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.