The cottage, where the general had seen the light his captain could
not see, was occupied by two families. The heads of these families
were brothers. The elder was named Joseph, the younger Pascal Picaut.
The father of these Picauts had taken part, in 1792, in the first
uprising of the Retz district, and followed the fortunes of the
sanguinary Souchu, as the pilot-fish follows the shark, as the jackal
follows the lion; and he had taken part in the horrible massacres
which signalized the outbreak of the insurrection on the left bank of
the Loire.
When Charette did justice on that Carrier of the white cockade Souchu,
Picaut, whose sanguinary appetites were developed, sulked at the new
leader, who, to his mind, made the serious mistake of not desiring
blood except upon the battlefield. He therefore left the division
under Charette, and joined that commanded by the terrible Jolly, an
old surgeon of Machecoul. He, at least, was on a level with Picaut's
enthusiasm. But Jolly, recognizing the need of unity, and
instinctively foreseeing the military genius of the leader of the
Lower Vendée, placed himself under Charette's banner; and Picaut, who
had not been consulted, dispensed with consulting his commander, and
once more abandoned his comrades. Tired out with these perpetual
changes, profoundly convinced that time would never lessen the savage
hatred he felt for the murderers of Souchu, he sought a general who
was not likely to be seduced by the splendor of Charette's exploits,
and found him in Stofflet, whose antagonism against the hero of the
Retz region was already revealed in numberless instances.
On the 25th of February, 1796, Stofflet was made prisoner at the farm
of Poitevinière, with two aides-de-camp and two chasseurs who
accompanied him. The Vendéan leader and his aides were shot, and the
peasants were sent back to their cottages. Picaut was one of them. It
was then two years since he had seen his home.
Arriving there, he found two fine young men, vigorous and well-grown,
who threw themselves upon his neck and embraced him. They were his
sons. The eldest was seventeen years old, the youngest sixteen. Picaut
accepted their caresses with a good grace and looked them well over.
He examined their structure, their athletic frames, and felt their
muscles with evident satisfaction. He had left two children behind
him; he found two soldiers. Only, like himself, these soldiers were
unarmed.
The Republic had, in fact, taken from Picaut the carbine and sabre he
had obtained through English gold. But Picaut resolved that the
Republic should be generous enough to return them and to arm his two
sons in compensation for the harm she had done him. It is true that he
did not intend to consult the Republic on this point.
The next day he ordered his sons to take their cudgels of wild
apple-wood and set out with him for Torfou. At Torfou there was a
demi-brigade of infantry. When Picaut, who marched by night and scorned
all regular roads, saw, as he crossed the fields, an agglomeration of
lights before him, which revealed the town and showed him he had
almost reached the end of his journey, he ordered his sons to continue
to follow him, but to imitate all his movements and to stop short,
motionless, the instant they heard the cry made by a blackbird when
suddenly awakened. There is no hunter but knows that the blackbird,
suddenly roused, utters three or four rapid notes which are quite
peculiar and unmistakable.
Then, instead of walking forward as before, Picaut began to crawl
around the outskirts of the town, in the shadow of the hedges,
listening every twenty steps or so, with the utmost attention.
At last he heard a step,--the slow, measured, monotonous step of one
man. Picaut went flat on his stomach, and continued to crawl toward
the sound on his knees and elbows. His sons imitated him. When he came
to the end of the field he was in, Picaut made an opening in the hedge
and looked through it. Being satisfied with what he saw he enlarged
the hole, and, without much regard to the thorns he encountered, he
slipped like an adder through the branches. When he reached the other
side he gave the cry of the blackbird. His sons stopped at the given
signal; but they stood up, and looking over the top of the hedge they
watched their father's proceedings.
The field into which Picaut had now passed was one of tall and very
thick grass, which was swaying in the wind. At the farther end of this
field, about fifty yards off, was the high-road. On this road a sentry
was pacing up and down, about three hundred feet from a building which
was used as barracks, before the door of which another sentry was
placed. The two young men took all this in with a single glance, and
then their eyes returned to their father, who continued to crawl
through the grass in the direction of the sentinel.
When Picaut was not more than six feet from the road he stopped behind
a bush. The sentinel was pacing up and down, and each time that he
turned his back toward the town, as he paced along, his clothes or his
musket touched the bush behind which Picaut was crouching. The lads
trembled for their father every time that this happened.
Suddenly, and at a moment when the wind seemed to rise, a stifled cry
came to them on the breeze. Then, with that acuteness of vision which
men accustomed to use their faculties at night soon acquire, they saw
on the white line of road a struggling black mass. It was Picaut and
the sentinel. After stabbing the sentinel with a knife, Picaut was
strangling him.
A moment later the Vendéan was on his way back to his sons; and
presently, like the she-wolf after slaughter dividing her booty among
her cubs, he bestowed the musket, sabre, and cartridges on the youths.
With this first equipment for service it was very much easier to
obtain a second.
But weapons were not all that Picaut wanted; his object was to obtain
the occasion to use them. He looked about him. In Messieurs
d'Autichamp, de Scepeaux, de Puisaye, and de Bourmont, who still kept
the field, he found only what he called rose-water royalists, who did
not make war in a way to suit him, none of them resembling Souchu, the
type of all that Picaut wanted in a leader.
It resulted that Picaut, rather than be, as he thought, ill-commanded,
resolved to make himself an independent leader and command others. He
recruited a few malcontents like himself, and became the leader of a
band which, though numerically small, never wearied in giving proofs
of its hatred to the Republic.
Picaut's tactics were of the simplest. He lived in the forests. During
the day he and his men rested. At night he left the sheltering woods,
and ambushed his little troop behind the hedges. If a government
convoy or a diligence came along, he attacked and robbed it. When
convoys were rare and diligences too strongly escorted, Picaut found
his compensation with the pickets whom he shot, and the farmhouses and
buildings of the patriots, which he burned. After one or two
expeditions his followers gave him the name of "Sans-Quartier," and
Picaut, who resolved, conscientiously, to deserve that title, never
failed, after its bestowal, to hang, shoot, or disembowel all
republicans--male and female, citizens or soldiers, old men and
children--who fell into his hands.
He continued his operations till 1800. At that period, Europe, leaving
the First Consul some respite (or the First Consul leaving Europe a
respite), Bonaparte, who had no doubt heard of the fame of Picaut
Sans-Quartier's exploits, resolved to consecrate his leisure to that
warrior, and sent against him, not a _corps d'armée_, but two Chouans,
recruited in the rue de Jérusalem, and two brigades of gendarmerie.
Picaut, not distrustful, admitted his two false compatriots into his
band. A few days later he fell into a snare. He was caught, together
with most of his men, and he paid with his head for the bloody renown
he had acquired. It was as a highwayman and a robber of diligences,
and not as a soldier, that he was condemned to the guillotine instead
of being shot. He went boldly to the scaffold, asking no more quarter
for himself than he had given to others.
Joseph, his eldest son, was sent to the galleys with those of the band
who were captured. Pascal, the younger, escaped the trap laid for his
father, and took to the forests, where he continued to "Chouanize"
with the remnants of the band. But this savage life soon became
intolerable to him, and one fine day he went to Beaupréau, gave his
sabre and musket to the first soldier he met, and asked to be taken to
the commandant of the town, to whom he related his history.
This commandant, a major of dragoons, took an interest in the poor
devil, and, in consideration of his youth and the singular confidence
with which he had come to him, he offered young Picaut to enlist him
in his regiment. In case of refusal, he should, he said, be obliged to
hand him over to the legal authorities. Before such an alternative
Pascal Picaut (who had now heard of the fate of his father and
brother, and had no desire to return to his own neighborhood) did not
hesitate. He donned the Republican uniform.
Fourteen years later the two sons of Sans-Quartier met again and
returned to their former home, to claim possession of their father's
little property. The return of the Bourbons had opened the gates of
the galleys for Joseph and released Pascal, who, from being a brigand
of La Vendée, was then a brigand of the Loire.
Joseph, issuing from the galleys, returned to the family cottage more
violent in feeling than ever his father had been. He burned to avenge
in the blood of patriots the death of his father, and his own
tortures.
Pascal, on the contrary, returned home with ideas quite changed from
his earlier ones, changed by the different world he had seen, and
changed, above all, by contact with men to whom hatred of the Bourbons
was a duty, the fall of Napoleon a sorrow, the entrance of the Allies
a disgrace,--feelings which were kept alive in his heart by the cross
that he wore on his breast.
Nevertheless, in spite of these differences of opinion, which led, of
course, to frequent discussion, and in spite of the chronic
misunderstanding between them, the two brothers did not separate,
but continued to live on in the house their father had left them,
and to cultivate on shares the fields belonging to it. Both were
married,--Joseph, to the daughter of a poor peasant; Pascal, to whom
his cross and his little pension gave a certain consideration in the
neighborhood, to the daughter of a bourgeois of Saint-Philbert, a
patriot like himself.
The presence of two wives in one house, each of whom--one from envy,
the other from rancor--exaggerated the sentiments of their husbands,
added not a little to the household discord. Nevertheless, the two
brothers and their families continued to live together till 1830. The
revolution of July, which Pascal approved, roused all the fanatical
wrath of Joseph. Pascal's father-in-law became mayor of Saint-Philbert,
and then the Chouan and his wife launched forth into such invectives
and insults against "those clumsy villains" that Madame Pascal told her
husband she would not live any longer with galley-slaves, for she did
not feel her life was safe among them.
The old soldier had no children, and he was singularly attached to
those of his brother. In particular there was a little fair-haired
boy, with cheeks as round and as rosy as a pigeon-apple, whom he felt
he could not part with, his chief pleasure in life being to dandle the
fellow on his knee for hours together. Pascal felt his heart wrung at
the very thought of losing his adopted son. In spite of the wrongs
done him by his elder brother, he was strongly attached to him. He
knew he was impoverished by the costs of his large family; he feared
that the separation might cast him into utter poverty, and he
therefore refused his wife's request. But he so far regarded it that
the two families ceased to take their meals together. The house had
three rooms, and Pascal retired into one, leaving two for his
brother's family and walling up the door of communication.
The evening of the day on which Jean Oullier was made prisoner, the
wife of Pascal Picaut was very uneasy. Her husband had left home at
four in the afternoon,--about the time when General Dermoncourt and his
detachment started from Montaigu. Pascal had to go, he said, and settle
some accounts with Courtin at la Logerie; and now, although it was
nearly eight o'clock, he had not returned. The poor woman's uneasiness
became agony when she heard the shots in the direction of the river.
From time to time she left her wheel, on which she was spinning beside
the fire, and went to listen at the door. After the firing ceased she
heard nothing except the wind in the tree-tops and the plaintive whine
of a dog in the distance.
Little Louis, the child whom Pascal loved so much, came to ask if his
uncle had returned; but hardly had he put his rosy little face into
the room before his mother, calling him harshly back, obliged him to
disappear.
For several days Joseph Picaut had shown himself more surly, more
threatening than ever; and that very morning, before starting for the
fair at Montaigu, he had had a scene with his brother, which if
Pascal's patience had not held good, might have ended in a scuffle.
The latter's wife dared not say a word to her sister-in-law about her
uneasiness.
Suddenly she heard voices muttering in mysterious, low tones in the
orchard before the cottage. She rose so hastily that she knocked over
her spinning-wheel. At the same instant the door opened, and Joseph
Picaut appeared on the threshold.