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