MADAME DE LA ROCHEJAQUELEIN.
[BORN 1772. DIED 1857.]
JEFFREY.
HIS hard-fated woman was very young and newly married when she was thrown, by the adverse circumstances of the time, into the very heart of those deplorable contests [the war in La Vendée, during the first and maddest years of the French Republic]; and without pretending to any other information than she could draw from her own experience, and scarcely presuming to pass any judgment upon the merits or demerits of the cause, she has made up her memoirs of a clear and dramatic description of acts in which she was a sharer, or scenes of which she was an eye-witness, and of the characters and histories of the many distinguished individuals who partook with her of their glories and sufferings. The irregular and undisciplined wars which it was her business to describe were naturally far more prolific of extraordinary incidents, unexpected turns of fortune, and striking displays of individual talent, and vice and virtue, than the more solemn movements of national hostility, where everything is in a great measure provided and foreseen, and where the inflexible subordination of rank, and the severe exactions of a limited duty, not only take away the inducement, but the opportunity, for those exaltations of personal feeling and adventure which produce the most lively interest, and lead to the most animating results.
This lady had some right, in truth, to be delicate and royalist beyond the ordinary standard. Her father, the Marquis de Donnison, had an employment about the person of the king, in virtue of which he had apartments in the Palace of Versailles, in which splendid abode Madame de la Rochejaquelein was born, and continued constantly to reside in the very focus of royal influence and glory till the whole of its unfortunate inhabitants were compelled to leave it by the fury of that mob which escorted them to Paris in 1789. She had, like most French ladies of distinction, been destined from her infancy to be the wife of M. de Lescure, a near relation of her mother, and the representative of the ancient and noble family of Salgues in Poitou.
The picture of the war [in which Madame de la Rochejaquelein figured so prominently, and in which she lost her young husband] is shaded with deep horrors. The convention issued the barbarous decree that the country [La Vendée], which still continued its resistance, should be desolated, that the whole inhabitants should be exterminated without distinction of age or sex, the habitations consumed with fire, and the trees cut down by the axe. A multitude of sanguinary conflicts ensued, and the insurgents succeeded in resisting this desolating invasion. Among the slain in one of those engagements the republicans found the body of a young woman, which, Madame de la Rochejaquelein informs us, gave occasion to a number of idle reports, many giving it out that it was she herself, or a sister of M. de la Rochejaquelein, who had no sister, or a new Joan of Arc, who had kept up the spirit of the peasantry by her enthusiastic predictions. The truth was, that it was the body of an innocent peasant who had always lived a remarkably quiet and pious life till recently before this action, when she had been seized with an irresistible desire to take a part in the conflict. [She deserved to be "a woman of history," but her name has not been preserved.] She had discovered herself some time before to Madame de la Rochejaquelein, and begged of her a shift of a peculiar fabric. The night before the battle, she also revealed herself to M. de la Rochejaquelein, asking him to give her a pair of shoes, and promising to behave in such a manner in the morrow's fight that he would never think of parting with her. Accordingly, she kept near his person through the whole of the battle, and conducted herself with the most heroic bravery. Two or three times, in the very heat of the fight, she said to him: "No, mon general, you shall not get before me; I shall always be closer up to the enemy even than you." Early in the day she was hurt pretty severely in the hand, but held it up, laughing, to her general, and said, "It is nothing at all." In the end of the battle, she was surrounded in a charge, and fell fighting like a desperado. There were about ten other women who took up arms, Madame de la Rochejaquelein says, in this cause: two sisters under fifteen, and a tall beauty who wore the dress of an officer.
At the end, after the loss of her husband, Madame de la Rochejaquelein was told that it was impossible to resist the attack that was to be made next day, and was advised to seek her safety in flight and disguise, without the loss of an instant. She set out accordingly with her mother, on a gloomy day in December, under the conduct of a drunken peasant; and, after being out most of the night, at length obtained shelter in a dirty farm-house, from which, in the course of the day, she had the misery of seeing her unfortunate countrymen scattered over the whole open country, chased and butchered without mercy by the republicans, who now took a final vengeance for all the losses they had sustained. She had long been clothed in shreds and patches, and needed no disguise to conceal her quality. She was sometimes hidden in the mill when the troopers came to search for fugitives in her lonely retreat, and often sent in the midst of winter to herd the sheep or cattle of her faithful and compassionate host, along with his raw-boned daughter.
While skulking about in this state of peril and desolation, they had glimpses and occasional rencounters with some of their former companions, whom similar misfortunes had driven upon similar schemes of concealment. In this wretched condition, the time of Madame de la Rochejaquelein's confinement drew on; and after a thousand frights and disasters, she was delivered of two daughters, one of whom died within a fortnight. The result at length was, that Madame de la Rochejaquelein, after several struggles with pride and principle, was prevailed to repair to Nantes, to avail herself of an amnesty.
