THE WAR IN LA VENDEE.

Tun manufacture of memoirs illustrative of the French Revolution and the First Empire has been carried to such unblushing lengths that any fresh " find " in those fields must expect a critical, if not a hostile, reception. In the adventures, however, of the Count de Cartrie we seem to have what is at any rate a genuine human documelt, and one which, though of no particular historical value, sheds a good deal of light on the

* Memoirs of the Count ds Cartrie: a Record of the Extraordinary Events is the Life of a French Royalist during the War in La Yendie, and of his Plight to Southampton, where he Followed the Humble Occupation of a Gardener. With an Introduction by Frederic Wal91)013. Appendices and Notes. by Pierre Amedee Piehot, and other hands. A Photogravure Portrait of the Author and 20 other Illustrations. London : John Lane. Ll0s. net.) condition of provincial France during the months of the Terror. The history of the manuscript is interesting and peculiar. Just two years. ago Mr. John Lane, the publisher, was informed of the existence at a bookshop in Torquay of an old and faded MS. bound in stained vellum which purported to contain a personal narrative of extraordinary events in the life of Ambroise Toussaint de Cartrie, Count de Villeniere. The narrative was in English, translated from the French by an anonymous friend of the author about the year 1800, with the intention, which has only to-day been carried into effect, of eventual publication. Advertisement and inquiry after the original having failed of any effect, Mr. Lane, who bad become the purchaser of the MS., which he has since presented to the British Museum, bad recourse to M. Pierre Amedee Pichot, the distinguished editor of La Revue Britannique. The indefatigable industry and fine antiquarian scent of M. Pichot enabled him to do much more than correct the innumerable false spellings of proper names which had dis- credited the MS. in the eyes of a former generation of British Museum officials. He has succeeded in identifying the narrator and the members of his family, in tracing their history, and in giving to a nariative which on the face of it was open to grave suspicion the stamp of authenticity.

Toussaint Ambroise, lord of the manors of La Cartrie and La Villeni&e, was the head of a family which had migrated from Normandy to Anjou at the close of the sixteenth century, and had become ennobled in virtue of the offices they held from father to son in the Court of Audit of Brittany. Born in 1743, Ambroiso served in the Seven Years' War, during the course of which three of his brothers were killed, two at Minden and one at Port Mahon; ho himself made the campaign of Canada with the regiment of Berri, and was taken prisoner at Montreal in 1760. Returning to France, and succeeding to a fine inheritance, he was married and the father of a large family when the storm of the Revolution broke over his head, it was in March, 1793, that the peasants of La Vendee and of the districts on either bank of the Loire rushed to arms and forced the nobility and gentry to put themselves at their head. Do Cartrie was under no illusions as to the desperate nature of the rising, and his inclinations were for a quiet life on his own estates; but the policy of extermination adopted from the first by the " patriots " made the lines of the Catholic Army the only refuge for those suspected of Royalist proclivities.

De Cartrie does not appear to have taken any active part in the insurrection until just before the disastrous battle of Cholet, October 16th, 1793, which cost the Vendeans their best leaders, and resulted in the fatal passage of the Loire by the defeated host. From that day till the eve of the final agony at Savenay (December 23rd) be bore his part in the furious fighting which for eleven weeks inflicted defeat after defeat upon the Republicans, and more than once held mt.& prospect of replacing Louis XVII. on the throne of his ancestors. His name is not recorded by any of the contempo- rary historians of the war, which is all the more strange in that he claims Bonchamps as his nephew, and states that the latter died in his arms. But his account of the battle of Dot (November 22nd) tallies remarkably with that given by Poirier de Beauvais, a much more reliable authority in military matters than Madame de la Rochojacquelein. And there is a stern fidelity to truth and a freedom from exaggeration in his description of the thrice-wretched non-combatants who followed the army from St. Florent to Glanville, on the Normandy coast, and back again in weary pilgrimage to Le Mans, and the fusillades and noyades of Nantes and Angers. The number of these has been variously estimated at from eight to forty thousand, the former figure, though given by the Count de Cartrie, being vastly below the one which is usually accepted ; but he had good opportunity of knowing, for his own wife and daughters and many of his relatives were in the hapless throng. His personal adventures, which led him right across France, past the outskirts of Paris, to Alsace, and finally across the frontier to Luxemburg and safety, are well worth reading. Separated from his family, the female members of whom remained in the hands of the revolutionaries at Angers,

he owed his life to the devotion of sorne of his former tenants, and also to his own coolness and presence of mind. These qualities enabled him to sustain the rale of a time-expired Quartermaster of Artillery who had volun- teered to rejoin his regiment on the Eastern frontier. It is

very remarkable, aaM. '$déiç Itfasson poi,* out, that an outlaw should thus have been able to traverse France from

end to end during the very climax of the Terror, meeting at almost every stage with sympathetic greetings offered to a stranger at the risk of life itself.

M. Masson gives a somewhat exaggerated praise to the narrative. Few memoirs of the time, he says, "are so sincere, 60 humanly true, so free from pompous and royalist emphasis; consequently few give so just an impression of the ideas and sentiments which stirred the greater part of the gentry who were nominally the leaders of the insurrection in the West."

For our own part, we are not prepared to rank them nearly so high, nor d9 they compare, in our judgment, either with the Memoirs of Fourier de Beauvais, or with that most moving book by M. Boutillier de St. Andre, rine Fanatic Vendeenne pendant la Grande Guerre, which is strangely unknown in England. Still, they are a useful corrective to the exquisitely written, but over-coloured, pages of Madame de la Roche- jacquelein, which, together with Dr. Neale's pleasant story of Duchenies, is the general reader's main authority for the war in La Vendee.

M. Masson'a view of the great peasant rising is that of the Republican school of French historians : he regards it as due solely to the exasperation of the masses at the repressive measures of the Government against those priests who refused to take the oath of the Civil Constitution of the clergy and against the enforced levy of soldiers to serve on a distant frontier. In his eyes, it is anything but a Royalist Movement; it is purely democratic and spontaneous, "on the one hand a protest against military service, and on the other a refusal to repudiate venerated and familiar traditions." It is perfectly true that the investigations of M. Chassin and others have shown that the grievances of the Angevin and Poitevin peasants as embodied in the famous cahiers differed little from those recorded over France generally, and that the towns in the West generally were hotbeds of republicanism; the National Guard of La Vendee patriots held the rising at bay until the arrival of the Regulars finally turned the scale. But the rising was far more Royalist in character than M. Masson is prepared to allow. A formidable conspiracy of the gentry in Brittany and south of the Loire, in 1791, had only been averted by the sudden and somewhat mysterious death of its originator, Armand de la Rouerie. The peasant General Cathelineau was as fervid a Royalist 'as courtiers like the Marquis de Donissan and M. de Lescnre. " Vive le Roi, quand meme !" was the cry of the Vendean sharpshooter who missed his living target, and the chorus which echoed over the

volleys of the onset was " Vive, vive le Roi ; bas la Republique." It is pathetic to think that the King for whom these loyal hearts and true laid down their lives so gladly was the poor little prisoner of the Temple, himself being slowly done to death by the brutality of the Terrorists.

M. Masson's introduction is a. terse and luminous apprecia- tion of one aspect of the French Revolution, written in a style of which his countrymen retain the secret and the monopoly. It would be difficult, for instance, to better his sketch of Barr as :— "A mixture of the dilapidated gentleman, of the verbose politician, and of the inveterate gambler, he had an effective glance, ready wit, decision, the habit of command, and courage." But H. Masson has really very little to say about La Vendee, and he is neither just nor generous to the Vendeans and their leaders. He declares the generals to have been as unsoldierly as their troops, and he maintains that the latter "failed before the smallest hamlet, as soon as the alarm was given, never succeeded in taking a town or a post, and although all but masters of the country could never form either a centre for reprovisionrnent or a basis of operations." This is sheer exaggeration; the capture of Thouars and Sanmur ought to be set off against the failure to retake Angers and against the repulse at Nantes, while the unsuccessful attempt to seize a port at Granville was based upon the co-operation of the English Fleet, which, like the Spanish, never came in sight. Under Bonchamps and D'Elbee, both trained and experienced officers, the Catholic Army evolved a series of tactics as suit- able to their "blind" and enclosed country as that of the Boers to the mountain and the veld. Nor is it accurate to say that the peasants collapsed as soon as they were brought face to face with disciplined troops. The arrival of the Maintz garrison undoubtedly gave "the Blues" the decisive

victory at Chola, but the event was long in doubt ; for two hours the Vendeans held the field, and the end only came when a battery, unmasked at point-blank range, spread con- fusion in their ranks and swept down their generals. Three weeks later La Rophejakquelein completely turned the tables at Laval, where the Mayencais were completely wiped out by a dispirited and retreating army. Of the military capacity of the earlier Vend6an leaders Jomini has written in terms of the highest praise; Mr. Fortescue's latest volume pays them, and Bonchamps in particular, the highest compliment; and Napoleon himself, not altogether uninspired by jealousy, pre- ferred the desperate resistance of the La Rochejacqueleins and the Charettes to the feats of arms of a Marcea.0 or a Roche. At St. Helena he spoke of the Vendeans as "giants."

Charette, indeed, is a strange enigma. His jealousy and his refusal to co-operate with the other leaders undoubtedly wrecked the cause which he championed; his cruelty, his strange fits of indolence, and his addiction to what are euphemistically termed his pleasures have left a stain upon his character. But he defied the legions of the Republic for three years ; he extorted terms of peace such as a con- queror might have dictated ; and even when theincompetence of the English Government and the cowardice of the Bourbon Princes had destroyed the last hope, he spurned the tempting offers of the Directory, and died a hunted fugitive.

If there is much alloy in Charette's metal, that of Henri de la Rochejacquelein is pure gold. He stands for all that was best in the old French chivalry, a type that paled before the swashbucklers who won batons and epaulettes from the Emperor. His military capacity has been decried, yet on field after field he drove his enemies like chaff before him. He commanded the Grand Catholic Army when he was one-and-twenty, and his words to the peasants, "If I advance, follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I die, avenge me," are among the great sayings of all time. His true place in history is by the side of Montrose and Dundee.

We have wandered far from the Count de Cartrie. Holland and the Low Countries were no safe place for an émigré, and after having shared in the disasters of Quiberon he made his way to Southampton penniless and destitute. Here he succeeded in subsisting on his two shillings a day from the English Government and the vegetables which, like Dr. Riccabocca, he reared in his little garden. In 1798 he learnt for the first time that his wife and daughter had survived the Terror, and in 1800 he . went to France hoping to be included in Bonaparte's Act of Amnesty; and here the manuscript ends. The industry of M. Pichot has ascertained the fact that he lived to be &core at the Restoration ; but misfortune dogged his footsteps, and he died in poverty in 1848, just after his nomination to Les Invalides had been made out.

The illustrations and portraits with which the book is lavishly embellished add. largely to its value. We cannot, however, regard the portrait of D'Elbee as a faithful likeness, though it professes to have been taken at the Council of War where he was sentenced to be shot. For one thing, it repre- sents him as standing erect and unwounded, whereas he never left the bed to which the mortal hurt received at Cholet had confined him until he was executed, tied in his chair, on the sands of Noirmoutier. The scene is depicted in a painting in the Nantes Museum.