The day after my arrival at la Jarrie I dressed in my shooting outfit, and, with gun on shoulder and game bag on back, I set off for Clisson. Two hours later I arrived there with my thighs torn by furze, my hands bleeding from briars, without having killed even a single lark.
Here a word of warning, in passing, to Parisians who should imagine that la Vendée is still a country abounding in game, and who should make the journey of a hundred and twenty leagues under that belief: I have shot there for a month, and have not raised fifteen partridges! On the other hand, vipers swarm there; one comes across them at every step, and every sportsman ought to carry a flask of alkali in his pocket.
To return to Clisson, which I was in so great a hurry to see that I left my excellent hosts to visit it the day after my arrival. Well, Clisson, which people had praised so highly to me, would have been an extremely pretty town in Greece or Italy, but in France and in la Vendée it was not: there is something incompatible between the misty skies of the west and the flat roofs of the east, between the pretty Italian factories and our dirty French countrysides. The château de Clisson itself, thanks to the care of M. Lemot, the celebrated sculptor, is so well preserved that one is tempted to be angry with its owner for not having allowed a single spider's web to crawl over its walls. It reminded one of an old man made up on shaving days, with false teeth and false hair and rouged. M. Lemot spent enormous sums to produce a picturesque effect, and only made an anomaly; and this anomaly was illustrated all the more forcibly by the presence of the tricolour flag floating over the eleventh-century ruin: the mayor would not allow it to be placed on the clock tower. The park is like every other park in existence—like Ermenonville or Mortefontaine: a river, rocks, grottoes, statues and temples to the Muses, to Apollo and to Diana. Instead of all these, imagine on both sides of the valley cottages grouped where the temples stand, some seeming to be climbing up the hillside and others descending it, dotted here and there according to the fancy or convenience of their owners; the river flowing at the bottom of the ravine, and, on the top of the hill, the castle: an old ruin rent by cracks, surrounded by stones which time has caused to roll down like dead leaves round the trunk of an oak tree. Add to this its old memories of Olivier de Clisson and its modern memories of the Chouans and the Blues; the vault which was used as a dungeon by the Barons, and the well that forms a tomb for four hundred Vendeans—and, if you possess a romantic turn of mind, you will have food for centuries of contemplation.
M. Lemot had done all he could to try and organise a National Guard at Clisson; he had already found ten volunteers, who were drilled in secret by the quarter-master and the gendarmerie. This quarter-master was an excellent fellow; though, for all that, he was extremely anxious to arrest me: telling the Liberals that I looked like a Chouan, and the Chouans that I looked like a Liberal; the consequence thereof being that the town would have been very pleased to see me marched off to gaol. I had my choice of a safeguard in my passport, which was perfectly correct, and in the letter from General La Fayette. I decided upon the passport, and I believe I was rightly inspired in my decision. I returned that same night to la Jarrie, although they did not expect me till next day and reproached me terribly for my imprudence; they could not get over their surprise that I had not rested during the journey. It was settled in council that I was to risk no more excursions without my guide, who had asked for a few days to go and visit his children and to spread abroad in the neighbouring villages the story of his adventure, which was to serve as a safeguard for me. He reappeared at the time arranged and put himself at my disposal, making himself answerable for everything. We took the road to Torfou. My man had made himself smart when he was to be condemned to penal servitude; for the type of his face and the style of his dress were those of a town dweller, which had not struck me before; but he adopted the costume of the countryside while acting as my guide. I now for the first time examined him with some attention. He had preserved the primitive type of the peasantry of the second race: from his narrow forehead, his serious face and his hair cut round, he looked like a peasant of the time of Charles le Gros. He scarcely opened his mouth, except it was to point out some topographical point on the right or left hand—
"It was here that the Blues were defeated!"
I don't think he had undertaken too much in promising me his protection, for, although he had been pardoned by King Louis-Philippe, the good man was a Chouan to the finger-tips. Moreover, in his eyes, it was I who had pardoned him and not the king at all.
A quarter of a league from Torfou, in the middle of a space made by four cross-roads, rose a stone column, twenty feet in height, almost after the pattern of that in the place Vendôme. M. de la Bretèche had it erected at his own expense at the time of the Restoration. Four names in bronze letters, enclosed in a crown of the same metal, were inscribed on it, each name facing one of the four roads, of which this pillar forms the meeting-place: the names are those of Charette, d'Elbée, Bonchamp and Lescure. I asked my guide for an explanation.
"Ah!" he said, in his own language, interspersed with old words which seemed to have come back to him as he stepped on the ground immortalised by these old memories, "because it was here that Kléber and his thirty-five thousand Mayençais were beaten by the Chouans."[1]
Then he burst out laughing, and, putting both hands close together, imitated the cry of the screech-owl.