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HE sportsman Count of La Rochejaquelein had it all his own way at the Aubiers. He took the town, and captured large supplies, and gleefully perched upon the cemetery wall, fired no less than two hundred telling shots. Thence he rode by night to Bonchamp and D’Elbée, and to the weary allies of Anjou, bringing aid and arms; and, as a gift not least, the contagious cheer that was in him. When he had fulfilled his public duty, but not before that, he flew to the rescue of his friends. Scarcely had Henri left Clisson, in the spring, when Lescure and all his family were seized as suspects, and conducted to Bressuire, but forgotten there whenfear caused an evacuation of the borough. Henri himself easily carried it, and burst in upon them at the château, crying that he had freed them. By a comical inconsistency, great numbers of the Republican inhabitants rushed for protection back to Clisson, as soon as Citizen Lescure, walking a free man from Bressuire, had entered the gates. That godly gentleman made bashful Henri kiss every woman among them, to ease their fears of the “monster” whom they believed him to be.
Six victories, due to Henri’s restless energy, followed in swift succession. Though his growth, in all things, was steadily towards reasonableness and the golden mean, his chief early characteristic was hare-brained intrepidity; a habit of confronting too near, pursuing too far, “combating with giants,” as old Burton says of his warrior, “running first upon a breach, and, as anotherPhillipus, riding into the thickest of his enemies.” He was wholly without fear, and often, at first, without foresight; and it took many bitter denials and reverses to teach him the pardonableness of deliberation and second thought in others. But while he lived, wherever he went, he was a force. He was of the stuff of Homer’s joyous men. His decisive fashion swayed elder and better soldiers. His troops were his for risks such as no general else besought them to run; every day he won their hearts anew by some spurt of daring, some astonishing fooling with death or failure. Many a dragoon was cut down with his sabre; horses were slain under him again and again. It is said of him that he never took a prisoner without offering him a single fight, sword to sword. This laughing audacity of his had no cant in it. It was the metal of which he was made, that which he lived by, the blameless outcomeof himself: a thing to sadden and exasperate his companions, and fill them with foreboding. Pilgrim-shells are quartered upon the arms of his house, “the scallop-shells of quiet,” as the poet sings. A more sarcastic advice for the La Rochejaqueleins it would be impossible to conceive!
As the close study of the Vendeans brings to mind the character of the Scotch Highlanders, great at an onset, with not a whit more native knowledge of the common etiquette of war, so Henri himself, in sober simplicity of nature, in the firm thoroughness of all he had to do, even in the agreeable accident of personal beauty, is not unlike a much-maligned man who lived a century before him: John Graham of Claverhouse, the never-to-be-forgotten “deil o’ Dundee.” Claverhouse had a habit of curling his hair on papers; and one learns, with the same sensation, that Henri hadone of those singular antipathies no effort of will can correct. At Pontorson, while Madame de Lescure was sewing in a room, with a tame black-and-gray squirrel in her lap, he came in, and backed against the door, pale and trembling. The sight of a squirrel, as he said with a laugh, gave him a feeling of invincible terror! His friend asked him to stroke the little creature. He did so, shaking in every limb, and avowing his weakness with great good-humor. He was never much of a talker. Discussions were intolerable to him. If called upon in council, he would speak his mind briefly, overcoming an extreme diffidence; and having done, he withdrew, or worse, fell asleep. No one was more humane at battle’s end; but, nevertheless, Henri’s element was battle. His Paradise was like the heathen board, where, after the combat and the chase, he might sit at the “red right hand of Odin;” and the masterlyrider looked forward to a life where he might play soldier forever. “When the King” (Louis XVII.) “is on the throne,” he confided to his cousin Lescure, “I shall ask for a regiment of hussars, a regiment always on the gallop.” It was his whole desire of guerdon.
Lescure had also the Roman devotedness: any morning he stood ready to outdo Curtius and Horatius. In the rout of Moulin-aux-Chèvres he drew the hostile squadrons from the pursuit of the frantic Vendeans by calling their attention to himself and to La Rochejaquelein by name. At Thouars he gained the bridge of Vrine alone, amid a shower of balls. He returned to his dispirited band with exhortations; one emboldened comrade followed him to the second charge. But on the instant Henri arrived with Forestier, to join Lescure and fire the lagging troops, as the celestial armies are fabled to have fought at needfor the old commonwealths. Here, this same day, mounted on the shoulders of a gigantic peasant named Texier, one of the most useful men in the ranks, Henri broke the mouldy coping of the fortress wall, and through the breach hurled stones at the flying Blues. His course henceforward is to be tracked in these flashing incidents, deeds compacted of demonic sense and wit. Pauvert depicts him breaking the tri-color lines outside Argenton merely by whistling through, with two friends in his train, like a blast of wind. At Château-Gontier he seized and bore the colors; there and elsewhere, wherever he moved, bullets ploughed the ground under him, and sent up a puff of dust to his spurs. While his weary infantry slept, he was known to watch for them, in an exposed bivouac, and turn his idleness to account by picking cartridges for his poorer “children” out of the wealthy pocketsof the adjacent slain. He and Stofflet reconnoitred the streets of hostile Châtillon by night, on all fours, the sentinel refraining from challenging the passage of the big dogs they were supposed to be. Observe the tricks of a generalissimo, on whose safety the balance of empire hung! He was a lad; he did not know his value; but what he did know was that nobody could manage these indispensable lesser manœuvres so exquisitely as himself. “Quel gaillard!” shouted those who at first held back from this incorrigible, superculpable, adorable, business-like creature of a Henri; “quel gaillard!” At the siege of Saumur, at a wavering moment of the assault, he flung his hat into the intrenchments. “Who will fetch that for me?” he cried, as certain of his response as was the great Condé, or Essex before Cadiz in 1596. Of course, with his usual verve, he leaped towards it himself, andthe crowd rushed after him as one. In the same engagement he saved the life of his loyal Ville-Baugé, struck from his stirrups while loading Henri’s pieces for him; as at Antrain, during the twenty-two hours’ battle, and with a call for much greater adroitness, he saved that of La Roche Saint André.
The central event of this period was the five days’ victory at Saumur. By Cathelineau’s order aTe Deumwas sung in the church, the captured flags, rent with balls and black with smoke and blood, dipping to the chancel floor at every sound of the Holy Name. Such a spectacle put them all in an exalted mood. Henri was found at a window, meekly musing over their fortunes: he, the deliverer, who placed elsewhere the primal credit of the deliverance. The garrison here was left to his charge, much to his disrelish. “They make a veteran of me!” he said, ruefully, for theaffairs he loved were going on outside. The inaction of the time told on his men, quite as discerning as himself, and far less dutiful; despite the fifteen sous a day which, as the first Vendean bribe, were offered them to remain, they perceived that there was nothing more to fear, and slipped away to their homes. Soon but nine were left, and with them Henri departed gloomily, carrying his cannon, and at Thouars, since not a cannoneer came back to relieve him, burying it in the river. Luçon, too, was lost. Having got astray during the action, he arrived but in time to cover the retreat. At Martigné, where D’Elbée was in command, and again at Vihiers, while Henri was off recruiting, his name had to be cited constantly to encourage the soldiers, though he was absent from the field.
He stood in a valley path, giving orders, during an obstinate fight at Martigné-Briand.A ball struck his right hand, shattering the thumb and glancing to the elbow. He did not stir, nor even drop his pistol. “See if my elbow bleeds much,” he said to his companion. “No, M’sieu Henri.” “Then it is only a broken thumb,” he replied, and went on directing the troops. It proved to be an ugly and dangerous wound; it deprived him, during the month of September, of his share of three signal victories won by “the devils in sabots” under Bonchamp at Torfou, Montaigu, and Saint Fulgent. Not long after, before Laval, his arm limp and swollen in a sling, Henri was attacked on a lonely road by a powerful foot-soldier. He seized the fellow by the collar with his left hand, and so managed his horse with his legs that his struggling assailant was unable to draw upon him. A dozen Vendeans ran up, eager to kill the man who menaced their general. He forbadeit, as he was sure to do. But he checkmated his Goliath with his tongue. “Go back to the Republicans,” he told him; “say that you were alone with the chief of the brigands, who had but one arm to use and no weapons, and that you could not get the better of him.”
In addition to his dark blue great-coat and his wide hat, Henri wore anything which he found available, and chose, for his distinctive mark, red handkerchiefs of immemorial Chollet make about his head and neck, and another about his waist to hold his pistols. It is striking to find him, the soul of conservatism, in the identical dress of the Cordeliers, “the red brothers of Danton,” cravatted and girdled in their Paris fashion, and flaunting thebonnet rouge. The appropriation of the hated color must have been of malice prepense, as a bit of not illegal bravado, and a slap of exquisite fun at the tailorish pomp and circumstanceof war. Henri made a mountain guy of himself to some purpose. Among the Blues at Fontenay it quickly became a universal order to fire at the Red Handkerchief. The other leaders were unable to persuade him to doff it. “They know me by that,” was his aggravating answer, “and besides, it is so comfortable!” But they adorned themselves quickly with the same insignia, and saved him from the sharp-shooters. Such was the origin of the officers’ earliest uniform; and with their flapping boots, their huge swords, and these floating flame-colored gingham plaids, they must indeed have resembled the “brigands” of their enemies’ fancy. Henri continued to take pride in his Chollet turban, and was apt to consider a hat, except on festal occasions, as a piece of tautology. Later, after the conference at Fougères, he adopted the white sash, with its famous little black knot.