It was plain,--even to the authorities, who are usually the last to be
informed as to the state of public opinion in the countries they are
called upon to govern,--it was plain, we say, that an uprising was
contemplated in Brittany and in La Vendée.
We have heard Courtin tell Madame de la Logerie of the meetings of the
legitimist leaders. Those meetings were a secret to no one. The names
of the new Bonchamps and Elbées, who were to put themselves at the head
of this last Vendéan struggle, were well-known and noted; the
organizations of the former period into "parishes," "captaincies," and
"divisions," were renewed; the priests refused to chant the _Domine
salvum fac regem Philippum_, commending to the prayers of their people
Henri V., king of France, and Marie-Caroline, regent. In short, in all
the departments bordering on the Loire, particularly those of the Lower
Loire and of the Maine-et-Loire, the air was filled with that smell of
powder which precedes, as a general thing, all great political
convulsions.
In spite of this wide-spread fermentation,--perhaps in consequence of
it,--the fair at Montaigu promised to be very brilliant. Although it
was usually of small importance, the influx of peasants on this
occasion was considerable. The men from the high lands of Mauges and
Retz rubbed shoulders with those from the Bocage and the plain; and
the warlike inclination of all these country-folk was manifested by
the prevalence of broad-brimmed hats and long-haired heads, and the
absence of caps. In fact, the women, who were usually the majority in
these commercial assemblies, did not come, on this occasion, to the
Montaigu fair.
Moreover,--and this alone would have sufficed to show the incipient
state of things to the least observing person,--though customers were
plentiful at the fair of Montaigu, horses, cows, sheep, butter, and
corn, which constituted the ordinary traffic, were conspicuously
absent. The peasants, whether they came from Beaupréau, Mortagne,
Bressuire, Saint-Fulgent, or Machecoul, carried in place of their
usual marketable produce nothing but stout cudgels of dogwood tipped
with iron, and by the way they grasped them it was plain enough that
they meant to do business of that kind.
The market-place and the main (and only) street in Montaigu, which
were used as the fairground, had a serious, almost threatening, and
certainly solemn aspect, which is not usual in such assemblages. A few
jugglers, a few vendors of quack medicines, a few teeth-pullers tapped
their boxes, blew their bugles, clanged their gongs, and vaunted their
trades facetiously to no purpose; frowns continued on the anxious
faces that passed them by without deigning to listen to their music or
their chatter.
The people of La Vendée, like their neighbors of the North, the
Bretons, talk but little. On this occasion they talked less than ever.
Most of them stood with their backs against the houses or the garden
walls or the wooden bars that inclosed the market-place, and there
they stood, motionless, their legs crossed, their heads under their
broad hats inclining forward, and their hands leaning on their sticks,
like so many statues. Some were gathered in little groups, and these
groups, which seemed to be awaiting something, were, strange to say,
as silent as the solitary individuals.
The crowds were great in the drinking-shops. Cider, brandy, and coffee
were dispensed there in vast quantities; but the constitution of the
Vendéan peasant is so robust that the enormous quantities of liquor
absorbed had no visible influence on the faces and conduct of any of
them. Their color might be a little higher, their eyes more brilliant,
but the men were masters of themselves, and all the more so because
they distrusted those who kept the wineshops, and the village folk
whom they met there. In the towns and villages along the great
high-roads of La Vendée and Brittany the minds of the inhabitants
were, as a general thing, awakened to ideas of progress and liberty;
but these sentiments, which cooled at a little distance, disappeared
altogether when the interior country districts were reached.
Consequently, all the inhabitants of the chief centres of population,
unless they had given unequivocal proofs of devotion to the royal
cause, were classed as "patriots" by the peasantry; and patriots were
to the peasants enemies, to whom they attributed all the evils
resulting from the great insurrection, hating them with that deep,
undying hatred which characterizes civil and religious warfare.
In coming to the fair at Montaigu--a centre of population, and
occupied at this time by a company of some hundred or so of Mobile
guards--the inhabitants of the country districts had penetrated to the
very centre of their enemies. They understood this thoroughly, and
that is why they maintained under a pacific demeanor the reserve and
vigilance of soldiers under arms.
Only one of the numerous drinking-shops of Montaigu was kept by a man
on whom the Vendéans could rely, and before whom, consequently, they
discarded all constraint. His tavern was in the centre of the
town, on the fairground itself, at the corner of the market-place and
a side alley leading, not to another street nor to the fields, but to
the river Maine, which skirts the town to the southeast.
The tavern had no sign. A branch of dry holly, stuck horizontally into
a crack of the wall, and a few apples, seen through window-panes so
covered with dust that no curtain was needed, informed all strangers
of the nature of the establishment. As for its regular customers, they
needed no indications.
The proprietor of this tavern was named Aubin Courte-Joie. Aubin was his
family name; Courte-Joie was a nickname, which he owed to the jeering
propensities of his friends. He came by it in this way. The part,
insignificant as it is, which Aubin Courte-Joie plays in this history
obliges us to say a word on his antecedents.
At twenty years of age Aubin was so frail, debilitated, and sickly,
that even the conscription, which did not look very closely into such
matters, rejected him as unfit for the favors which his Imperial and
Royal Majesty bestowed upon his conscripts. But in 1814 this same
conscription, having then aged by two years, was less fastidious, and
came to the conclusion that what it had so far considered an abortion
was at any rate a numerical figure, somewhere between a one and a
nought, and could, if only on paper, contribute to the terrifying of
the kings of Europe. Consequently, the conscription laid hands on
Aubin.
But Aubin, whom the original disdain manifested by the authorities
toward his person had alienated from all desire for military glory,
resolved to desert the government, and taking to flight he connected
himself with one of those bands of refractories (as recalcitrant
conscripts were then called) who roamed the interior of the country.
The less plentiful recruits became, the more pitiless grew the agents
of imperial authority.
Aubin, whom Nature had not endowed with excessive conceit, would never
have thought himself so necessary to the government if he had not seen
with his own eyes the trouble that the government took to hunt for him
through the forests of Brittany and the bogs of La Vendée. The
_gendarmes_ were active in their pursuit of refractories.
In one of the encounters that resulted from this pursuit, Aubin had
used his gun with a courage and tenacity which proved that the
conscription of 1814 was not altogether wrong in wishing to lay hands
on him as one of its elect,--in one of these encounters, we were about
to say, Aubin was hit by a ball and left for dead in the roadway.
On that day a bourgeoise of Ancenis took the road by the river bank,
which leads from Ancenis to Nantes. She was in her carriole, and it
might be about eight or nine o'clock at night; at any rate, it was
dusk. When she came to the body the horse shuddered in the shafts and
refused to go on. She whipped him, he reared. On further whipping, the
animal tried to turn short round and go back to Ancenis. His mistress,
who had never known him to behave in that way before, got out of her
carriole. All was then explained. Aubin's body lay across the road.
Such encounters were not infrequent in those days. The bourgeoise was
only slightly alarmed. She fastened her horse to a tree, and began to
drag Aubin's body into the ditch, to make room for her vehicle and
others that might pass that way. But she had no sooner touched the
body than she found it warm. The motion she gave to it, perhaps the
pain of the motion, brought Aubin to his senses; he gave a sigh and
moved his arms.
The end of it was that, instead of putting him into the ditch, the
bourgeoise put him into her carriole; and instead of continuing her
way to Nantes she returned to Ancenis. The good dame was pious and a
royalist. The cause for which Aubin was wounded, the scapulary she
found on his breast, interested her deeply. She sent for a surgeon.
The luckless Aubin had both legs fractured by one shot; it was
necessary to amputate them. The worthy woman nursed him and took care
of him with all the devotion of a sister of charity. Her good deed, as
often happens, attached her to the object of it, and when Aubin was
once more well in health it was with the utmost astonishment that he
received an offer of her heart and hand. Needless to say that Aubin
accepted.
Thenceforth Aubin became, to the stupefaction of all the country round
one of the small proprietors of the canton. But, alas! his joy was of
short duration. His wife died within a year, She had taken the
precaution to make a will, leaving him all her property; but her
natural heirs attacked it for some error of form, and the court at
Nantes having decided in their favor, the poor ex-recruit was no
better off than before his luck happened to him. It was in reference
to the short duration of his opulence that the inhabitants of
Montaigu, who were not, as will be imagined, without envy at his rise
or rejoicing at his fall, bestowed upon him the significant addition
of Courte-Joie (Short-Joy) to his proper name.
Now, the heirs who had managed to set aside the will belonged to the
liberal party. Aubin could not, therefore, do less than vent upon
that party in general the anger that the loss of his property excited
in him. He did so, and he did it conscientiously. Soured by his
infirmities, embittered by what seemed to him a horrible injustice,
Aubin Courte-Joie felt to all those whom he blamed for his
fortunes--judges, patriots, and adversaries--a savage hatred. Public
events had encouraged this hatred, and it was now awaiting a favorable
moment to convert itself into deeds which the sullen and vindictive
nature of the man would undoubtedly render terrible.
With his twofold infirmity it was impossible for Aubin to go back to
his old life and become a farmer and tiller of the ground like his
father and grandfather before him. He was compelled, therefore, much
against his will, to live in a town. Gathering up the fragments of his
lost opulence he came to live in the midst of those he hated most, at
Montaigu itself, where he kept the tavern in which we find him
eighteen years after the events we have just recorded.
In 1832 there was not in all La Vendée a more enthusiastic adherent to
royalist opinions than Aubin Courte-Joie. In serving that cause was he
not fulfilling a personal vengeance? Aubin Courte-Joie was, in spite
of his two wooden legs, the most active and intelligent agent in the
uprising which was now being organized. Standing sentinel in the midst
of the enemy's camp, he kept the Vendéan leaders informed of all the
government preparations for defence, not only in the canton of
Montaigu, but also throughout the adjoining districts.
The tramps who roamed the country--those customers of a day, whom
other tavern-keepers considered of no profit and paid no heed to--were
in his hands marvellous auxiliaries, whom he kept employed in a
circuit of thirty miles. He used them as spies, and also as messengers
to and from the inhabitants of the country districts. His tavern was
the rendezvous of all those who were distinctively called Chouans. It
was the only one, as we have said, where they were not obliged to
repress their royalist sentiments.
On the day of the fair at Montaigu Aubin Courte-Joie's drinking-shop
did not at first sight seem so full of customers as might have been
expected from the great influx of country people. In the first of the
two rooms, a dark and gloomy apartment, furnished with an unpolished
wooden counter and a few benches and stools, not more than a dozen
peasants were assembled. By the cleanliness, we might say the nicety
of their clothes, it was plain that these peasants belonged to the
upper class of farmers.
This first room was separated from the second by a glass partition,
behind which was a cotton curtain with large red and white squares.
The second room served as kitchen, dining-room, bedroom, and office,
becoming also, on great occasions an annex to the common hall; it was
where Aubin Courte-Joie received his special friends.
The furniture of this room showed its quintuple service. At the
farther end was a very low bed, with a tester and curtains of green
serge; this was evidently the couch of the legless proprietor. It was
flanked by two huge hogsheads, from which brandy and cider were drawn
on demand of customers. To right, on entering, was the fireplace, with
a wide, high chimney-piece like those of cottages. In the middle of
the room was an oak table with wooden benches on each side of it.
Opposite to the fireplace stood a dresser with crockery and tin
utensils. A crucifix surmounted by a branch of consecrated holly, a
few wax figurines of a devotional character coarsely colored,
constituted the decoration of the apartment.
On this occasion Aubin Courte-Joie had admitted to this sanctuary a
number of his numerous friends. In the outer room there were, as we
have said, not more than a dozen; but at least a score were in the
second. Most of these were sitting round the table drinking and
talking with great animation. Three or four were emptying great bags
piled up in one corner of the room and containing large, round
sea-biscuits; these they counted and put in baskets, giving the baskets
to tramps or women who stood by an outer door in the corner of the room
behind the cider cask. This door opened upon a little courtyard, which
itself opened into the alley-way leading to the river, which we have
already mentioned.
Aubin Courte-Joie was seated in a sort of arm-chair under the
mantel-shelf of the chimney. Beside him was a man wearing a goatskin
garment and a black woollen cap, in whom we may recognize our old
friend Jean Oullier, with his dog lying at his feet between his legs.
Behind them Courte-Joie's niece, a young and handsome peasant girl,
whom the tavern-keeper had taken to do the serving of his business, was
stirring the fire and watching some dozen brown cups in which was
gently simmering in the heat from the hearth what the peasants call "a
roast of cider."
Aubin Courte-Joie was talking eagerly in a low voice to Jean Oullier,
when a slight whistle, like the frightened cry of a partridge, came
from the outer room.
"Who came in?" said Courte-Joie, looking through a peephole he had
made in the curtain. "The man from La Logerie. Attention!"
Even before this order was given to those whom it concerned, all was
still and orderly in Courte-Joie's sanctum. The outer door was gently
closed; the women and the tramps disappeared; the men who were
counting the biscuits had closed and turned over their sacks, and were
sitting on them, and smoking their pipes in an easy attitude. As for
the men drinking at the table, three or four had suddenly gone to
sleep as if by enchantment. Jean Oullier turned round toward the
hearth, thus concealing his face from the first glance of any one
entering the apartment.