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T
HE strength and beauty of the cause vanished with Henri. The war did not end for more than a twelve-month; fresh recruits carried it on with wonderful persistence and pluck, under Charette, still in the Marais, Stofflet in the interior, and the Chouan leaders in Brittany. But towards the close, itself the disciple of accursed experience, it became merely “a war of ruffians, carried on by treachery,” and accomplished in carnage and wrath; its last flutter on Quiberon sands, its last allaying, far gentler than any anticipation of it, from the steady hand of General Hoche.
“So quick bright things come to confusion!”
“So quick bright things come to confusion!”
“So quick bright things come to confusion!”
“So quick bright things come to confusion!”
The Vendean captains were patriots, as is well said in the preface to Mr. George J. Hill’s admirable little book, “whosepatriawas not of this world,” Cathelineau, with his thirty-six kinsmen, Bonchamp and Lescure, gloriously perished while yet hope was high; D’Elbée, in a sick-chair in his own garden, laden with abuse, and bearing himself gallantly, was shot at Noirmoutiers; Mondyon and other faithful youths “died into life” at Angers, bound in couples like dogs; Stofflet paid the wages of his exceeding loyalty in the same rocky town; Bernard de Marigny was cut off in his prime by the acquiescence of Stofflet, who was under an evil influence, and by the orders of Charette, to the bitter sorrow, afterwards, of the former; Charette himself, having made terms to his advantage in March of 1795, at Nantes, and renewing hostilities for what he thought to be sufficient cause, though offered a thousand pounds andfree passage to England for his good-will, kept up to the last the unequal struggle with Travot, and, closing a career of signal splendor, was taken and put to death, lion-stanch, with a salute to the King upon his lips. As soon as his grave was dug, General Hoche withdrew his forces. The war was finished.
It is the word of homage to be spoken of the Vendeans, that they fought long with honor and with pity, in the face of unnameable brutality and treachery. During the first Royalist occupation of Chollet, when it was for a while Cathelineau’s gay and free little capital, full of festivity and transient peace, the public treasury, known to be packed, was not touched. Tributes to facts of this kind are to be gathered from the pages of every hostile or neutral annalist. And Madame de La Rochejaquelein recalled, for the amusement of another generation, her own amusement at Bressuire in 1793,when the rueful masters of the situation complained to her that they had no money to buy tobacco, it never having occurred to them to seize it in the shops! It is clear that persons who so scrupled to appropriate the goods the gods provided, were not destined easily to become experts in wanton slaughter, which relieved no need of their honest stomachs. The Republicans began their business at once with the master-stroke of homicide, and forecasted the immortal axiom of De Quincey, that when once a man indulges in murder he soon gets to think little of robbing and lying, of drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and even of incivility and procrastination. But in La Vendée they had a breed of misgiving hearts. Marigny, indeed, mild and brotherly towards his own, was as a demon towards his foes; Charette, the very Charette who had put a stop to the cruelties of Souchu at the beginning,was, with D’Elbée, the first to sanction reprisals. But Cathelineau, Bonchamp, Lescure, La Rochejaquelein and priests innumerable stood then, and stand always, ranged on the side of Christ-like charity.
To any student of the great Revolution not much need be said of the unequal exchange of grim attentions. The Blues outdid themselves on Vendean territory. Arrest, with them, meant an immediate commission to explore the spheres. The burials alive at Clisson, the holocaust at Vezins, the atrocities in the wood of Blanche Couronne, the week-long fusillade at Savenay, Westermann’s thousands shot at Angers, Carrier’s drowned at Nantes, the hellish policy of Commaire, Crignon, Amey, Dufour—these were the things which crazed the gentler rebels until they, too, learned to throw forgiveness by, as a coin hollow and vile. In May of 1794, Vimeux, thenin command, went to lay their country waste. Only Victor Hugo’s pen could fitly portray the results. The Convention desired report of a landscape without a man, without a house, without a tree; in due season they had it, true to the letter. It was Westermann’s boast to the Committee of Public Safety that he had crushed the children under the horses’ hoofs, and massacred the women, who should bring forth no more “brigands;” that not a prisoner could be laid to his charge, for he had exterminated them; that La Vendée was heaped, like the pyramids, with bodies. At Rennes the children were made to fire upon their parents: it was a novel, awkward, and lengthy proceeding, entirely to the minds of its originators. At Savenay, hundreds were lured under cover by a promise of amnesty, and as they entered, they were shot down. An adjutant was brought to La Rochejaquelein, during the lastdays of his life, in whose pocket was an order to repeat this brilliant joke. During that January, also, at Barbastre, fifteen hundred insurgents capitulated, and were cheated in the same way. What wonder if, outside Laval, with horror on horror bruited in their ears, the peasants destroyed a whole battalion of Mayence men who were laying down their arms? But after, marching on Angers from Antrain, they sent to Rennes one hundred and fifty prisoners, with the significant message that this was the sort of vengeance taken by choice for old injuries. It was the work of the kindly incumbent of Sainte-Marie-de-Rhé. On the morning of this release, Monsieur de Hargues, for whom Henri (who had once a hot quarrel with him) interceded passionately, mounted the scaffold. For the bitter deeds of Souchu at Machecould the army did voluntary penance. Until it was practically disorganized, it didnot sin in the same way again. We are aware how pretty a burlesque between nominal captor and captives came off at Bressuire. And in Thouars, Fontenay, and many towns like them, inhabited by Republicans and revolutionists who trembled for their fate, no violence whatever was wreaked.
A truly humorous retaliation was made, at the suggestion of the Marquis of Donnissan, at Fontenay. There were four thousand prisoners, and no forts nor cells to hold them. Should they be loosed they could not be trusted on parole. (What a thing for Frenchmen to know of Frenchmen!) To solve the difficulty their heads were shaved, so that if during the following weeks they again attempted to fight, they might be caught and punished. The wild barbers had infinite entertainment out of this circumstance. La Rochejaquelein’s clemency was a proverb. He waived the very show ofsuperiority, as when, at Bois-Grolleau, he made Tribert keep his proferred sword. As one who had accepted beforehand the painfulest surprises of fate, he heard of the destruction of La Durbellière without a sigh. Precisely the same danger which proved fatal to him, having rehearsed itself before him early in his career, and the pistol having missed fire, the marksman flung himself at his feet, crying out that he could now have his satisfaction. “That is to let thee live,” was the Alexander-like reply, made over and over to those who thus fell into his power. He was destined to perish through his belief in the honor of others. The best acknowledgment of the influence which he had upon his headstrong band, was that although they slew, in his absence, the Republican officer who led the first raid upon his homestead, yet, when he was murdered by the hand of one of the two grenadiers,they spared the man who had not fired, because he had been offered mercy in Henri’s last spoken word. The Marigny, who bore to his imminent misfortune the surname of an active Royalist, was so charmed with the spirited behavior of Richard Duplessis, made captive at the siege of Angers, that he sent him back under escort to his own lines. La Rochejaquelein, never to be outdone in a handsome service, instantly freed two dragoons, with their arms, thanking him, and offering him, in the future, an exchange of any two prisoners for his one. “This was the only Republican general,” adds Madame de Lescure, “who had been wont to show us any humanity: he was killed that very day.” Marceau and Quétineau, both scrupulously fair, deserve to share this mention of Bouin de Marigny. And to Kléber and Hoche, the knightliest of foemen, no acknowledgment would be too great.
Lescure himself was the consummate type of the early Christian: so tolerant, so self-controlling, that to be able to impute one vicious deed to him would be a gratification. “The Saint of Poitou,” however, was once known to swear steadily for several minutes. An enemy, in action, having cocked a pistol within a rod of his menaced head, Lescure, fearless and quick, dislodged the barrel with a swing of his sword, and told the astonished invader to go free. The Poitevins behind had a mind of their own on the subject, and presently cut the bold Blue to pieces. When the general learned how he had been obeyed, his rage was something to be remembered. This was the aristocrat who, when his ancestral halls were razed to the ground, would not burn Parthenay, which he had taken, not only lest it should be, on his part, a revenge for Clisson, but lest, being a precaution merely, it should disedify byhaving the look of a revenge! And it is a curious instance of the “governance of blood” in his most lovely character, that although he was invariably in the thickest of the fight, his hand inflicted no wilful wound throughout the war, and that to his personal interference no fewer than twenty thousand owed their lives. Again, at the crossing of the Loire, in an hour of unexampled perplexity, between five and six thousand captives were in the hands of the migrating army, and shut in the Benedictine Abbey church, which still tops the crescent-shaped heights of Saint Florent-le-Vieil. There could be no question of transporting them; the simplest expedient was to destroy them. Nor was this proposal made in cold blood, for the Marquis of Bonchamp was dying young from the last of many wounds, “for the sacred cause of the lilies,” and his troops were in a frenzy of excitement and grief. Not an officer could be foundto give the revolting order. The men had the guns already pointed at the doors, and the slaughter was about to begin, when Bonchamp, apprised of what was pending, with his last breath commanded, as he had done before at Pallet, that the Blues should be spared. From the house where he lay the echo rolled along the crowd: “Quarter for the prisoners; quarter! It is Bonchamp’s order!” They were delivered. With the genuine Gallic sense of the apportioning of things, Bonchamp’s gracious valedictory is inscribed upon his tomb, lifting its glorious outlines to-day in the transept of that very church, and bearing, in a free-will offering, the name of the sculptor, David d’Angers, whose father was among the ransomed soldiery. As to the amnesty, the Convention, guided by the advice of Merlin de Thionville, growled over it. “Freemen accept their lives from slaves! ’Tis against thespirit of the Revolution.... Consign the unfortunate affair to oblivion.” There was different speech in the Temple. “Capet!” said the brute Simon to the wretched little King, when the news came of the crossing of the Loire, “if the Vendeans deliver you, what will you do first?” “Forgive you!” replied the child.
La Vendée, forbearing wrong, and seeking after righteousness, has no mean martyrology. What people in the modern world so sweetly rival the holy race of whom it is said in thePharsaliathat they hurried on their own extermination, and, brimming with life, spilled it as a libation to the gods? But since these others were not pagan, there is a yet more endearing and more becoming word: “Æterna fac cum sanctis tuis in gloria numerari!”