knew what was going on in La Vendée. One day early in August there came to Chatillon a strange little man, with an exceedingly sharp penetrating look, seeking an interview with the Vendéan generals. This was an envoy from England, carrying despatches from Pitt and Dundas as wadding in his pistols. His name was Tinteniac: he was a Breton emigrant, one of those men of whom so many extraordinary stories are told, who, by the joint force of a wild courage and an exhaustless ingenuity, contrived, during the heat of the war, to pass and repass through miles of hostile territory, carrying despatches which, if discovered, would have conducted them to the nearest gallows. Tinteniac produced his credentials. Can we wonder that a pang of anger was felt when, on opening them, it was found that they were addressed, not to D'Elbée, Lescure, Larochejaquelein, Stofflet, or any other general in the insurrection, but to a dead man-no other, in fact, than the barber Gaston, who had headed a local outbreak in the Marais in the month of March, and been killed a day or two after. Oh! it was heart-sickening. Here had they been resisting the Revolution for five months, and yet the statesman whose eyes were supposed to be ranging over Europe, was not so much as aware of the names that were daily bandied about by the French journals. No wonder that they now distrusted England. Nevertheless, an answer to the questions contained in the despatches was written out, pressing for the landing of an English army on the coast of Bretagne, insisting particularly on the necessity of having a Bourbon prince at the head of it, promising 20,000 recruits from La Vendée alone, and assuring England that the landing of the army would rouse all Bretagne. With this answer Tinteniac departed.

The activity of the repubiican generals, stimulated by the recent orders of the Convention, did not allow the Vendée leaders to desist long from military operations. A battle became necessary whenever the Blues penetrated the Bocage; and this a strong force under Tuncq, one of Beysser's officers, was now doing. To repel this inroad, Charette, on the 12th of August, joined his forces to those of D'Elbée. A desperate battle took place at Luçon, in which the Vendéans suffered a terrible defeat; and this was but the beginning of disasters. All the servants of the Republic were thinking about nothing else than the best way of carrying out the exterminating edict of the Convention. Santerre himself, who, though nominally exerting himself in a military capacity, was, in reality, in safe lodgings at Saumur, came forward with a scheme peculiarly his own. He was for putting an end to the insurrection by carbonic acid gas. He recommended that the chemists should prepare some of their strongest gas-emitting substances; these were to be bottled up in tight leathern vessels, which were to be fired like shells into the doomed district, so that, falling on the ground, they might burst, and emit the subtle fluid to impregnate the

atmosphere, asphyxiate every living thing, and strew the fields with corpses. Possibly Santerre, though familiar with the effects of carbonic acid gas at the bottom of vats, had no distinct notion of chemical possibilities; at anyrate, his plan was not adopted, and the Republic fell back upon the ordinary instrumentality of fire and

massacre.

The devoted Bocage was now surrounded by a formidable ring of republican forces, amounting in all to about 200,000 men, many of them raw recruits, but many of them also veteran soldiers; and the purpose was, to draw closer and closer round the whole insurgent population, until they should be collected like sheep within a pen, and then deliberately butchered. To frustrate this design, La Vendée was divided into four districts, presided over severally by Charette, Bonchamp, Lescure, and Larochejaquelein, each of whom employed himself in repelling the inroads of the enemy on his own frontier. Not a few bloody engagements took place in this way; and when the royalists were victorious, as was usually the case when they fought in the labyrinths of their own Bocage, they did not, as formerly, spare their prisoners, but killed them without mercy. All that had gone before seemed but a prelude to what was now going on. Everybody believed that the time had now come pointed out in the memorable prophecy of that holy man Grignon de Montfort, founder of the blessed societies of the Missionaries of St Laurent and the Daughters of Wisdom, who, more than fifty years ago, had, with his own hands, planted a stone cross in the earth, uttering these words: 'My brothers, God, to punish misdoers, shall one day stir up a terrible war in these quarters. Blood shall be spilt; men shall kill one another; and the whole land shall be troubled. When you see my cross covered with moss, you may know that these things are about to happen.' And, sure enough, was it not covered with moss now? Ah! the words of that holy and devout man have not come to nought.

The Vendéans, hemmed in on all sides, performed prodigies of valour. Santerre and Ronsin at one point, Duhoux at another, Mieskowski at another, Canclaux and Dubayet at another, and lastly, Kleber himself the herculean and magnanimous Kleber, one of the ablest servants the Revolution ever had-Kleber at Torfou, with the brave Mayençais—all were defeated and beaten back. The end of September was spent by the peasants in rejoicing and thanksgiving. Still the antagonists were unequally matched, and the struggle could not last long. Charette, also, whose assistance had helped the insurgents in their successes, now left them to pursue some plan of his own on the coast, having quarrelled with the generals.

The Convention at Paris now recalled General Beysser for being unsuccessful in the war, and with him Canclaux and Dubayet. These two officers were exceedingly popular with the army; and

their recall so offended the Mayençais, that they offered, for 400,000 livres paid down, and a guaranteed pay of seven sous a day per head, to desert the Republic, and join the royalists. The Superior Council, contrary to Abbé Bernier's wishes, rejected this offer; the scrupulous honesty of the Vendéans conceiving it to be a sacrilege to employ, for however good an end, the dishonesty of others. Hearing of the insubordination of the Mayençais, the Convention, on the 9th of October, issued an order for concentrating all the troops then serving in the west, in Normandy and Bretagne, as well as Anjou and Poitou, into one large army, to be styled the Army of the West, and commanded, 'not by ci-devant nobles like Canclaux and Dubayet, but by Lechelle, a man of the people.'

Lechelle was not more capable than others; but he had able subordinates, the best of whom were Kleber and Westermann; and besides, Canclaux generously left him a plan of procedure. Acting on this plan, he caused two bodies of troops to march into the centre of the Bocage simultaneously by different routes. Advertised of the approach of one of these on the frontier committed to his care, Lescure, then at La Trenblaye, went out to meet it. Mounting a rising ground, he discovered the Blues almost at his feet. 'Forward!' he cried; but at that moment a ball struck him on the right eyebrow, coming out behind his ear, and gashing his head. It was his death-wound. While he was in the act of being carried off the field, his men rushed madly forward, and repulsed the enemy. But a more terrible encounter was at hand. The various bodies of republicans were now concentrated at Cholet, each having left behind it a track of desolation, as if it had scathed the earth where it marched. During the day, the air was filled with the smoke of burning villages; at night, fires blazed up along the horizon; the untended cattle were heard lowing wildly on the hills; and the croaking of the carrion birds, and the howling of the wolves, feasting on the corpses scattered about, made the scene more horrible. The royalists gathered their dispersed forces, resolved to stake the issue upon_one decisive battle; taking the precaution, however, of following Bonchamp's advice so far as to send the Prince de Talmont, with a small body of men, to keep open an avenue from Cholet into Bretagne, so that, in case of defeat, their shattered army might still have the means of reaching an asylum-a precaution, alas! which the event proved to have been but too necessary.

Long, and desperate was the engagement between Kleber's fortyfour thousand republican soldiers and the forty thousand Vendéans at Cholet. The carnage was great; and the issue was yet doubtful, when suddenly, in one part of the royalist army, there arose the panic-stricken cry: To the Loire! to the Loire!' In vain the generals galloped hither and thither, shouting till they were hoarse ; it was night, and nothing could be distinguished. Flags, artillery, chiefs, horses, soldiers, women, priests, children, were all commingled

and swept along in an irretrievable indiscriminate confusion. In the mêlée, Bonchamp and D'Elbée both fell, the one struck down, the other shot in the breast. They would have been left among the dead, but that they were recognised by a small body of men who had taken no part hitherto in the fight, but had come up in time to witness the flight, and make it somewhat less disastrous by interposing themselves between the fugitives and their pursuers. Brandishing his bloody sabre over his head, Larochejaquelein made an attempt to rush back, crying out: 'Let us die where we are!' but he was carried on by the river of fugitives, his voice drowned by cries of: 'To the Loire ! to the Loire!' And on they impetuously went towards the Loire, a wild and intractable herd of human beings; governed by a blind impulse, they rushed towards the broad and tranquil river which separated their unhappy country from Brittany.

Overcome with fatigue, and arrested by darkness, the Vendéans halted at Beaupréau, where they remained during the night.

PASSAGE OF THE LOIRE.

We left the panic-stricken host of Vendéans halting for the night at Beaupréau, on its way towards the Loire. A terrible spectacle presented itself on the following morning-a continuous stream of a hundred thousand human beings, men, women, and children, with tattered garments and bleeding feet, pouring out of their desolated native land, and seeking from God and man's mercy some other asylum. Before them, beyond a broad river, was a strange country; behind them was a pursuing enemy. Three of their chiefs, too, were dying of their wounds, carried uneasily along in litters. It was not long since the heroic Cathelineau was taken away from them, and now all at once they were bereft of Lescure, Bonchamp, and D'Elbée. La Vendée had indeed proved itself too weak for the Revolution. For seven months the brave little district had, by its own unaided efforts, kept that gigantic force at bay: the blame of its not being able to do anything more, of its not being able to frustrate and crush the Revolution altogether, lay not with it, but with those whose duty it was to improve the opportunity which the struggle in La Vendée afforded them. La Vendée had done her utmost. Whatever fault there was, lay with those royalists who were nearest the centre of European affairs, and who did nothing.

A hundred thousand Vendéans, men, women, and children, were wending along towards the Loire. They arrived at St Florent, and prepared to cross the river opposite to Ancenis. In a paroxysm of revenge, they were going to massacre about five thousand republican prisoners they had brought along with them, when Bonchamp interfered on the side of mercy; and when they would have respected nothing else, they respected this, the last wish of their dying general.

The men were liberated. On the 18th of October, the passage of the Loire was effected, and is thus described by Madame Lescure in her memoirs: The heights of St Florent form a kind of semicircular boundary to a vast level strand reaching to the Loire, which is very wide at this place. Eighty thousand people were crowded together in this valley; soldiers, women, children, the aged and the wounded, flying from immediate destruction. Behind them they perceived the smoke of burning villages. Nothing was heard but loud sobs, groans, and cries. In this confused crowd every one sought his relations, his friends, his protectors. They knew not what fate they should meet on the other side, yet hastened to it, as if beyond the stream they were to find an end to all their misfortunes. Twenty bad boats carried successively the fugitives who crowded into them; others tried to cross on horses; all spread out their arms, supplicating to be taken to the other side. At a distance on the opposite shore, another multitude, those who had crossed, were seen and heard fainter. In the middle was a small island crowded with people. Many of us compared this disorder, this despair, this terrible uncertainty of the future, this immense spectacle, this bewildered crowd, this valley, this stream which must be crossed, to the images of the last judgment.' They had almost all crossed, and relations who had been separated were seeking each other in the crowd on the safe side, when Merlin de Thionville, representative of the people, galloped in among those still waiting on the Vendée side, cutting the throats of women and children. A large number were thus butchered at the river side. This Merlin de Thionville appears to us to have been one of the most consummate scoundrels even of that age, when, in the troubling of the waters, so many latent scoundrels were stirred up from the bottom. In a letter addressed on the 19th of October to the Committee of Public Safety, after congratulating the Committee on the flight of the Vendéans, he adverts to the five thousand republican prisoners whom the fugitives had so magnanimously spared. Thionville is vexed at the circumstance, and calls it an unfortunate occurrence. He had taken great pains, he said, to represent the affair in its proper light, as some faint-hearted republicans were actually touched by it. It is best, therefore,' he says in conclusion, 'to cover with oblivion this unfortunate occurrence. Do not speak of it even to the Convention. The brigands have no time to write or make journals. The affair will be forgotten, like many things else.' The man who could write so-who could coolly suppress a fact creditable to an enemy, speculating on the chance that that enemy did not keep a journal-deserves to be singled out from among his brother liars, to go down to posterity as the blackest heart in the Revolution. Desirous of conveying his falsehood through a public document to the people, he wrote as follows to the Convention: At St Florent we rescued out of the hands of the enemy five thousand five hundred republican prisoners.