Part 4

Cathelineau, the first, and, next to Charette, the ablest commander-in-chief of the Vendeans, having been mortally wounded before the gates of Nantes, D’Elbée, by his skilful policy at Châtillon, had himself appointed to the succession. It was the work of an obstinate cabal; Bonchamp, by every claim, deserved the election. But after the passage of the Loire, D’Elbée, in the confusion, was not to be found. Lescure, besought, in his bed, to take matters into his own hands, immediately proposed that the officer best-beloved by all divisions of the army, and best-known to them, Henri de La Rochejaquelein, should be nominated to the vacant generalship. “As for me, should I recover,” added Lescure, “you know I cannot quarrel with Henri. I shall be his aide-de-camp.” The little senate met at Laval. Henri, never willing to push himself forward, dissented hotly. As advocate against his own claims, he made his longest speech. He represented that he had neither age nor experience, that he was merely a fighter, that he had too little practical wisdom, that he was untenacious of his opinions, that he should never learn how to silence those who opposed him: in vain. After the ensuing vote he was found hidden in a corner, and cried like the child he was, on Lescure’s breast, for the unsought honor thrust upon him. He was to have no further guardianship and support from that dearest of his friends. On the road between Ernée and Fougères Lescure died, not before a mighty pang was added to his passing by an oral account of the execution of the Queen. In the room where his body lay Henri said to his widow, “Could my life restore him to you, oh, you might take it!”

The Royalists nearly sank under this second calamity, for Bonchamp, too, had but lately died, on the eighteenth of October. (“The news of these two,” cried lively Barrère in the Convention, “is better than any victory!”) His remains, which, like Lescure’s, were carried for a brief time under the colors, were temporarily buried at Varades. His only son, Hermenée, became Henri’s special care. In all his trouble and preoccupation he was pathetically kind to the child, and had him sleep with him every night. By day Hermenée rode with Henri on the same saddle, or trotted in the rear-guard, beating his toy-drum, haranguing the soldiers with pretty ardor, and remembering each lovingly by name. The poor little fellow, weakened by his hardships, succumbed to the small-pox, in his mother’s arms, at Saint Herbelon, before the year was over.

The wretched throng were exiled, as completely as they would have been had they crossed the Pyrenees. Seven months of intense activity, seven months of successful fight, even while they were surrounded like sheep in a pen, had resulted only in this: that no single general, at his allotted post, had been able to beat back the Revolution from La Vendée; that the restoration of the monarchy, the remoter and greater object, was more visionary and hypothetical than ever. They hurried northward feverishly, pursued always by an immense force, subject to continuous cold rains, obliged to leave at every stopping-place the wounded and the sick, the women and babes, to mark their trail and to perish by massacre. Kléber had his keen eye upon Henri: “I do not believe he can hold out long, away from his own country.” But Henri proceeded to defeat the garrison at Château-Gontier, to crush L’Echelle’s division at Entrammes, and to score a double triumph at Laval. It was at Château-Gontier that the venerable Monsieur de Royrand, who had sustained the war in Lower Poitou from the very beginning, breathed his last. His regiments ceased firing, and mourned aloud. Henri hurried into the midst of them, his own tears flowing. “Come, come!” he cried; “we will weep and pray for the dear friend to-morrow. Let us avenge him to-day!” Then he swooped like an eagle on the troops of the state, with Royrand’s orphans at his heels.

These were the days of what the peasants called “the reign of Monsieur 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.