of her friends promise to see that it was done. A funeral sermon was performed at Fougères, and the entrails buried there: the body then, being embalmed as circumstances would permit, was coffined, and placed upon a covered cart: on the way, however, it was secretly interred,-as she supposes, by her father's orders: but it was a lasting subject of regret, that she knew not where it had been deposited.

The fatal resolution was now taken of marching against Granville instead of Rennes, by which the Bretons were discouraged, and Rossignol was left at leisure to curb them, to rally his scattered troops, and collect an army in the rear of the royalists, to combine with that from La Vendée, and intercept their retreat. There was a hope that England would co-operate with them, and land a force at Granville. And here we must remark, that the Marchioness, in her Memoirs, wherever England is alluded to, speaks of that country in a manner scarcely less reprehensible than the writers who published under the republic or the military despotism. Because the English ministry were so ill informed of the state of things in La Vendée, that their first communication was addressed to Gaston, she says, either the English, instead of their zeal for the royal cause, must have felt a great indifference for the affairs of the continent, or some motive must have induced them to feign this ignorance. She herself wrote the reply to this first overture; it was written, she says, with sufficient frankness; 'however, we took care to exaggerate our strength a little, that England might not think her sacrifices would be ill bestowed.' 'It must be allowed,' she says, that we gave the English facilities enough for their debarkment, and that there was on their part a great tardiness at least. The second messengers who arrived were emigrants; and those very men who brought despatches from the English government told the royalist generals not to have full confidence in England, for that it was impossible not to have doubts, if not of her good faith, at least of her activity. And when this ill-conducted, ill-equipped, ill-fated army made their disorderly attack upon Granville, the Marchioness says, the English heard the cannon at Jersey, and might have sent off ships and succours to co-operate! It is perfectly true that the strength of the royalists was not sufficiently understood in England, and that due advantage was not taken of the great opportunity which, more than once, were offered by these western provinces: but the cause is to be found in the intrigues of the emigrants, and their want of good faith toward each other; not in any want of zeal or sincerity in England. The memoirs of M. de Puisaye contain abundant evidence of this. Granville was resolutely defended by the republican garrison, aided by two small vessels from St. Malo: the assailants got possession of the suburbs;

and the representative Lecarpentier set fire to them; the royalists lost heart, and began to cry out for a change of plan: it was proposed to march upon Caen, and Roche Jaquelein actually set out with the cavalry, but the peasants insisted upon returning to their own country; most of the officers agreed with them; the passage was by Angers; and they declared that they would force their way into that city though the walls were of fire. The republicans were now collecting behind them ;-Pontoison, the first place to which the Vendeans marched on their return, was occupied by six hundred of the enemy, who were driven out, and many of them bayonetted in the streets. The Marchioness speaks of the jolting of her carriage over their dead bodies, and the unutterable sensation when. she felt their bones crush under the wheel! Dol was their next station; it became the scene of a frightful conflict. The republicans attacked them at night; they were repulsed; a triumphant shout of Vive le Roi! was set up by the whole multitude-a hundred thousand voices, says the Marchioness, of men, women and children; but the royalists took panic, as from want of discipline frequently occurred; and towards day-break they were in full flight. Never had they been so completely overcome with fear. Stofflet himself, one of the bravest in the army, was running like a man bewildered, when the Marchioness's mother met him-stopt him-and recalled him to himself. His conduct then was such as to wipe off all stain. The scene was dreadful beyond description; women were shrieking -children crying; the wretched who could go no farther lay down, and were trampled to death by their comrades. Roche Jaquelein thought that all was lost; placed himself before one of the enemy's batteries, and stood for some minutes with his arms crossed upon his breast, hoping for death. In this attitude he heard a sustained fire in one part of the field, and it restored him to himself; he there found Talmont standing his ground with 400 men; and to that stand the multitude owed their preservation; it gave time for a few officers, the priests, and the women, to stop the fugitives, and turn them back; for on this occasion the women gathered courage from despair, and exerted themselves with wonderful effect. Bonchamp's widow rallied her husband's soldiers. M. Beauchamp describes the Marchioness as using the same exertions, and demanding vengeance for her husband; she was incapable of any such effort, from disease and weakness; but her mother seemed to shake off the fears of her sex and the infirmity of age at this trying hour. A priest mounted upon a little hillock, lifted up a large crucifix, and, with a voice like Stentor, preached to the soldiers, asking them if they were infamous enough to leave their women and children to be butchered by the Blues; the only way to save them was by turning back to meet and defeat the ene

my. 'My children,' he cried, 'I will lead you on with this crucifix: let those who will follow me kneel down, and I will give them absolution. If they die they will go to paradise; but the poltroons who betray their God, and abandon their families, will have their throats cut by the Blues, and go to hell.' More than 2000 men fell on their knees at this exhortation; he absolved them aloud, and then led them to battle, the whole body exclaiming Vive le Roi! nous allons en paradis! When the victory was won, he returned in triumph at the head of this band, still bearing the crucifix, and chaunting with his powerful voice the Vexilla Regis, while the whole multitude knelt as he approached and passed them. The next day the republicans renewed the attack; they were entirely defeated; and the wreck of the routed army fled to Rennes. Even now if the Vendeans had marched upon that city, the spell which kept down the Bretons would have been broken; but they were no longer animated with hope: they looked merely to effecting their return into their own country, where every man, from his local knowledge, trusted that he should find a lurking place for himself. They sang Te Deum at Fougères for their late victories; and the Marchioness remarks, how heart-rending a contrast this ceremony formed with their actual condition.

'We continued our route,' says she, 'every one with the certainty of perishing in battle, or being butchered sooner or later.' The road, as far as they retreated exhibited shocking proofs of French ferocity. The sick, the wounded, the very children who had dropped behind upon their advance, had been massacred without mercy by the republicans; and all who had received the royalists into their houses, or shown the slightest instances of compassion toward them, had suffered the same fate. From Laval they moved upon Angers; but the people in Angers were republicans, and did more than the soldiers in preparing for a vigorous defence. They had cause to exert themselves, for the royalist leaders, to encourage their soldiers, promised them the pillage of the town. The Vendeans had boasted that if Angers were walled with fire, they would force their way through; their courage was not found answering in the day of performance. After a disorderly attack of thirty hours, they retreated, without knowing whither to bend their course, in a state of complete insubordination and utter hopelessness. The Marchioness's aunt, the abbess, in this confusion, fell into the enemy's hands-she was eighty years of age. But the national character, at that time, seemed equally incapable of justice and of compassion, and she was condemned and shot two days afterwards, with 700 other prisoners! Whither should this wretched multitude turn? They bent their way back to La Flèche : the bridge was broken down, and 3 or 4000 republicans occupied the opposite

bank. Roche Jaquelein forded the river, beat the enemy, and reestablished the bridge; but his officers seconded him so ill that day, that he said to them with bitterness, Sirs, is it not enough that you oppose me in council, but you must abandon me in the field? They advanced to Mans: the peasantry of Mans were said to be royalists, and they hoped, by drawing near Bretagne, to recruit their forces there; but the opportunity had been lost. If at any time they could have succeeded, it was by occupying Rennes when first they entered that province; and there is great reason for supposing, that this might have raised an insurrection too extensive and too general to have been crushed. But the government, growing wise from experience, was correcting its former errors in the management of this war: they had discovered that fencing masters, brewers, goldsmiths, and tailors, could not at once be transformed into generals, without imminent danger to the men over whom they were appointed; they had learned also that something more than personal courage was required for a commander, and that there were other qualifications besides jacobinism and ferocity. Rossignol, therefore, was superseded, and the command given to Turreau, a man capable of forming military arrangements, and merciless enough to act upon any system, however barbarous. He was at this time with the army on the Spanish frontiers, and till he could arrive Marceau was to hold the command; this officer, during his short career, acquired a high reputation; but the glory, as M. Beauchamp calls it, of annihilating la grand Vendée, will add little to his honour in this world, or to his happiness in the next. The royalists halted at Mans: they had no confidence in their chiefs or in each other; and despair had produced the deplora ble effect of disposing them rather to wait for their fate with resignation, than to exert themselves for the purpose of retarding and perhaps averting it. No preparations were made for defence; no route was fixed; no place of retreat even appointed in case they should be driven from thence. In this state they were attacked early on the second morning. Roche Jaquelein did every thing which personal intrepidity and activity could effect, but the example was lost upon the great bulk of his army; and the whole multitude would have been involved in one tremendous massacre, if a few hundred peasants had not remained during the night in the town, and, by firing from the windows, deterred the conquerors from passing through in pursuit. The last officers left the town at four in the morning; and these heroic peasants did not retreat till four hours afterwards, and were fortunate enough to escape, as their virtue deserved. When all resistance had ceased, the women, who from hope or despair had concealed themselves in the town, were dragged from the houses into the market-place, and there, before the

windows of the representatives of the people, massacred in mass! The French soldiers fired in platoons upon them, volley after volley, as those who were outermost of the crowd fell, and exposed their more miserable fellow sufferers, still shrieking and shrinking at the fate which it was impossible to escape. Will it be credited that the soldiers made the writhings and contortions of agony, and the last convulsive shudderings of death, matter for mockery and jest?-M. Beauchamp has recorded the fact. It is but too certain that ignorant and brutalized man is more ferocious and cruel than the wildest beast: but we hope and believe that in no other country upon earth could men and soldiers have been found to perpetrate massacres like these upon women; women, too, of their own country! Marceau is said to have groaned at these enormities, which he found it impossible to repress, for the soldiers had been trained, like the manhounds of the Spaniards in the Columbian Islands, to their work of blood; and the government had its ministers on the spot, to encourage and halloo them on! He called them off from pillage, by urging the pursuit ;--for a space of fourteen leagues the ground was covered with carcasses: not a toise of ground, says M. Beauchamp, without some dead bodies! The Marchioness states the loss at 15,000; and an untold number of the fugitives escaped the slaughter only to perish by the guillotine. The Marchioness, before she fled from Mans, hid her child in the bed of a republican lady, (herself a mother,) who refused to afford it shelter. One of Lescure's servants, ignorant of what his mistress had done, searched for the infant, and brought it again to the heart-broken mother; the child was now sinking fast under disease, the effect of dentition and of fatigue; a peasant was found to shelter it, when the mother could convey it no farther, without sacrificing both lives; and in a few days its sufferings were termi- ' nated. The route of Mans had been fatal to the Vendeans: they reached Laval once more on the 13th of December, and in three days more arrived at Ancenis, in the forlorn hope of effecting their passage over the Loire. The enemy had troops at St. Florent, on the opposite shore. Two boats were found, in which Roche Jaquelein, Stofflet, and about twenty men, crossed, to seize some haybarges on the other side; and to prevent the men from dispersing as soon as they reached the shore. A republican patrole attacked them while they were throwing out the hay: the men took flight, and Roche Jaquelein and Stofflet had no other resource but to fly also. An enemy's gunboat began to play upon the rafts which the Vendeans were framing, and the remains of this unhappy people, about 10,000 in number, were left without a general. Every man now thought only of himself; and the officers, in spite of all Marigny's efforts, seized the military chest, and shared its contents