Chapter II: Part 2

He stood in a valley path, giving orders, during an obstinate fight at Martigné-Briand. A ball struck his right hand, shattering the thumb and glancing 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 deprived him, during the month of September, of his share of three signal victories won by “the devils in sabots” under Bonchamp at Torfou, Montaigu, and Saint Fulgent. Not long after, before 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 checkmated his Goliath with his tongue. “Go back to the Republicans,” 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 appropriation 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 circumstance 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 Handkerchief. The other leaders were unable to persuade him to doff it. “They know me by that,” was his aggravating answer, “and besides, it is so comfortable!” But they adorned themselves quickly with the same insignia, and saved him from the sharp-shooters. Such was the origin of the officers’ earliest uniform; 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 continued to take pride in his Chollet turban, and was apt to consider a hat, except on festal occasions, as a piece of tautology. Later, after the conference at Fougères, he adopted the white sash, with its famous little black knot.

Those officers and civic adherents who encompassed the royal family at Paris, between the tragic forsaking of Versailles and the dawn of the regicide year, were, as well they knew, standing under oak-boughs in a gathering storm. Event was treading 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 sleepers; Lafayette, with brave step and smile of compromise, riding through the blue national guards; the Queen, appearing in white on balconies, calm before mobs, with her firm fair arm about her little 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 Chéniers; Vergniaud; Westermann, with his hard, tenacious intelligence not yet amply employed; 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 verifications of the butcheries at Avignon, and bishops departing, after a rapturous _Te Deum_ in the cathedral, each to his seething diocese; stout foreigners drinking in the Faubourg Saint Honoré, and darkly prognosticating ruin for this whole wild smithy where so much old iron was being lighted and beaten into new uses; Maillard 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 literally saw, and part of which, belying the adage, he was not. He, too, had been at the Café Valois; he, too, had watched on the quays the gaming soldiers his colleagues, and the knowing tri-color demoiselles; and heard through his lonely windows, by night, the mounting chorus of

“_Amour sacré de la patrie,
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs!_”

the legacy of immortal song which a Royalist had given to the Republic forever. But these externals had no real hold upon him. He was no searcher of the deep roots nor the forward-stretching 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 medium of his sequestered soul were reeking sedition, experiments blundering and caring not whom they hurt, principles despoiling the world of quiet and gentleness and “the unbought grace of life;” and he moved, indeed, towards Burke’s own curious inference, that the Revolution was criminal because it was unmannerly. He took no time to philosophize when the one blameless and disadvantaged Bourbon needed his sword; it was nothing to him that pent-up rights, burst abroad, were about to vindicate themselves terribly and justly in “immolating 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 mother’s knee swept into the universal dust-heap. There were hundreds of honorable lives like his, impelled by the same hurrying conscientiousness, forming on either side of the great struggle from 1789 to 1792: the men who represented the early beauty of the Revolution, 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 victoriously, if but for an hour, and recognize 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.

With every foot of the Bocage he became 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 Eugène Genoude and Viscount Francis Walsh, 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 particular, 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 misgivings 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 instantly 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 sweetness 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 Rochejaquelein’s _Mémoires_, so, alive, he compelled the interest of on-lookers and of commentators who were foes. Jomini, in his _Histoire Critique_, turns to him with insistent admiration. Kléber’s reports are filled with notes on his scientific skill. It was the opinion of Sempré, after 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 significant exclamation: “What might he not have become!” Henri’s large close mental grasp, his delighting straightforward talk, his prompt deed, were all of a piece; and they won his great contemporary 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, however, 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 Walter Scott would put it, was doing things worthy to be written; he was breathing abroad something of the Greece crystalizing silently in André Chénier’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 (“_sévère_” 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: ‘How 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 extreme to him, he preferred to charge upon supernatural agencies. When he galloped into the guns, and caught no one admiring him visibly, he took occasion to make the sign of the cross; the bigger the danger, the bigger the gesture, according to tradition. Nothing was mere mechanism with him; he was a scorner of exaggeration. His religiousness 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 speculation about it, nor a single dread.

The 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’Elbée and Lescure were borne helpless 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 and new strength from the Bretons, and of opening a northern seaport to the expected 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 Kléber wrote to the Convention, “but our lions beat them.” Before daybreak 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 manœuvre, suggested but a little while before as a safeguard, was adopted in complete despair, and the retreat deteriorated into a migration. Countless families emptied themselves into the rebel camp; a horde of poor creatures, including the entire population of Chollet and the near boroughs, 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 under 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 others relied, known to be dying; Lescure, who had been wounded at La Tremblaye in the midst of his squadrons, dying also; the bewildered, groaning multitude dropping, like the pallid passengers 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’Elbée, by his skilful policy at Châtillon, had himself appointed to the succession. It was the work of an obstinate cabal; Bonchamp, by every claim, deserved the election. But after the passage of the Loire, D’Elbée, in the confusion, 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 divisions 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 untenacious of his opinions, that he should never learn how to silence those who opposed him: in vain. After the ensuing vote he was found hidden in a corner, and cried like the child he was, on Lescure’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 Ernée and Fougères Lescure died, not before a mighty pang was added 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 October. (“The news of these two,” cried lively Barrère in the Convention, “is better than any victory!”) His remains, which, like Lescure’s, were carried for a brief time under the colors, were temporarily buried at Varades. His only son, Hermenée, 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 Hermenée rode with Henri on the same saddle, or trotted in the rear-guard, beating his toy-drum, haranguing the soldiers with pretty ardor, and remembering each lovingly by name. The poor little fellow, weakened by his hardships, succumbed 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 resulted only in this: that no single general, at his allotted post, had been able to beat back the Revolution from La Vendée; that the restoration of the monarchy, the remoter and greater object, was more visionary and hypothetical than ever. They hurried northward feverishly, pursued always by an immense 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. Kléber had his keen eye upon Henri: “I do not believe he can hold out long, away from his own country.” But Henri proceeded to defeat the garrison at Château-Gontier, to crush L’Echelle’s division at Entrammes, and to score a double triumph at Laval. It was at Château-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 hurried into the midst of them, his own 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 Royrand’s orphans at his heels.

These 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 unhampered he became the more intelligently he was able to serve his cause; and his manner of serving, as we know, was not to draw charts in his tent. Incapable of turning his little finger to benefit himself, he was a perennial benefit to all around him. His glad irrepressible gusto leavened the spirits of thousands. Providence, he liked to think, took care of him while he was needed. 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. Lescure and Bonchamp, whom none will accuse of recklessness, pursued, on calculation, the same and the only course of constant self-exposure; for to such cruel tests did the foolish philosophers of La Vendée 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 Henri’s behavior is that he did not compel obedience off the field. It became necessary even for him, who was so secure in the affections of his volunteers, and who had so much influence over them, to shed something besides persuasion on the difficult crowd in his charge. He made no endeavor to employ Stofflet’s verbal whips and goads, which never failed to accomplish their object; sternness 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 confessed, 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 made it impossible to curb factional intrigue.

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 expect 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. Cathelineau’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 Rochejaquelein” 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 Château-Gontier, a unique opportunity arose to retrace the march and re-establish headquarters in the Bocage, it went hard indeed with Henri that none would listen to him. Again, at Laval, he would have pushed through Kléber’s disorganized forces, towards the safe though smoking labyrinths at home; but, misled by some vague encouraging rumor, the majority clamored to push on. Throughout this unhappy time, when his light heart was sickening with rebuffs and delays, there came to him a growing prudence and calm. He learned to cover a rout, to reap the full fruit of a victory. Many of the elder subofficers who watched him were touched and comforted, during the hot fourteen hours at Château-Gontier, where he forbore his old impetuous charges, but rode close to his column, clearing up the confusion, hindering the bravest from advancing alone, and holding the disciplined musketeers together; so as to remind more than one of the tradition of Condé, in his invincible youth, at Rocroy.

The blue sea-horizon showed no sign of an English sail, though the firing was heard at Jersey; there were tidings 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 reoccupied by their enemies. They had to contest 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 Abbé Bernier. At Pontorson, where the streets had been choked with dead for many days, the army routed the Blues; Forêt, the first brand in the burning at Saint Florent, 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 fighting 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 owing wholly to the exhortations of Abbé Doussin of Sainte-Marie-de-Rhé, 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 October was to be retraced inch by inch. “You deny me in conference; you abandon 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; famine 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 Baugé, and now, unable to seize a permanent advantage, ran hither and thither, ever away from the Loire. At the bridge of La Flèche, Henri, fording the stream with a small picked body of horsemen, overcame 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, Müller, Tilly, and Westermann’s light cavalry were closing on them. Prostrate and drunken, the Royalist survivors lay inert as stones. But Henri’s frantic energy (“he was like a madman,” says Madame de La Rochejaquelein) once more assembled a desperate handful, 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 remnant of the journeying army laid down their lives. In the deserted town thousands of old men, women, and children were slaughtered, amid jeers and fury and the patter of grape-shot. Exhausted, 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 affectionate 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 answered. He knew that La Vendée had had its death-blow before him.

So ended the march into Brittany. No coward Bourbon appeared to lead and comfort his believers; the emigrant aristocracy, “effeminated by a long peace,” and scattered among the European capitals, shrunk from reviving their own fainting 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 twenty 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 Vendée paid its last penny for what it took, and when that was spent issued notes in the King’s name, payable 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 farther 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, Stofflet, and La Ville-Baugé in one, young De Langerie and eighteen men in the other, succeeded in launching themselves, with the intention of capturing and towing back some hay-laden skiffs on the opposite shore. The current was rapid and strong; the patrols opened fire; a gun-boat descended the channel and sank the skiffs; the mournful peasants, separated 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.

The fugitives, fortunately, landed in safety, and wandered all day through the fields. The Republic, angered at the strategies that so long held its strength at bay from the footpaths, hedges, and queer monotonous bush-places which had provided shelter to the rebels and pitfalls to its own baffled soldiery, was literally clearing the neighborhood out, and burning east and west down to the very grass. The houses were in ashes; the inhabitants had taken to the woods; the lowing of the homeless cattle filled the wind. Desolation yet more complete, a desolation known to wolves and carrion-crows, was to fall upon La Vendée. After twenty-four hours, traversing several 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 Poché-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 departed, unsuspecting, ere dawn. Their poor bedfellows, thankful for their immunity, crept forth and roamed on. They would have perished, had they not, with the strength of despair, attacked 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 _Amen_ 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 Boisvert de Combrand, and passed a melancholy 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 closing 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 esteem 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 Durbellière 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 flat, and watched his fowlers debate, pass under, and clatter off, without their bird. This opportune reminder of how much he was still sought and feared, determined his immediate action. Nothing but the jaws of the guillotine awaited him if he failed.

He learned that while Stofflet was already bravely combating in the recesses of the Bocage, Charette was advancing towards Maulevrier. Chafing to be separated 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 breakfasting 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 crossed over to the spot where Henri was standing. “You will follow me?” he asked. Henri made a foolish and haughty answer: “I am accustomed to be followed!” and turned away. Here was an instance of the jealousy and disunion which had affected the chiefs of the insurrection. Though Henri was the legitimate 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 Luçon, where they were beaten by Tuncq. Could the two have agreed to march together on the capital, the counter-revolution, Napoleon declared, would have set in nearly twenty years sooner.

The peasants, flocking meanwhile from the environs to join Charette, crowded about with welcoming shouts of “M’sieu Henri!” before he had so much as spoken. He was pleased, as they were; his eager spirit revived; he left the Chevalier to his own devices in his own county. Assembling the new battalion at Neuvy, he marched all night, and carried a Republican post eight leagues distant. Then began his most indefatigable minor 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 Salbœuf Castle and in Vezins his astonishing 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 daily, he became, by sheer thrust and parry, master of the surrounding country; and at last he prepared to besiege Mortagne and Châtillon. His headquarters 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 regimentals, the little symbolic heart worn outside, as of old. He kept his adherents, poor and threadbare like himself, 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 Nouaillé, 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 riding 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 conspicuous 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 sudden sense of danger, to disarm his assailant; but on the instant, and without a cry, he fell from his saddle, dead.

The legend of Henri de La Rochejaquelein did not end with his life. Says the Count of C----, an emigrant (author of the graphic and erratic pamphlet entitled _Un Séjour de Dix Mois en 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 perished on the field of honor.” From this anonymous gentleman comes fragmentary testimony on a subject once of some mystery and conjecture. He had embraced, 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 burning to avenge him, she flung herself upon the advancing Blues, and so expired. And he lends her, moreover, the soldierly 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 contradicting 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 dowered with so much worth and so much charm! look down upon the tears of thy brethren-in-arms; listen to the sorrowings of the whole army; see the glorious tomb raised to thy memory; bid thy spirit hover nigh among the cypresses, to count the trophies which thy victorious 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 perpetuate 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 triumph’s pulse and centre; ah! behold and consider all these things at once, and let the palm which is thine in Heaven 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 extract, 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 company during the winter, received her death-blow in the neighborhood of Trémentines. The nonsense of her being Henri’s sweetheart probably owed its origin to the same singular Republican inventiveness 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 dealings 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 théatrique_. 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 tenderer 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 comprehensible 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 Brissonière and Haie Bureau, there was some one, verily, to share the hallowed six feet of ground with Henri; some one sleeping quietly as the child Hermenée 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 miscreant who had slain him.

When the Vendeans, transported with fury, rushed forward and cut the grenadier down, there was in the air the noise of an approaching hostile column. In the utmost distress the detachment at Nouaillé, to whose command Stofflet now succeeded, enjoined it upon a trusty farmer to bury their chief in a hasty grave. They would not have the grenadier parted from him, that his uniform might be a silent defence against profanation 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 Chollet, 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 confusion as to the date of Henri’s death is found in all contemporary accounts, caused by the prolonged lack of calendars; and uncertainty of the fact itself bewildered those interested without. Henri’s mother knew nothing of her loss until the following summer. Meanwhile Stofflet 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 discovering and digging up the body. Thanks to the foresight of others, no such indignity befell what was Henri. But how little Turreau recognized the splendid oblique flattery of this order, which, as Crétineau-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 testimony 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 cemetery of Saint Aubin de Baubigné. 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 Waterloo, at the head of the Vendean army raised to oppose the Emperor Napoleon. “Accident,” says 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 _Mémoires_ of Madame de Bonchamp, “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 vault of the new church near, where Henri lies with very many of his high-hearted kindred; 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 years. In the still aisle-chapel above them, the rich light of a memorial window slides down on delicate 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 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.”

The strength and beauty of the cause vanished with Henri. The war did not end for more than a twelve-month; fresh recruits carried 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 treachery,” and accomplished in carnage and wrath; its last flutter on Quiberon sands, its last allaying, far gentler than any anticipation 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 _patria_ was not of this world,” Cathelineau, with his thirty-six kinsmen, Bonchamp and Lescure, gloriously perished while yet hope was high; D’Elbée, in a sick-chair in his own garden, laden with abuse, and bearing himself gallantly, was shot at Noirmoutiers; Mondyon and other faithful youths “died into life” at Angers, bound in couples like dogs; Stofflet paid the wages of his exceeding loyalty in the same rocky town; Bernard de Marigny was cut off in his prime by the acquiescence of Stofflet, who was under an evil influence, and by the orders of Charette, to the bitter sorrow, afterwards, 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 career 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 withdrew 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 Cathelineau’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 drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and even of incivility and procrastination. But in La Vendée they had a breed of misgiving hearts. Marigny, indeed, mild and brotherly towards his own, was as a demon towards his foes; Charette, the very Charette who had put a stop to the cruelties of Souchu at the beginning, was, with D’Elbée, the first to sanction reprisals. But Cathelineau, Bonchamp, Lescure, La Rochejaquelein and priests innumerable stood then, and stand always, ranged on the side of Christ-like charity.