with a strong hand. Intellectually to assist the operation of this decree, the refractory districts were to be flooded with cheap reprints of popular philosophical works, and with enlightened new publications-a project which proved of efficacy in many places, but was of small avail in La Vendée.

During the whole of 1792, La Vendée continued in a state of violent ebullition; the local authorities carrying out the decree with considerable rigour, and the peasants everywhere offering resistance. When they were turned out, the nonconforming clergy hid themselves in the woods; thither the people flocked to hear them, the men carrying muskets in their hands; and if they were surprised by the military, a skirmish took place. It was not till the spring of 1793, after the execution of the unfortunate Louis XVI., that anything like a rising took place, and then only in consequence of the new and stringent measures to raise men for the army of the Republic. The Convention, as the governing body was now called, on the 24th of February decreed a levy of 30,000 men throughout France. Every parish was to supply an allotted number of conscripts. Sunday the 10th of March had been fixed as the day of drawing in many parishes of Anjou and Poitou; and, in expectation of resistance, artillery and gendarmes were in attendance. In the town of St Florent, on the Loire, especial precautions had been adopted; cannons stood ready loaded to fire at a moment's notice. Some disturbance having broken out, a cannon was fired, and this was the signal for insurrection. René Forêt, a young man, heading a body of peasants, rushed forward, and seizing the gun, quickly dispersed the authorities, civil and military. The party afterwards proceeded to the municipality, took whatever arms they could find, collected all the papers, and made a bonfire of them amid huzzas and shouts of laughter. Having remained together for an hour or two in high spirits, they dispersed, each individual taking his own direction homeward through the Bocage, and reciting to every one he met the exploits of the day.

In the course of the evening, intelligence of this event was communicated to Jacques Cathelineau, a hawker of woollen goods in the small town of Pin. Jacques was a shrewd, painstaking, and neighbourly man; a good converser, and a species of oracle in the district. He was a middle-sized man, with a broad forehead, and in the prime of life, being thirty-five years of age. As soon as Jacques heard of the insurrection, he resolved on leaving wife and family, and putting himself at its head; it was, he said, the cause of God and religion, and it was plainly his duty to sit no longer idle. Acting on this impulse, he instantly set out, going from house to house scattering his burning words, and in a few hours he had twenty-seven followers, all vigorous and earnest. The civil war in La Vendée had begun.

With his small and trusty band, Jacques proceeded onward to the

village of Poitevinière, recruiting all the way, and rousing the country by setting the church bells a-ringing. With about a hundred men, armed mostly with pitchforks and clubs, he made a bold beginning by attacking the château of Tallais, garrisoned by a hundred and fifty republican soldiers, or Blues, as they were contemptuously termed, commanded by a physician of the name of Bousseau, and possessed of one cannon. The attack was over in a moment. The cannon was fired; but the shot passed over their heads, and Cathelineau and his men dashed on to the hand-grapple. The Blues fled -Bousseau was taken prisoner. The peasants also got fire-arms, horses, and ammunition, and they had now procured a cannon. Delighted with the prize, they almost hugged it for joy, and with a mixture of pious faith and shrewdness, they christened it The Missionary. Losing no time at Tallais, they marched to Chemillé, where there was a garrison of two hundred Blues, with three cannon. The insurgents took Chemillé with even greater ease than they had taken Tallais, and were rewarded with more cannon and fire-arms. At the same time recruits were fast pouring in from all directions.

Meanwhile there were similar commotions in other parts of the Bocage. Forêt, the hot-spirited young man who had begun the affray at St Florent, had gone home, like the rest, that evening; he lived at Chanzeaux. Next morning, a party of gendarmes, led by a guide, came to arrest him. Forêt, who expected the visit, saw them coming, fired, killed the guide, and then darting off through the hedges, ran to the church and set the bell a-ringing. The peasants flocked out and gathered round him. Another rising took place at a short distance, on the estate of Maulévrier. The proprietor was absent, and nobody representing him was on the property except the garde chasse, or gamekeeper. This man's name was Nicolas Stofflet. He was a large and powerful man, of German descent, with stern, strongly marked features, a swarthy complexion, black hair and black eyes, and had a vehement determined way of speaking, with a German accent. He was forty years of age, had served sixteen of these in the army, where his courage and strong sense had raised him above the rank of a common soldier, and it was there that he had attracted the notice of the proprietor of Maulévrier, on whose estate he now held the situation of gamekeeper. Though noted for a blunt, harsh, positive manner, he had an extraordinary degree of native sagacity, great acquired knowledge of affairs, a frame of iron, and the courage of a desperado. On the day that the gendarmes went to arrest Forêt, a detachment of national guards came from Cholet, a town in the neighbourhood, to the château of Maulévrier, and carried off twelve cannon, which were kept as family relics. Burning with rage at this insult, Stofflet vowed vengeance, and roused the peasantry to the number of two hundred. This was on the 11th. On the 14th, these two bands,

Stofflet's and Forêt's, with others raised in a similar manner, joined themselves to that of Cathelineau.

On the 16th, these combined forces attacked Cholet. Beating the national guards, they gained possession of a considerable quantity of arms, money, and ammunition. Scarcely was the combat over, when Cathelineau hearing that the national guards of Saumur were at that moment on their way to Vihiers, sent a part of his forces to attack them. At Vihiers, the guards fled, abandoning their arms, and among the rest a peculiar-looking brass cannon. This cannon had been taken from the Château de Richelieu, and was the identical one which Louis XIII. had given to the great Cardinal Richelieu. The peasants immediately conceived a great veneration for this precious relic. They thought they could trace in the engraving with which it was covered an image of the Virgin, and so they called it Marie Jeanne.

It was now Saturday night, and to-morrow was Easter Sunday. Cathelineau's little army broke up, the peasants all wending their way through the bushy labyrinth to their several homes, to prepare for the solemnities of the morrow. They were to re-assemble when these were over. Thoughts of the events of the past week, and of the dangers of the enterprise to which they had committed themselves, mingled, we may suppose, with their prayers and pious ceremonies. Cathelineau, at least, had been thinking busily; for we shall find that, on the reassembling of the little army, he came prepared with a scheme for their future proceedings.

In a single week, it is observed, not a little had been effected in the district, which embraced the south of Anjou and the north of Poitou. But all through the south of Bretagne, and the lower part of Poitou, including the district called the Marais, the draughting of recruits had been attended with similar effects. At Chalais and Machecoul especially, there were vigorous demonstrations. At the former town, one Gaston, a barber, who had killed a revolutionist officer, headed the rising. At Machecoul, the outbreak was headed by a private gentleman, a keen royalist, who had been a lieutenant in the navy, had seen some of the terrible doings at Paris, and was now living on a small estate. His name was the Chevalier de Charette. Twice the peasants about Machecoul came to him, begging him to come and be their leader, and as often he refused. They came a third time, threatening to kill him if he did not comply with their wishes. 'Oh,' said Charette, 'you force me, do you? Well, then, I shall be your leader; but, remember, the first one who disobeys me, I shall blow his brains out.' Charette was as extraordinary a man as any of the Vendée heroes, though different in character from them all; but his story is the narrative of a whole insurrection in itself, which continued later than that with which alone we are at present concerned, and therefore we pass him by with a slight notice. The army which he led was called that of

Bas-Poitou, to distinguish it from the Vendée army which Cathelineau headed, and which was called the army of Haut-Poitou. The existence of these two armies, conducting operations near each other at the same time, but totally independent of each other, is to be borne in remembrance. While we are following the proceedings of the army of Haut-Poitou, it is to be recollected, therefore, that another army was carrying on similar operations. Occasionally the two armies co-operated; Charette, however, seems to have disliked acting in concert with other commanders, and regulated his own movements.

To return to Cathelineau and Stofflet. After Easter, the peasants reassembled in large numbers. One of Cathelineau's first propositions, after the little army collected, was to insist upon the necessity of securing one or two royalist gentlemen to join their enterprise and become its leaders. 'It is for the nobles to be our generals,' said he. 'We are as brave as they are; but they understand the art of war better than we do.' The proposal was received with enthusiasm; and that day, by dint of entreaties and deputations, they dragged three of the most popular royalist gentlemen of the neighbourhood out of the retirement of their châteaux. These were M. de Bonchamp, M. d'Elbée, and M. Dommaigné. Bonchamp was a man of about thirty-three years of age, and of noble family : he had served in India, but had resigned his commission on being required to take the Revolution oath; had emigrated, but after a little while returned to his estate in the Bocage. He was one of the ablest and best-liked officers the Vendéans ever had; and his great military experience made his services particularly valuable. D'Elbée had served in the army too; he was a little man of about forty years of age, with good abilities, and great personal courage; exceedingly devout, somewhat vain, consequential, and touchy. The last of the three gentlemen mentioned, Dommaigné, had been a captain of carabineers, and was also a valuable acquisition. Having secured these three generals to share the command with Cathelineau and Stofflet, the peasants were prepared for all that might come against them.

At that time, there was living at the château of Clisson, farther south in Poitou than the scene of the occurrences we have been describing, a royalist family named Lescure. The Marquis de Lescure, the head of the family, was a young man of twenty-six years of age, who had lately inherited the property from his father, and been married to Mademoiselle Donnissan, a young lady who had been on terms of intimacy with the queen and other members of the royal family. Having fortunately escaped from Paris when their lives were menaced by a revolutionary mob, they retreated to their castle of Clisson, where their hospitality was extended to a number of distressed royalists.

Among the personages who had taken up their residence at Clisson,

there was a young man, a friend of M. de Lescure, by name Henri du Verger, Count de Larochejaquelein. This young man, the son of a colonel, was himself a cavalry-officer in the king's guard. Though all his family had emigrated, Henri would not, and, leaving Paris after the terrible 10th of August 1792, he was heard to say: "I am going to my native province, and you will shortly hear something of me.' After residing for some time by himself in his château of La Durbellière, situated in one of the disturbed parishes, he had come to live with his friend Lescure at Clisson. He was only twenty years of age, but tall, and singularly handsome. With fair hair, a fine oval face, more English than French, and a proud eagle look, never did hussar sit on horseback with a nobler bearing than that of the generous, dashing, chivalrous Henri. His appearance, indeed, was exceedingly prepossessing, and his conversation only increased the fascination of his manner. It was pleasant to hear him speak; his mode of expressing himself was so simple, so intense, so quaint, so laconic. At present, his fault was in being too impulsive, too daring; but this high-souled impatience seemed to make him more an object of attraction. The peasants adored him. And afterwards, when they saw him dashing on at their head into the thick of the enemy, the first man in a charge or defending a bridge, making his horse wheel and his sabre flash amid whistling bullets, or the last man in a retreat, they could have stood still and looked on for sheer admiration. Such was Henri Larochejaquelein.

During the early part of the insurrection, none of the inmates of Clisson had thought it necessary to interfere; but now it was evident that the time had arrived when they should take part either with the peasants or with the authorities. It was decided that when it became necessary to act, they would all join the insurrection. The day was approaching when the militia were to be drawn for in the parish in which Clisson was situated, and young Larochejaquelein had to submit to be drawn for with the rest. The evening before the drawing, a young peasant came to the château charged with a message to Henri from his aunt Mademoiselle de Larochejaquelein, who resided a little way off, near the scene of Charette's operations. This young man told Henri that the peasants in the quarter from which he had come were going to rise to-morrow, and that they were all exceedingly anxious to have him for their leader. Henri, whose mind was already made up, and who, in fact, was only waiting for a good opportunity, declared his readiness to go that instant. Lescure was for accompanying him, but Henri urged the folly of committing a whole family, till it should be ascertained whether the enterprise were feasible. It was then urged by Madame Donnissan that Henri's departure might draw down the vengeance of the authorities on the inmates of the château; and this almost had the effect of shaking the young man's resolution; but at last, putting on that energetic look which never afterwards left him,