had too little 
 practical wisdom, that he was untena- 
 cious of his opinions, that he should 
 
79 
 
 never learn how to silence those who 
 opposed him : in vain. After the ensu- 
 ing vote he was found hidden in a corner, 
 and cried like the child he was, on Les- 
 cure's breast, for the unsought honor 
 thrust upon him. He was to have no 
 further guardianship and support from 
 that dearest of his friends. On the road 
 between Ernee and Fougeres Lescure 
 died, not before a mighty pang was add- 
 ed to his passing by an oral account of 
 the execution of the Queen. In the 
 room where his body lay Henri said to 
 his widow, " Could my life restore him 
 to you, oh, you might take it!" 
 
 The Royalists nearly sank under this 
 second calamity, for Bonchamp, too, had 
 but lately died, on the eighteenth of Oc- 
 tober. (" The news of these two," cried 
 lively Barrere in the Convention, " is 
 better than any victory !") His remains, 
 which, like Lescure's, were carried for a 
 brief time under the colors, were tempo- 
 
rarily buried at Varades. His only son, 
 Hermenee, became Henri's special care. 
 In all his trouble and preoccupation he 
 was pathetically kind to the child, and 
 had him sleep with him every night. By 
 day Hermenee rode with Henri on the 
 same saddle, or trotted in the rear-guard, 
 beating his toy-drum, haranguing the sol- 
 diers with pretty ardor, and remembering 
 each lovingly by name. The poor little 
 fellow, weakened by his hardships, suc- 
 cumbed to the small-pox, in his mother's 
 arms, at Saint Herbelon, before the year 
 was over. 
 
 The wretched throng were exiled, as 
 completely as they would have been had 
 they crossed the Pyrenees. Seven 
 months of intense activity, seven months 
 of successful fight, even while they were 
 surrounded like sheep in a pen, had re- 
 sulted only in this : that no single gene- 
 ral, at his allotted post, had been able to 
 beat back the Revolution from La Ven- 
 
dee ; that the restoration of the mon- 
 archy, the remoter and greater object, 
 was more visionary and hypothetical 
 than ever. They hurried northward 
 feverishly, pursued always by an im- 
 mense force, subject to continuous cold 
 rains, obliged to leave at every stopping- 
 place the wounded and the sick, the 
 women and babes, to mark their trail 
 and to perish by massacre. Kleber had 
 his keen eye upon Henri : " I do not be- 
 lieve he can hold out long, away from 
 his own country." But Henri proceeded 
 to defeat the garrison at Chateau- 
 Gontier, to crush L'Echelle's division 
 at Entrammes, and to score a double 
 triumph at Laval. It was at Chateau- 
 Gontier that the venerable Monsieur de 
 Royrand, who had sustained the war in 
 Lower Poitou from the very beginning, 
 breathed his last. His regiments ceased 
 firing, and mourned aloud. Henri hur- 
 ried into the midst of them, his own 
 
 6 
 
tears flowing. " Come, come !" he cried ; 
 "we will weep and pray for the dear 
 friend to-morrow. Let us avenge him 
 to-day !" Then he swooped like an eagle 
 on the troops of the state, with Roy- 
 rand's orphans at his heels. 
 
f 
 
 HESE were the days of what 
 the peasants called "the 
 reign of Monsieur Henri." 
 Power and the opportunity 
 of dictatorship, which prove 
 the ruin of much excellence, seemed to 
 awaken in him only fresh virtues. So 
 sound was his temperament, that the less 
 unham^pered he became the more intelli- 
 gently he was able to serve his cause ; 
 and his manner of serving, as we know, 
 was not to draw charts in his tent. In- 
 capable of turning his little finger to 
 benefit himself, he was a perennial bene- 
 fit to all around him. His glad irre- 
 pressible gusto leavened the spirits of 
 thousands. Providence, he liked to think, 
 took care of him while he was needed. 
 
84 
 
 Now that he had a community depending 
 upon him, as if he were a patriarch of old, 
 his conduct came to be more and more 
 temperate. For his habitual rashness, 
 criminal under other conditions, he ought 
 not at any time to be blamed. A verse 
 from the most masculine ode in English 
 literature might be borrowed to describe 
 La Rochejaquelein, who, 
 
 "like the three-fork'd lightning first 
 
 Breaking the clouds where it was nurst, 
 Did thorough his own side 
 His fiery way divide." 
 
 He must have blazed or burst. And he 
 had exterior warrant. It was of the first 
 importance that the generals should have 
 the confidence of their curiously critical 
 liegemen ; and that confidence was to 
 be won in nowise but by the display of 
 pluck, the argument of example. Les- 
 cure and Bonchamp, whom none will 
 accuse of recklessness, pursued, on cal- 
 
85 
 
 culation, the same and the only course 
 of constant self-exposure ; for to such 
 cruel tests did the foolish philosophers 
 of La Vendee put their worthiest. Can 
 anything be more marvellous than that 
 an army so handicapped by whim and 
 ignorance should have withstood attack 
 at all ? One by one its governors and 
 guides were mown like weeds, who, had 
 they been enrolled in other ranks, would 
 have been warded from the remote 
 approach of personal peril. 
 
 The only legitimate stricture on Hen- 
 ri's behavior is that he did not compel 
 obedience off the field. It became 
 necessary even for him, who was so se- 
 cure in the affections of his volunteers, 
 and who had so much influence over 
 them, to shed something besides persua- 
 sion on the difficult crowd in his charge. 
 He made no endeavor to employ Stoff- 
 let's verbal whips and goads, which never 
 failed to accomplish their object ; stern- 
 
86 
 
 ness was not natural to him, and it was 
 an art which he somehow disdained to 
 acquire. The fault, beyond doubt, was 
 the outcome of his extreme youth, and 
 of his habit, even in Paris (and what an 
 orgy of a Paris it was then !), of mingling 
 as little as possible with the social world, 
 the sole school for the development of 
 the defensive faculties. Such a lack, in 
 such a character, was predestined to be 
 righted with advancing years. While 
 the reproach existed it was fully con- 
 fessed, and it colored all his judgments 
 upon himself : it was entirely just that 
 he should have deprecated, as he did, 
 the major responsibilities urged upon 
 him in the October of 1793. Almost 
 the last words of Louis de Lescure to 
 his cousin were to assure him that if he, 
 Lescure, lived, his chief care would be to 
 help La Rochejaquelein overcome this 
 ill-placed timidity, which belied the true 
 masterfulness within him, and which 
 
87 
 
 made it impossible to curb factional in- 
 trigue. 
 
 It is to be observed, that throughout 
 the campaign in Brittany, no blunder 
 has ever been imputed to Henri. He 
 guessed at a science to which others had 
 made the painful approximation of 
 study. His own vision was so clear, so 
 free of prejudice, that he saw at once 
 what was to be done. His sagacity, 
 when things were left in his own hands, 
 was simply amazing : for we do not ex- 
 pect sagacity from dare-devils. But he 
 had a mistaken humility which forbade 
 him to apply his great force of will, when 
 the question arose of overruling age and 
 numbers. His fear that he should not 
 know how to silence those who opposed 
 him proved but too accurate. Catheii- 
 neau's death closed the first of the three 
 periods of the war, as his own death 
 closed the second ; and up to the hour 
 when " the honest and the perfect man " 
 
of Pin-en-Mauges gave back his great 
 spirit, there was no rivalry nor internal 
 strife in his camp. But by the time 
 " the son of Monsieur de La Rochejaque- 
 lein " stood up to direct the graybeards 
 of his staff, the general concord about 
 him^ was by several degrees less angelic. 
 The farther north the army strayed the 
 more irksome became his position, for 
 his steadfast conviction was against the 
 expediency of trying to reach Granville 
 at all. When, after the affair of Chateau- 
 Gontier, a unique opportunity arose to 
 retrace the march and re-establish head- 
 quarters in the Socage, it went hard in- 
 deed with Henri that none would listen 
 to him. Again, at Laval, he would have 
 pushed through Kleber's disorganized 
 forces, towards the safe though smoking 
 labyrinths at home ; but, misled by 
 some vague encouraging rumor, the ma- 
 jority clamored to push on. Through- 
 out this unhappy time, when his light 
 
89 
 
 heart was sickening with rebuffs and de- 
 lays, there came to him a growing pru- 
 dence and calm. He learned to cover 
 a rout, to reap the full fruit of a victo- 
 ry. Many of the elder subofficers who 
 watched him were touched and com- 
 forted, during the hot fourteen hours 
 at Chateau - Gontier, where he forbore 
 his old impetuous charges, but rode 
 close to his column, clearing up the con- 
 fusion, hindering the bravest from ad- 
 vancing alone, and holdingthe disciplined 
 musketeers together ; so as to remind 
 -more than one of the tradition of Conde, 
 in his invincible youth, at Rocroy. 
 
 f 
 
iHE blue sea-horizon showed 
 no sign of an English sail, 
 though the firing was heard 
 at Jersey; there were tid- 
 ings neither from " le roi 
 Georges" nor from the absent princes of 
 France. When the insurgents, driven 
 forth from Granville by flame and sword, 
 started to return, they found the country 
 which they had just conquered reoccu- 
 pied by their enemies. They had to con- 
 test their way back to the Loire-barrier, as 
 if they were breaking virgin ground. At 
 Avranches there was a mutiny, caused by 
 a rather ridiculous suspicion of treason in 
 Talmont and the ambitious Abbe Bern- 
 ier. At Pontorson, where the streets had 
 been choked with dead for many days, 
 
the army routed the Blues ; Foret, the 
 first brand in the burning at Saint Flo- 
 rent, fell there ; no quarter was given nor 
 taken. A tremendous battle followed at 
 Dol. Talmont sustained the siege with 
 superb courage. Not a few of the fight- 
 ing corps were sinking already from 
 homesickness, exhaustion, and hunger. 
 While there was a single squad to stand 
 by him, Henri fought like a lion; and 
 then, alone and seemingly numb with 
 despair, he turned about, with folded 
 arms, and faced the battery. It was ow- 
 ing wholly to the exhortations of Abbe 
 Doussin of Sainte-Marie-de-Rhe, and to 
 the resolution of the women, that the 
 troops rallied nobly and wrested three 
 successive victories from their foes. 
 Yet again would Henri have struck out 
 as far as Rennes, thence in a straight 
 line south ; and yet again he was forced 
 to see the acceptance of a crazy project, 
 whereby the roundabout route of Octo- 
 
ber was to be retraced inch by inch. 
 " You deny me in conference ; you aban- 
 don me on the field !" he could well say, 
 with something like wrath flushing his 
 young cheek. The highways were one 
 horrible open grave ; the winter weather 
 was cruelly cold ; desertions set in ; fam- 
 ine and pestilence came upon them. At 
 Angers, Henri would fain have quickened 
 the lagging spirits of his old comrades ; 
 the guns having made a small breach in 
 the town -walls, he, with Forestier of 
 Pommeraie-sur- Loire, who was never far 
 from his side, and two others, flung 
 themselves into it. Not a soul rallied to 
 their defence. A miserable huddled 
 mass, the army fell back on Bauge, and 
 now, unable to seize a permanent advan- 
 tage, ran hither and thither, ever away 
 from the Loire. At the bridge of La 
 Fleche, Henri, fording the stream with 
 a small picked body of horsemen, over- 
 came the garrison by an adroit move. 
 
and there was a flicker of great hope. 
 But the peasants who began the war 
 were weary, weary. Too truly the tide 
 of disaster had set in. 
 
 In the city of Mans, at the end of the 
 only road open, were food, warmth, and 
 rest. The exiles ate, drank, and slept ; 
 slept, drank, and ate again. It seemed 
 as if nothing could rouse them more. 
 Marceau,Miiller, Tilly, and Westermann's 
 light cavalry were closing on them. 
 Prostrate and drunken, the Royalist sur- 
 vivors lay inert as stones. But Henri's 
 frantic energy (" he was like a madman," 
 says Madame de La Rochejaquelein) 
 once more assembled a desperate hand- 
 ful, under himself, Marigny, Forestier, 
 and the Breton, Georges Cadoudal, A 
 bitter and awful fight it was — a scene of 
 din and smoke and blind tumult, surging 
 about the bloody gates by moonlight. 
 Twice Westermann wavered and charged 
 again. Two-thirds of the forlorn rem- 
 
94 
 
 nant of the journeying army laid down 
 their lives. In the deserted town thou- 
 sands of old men, women, and children 
 were slaughtered, amid jeers and fury 
 and the patter of grape-shot. Exhaust- 
 ed, and with a heart like lead within 
 him, the commander-in-chief spurred to 
 the side of the widowed Marchioness of 
 Lescure, who, seated on horseback, hung 
 at the outskirts of the forces. (Madame 
 de Bonchamp, under the same affec- 
 tionate protection of La Rochejaquelein 
 and D'Autichamp, had been ordered, 
 with her two little ones, to withdraw). 
 She took his hand solemnly. " I thought 
 you were dead, Henri," she sighed— and 
 her sequence of speech was worthy both 
 of him and of her, " for we are beaten." 
 " Indeed, I wish I were dead," he an- 
 swered. He knew that La Vendee had 
 had its death-blow before him. 
 
 So ended the march into Brittany. No 
 coward Bourbon appeared to lead and 
 
95 
 
 comfort his believers ; the emigrant aris- 
 tocracy, " effeminated by a long peace," 
 and scattered among the European capi- 
 tals, shrunk from reviving their own faint- 
 ing cause ; the imperfect overtures with 
 Pitt and Dundas, until too late, were of no 
 avail. The Vendeans were forty leagues 
 from home, famished, diseased, betrayed, 
 burdened with a host of the useless and 
 the weak; and let it be written that in 
 this plight they took twelve cities, won 
 seven battles, destroyed more than twen- 
 ty thousand Republicans, and captured 
 one hundred cannon. It is a wonderful 
 two months' record : a failure such as 
 bemeans most conquests. And while 
 Maine and the Breton country were 
 overrun, when there were so many to 
 nurse and shelter, so many mouths to 
 feed, it is to be noted that no pillage was 
 legalized. La Vendee paid its last penny 
 for what it took, and when that was spent 
 issued notes in the King's name, payable 
 
96 
 
 at a four-and-a-half per cent, interest at 
 the Restoration. 
 
 For the last time Henri led a masterly 
 retreat through Craon and Saint Mars, 
 too rapid, alas ! for the dying feet of 
 many. The Loire was to be recrossed 
 at Ancenis on the sixteenth of December. 
 The Republican troops were on the far- 
 ther side and all about ; not so much as 
 a raft was to be hired for pawns. Two 
 pleasure-boats were seized on adjacent 
 ponds and carried to the river. Henri, 
 Stofilet, and La Ville-Bauge in one, young 
 De Langerie and eighteen men in the 
 other, succeeded in launching themselves, 
 with the intention of capturing and tow- 
 ing back some hay-laden skiffs on the op- 
 posite shore. The current was rapid and 
 strong ; the patrols opened fire ; a gun- 
 boat descended the channel and sank 
 the skiffs ; the mournful peasants, sep- 
 arated from their generals, lost the 
 chance of following, and disbanded in 
 
universal disorder and terror. The 
 army Catholic and Royal, driven back 
 on Nort, and relying on Fleuriot as its 
 provisionary commander, saw Henri de 
 La Rochejaquelein no more. 
 
 7 
 
I HE fugitives, fortunately, 
 landed in safety, and wan- 
 dered all day through the 
 fields. The Republic, an- 
 gered at the strategies that 
 so long held its strength at bay from 
 the footpaths, hedges, and queer monot- 
 onous bush-places which had provided 
 shelter to the rebels and pitfalls to its 
 own baffled soldiery, was literally clear- 
 ing the neighborhood out, and burning 
 east and west down to the very grass. 
 The houses were in ashes ; the inhabit- 
 ants had taken to the woods ; the lowing 
 of the homeless ^cattle filled the wind. 
 Desolation yet more complete, a des- 
 olation known to wolves and carrion- 
 crows, was to fall upon La Vendee. 
 
99 
 
 After twenty-four hours, traversing sev- 
 eral parishes and meeting no sign of life, 
 Henri and his companions found a lately- 
 deserted barn, and threw themselves on 
 the straw. The farmer stole in from the 
 thicket to tell them that the Blues were 
 on the trail. "We may be murdered, 
 but we must sleep," was the response. 
 They were incapable of resistance. The 
 Blues, probably sent out from Chollet 
 by the tireless Poche-Durocher, came 
 promptly. They were also a small party, 
 apparently greatly fatigued, and they lay 
 down with their guns on the same heap 
 of straw, not two yards away, and de- 
 parted, unsuspecting, ere dawn. Their 
 poor bedfellows, thankful for their im- 
 munity, crept forth and roamed on. 
 They would have perished, had they 
 not, with the strength of despair, at- 
 tacked a relay, and seized bread and 
 meat. They had news by chance of 
 the last flash of Vendean courage at 
 
Savenay, under Fleuriot and Marigny, 
 when the hostile cannon boomed A7nen 
 to the long psalm of heroic pain. Out 
 of nearly one hundred thousand who 
 crossed the Loire the season preceding, 
 less than seven thousand remained. 
 
 The little party disbanded. Those 
 who accompanied Henri reached Bois- 
 vert de Combrand, and passed a mel- 
 ancholy Christmas with Mademoiselle 
 de La Rochejaquelein, still concealed 
 and in solitude. Here Henri, who was 
 not well, fell into the deepest dejection 
 he had ever known, thinking still of 
 Mans and of the friends gone before 
 him, thinking more of the hopeless to- 
 morrow, now that the chartered Terror, 
 a tightening ring of myriad evil faces, 
 led by Carrier and Francastel, was clos- 
 ing in on the wretched west. His aunt, 
 the best stoic of a stoic family, roused 
 him from his lethargy. She would have 
 him leave her, and risk himself once 
 
again. " If thou diest, Henri," she said, 
 with the reticence which, in her, was rich 
 with meaning, " surely thou hast my es- 
 teem as well as my regret." This was 
 the sort of godspeed which could not 
 fail to influence him. He went, at this 
 time, to La Durbelliere alone, perhaps 
 conscious that it was his solemn farewell 
 look at the woods dear to his infancy. A 
 detachment of Blues dogged him. He 
 heard the hoofs in time to save himself. 
 His neglected arm, causing him much 
 suffering, was still in a sling. Always 
 light-footed and firm of muscle, he 
 swung himself up as best he could to 
 the ruined lintel of the court -yard 
 gate, and dropping inside the wall, 
 without dislodging a stone, he lay fiat, 
 and watched his fowlers debate, pass 
 under, and clatter ofif, without their 
 bird. This opportune reminder of how 
 much he was still sought and feared, de- 
 termined his immediate action. Noth- 
 
ing but the jaws of the guillotine await- 
 ed him if he failed. 
 
 He learned that while Stofflet was al- 
 ready bravely combating in the recesses 
 of the Bocage, Charette was advancing 
 towards Maulevrier. Chafing to be sep- 
 arated from the rallying men, Henri and 
 his comrades set out on the twenty- 
 eighth of December, walking all night, 
 to reach the camp. Charette was break- 
 fasting in his tent. He received Henri 
 coldly, nor did he ask him to the table. 
 They had some conversation, and the 
 younger general withdrew to the house 
 of a neighbor for refreshment. When 
 the drums began to beat, Charette cross- 
 ed over to the spot where Henri was 
 standing. " You will follow me ?" he 
 asked. Henri made a foolish and haugh- 
 ty answer : " T am accustomed to be fol- 
 lowed !" and turned away. Here was 
 an instance of the jealousy and disunion 
 which had affected the chiefs of the in- 
 
I03 
 
 surrection. Though Henri was the le- 
 gitimate commander of all the forces of 
 the main army, Charette had a rather 
 ignoble precedent in his favor, inasmuch 
 as his little legion of the Marais had 
 never been fused in the main army ; and 
 a long despotism, pure enough in its 
 purpose, had made him averse to any 
 compromise. It seems scarcely credible 
 that, from Cathelineau's time onward, 
 Charette had ruled in Lower Poitou 
 his own schismatical twenty thousand, 
 which never crossed the Loire, which 
 never even co-operated with the other 
 forces, save at Nantes, where they were 
 beaten by Beysser, and at Lugon, where 
 they were beaten by Tuncq. Could the 
 two have agreed to march together on 
 the capital, the counter-revolution, Na- 
 poleon declared, would have set in nearly 
 twenty years sooner. 
 
 The peasants, flocking meanwhile from 
 the environs to join Charette, crowded 
 
ab^ut with welcoming shouts of " M'sieu 
 Henri !" before he had so much as spo- 
 ken. He was pleased, as they were ; his 
 eager spirit revived; he left the Cheva- 
 lier to his own devices in his own coun- 
 ty. Assembling the new battalion at 
 Neuvy, he marched all night, and carried 
 a Republican post eight leagues distant. 
 Then began his most indefatigable mi- 
 nor campaign. He attacked remote 
 points to prevent surmise ; he dropped 
 down on widely-scattered garrisons; he 
 harassed pickets, captured provisions, 
 convoys, and horses ; he intercepted 
 Cordelier's rear-guards on perilous roads. 
 His name was in everybody's mouth at 
 Paris ; he spread fresh fear abroad with 
 every success of these wild days. At 
 Salboeuf Castle and in Vezins his aston- 
 ishing boldness sprang into final play. 
 He was wise in not yet collecting his 
 men, and hazarding a general contest. 
 His troop of eight hundred increasing 
 
J 05 
 
 daily, he became, by sheer thrust and 
 parry, master of the surrounding coun- 
 try ; and at last he prepared to besiege 
 Mortagne and Chatillon. His head- 
 quarters were in the forest of Vezins ; 
 his house was a hut of boughs. About 
 it he went and came, a familiar figure in 
 disguise, with long fair clustering hair, 
 his arm in a rough sling, a great woollen 
 cap and peasant's blouse for his regi- 
 mentals, the little symbolic heart worn 
 outside, as of old. He kept his ad- 
 herents, poor and threadbare like him- 
 self, continually under exercise. Tidings 
 came, too, to cheer them all, that in the 
 north the Chouans were aroused. 
 
 It was the twenty-eighth of January, 
 1794. Henri had a skirmish at Nouaille, 
 and won. After the enemy were routed, 
 he saw, far to the right of his little army, 
 two grenadiers stooping behind a bush. 
 Some who were with him aimed at them. 
 He bade them desist ; he wished to 
 
question them. He went forward, alone, 
 with the Vendean formula : " Surrender 
 and be spared !" A voice from his own 
 ranks, either not heard or not heeded, 
 warned him to stop short. He was rid- 
 ing a richly-caparisoned horse which he 
 had seized, and he had been able that 
 morning to resume his general's coat 
 and sash — things which made him con- 
 spicuous and proclaimed him aloud ; for 
 one of the Blues, recognizing him, with 
 inconceivable celerity rose and fired. 
 Henri had put out his hand, with a sud- 
 den sense of danger, to disarm his assail- 
 ant; but on the instant, and without a 
 cry, he fell from his saddle, dead. 
 
4. 
 
 HE legend of Henri de La 
 Rochejaquelein did not end 
 with his life. Says the 
 Count of C , an emi- 
 grant (author of the graph- 
 ic and erratic pamphlet entitled Un 
 Sejour de Dix Mots e7i France) : "It 
 was in a prosperous hour, and shortly 
 after the fortunate expedition of which 
 I have been speaking, that I had the 
 pleasure of joining the Royalist army. 
 On every side I saw tears only, and I 
 heard but sighs : Henri had lately per- 
 ished on the field of honor." From this 
 anonymous gentleman comes fragmen- 
 tary testimony on a subject once of some 
 mystery and conjecture. He had em- 
 braced, or helped to create, a rumor that 
 
a woman headed the young chief's troops 
 as soon as he had fallen. He declares 
 that, unwilling to survive him, yet burn- 
 ing to avenge him, she flung herself upon 
 the advancing Blues, and so expired. 
 And he lends her, moreover, the soldier- 
 ly distinction of reposing by her hero 
 henceforward. Now, as the Count of 
 
 C is the only one in the world to 
 
 print this story, it may be worth while 
 to quote, for the sake of contradict- 
 ing it, a passage of that cloying racial 
 eloquence which has never the Saxon 
 shame of speaking a little more than it 
 feels : "And thou, O La Rochejaquelein, 
 thou the Rinaldo of the new Crusade, 
 the terror of infidels and the hope of 
 Christians, thou whom nature had dow- 
 ered with so much worth and so much 
 charm ! look down upon the tears of thy 
 brethren-in-arms ; listen to the sorrow- 
 ings of the whole army ; see the glorious 
 tomb raised to thy memory; bid thy 
 
log 
 
 spirit hover nigh among the cypresses, 
 to count the trophies which thy victori- 
 ous comrades hang there day by day, 
 the garlands which thy countrywomen, 
 fair and sad, wreathe there forever ; hear 
 the hymns sung for thy sake ; watch the 
 young and buoyant legion sworn to per- 
 petuate thy name and to accomplish thy 
 vengeance ; read the inscriptions which 
 passers-by grave on the trees in memory 
 of thee ; rejoice to know that thy sweet 
 friend sleeps at thy side, wept, cherished, 
 reverenced, less because she was lovely, 
 good, and bright than because she was 
 once thy heart's happiness and thy tri- 
 umph's pulse and centre; ah! behold 
 and consider all these things at once, 
 and let the palm which is thine in Heav- 
 en be set about and made fairer, if that 
 can be, with all the bays won well of old 
 of earth." The soft music of this ex- 
 tract, crossed with appeals to the super- 
 mundane vanity of the most modest of 
 
mortals, is a sufficient voucher that with 
 the real La Rochejaquelein it has no 
 commerce whatever. It was indeed true 
 that some martial girl, leading a compa- 
 ny during the winter, received her death- 
 blow in the neighborhood of Tremen- 
 tines. The nonsense of her being Henri's 
 sweetheart probably owed its origin to 
 the same singular Republican inventive- 
 ness which, long after the fight of Vrine 
 which laid Jeanne Robin low, continued 
 to call her Jeanne de Lescure and sister 
 of her commander, who might have 
 wished any sister of his, did such exist, 
 to be as pure and as brave. 
 
 There are instances, in the long deal- 
 ings of eternity with time, when a man 
 is given whose life is an imagination not 
 to be matched in the arts ; but such a 
 one is usually spoiled, like Icarus, by the 
 heats of an alien planet : we cannot take 
 him as he is ; we must needs relax and 
 refashion him, and make of the abstract 
 
idyll a sujet theatrique. Henri de La 
 Rochejaquelein, zigzagging in the teeth 
 of the enemy, doing deeds with his own 
 hands which are not common in salons ; 
 Henri, with his slender height, his shy 
 caressing voice and smile, having no ten- 
 derer talisman to carry than the sign of 
 the cross, no parting look at anything 
 more responsive than a torn white flag, — 
 such a Henri, jarring with prescriptive 
 ideas, calls for reform. It is ungracious 
 that a chevalier of twenty should have 
 no leisure for a personal romance ; and 
 therefore, for his own credit's sake, that 
 he may remain a consistent and compre- 
 hensible chevalier, kind gossip makes 
 him the gift of a lady ! almost as beautiful 
 there as Briseis by Agamemnon. Nay; 
 more sincere tradition must leave him 
 as he was, with no true-love yet at his 
 side. For many years, under the boughs 
 of Brissoniere and Haie Bureau, there 
 was some one, verily, to share the hal- 
 
lowed six feet of ground with Henri ; 
 some one sleeping quietly as the child 
 Hermenee in old days, while yet over 
 the two virginal hearts their common 
 doom was hanging: the bride of the 
 irony of this world, the ungrateful miscre- 
 ant who had slain him. 
 
 When the Vendeans, transported with 
 fury, rushed forward and cut the gren- 
 adier down, there was in the air the 
 noise of an approaching hostile column. 
 In the utmost distress the detachment 
 at Nouaille, to whose command Stofilet 
 now succeeded, enjoined it upon a trusty 
 farmer to bury their chief in a hasty 
 grave. They would not have the gren- 
 adier parted from him, that his uniform 
 might be a silent defence against profa- 
 nation and conceal the identity of Henri, 
 who, stripped of his own insignia, had 
 the enemy's cap and cockade drawn over 
 his forehead. Thrice were the two 
 moved from pit to pit in the lonely 
 
neighborhood a mile or two from Choi- 
 let, and always by the loyal, secret, and 
 shrewd hands of the farmer Girard. 
 
 Madame de Sapinaud de Bois-Huguet 
 says that the Royalists at large supposed 
 Henri to have been seriously hurt only, 
 and carried to a place of safety, up to 
 the treaty of peace signed by Sapinaud 
 and Charette. This allegation alone 
 would confound the ready rhetoric of 
 
 the Count of C and the " glorious 
 
 tomb" which never existed. Great con- 
 fusion as to the date of Henri's death is 
 found in all contemporary accounts, 
 caused by the prolonged lack of calen- 
 dars; and uncertainty of the fact itself 
 bewildered those interested without. 
 Henri's mother knew nothing of her 
 loss until the following summer. Mean- 
 while StofHet temporarily carried on 
 energetic operations in his colleague's 
 name. The rumor of the truth reached 
 Paris slowly, and it bred so great a 
 
doubt in Turreau's mind that he wrote 
 Cordelier to secure proof, by discover- 
 ing and digging up the body. Thanks 
 to the foresight of others, no such in- 
 dignity befell what was Henri. But how 
 little Turreau recognized the splendid 
 oblique flattery of this order, which, as 
 Cretineau-Joly remarks, was accorded 
 only once before in history, and then by 
 the Romans to Hannibal ! 
 
 In 1816, twenty-two years after, by the 
 piety of Mademoiselle Louise de La 
 Rochejaquelein, upheld by the most 
 minute and accurate converging testi- 
 mony of eye-witnesses, the remains of 
 her brother, easily recognizable by the 
 tall frame and the bullet-hole through 
 the head, were officially disinterred, and 
 laid under the altar of Saint Sebastian, 
 in the old church of Saint Peter at 
 Chollet. And within the year, the centre 
 of a solemn and moving spectacle, borne 
 by his former comrades and the returned 
 
exiles of his family, amid the muffled 
 music of the march, the salutation of the 
 Latin liturgy, and the proud rapture of 
 public tears, Henri de La Rochejaquelein 
 was brought home to the parish ceme- 
 tery of Saint Aubin de Baubigne. He was 
 buried at the right hand of his brother 
 Louis, who, with another Cathelineau 
 and another Charette, had died at his 
 post in June of 1815, just before Water- 
 loo, at the head of the Vendean army 
 raised to oppose the Emperor Napoleon. 
 "Accident," sa3^s Genoude very sweetly, 
 "took upon herself the writing of their 
 epitaphs, and sowed in abundance over 
 their dust what is known as the Achilles- 
 flower." " That is more touching to 
 me," adds Madame de Genlis, in a note 
 to the Memoires of Madame de Bon- 
 champ, " than the legendary laurel which 
 sprung from Virgil's grave." 
 
 Again, in 1857, all the precious dust in 
 that little tomb was gathered into the 
 
ii6 
 
 vault of the new church near, where 
 Henri Hes with very many of his high- 
 hearted Icindred ; and with the venerated 
 gentlewoman who was his cousin both 
 by her first marriage and by birth, and 
 who became, after his death, his brother's 
 wife: Victoire de Donnissan, his junior 
 by three months, his dear friend of the 
 camp and the fireside, his survivor of 
 over sixty yea'rs. In the still aisle- 
 chapel above them, the rich light of a 
 memorial window slides down on del- 
 icate sculptured marbles, through the 
 figures of the dying Maccabees; and 
 around the walls, graven like a triumphal 
 scroll, is the cry of the same Hebrew 
 martyrs that it is far, far better to fall in 
 battle, than to let ruin come upon the 
 things that are holy. The spotless name 
 of La Rochejaquelein must, with the ebb 
 of this century, be withdrawn from 
 among men ; but whoso fears for it is 
 not wise. Every villager to-day, passing 
 
117 
 
 the low sepulchral outer door between 
 Le Rabot and the inn, affectionately 
 raises his cap, and, walking in the ways 
 of his fathers, forgets not the prayer, 
 which, as some yet think with Sir 
 Thomas Browne, is " more noble than a 
 history." 
 
^ 
 
 HE strength and beauty of 
 the cause vanished with 
 Henri. The war did not 
 end for more than a twelve- 
 month ; fresh recruits car- 
 ried it on with wonderful persistence 
 and pluck, under Charette, still in the 
 Marais, Stofflet in the interior, and 
 the Chouan leaders in Brittany. But 
 towards the close, itself the disciple of 
 accursed experience, it became merely 
 "a war of ruffians, carried on by treach- 
 ery," and accomplished in carnage and 
 wrath ; its last flutter on Quiberon sands, 
 its last allaying, far gentler than any an- 
 ticipation of it, from the steady hand of 
 General Hoche. 
 "So quick bright things come to confusion !" 
 
The Vendean captains were patriots, as 
 is well said in the preface to Mr. George J. 
 Hill's admirable little book," whose^<a;/r/^ 
 was not of this world," Cathelineau, with 
 his thirty- six kinsmen, Bonchamp and 
 Lescure, gloriously perished while yet 
 hope was high ; D'Elbee, in a sick-chair 
 in his own garden, laden with abuse, and 
 bearing himself gallantly, was shot at 
 Noirmoutiers ; Mondyon and other faith- 
 ful youths "died into life" at Angers, 
 bound in couples like dogs ; Stofiiet paid 
 the wages of his exceeding loyalty in the 
 same rocky town ; Bernard de Marigny 
 was cut off in his prime by the acquies- 
 cence of Stoffiet, who was under an evil 
 influence, and by the orders of Charette, 
 to the bitter sorrow, aftervv^ards, of the 
 former; Charette himself, having made 
 terms to his advantage in March of 1795, 
 at Nantes, and renewing hostilities for 
 what he thought to be sufficient cause, 
 though offered a thousand pounds and 
 
free passage to England for his good- 
 will, kept up to the last the unequal 
 struggle with Travot, and, closing a ca- 
 reer of signal splendor, was taken and 
 put to death, lion-stanch, with a salute 
 to the King upon his lips. As soon as 
 his grave was dug, General Hoche with- 
 drew his forces. The war was finished. 
 It is the word of homage to be spoken 
 of the Vendeans, that they fought long 
 with honor and with pity, in the face 
 of unnameable brutality and treachery. 
 During the first Royalist occupation of 
 Chollet, when it was for a while Cathel- 
 ineau's gay and free little capital, full of 
 festivity and transient peace, the public 
 treasury, known to be packed, was not 
 touched. Tributes to facts of this kind 
 are to be gathered from the pages of 
 every hostile or neutral annalist. And 
 Madame de La Rochejaquelein recalled, 
 for the amusement of another generation, 
 her own amusement at Bressuire in 1793, 
 
when the rueful masters of the situation 
 complained to her that they had no 
 money to buy tobacco, it never having 
 occurred to them to seize it in the 
 shops ! It is clear that persons who so 
 scrupled to appropriate the goods the 
 gods provided, were not destined easily 
 to become experts in wanton slaughter, 
 which relieved no need of their honest 
 stomachs. The Republicans began their 
 business at once with the master-stroke 
 of homicide, and forecasted the immortal 
 axiom of De Quincey, that when once a 
 man indulges in murder he soon gets to 
 think little of robbing and lying, of drink- 
 ing and Sabbath -breaking, and even of 
 incivility and procrastination. But in 
 La Vendee they had a breed of misgiv- 
 ing hearts. Marigny, indeed, mild and 
 brotherly towards his own, was as a de- 
 mon towards his foes ; Charette, the very 
 Charette who had put a stop to the 
 cruelties of Souchu at the beginning, 
 
was, with D'Elbee, the first to sanction 
 reprisals. But CatheUneau, Bonchamp, 
 Lescure, La Rochejaquelein and priests 
 innumerable stood then, and stand al- 
 ways, ranged on the side of Christ-like 
 charity. 
 
 To any student of the great Revolu- 
 tion not much need be said of the un- 
 equal exchange of grim attentions. The 
 Blues outdid themselves on Vendean 
 territory. Arrest, with them, meant an 
 immediate commission to explore the 
 spheres. The burials alive at Clisson, 
 the holocaust at Vezins, the atrocities 
 in the wood of Blanche Couronne, the 
 week-long fusillade at Savenay, West- 
 ermann's thousands shot at Angers, Car- 
 rier's drowned at Nantes, the hellish pol- 
 icy of Commaire, Crignon, Amey, Du- 
 four — these were the things which crazed 
 the gentler rebels until they, too, learned 
 to throw forgiveness by, as a coin hollow 
 and vile. In May of 1794, Vimeux, then 
 
in command, went to lay their country 
 waste. Only Victor Hugo's pen could 
 fitly portray the results. The Convention 
 desired report of a landscape without a 
 man, without a house, without a tree ; in 
 due season they had it, true to the letter. 
 It was Westermann's boast to the Com- 
 mittee of Public Safety that he had 
 crushed the children under the horses' 
 hoofs, and massacred the women, who 
 should bring forth no more "brigands ;" 
 that not a prisoner could be laid to his 
 charge, for he had exterminated them ; 
 that La Vendee was heaped, like the 
 pyramids, with bodies. At Rennes the 
 children were made to fire upon their 
 parents : it was a novel, awkward, and 
 lengthy proceeding, entirely to the minds 
 of its originators. At Savenay, hundreds 
 were lured under cover by a promise of 
 amnesty, and as they entered, they were 
 shot down. An adjutant was brought 
 to La Rochejaquelein, during the last 
 
days of his life, in whose pocket was an 
 order to repeat this brilHant joke. Dur- 
 ing that January, also, at Barbastre, fifteen 
 hundred insurgents capitulated, and were 
 cheated in the same way. What wonder 
 if, outside Laval, with horror on horror 
 bruited in their ears, the peasants de- 
 stroyed a whole battalion of Mayence 
 men who were laying down their arms ? 
 But after, marching on Angers from An- 
 train, they sent to Rennes one hundred 
 and fifty prisoners, with the significant 
 message that this was the sort of ven- 
 geance taken by choice for old injuries. 
 It was the work of the kindly incumbent 
 of Sainte-Marie-de-Rhe. On the morn- 
 ing of this release. Monsieur de Hargues, 
 for whom Henri (who had once a hot 
 quarrel with him) interceded passion- 
 ately, mounted the scaffold. For the 
 bitter deeds of Souchu at Machecould 
 the army did voluntary penance. Until 
 it was practically disorganized, it did 
 
not sin in the same way again. We 
 are aware how pretty a burlesque be- 
 tween nominal captor and captives came 
 ofif at Bressuire. And in Thouars, Fon- 
 tenay, and many towns like them, inhab- 
 ited by Republicans and revolutionists 
 who trembled for their fate, no violence 
 whatever was wreaked. 
 
 A truly humorous retaliation was made, 
 at the suggestion of the Marquis of Don- 
 nissan, at Fontenay. There were four 
 thousand prisoners, and no forts nor 
 cells to hold them. Should they be loosed 
 they could not be trusted on parole. 
 (What a thing for Frenchmen to know 
 of Frenchmen !) To solve the difficulty 
 their heads were shaved, so that if during 
 the following weeks they again attempt- 
 ed to fight, they might be caught and 
 punished. The wild barbers had infinite 
 entertainment out of this circumstance. 
 La Rochejaquelein's clemency was a 
 proverb. He waived the very show of 
 
126 
 
 superiority, as when, at Bois-Grolleau, 
 he made Tribert keep his proferred 
 sword. As one who had accepted be- 
 forehand the painfulest surprises of 
 fate, he heard of the destruction of La 
 DurbelHere without a sigh. Precisely 
 the same danger which proved fatal to 
 him, having rehearsed itself before him 
 early in his career, and the pistol having 
 missed fire, the marksman flung himself 
 at his feet, crying out that he could now 
 have his satisfaction. " That is to let 
 thee live," was the Alexander-like reply, 
 made over and over to those who thus 
 fell into his power. He was destined to 
 perish through his belief in the honor of 
 others. The best acknowledgment of 
 the influence which he had upon his 
 headstrong band, was that although 
 they slew, in his absence, the Republic- 
 an officer who led the first raid upon his 
 homestead, yet, when he was murdered 
 by the hand of one of the two grena- 
 
diers, they spared the man who had not 
 fired, because he had been offered mer- 
 cy in Henri's last spoken word. The 
 Marigny, who bore to his imminent 
 misfortune the surname of an active 
 Royalist, was so charmed with the spir- 
 ited behavior of Richard Duplessis, made 
 captive at the siege of Angers, that he 
 sent him. back under escort to his own 
 lines. La Rochejaquelein, never to be 
 outdone in a handsome service, instantly 
 freed two dragoons, with their arms, 
 thanking him, and offering him, in the 
 future, an exchange of any two prisoners 
 for his one. " This was the only Repub- 
 lican general," adds Madame de Lescure, 
 "who had been wont to show us any 
 humanity : he was killed that very day." 
 Marceau and Quetineau, both scrupu- 
 lously fair, deserve to share this mention 
 of Bouin de Marigny. And to Kleber 
 and Hoche, the knightliest of foemen, 
 no acknowledgment would be too great. 
 
128 
 
 Lescure himself was the consummate 
 type of the early Christian : so tolerant, 
 so self-controlling, that to be able to im- 
 pute one vicious deed to him would be 
 a gratification. " The Saint of Poitou," 
 however, was once known to swear 
 steadily for several minutes. An enemy, 
 in action, having cocked a pistol within 
 a rod of his menaced head, Lescure, fear- 
 less and quick, dislodged the barrel with 
 a swing of his sword, and told the aston- 
 ished invader to go free. The Poitevins 
 behind had a mind of their own on the 
 subject, and presently cut the bold Blue 
 to pieces. When the general learned 
 how he had been obeyed, his rage was 
 something to be remembered. This was 
 the aristocrat who, when his ancestral 
 halls were razed to the ground, would 
 not burn Parthenay, which he had taken, 
 not only lest it should be, on his part, a 
 revenge for Clisson, but lest, being a pre- 
 caution merely, it should disedify by 
 
129 
 
 having the look of a revenge ! And it is 
 a curious instance of the " governance of 
 blood " in his most lovely character, that 
 although he was invariably in the thick- 
 est of the fight, his hand inflicted no 
 wilful wound throughout the war, and 
 that to his personal interference no fewer 
 than twenty thousand owed their lives. 
 Again, at the crossing of the Loire, in an 
 hour of unexampled perplexity, between 
 five and six thousand captives were in the 
 hands of the migrating army, and shut 
 in the Benedictine Abbey church, which 
 still tops the crescent-shaped heights of 
 Saint Florent-le-Vieil. There could be no 
 question of transporting them ; the simp- 
 lest expedient w^as to destroy them. Nor 
 was this proposal made in cold blood, 
 for the Marquis of Bonchamp was dying 
 young from the last of many wounds, 
 " for the sacred cause of the lilies," and 
 his troops were in a frenzy of excitement 
 and grief. Not an officer could be found 
 
to give the revolting order. The men 
 had the guns already pointed at the 
 doors, and the slaughter was about to 
 begin, when Boncharap, apprised of 
 what was pending, with his last breath 
 commanded, as he had done before at 
 Pallet, that the Blues should be spared. 
 From the house where he lay the echo 
 rolled along the crowd : " Quarter for 
 the prisoners ; quarter ! It is Bon- 
 champ's order !" They were delivered. 
 With the genuine Gallic sense of the 
 apportioning of things, Bonchamp's gra- 
 cious valedictory is inscribed upon his 
 tomb, lifting its glorious outlines to-day 
 in the transept of that very church, and 
 bearing, in a free-will offering, the name 
 of the sculptor, David d'Angers, whose 
 father was among the ransomed soldiery. 
 As to the amnesty, the Convention, 
 guided by the advice of Merlin de Thion- 
 ville, growled over it. " Freemen accept 
 their lives from slaves ! 'Tis against the 
 
spirit of the Revolution, . . . Consign 
 the unfortunate affair to oblivion." 
 There was different speech in the Tem- 
 ple. " Capet !" said the brute Simon to 
 the wretched little King, when the news 
 came of the crossing of the Loire, " if the 
 Vendeans deliver you, what will you do 
 first }" " Forgive you !" replied the child. 
 La Vendee, forbearing wrong, and seek- 
 ing after righteousness, has no mean 
 martyrology. What people in the mod- 
 ern world so sweetly rival the holy race 
 of whom it is said in the Pharsalia that 
 they hurried on their own extermination, 
 and, brimming with life, spilled it as a 
 libation to the gods ? But since these 
 others were not pagan, there is a yet 
 more endearing and more becoming 
 word : "Sterna fac cum Sanctis tuz's in 
 gloria nufnerari I" 
 
 t 
 
^a 
 
 T is a brief and moving story, 
 and it is over. Small com- 
 ment is to be made at any- 
 time, on promise cut short, 
 on the burning of Apollo's 
 laurel - bough. La Rochejaquelein of 
 Poitou, with his goodness, genius, health, 
 breeding, wealth, and beauty — who in 
 his day would have measured for him 
 the renown which seemed so nigh and 
 so wide ? And the first reward of that 
 fine heart and brain was a wild grave in 
 the grassy trenches with the assassin ; 
 no dues, no amends, no appeal, beyond 
 that piteous ending. He was a boy, rash 
 and romantic, as boys are, and so pyro- 
 technically French that some must smile 
 at him. His chivalry went to the up- 
 
133 
 
 holding of kings ; all he did has a sole 
 value of loyalty, and the application of 
 it is open to dispute. But his spirit, dis- 
 entangled from old circumstances of 
 action, is that which helps humanity 
 towards the dawn, and sets oppressions 
 aside with bad by-gone dreams ; a spirit 
 infinitely suggestive and generative^ then 
 and now a durable sign of hope. 
 
 It is difficult to account for the halo 
 which gathers about such heads, and 
 stays, to make of a sometime aimless 
 intelligence a vision of extreme force 
 and charm to the youth of his own 
 land. Nor ought we try to account 
 for it. Henri de La Rochejacquelein is 
 one with whom statistics and theories 
 have distant dealings. He is a fond in- 
 congruity, a compliment to human nat- 
 ure almost as great as it can bear. He 
 has precisely the look, language, and 
 physical radiance of the demigods : we 
 infer how, from his counterparts, the 
 
early myths grew. Wherever there is a 
 liberal air, and discipline, behold, the 
 demigods are again ; and the senses no 
 longer boggle at them. They rise often, 
 and repeat one another, preaching affir- 
 mation, and inclining us to allow that 
 what Greece and Japan have had, Eng- 
 land has, Alaska and the Congo shall 
 have. Stress must be laid upon heroes : 
 they are the universal premise. Like 
 Emerson's stars, they " light the world 
 with their admonishing smile ;" they 
 warn us, if we will not adore, at least not 
 to deny that they shine forever. 
 
 Among Henri de La Rochejacquelein's 
 peers there were those who would have 
 been men of weight and of mark in any 
 career. But perhaps he, more sensitive 
 and solitary, had no such adaptabilities 
 to bear him out. He was not twenty- 
 two when the dark curtain was rung 
 down upon him. To regret it, is to show 
 small appreciation of the masterly con- 
 
sistency which Fate sometimes allows 
 herself. No spectator of the little drama 
 enacted within the Revolution can for- 
 get how dominant, distinct, unrepeated, 
 this artful image of Henri burns itself in 
 upon the memory. To wish him age 
 and a competency were superstition. 
 Mark how, even in her hasty finishing 
 touches, Nature did not bungle with 
 him. She rounds out her white ideal. 
 She leaves us convinced that living a 
 span, and dying in the hurly-burly, he 
 best fulfilled himself. He is placed in 
 an allotted light perfectly kind to him, 
 perfectly soft and clear to the looker-on. 
 Virtually, what did he amount to? 
 What testimony of him is left ? To the 
 man of facts, who asks the questions, 
 the answers are : Nothing and None. 
 There is a laconic apology in the Spaitish 
 Gypsy : 
 
 "The greatest gift the hero leaves his race 
 Is to have been a hero." 
 
136 
 
 Such a one makes a jest of values ; he 
 has the freedom of every city ; he need 
 pay no taxes ; he cripples criticism ; he 
 can do without a character ; theology 
 itself will not exact faith and good works 
 from him. This Henri lived with his 
 whole soul. His interest to us now is 
 that he blazed with genuine fire, and 
 played no tricks with his individuality. 
 Among the serious war-worn leaders of 
 the insurrection he stands, a fairy prince, 
 with a bright absurd glamour. Never 
 was anybody more like the fiction of an 
 artist's brain. He is all that children 
 look for in a tale, and he has no moral. 
 He is the embodiment of " VmexpHcable 
 Ve7ideey 
 
 He was made to despatch this world, 
 like an errand or a game. He had no 
 sovereign interests here of his own ; 
 rather was he his brother's keeper. A 
 sort of rich unreason shot him past the 
 work, the musing, the sight -seeing for 
 
self, and the pleasant banquets over 
 which men linger. Careless for the 
 making of a name, for the gain of expe- 
 rience, even for the duty of prolonging 
 his usefulness, he chose the first course 
 which he believed honorable, and to 
 which he could give his heart ; and so 
 stumbled on death. The war had a 
 thousand sanctions in his eyes. His 
 enlisting was honest and humble. If 
 he flashed into the most unexampled 
 comet-like activity before he had been 
 long apprenticed, it was merely that he 
 warmed with the motion, that he felt 
 sure at last of himself, and so blazoned 
 abroad his content and comprehension 
 of life. He is less flesh and blood than 
 a magnificent quibble for all the phil- 
 osophies of the cold schools. He repre- 
 sents, in the economy of things, the 
 waste which is thrift, the daring which is 
 prudence, the folly which is wisdom in- 
 effable. 
 
138 
 
 Despite the white heat of enthusiasm, 
 which is apt to singe the susceptibiUties 
 of others, his, at least, was a modest, 
 merry, and balanced mind. Ranked as 
 he will be always with his Cathelineau, 
 Bonchamp, and Lescure, he differs sharp- 
 ly from them : that is, he was farther 
 from a saint or a conventional hero. 
 None the less is he a type of young 
 French manhood ere it had grown 
 wholly modern and complex ; the last 
 of a single-minded race, soldiers by ac- 
 cident, helpers and servers of men by 
 choice. In short, he was a Vendean, 
 behind his century in shrewdness, ahead 
 of it in joy ; a straggler from the pageant 
 of the ancestral crusaders, having all the 
 thirst for justice, the rational gayety, 
 the boyish bel air of the sworded squires 
 of the Middle Ages. A phrase meant 
 for Sidney will grace him : " God hath 
 disdeigned the worlde of this most noble 
 Spirit." Let him ride ever now in mem- 
 
ory, a beardless knight erect upon Fal- 
 lowdeer, his white scarf around him, the 
 nodding cockade of his foes behind ; 
 women watching his lips for comfort and 
 assurance, the happy Hermenee prattling 
 between his knees; beautiful indeed, even 
 in the smoke of war, with his oval face, 
 his hale and winning aspect, his terse 
 speech and candid ways : not the Count 
 nor the General La Rochejaquelein, but 
 " Master Henry, a hard hitter and a dear 
 fellow," as his compatriots knew him, 
 and as Froissart, his fittest chronicler, 
 might have loved him. 
 
 «$» 
 
48/ 
 
 fP/oe; 
 
 Ri 
 
i 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 030 268 548 4