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.
To any student of the great Revolution not much need be said of the
unequal exchange of grim attentions. The Blues outdid themselves on
Vendean territory. Arrest, with them, meant an immediate commission
to explore the spheres. The burials alive at Clisson, the holocaust
at Vezins, the atrocities in the wood of Blanche Couronne, the
week-long fusillade at Savenay, Westermann’s thousands shot at
Angers, Carrier’s drowned at Nantes, the hellish policy of Commaire,
Crignon, Amey, Dufour--these were the things which crazed the gentler
rebels until they, too, learned to throw forgiveness by, as a coin
hollow and vile. In May of 1794, Vimeux, then in command, went to
lay their country waste. Only Victor Hugo’s pen could fitly portray
the results. The Convention desired report of a landscape without a
man, without a house, without a tree; in due season they had it, true
to the letter. It was Westermann’s boast to the Committee of Public
Safety that he had crushed the children under the horses’ hoofs, and
massacred the women, who should bring forth no more “brigands;” that
not a prisoner could be laid to his charge, for he had exterminated
them; that La Vendée was heaped, like the pyramids, with bodies. At
Rennes the children were made to fire upon their parents: it was a
novel, awkward, and lengthy proceeding, entirely to the minds of its
originators. At Savenay, hundreds were lured under cover by a promise
of amnesty, and as they entered, they were shot down. An adjutant was
brought to La Rochejaquelein, during the last days of his life, in
whose pocket was an order to repeat this brilliant joke. During that
January, also, at Barbastre, fifteen hundred insurgents capitulated,
and were cheated in the same way. What wonder if, outside Laval,
with horror on horror bruited in their ears, the peasants destroyed
a whole battalion of Mayence men who were laying down their arms?
But after, marching on Angers from Antrain, they sent to Rennes one
hundred and fifty prisoners, with the significant message that this
was the sort of vengeance taken by choice for old injuries. It was the
work of the kindly incumbent of Sainte-Marie-de-Rhé. On the morning
of this release, Monsieur de Hargues, for whom Henri (who had once a
hot quarrel with him) interceded passionately, mounted the scaffold.
For the bitter deeds of Souchu at Machecould the army did voluntary
penance. Until it was practically disorganized, it did not sin in the
same way again. We are aware how pretty a burlesque between nominal
captor and captives came off at Bressuire. And in Thouars, Fontenay,
and many towns like them, inhabited by Republicans and revolutionists
who trembled for their fate, no violence whatever was wreaked.
A truly humorous retaliation was made, at the suggestion of the Marquis
of Donnissan, at Fontenay. There were four thousand prisoners, and no
forts nor cells to hold them. Should they be loosed they could not be
trusted on parole. (What a thing for Frenchmen to know of Frenchmen!)
To solve the difficulty their heads were shaved, so that if during the
following weeks they again attempted to fight, they might be caught
and punished. The wild barbers had infinite entertainment out of this
circumstance. La Rochejaquelein’s clemency was a proverb. He waived
the very show of superiority, as when, at Bois-Grolleau, he made
Tribert keep his proferred sword. As one who had accepted beforehand
the painfulest surprises of fate, he heard of the destruction of La
Durbellière without a sigh. Precisely the same danger which proved
fatal to him, having rehearsed itself before him early in his career,
and the pistol having missed fire, the marksman flung himself at his
feet, crying out that he could now have his satisfaction. “That is to
let thee live,” was the Alexander-like reply, made over and over to
those who thus fell into his power. He was destined to perish through
his belief in the honor of others. The best acknowledgment of the
influence which he had upon his headstrong band, was that although
they slew, in his absence, the Republican officer who led the first
raid upon his homestead, yet, when he was murdered by the hand of one
of the two grenadiers, they spared the man who had not fired, because
he had been offered mercy in Henri’s last spoken word. The Marigny,
who bore to his imminent misfortune the surname of an active Royalist,
was so charmed with the spirited behavior of Richard Duplessis, made
captive at the siege of Angers, that he sent him back under escort to
his own lines. La Rochejaquelein, never to be outdone in a handsome
service, instantly freed two dragoons, with their arms, thanking him,
and offering him, in the future, an exchange of any two prisoners
for his one. “This was the only Republican general,” adds Madame de
Lescure, “who had been wont to show us any humanity: he was killed that
very day.” Marceau and Quétineau, both scrupulously fair, deserve to
share this mention of Bouin de Marigny. And to Kléber and Hoche, the
knightliest of foemen, no acknowledgment would be too great.
Lescure himself was the consummate type of the early Christian: so
tolerant, so self-controlling, that to be able to impute one vicious
deed to him would be a gratification. “The Saint of Poitou,” however,
was once known to swear steadily for several minutes. An enemy, in
action, having cocked a pistol within a rod of his menaced head,
Lescure, fearless and quick, dislodged the barrel with a swing of
his sword, and told the astonished invader to go free. The Poitevins
behind had a mind of their own on the subject, and presently cut the
bold Blue to pieces. When the general learned how he had been obeyed,
his rage was something to be remembered. This was the aristocrat who,
when his ancestral halls were razed to the ground, would not burn
Parthenay, which he had taken, not only lest it should be, on his
part, a revenge for Clisson, but lest, being a precaution merely, it
should disedify by having the look of a revenge! And it is a curious
instance of the “governance of blood” in his most lovely character,
that although he was invariably in the thickest of the fight, his hand
inflicted no wilful wound throughout the war, and that to his personal
interference no fewer than twenty thousand owed their lives. Again, at
the crossing of the Loire, in an hour of unexampled perplexity, between
five and six thousand captives were in the hands of the migrating
army, and shut in the Benedictine Abbey church, which still tops the
crescent-shaped heights of Saint Florent-le-Vieil. There could be no
question of transporting them; the simplest expedient was to destroy
them. Nor was this proposal made in cold blood, for the Marquis of
Bonchamp was dying young from the last of many wounds, “for the sacred
cause of the lilies,” and his troops were in a frenzy of excitement and
grief. Not an officer could be found to give the revolting order. The
men had the guns already pointed at the doors, and the slaughter was
about to begin, when Bonchamp, apprised of what was pending, with his
last breath commanded, as he had done before at Pallet, that the Blues
should be spared. From the house where he lay the echo rolled along the
crowd: “Quarter for the prisoners; quarter! It is Bonchamp’s order!”
They were delivered. With the genuine Gallic sense of the apportioning
of things, Bonchamp’s gracious valedictory is inscribed upon his tomb,
lifting its glorious outlines to-day in the transept of that very
church, and bearing, in a free-will offering, the name of the sculptor,
David d’Angers, whose father was among the ransomed soldiery. As to the
amnesty, the Convention, guided by the advice of Merlin de Thionville,
growled over it. “Freemen accept their lives from slaves! ’Tis against
the spirit of the Revolution.... Consign the unfortunate affair to
oblivion.” There was different speech in the Temple. “Capet!” said the
brute Simon to the wretched little King, when the news came of the
crossing of the Loire, “if the Vendeans deliver you, what will you do
first?” “Forgive you!” replied the child.
La Vendée, forbearing wrong, and seeking after righteousness, has no
mean martyrology. What people in the modern world so sweetly rival
the holy race of whom it is said in the _Pharsalia_ that they hurried
on their own extermination, and, brimming with life, spilled it as a
libation to the gods? But since these others were not pagan, there is
a yet more endearing and more becoming word: “_Æterna fac cum sanctis
tuis in gloria numerari!_”
It is a brief and moving story, and it is over. Small comment is to
be made at any time, on promise cut short, on the burning of Apollo’s
laurel-bough. La Rochejaquelein of Poitou, with his goodness, genius,
health, breeding, wealth, and beauty--who in his day would have
measured for him the renown which seemed so nigh and so wide? And the
first reward of that fine heart and brain was a wild grave in the
grassy trenches with the assassin; no dues, no amends, no appeal,
beyond that piteous ending. He was a boy, rash and romantic, as boys
are, and so pyrotechnically French that some must smile at him. His
chivalry went to the upholding of kings; all he did has a sole value
of loyalty, and the application of it is open to dispute. But his
spirit, disentangled from old circumstances of action, is that which
helps humanity towards the dawn, and sets oppressions aside with bad
by-gone dreams; a spirit infinitely suggestive and generative, then and
now a durable sign of hope.
It is difficult to account for the halo which gathers about such
heads, and stays, to make of a sometime aimless intelligence a vision
of extreme force and charm to the youth of his own land. Nor ought
we try to account for it. Henri de La Rochejacquelein is one with
whom statistics and theories have distant dealings. He is a fond
incongruity, a compliment to human nature almost as great as it can
bear. He has precisely the look, language, and physical radiance of
the demigods: we infer how, from his counterparts, the early myths
grew. Wherever there is a liberal air, and discipline, behold, the
demigods are again; and the senses no longer boggle at them. They rise
often, and repeat one another, preaching affirmation, and inclining us
to allow that what Greece and Japan have had, England has, Alaska and
the Congo shall have. Stress must be laid upon heroes: they are the
universal premise. Like Emerson’s stars, they “light the world with
their admonishing smile;” they warn us, if we will not adore, at least
not to deny that they shine forever.
Among Henri de La Rochejacquelein’s peers there were those who would
have been men of weight and of mark in any career. But perhaps he, more
sensitive and solitary, had no such adaptabilities to bear him out. He
was not twenty-two when the dark curtain was rung down upon him. To
regret it, is to show small appreciation of the masterly consistency
which Fate sometimes allows herself. No spectator of the little drama
enacted within the Revolution can forget how dominant, distinct,
unrepeated, this artful image of Henri burns itself in upon the memory.
To wish him age and a competency were superstition. Mark how, even in
her hasty finishing touches, Nature did not bungle with him. She rounds
out her white ideal. She leaves us convinced that living a span, and
dying in the hurly-burly, he best fulfilled himself. He is placed in an
allotted light perfectly kind to him, perfectly soft and clear to the
looker-on.
Virtually, what did he amount to? What testimony of him is left? To
the man of facts, who asks the questions, the answers are: Nothing and
None. There is a laconic apology in the _Spanish Gypsy_:
“The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero.”
Such a one makes a jest of values; he has the freedom of every city;
he need pay no taxes; he cripples criticism; he can do without a
character; theology itself will not exact faith and good works from
him. This Henri lived with his whole soul. His interest to us now
is that he blazed with genuine fire, and played no tricks with his
individuality. Among the serious war-worn leaders of the insurrection
he stands, a fairy prince, with a bright absurd glamour. Never was
anybody more like the fiction of an artist’s brain. He is all that
children look for in a tale, and he has no moral. He is the embodiment
of “_l’inexplicable Vendée_.”
He was made to despatch this world, like an errand or a game. He had
no sovereign interests here of his own; rather was he his brother’s
keeper. A sort of rich unreason shot him past the work, the musing,
the sight-seeing for self, and the pleasant banquets over which men
linger. Careless for the making of a name, for the gain of experience,
even for the duty of prolonging his usefulness, he chose the first
course which he believed honorable, and to which he could give his
heart; and so stumbled on death. The war had a thousand sanctions in
his eyes. His enlisting was honest and humble. If he flashed into
the most unexampled comet-like activity before he had been long
apprenticed, it was merely that he warmed with the motion, that he
felt sure at last of himself, and so blazoned abroad his content and
comprehension of life. He is less flesh and blood than a magnificent
quibble for all the philosophies of the cold schools. He represents, in
the economy of things, the waste which is thrift, the daring which is
prudence, the folly which is wisdom ineffable.
Despite the white heat of enthusiasm, which is apt to singe the
susceptibilities of others, his, at least, was a modest, merry, and
balanced mind. Ranked as he will be always with his Cathelineau,
Bonchamp, and Lescure, he differs sharply from them: that is, he was
farther from a saint or a conventional hero. None the less is he a type
of young French manhood ere it had grown wholly modern and complex; the
last of a single-minded race, soldiers by accident, helpers and servers
of men by choice. In short, he was a Vendean, behind his century in
shrewdness, ahead of it in joy; a straggler from the pageant of the
ancestral crusaders, having all the thirst for justice, the rational
gayety, the boyish _bel air_ of the sworded squires of the Middle
Ages. A phrase meant for Sidney will grace him: “God hath disdeigned
the worlde of this most noble Spirit.” Let him ride ever now in
memory, a beardless knight erect upon Fallowdeer, his white scarf
around him, the nodding cockade of his foes behind; women watching his
lips for comfort and assurance, the happy Hermenée prattling between
his knees; beautiful indeed, even in the smoke of war, with his oval
face, his hale and winning aspect, his terse speech and candid ways;
not the Count nor the General La Rochejaquelein, but “Master Henry, a
hard hitter and a dear fellow,” as his compatriots knew him, and as
Froissart, his fittest chronicler, might have loved him.
[Illustration: CHART ON A REDUCED SCALE OF VENDÉE MILITAIRE.]
Transcriber’s Note:
Spelling has been retained as used in the original publication,
including both Rochejaquelein and Rochejacquelein and possible
typographical errors.
End of Project Gutenberg's 'Monsieur Henri', by Louise Imogen Guiney