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HE legend of Henri de La Rochejaquelein did not end with his life. Says the Count of C——, an emigrant (author of the graphic and erratic pamphlet entitledUn Séjour de Dix Mois en France): “It was in a prosperous hour, and shortly after the fortunate expedition of which I have been speaking, that I had the pleasure of joining the Royalist army. On every side I saw tears only, and I heard but sighs: Henri had lately perished on the field of honor.” From this anonymous gentleman comes fragmentary testimony on a subject once of some mystery and conjecture. He had embraced, or helped to create, a rumor thata woman headed the young chief’s troops as soon as he had fallen. He declares that, unwilling to survive him, yet burning to avenge him, she flung herself upon the advancing Blues, and so expired. And he lends her, moreover, the soldierly distinction of reposing by her hero henceforward. Now, as the Count of C—— is the only one in the world to print this story, it may be worth while to quote, for the sake of contradicting it, a passage of that cloying racial eloquence which has never the Saxon shame of speaking a little more than it feels: “And thou, O La Rochejaquelein, thou the Rinaldo of the new Crusade, the terror of infidels and the hope of Christians, thou whom nature had dowered with so much worth and so much charm! look down upon the tears of thy brethren-in-arms; listen to the sorrowings of the whole army; see the glorious tomb raised to thy memory; bid thyspirit hover nigh among the cypresses, to count the trophies which thy victorious comrades hang there day by day, the garlands which thy countrywomen, fair and sad, wreathe there forever; hear the hymns sung for thy sake; watch the young and buoyant legion sworn to perpetuate thy name and to accomplish thy vengeance; read the inscriptions which passers-by grave on the trees in memory of thee; rejoice to know that thy sweet friend sleeps at thy side, wept, cherished, reverenced, less because she was lovely, good, and bright than because she was once thy heart’s happiness and thy triumph’s pulse and centre; ah! behold and consider all these things at once, and let the palm which is thine in Heaven be set about and made fairer, if that can be, with all the bays won well of old of earth.” The soft music of this extract, crossed with appeals to the super-mundane vanity of the most modest ofmortals, is a sufficient voucher that with the real La Rochejaquelein it has no commerce whatever. It was indeed true that some martial girl, leading a company during the winter, received her death-blow in the neighborhood of Trémentines. The nonsense of her being Henri’s sweetheart probably owed its origin to the same singular Republican inventiveness which, long after the fight of Vrine which laid Jeanne Robin low, continued to call her Jeanne de Lescure and sister of her commander, who might have wished any sister of his, did such exist, to be as pure and as brave.
There are instances, in the long dealings of eternity with time, when a man is given whose life is an imagination not to be matched in the arts; but such a one is usually spoiled, like Icarus, by the heats of an alien planet: we cannot take him as he is; we must needs relax and refashion him, and make of the abstractidyll asujet théatrique. Henri de La Rochejaquelein, zigzagging in the teeth of the enemy, doing deeds with his own hands which are not common in salons; Henri, with his slender height, his shy caressing voice and smile, having no tenderer talisman to carry than the sign of the cross, no parting look at anything more responsive than a torn white flag,—such a Henri, jarring with prescriptive ideas, calls for reform. It is ungracious that a chevalier of twenty should have no leisure for a personal romance; and therefore, for his own credit’s sake, that he may remain a consistent and comprehensible chevalier, kind gossip makes him the gift of a lady! almost as beautiful there as Briseis by Agamemnon. Nay; more sincere tradition must leave him as he was, with no true-love yet at his side. For many years, under the boughs of Brissonière and Haie Bureau, there was some one, verily, to share the hallowedsix feet of ground with Henri; some one sleeping quietly as the child Hermenée in old days, while yet over the two virginal hearts their common doom was hanging: the bride of the irony of this world, the ungrateful miscreant who had slain him.
When the Vendeans, transported with fury, rushed forward and cut the grenadier down, there was in the air the noise of an approaching hostile column. In the utmost distress the detachment at Nouaillé, to whose command Stofflet now succeeded, enjoined it upon a trusty farmer to bury their chief in a hasty grave. They would not have the grenadier parted from him, that his uniform might be a silent defence against profanation and conceal the identity of Henri, who, stripped of his own insignia, had the enemy’s cap and cockade drawn over his forehead. Thrice were the two moved from pit to pit in the lonelyneighborhood a mile or two from Chollet, and always by the loyal, secret, and shrewd hands of the farmer Girard.
Madame de Sapinaud de Bois-Huguet says that the Royalists at large 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 adoubt 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 returnedexiles 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 theMémoiresof 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 thevault 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, passingthe 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.”