It was equivalent to saying, "What does it matter to us what may happen to Alsace and Lorraine, Champagne and Burgundy, the Dauphiné and Provence?... What does it matter to us if they extinguish Paris, the light of the world?... Time enough to seize our guns when we see the Cossack leap his horse over our hedges!"
Now the most picturesque of writers would find great difficulty in giving a patriotic turn to such assertions as these. Personally, I much prefer the volunteers who ran in front of the Prussians as far as Valmy, to these peasants who waited quietly behind their hedgerows; and all the more so since I am not at all convinced that they were not really waiting for them on purpose to ally themselves to them. Why should they not compound with the Prussians? they entered into plenty of negotiations with the English! The war, then, began between patriots and royalists, between citizens and peasants. There were constitutional towns, manufacturing ones,—as, for example, Chollet, where very beautiful handkerchiefs are made,—which contained numbers of workpeople who did not wish for Prussians in France or for friends of the Prussians. One day they heard that the people of Bressuire had risen in revolt; they armed themselves with pikes and rushed off to attack them. So the town of Chollet was especially marked out for hatred by the peasants.
On 4 March, they attacked it in their turn. A commanding officer belonging to the National Guard trusted himself among a group of royalists; he went among them to endeavour to reconcile the two parties; soon, cries of pain issued from this group, the members of which had closed round him and were slashing at his legs with his own sword.
On the 10th, came the turn of Machecoul; here, there was less to do than at Chollet. Machecoul was a small town, exposed on every side and easy to capture. They first learnt the danger they were in on a Sunday; the tocsin was rung and all the peasantry of the surrounding country made for the town. Two hundred patriots rallied and bravely advanced against the assailants—two hundred against two thousand!—the mass opened, surrounded the little band and made but one mouthful of it. Machecoul had a constitutional curé, and the priests who had not taken the oath to the constitution bore a grudge against those who had: they protested that the latter "spoilt the profession"; they seized the poor man as he came to say mass, and they killed him; but there was a preconcerted plan among them to kill him by inches by blows on the face. The torture lasted a long time: life is sometimes very tenacious, especially in the hands of skilful executioners, who do not incline to chase it too quickly out of the body. But everything has an end: the curé died a martyr, and, when he was dead, they consulted an old huntsman, a clever bugle blower, and organised a hunt, searching from house to house to track down their quarry. When they unearthed a patriot they blew the vue, at the sound of which every man, woman and child ran out (in this kind of warfare, women and children are even worse than men). When the patriot was beaten down, the hallali was bugled, then came the curée, which lasted a long time: it was carried out, usually, by women, with the help of scissors and nails, and by children, with the aid of stones. Machecoul lies on an eminence between two departments; it was judged to be a good place for establishing a court of justice; and they massacred there for forty-two days, from 10 March to 22 April.
The reader knows how the insurrection spread from the Lower Vendée to the Higher. It was brought about by an affair at Saint-Florent: an émigré had sent his servant, a Vendean named Forest into Vendée to preach resistance, and opposition to the military system. They tried to stop him, but he would not be denied a hearing; he openly preached revolt in the streets. A gendarme came to him; he drew a pistol from his pocket, fired at the gendarme and killed him. That pistol-shot woke those who were yet slumbering, And, mark well, when this unlucky shot was fired, the tocsin was already ringing in six hundred parishes; then it was carried by the wind in all directions; nothing could be heard but the ringing of bells, as though flocks of invisible birds were flying over their brazen tongues. The vibration of those deadly knells, which were answering one another from village to village, grew in volume, clashing in the air, charging the atmosphere like a thunderstorm, with electric currents of hatred and of revenge.
Meantime, what was Cathelineau, the prime mover of all this, busy about? We will hear Michelet's version:—
"He had heard of the fight at Saint-Florent and the firing of guns clearly enough; nor could he be unaware by the 12th of the frightful massacre of the 10th, which had compromised the Vendean coast in the revolt past all drawing back. Even if he had not heard anything, the tocsin would have roused him hard enough: the whole country seemed in an uproar, the very earth trembled. He began to think things were growing serious, and whether from the foresight of the father of a family which he was shortly to leave, or whether from military prudence, in the matter of laying in stores of food, he began to heat his ovens and to make bread. First came his nephew, with the story of the affray at Saint-Florent. Cathelineau continued to knead his dough. Then the neighbours began dropping in—a tailor, a weaver, a shoemaker, a hatter.
"'Well, neighbour, what shall we do?'
"Quite twenty-seven of them had assembled there, bent on following his counsel implicitly. He pointed out first that a crisis had come: the leaven had done its work, the fermentation was sufficiently advanced; it was time to stop kneading, wipe his hands and shoulder his gun. Twenty-seven went forth; at the end of the village they numbered five hundred. It was the whole of the population, all worthy men, sturdy, strong, steadfastly brave and honest, the very pick of the Vendean armies, intrepid leaders almost always to be found in the front ranks, facing the Republican cannon."
By the time they reached Chollet, they were fifteen thousand. They had seized a piece of cannon at Jallais, which they christened the Missionnaire; and a second, at some other place, which was dubbed Marie-Jeanne. All along the route priests joined their ranks, exhorting, preaching, singing mass to them. They started on the 12th, as we have seen; after the 14th, a large band joined forces with them, headed by a man who was to share the command with Cathelineau, and, later, to succeed him. This was Stofflet, another rough but brave peasant, a gamekeeper on M. Maulevrier's estate, whose grandson, poor lad, the last descendant of the race, was killed out hunting, at the age of sixteen. When the Vendean army reached Chollet it sent in a flag of truce—a strange envoy he was, too, and he gives us a good idea of the times, the place and the circumstances: his head and his feet were bare; he carried in his hand a crucifix crowned with thorns, bound round with a huge rosary; his eyes were lifted to heaven, as those of a mystic or martyr, and he cried out between his sobs—
"Surrender, my dear friends, or you will all be put to fire and sword!"
This summons was made in the name of commanding officer Stofflet and almoner Barbotin.