THE BOY-GENERAL.
THE STORY OF JEAN CAVALIER.
'Guillot—you here! Why have you left the mountain of St. Julian?'
'To be with you, brother Jean—to fight for the Cevennes.'
'With a beardless face and a feeble hand!'
'I have about as much beard as you, mon frère; and if my hand be feeble, it has brought down many a wolf in Mialet and the Gevaudan,' replied Guillot, slapping the butt of his carbine emphatically.
The speakers were young Guillot Cavalier and his elder brother Jean, who was then, at the age of seventeen years, actually a general and second in command of the Camisard army, the Insurgent Protestants of Languedoc; who fought many a battle with Villars and De Montrevel, the best leaders of the age; who, with Roland, led the great revolt in 1703; and who in his twentieth year became a full colonel in the English army!
Both were very handsome lads, and both wore the white tunic (in Languedocian, camisa) to distinguish themselves from their enemies, and hence their well-known name of Camisards. Both were well armed, with swords, silver-mounted pistols, and short carbines; but the elder wore over his shoulder the scarf of a French general, and in his white velvet cap the wing of an eagle. Strong—and tender as strong—was the bond of affection between these two lads, who had both been born in the village of Ribaute, among the pastoral mountains north of the Valley of Garden; and though Jean was ready to face any peril and to 'do all that may become a man' for the cause in which he had been so suddenly made a leader, and in which he had already won such high distinction, his heart sank at the contemplation of Guillot—a delicate boy, and their mother's chief care—encountering the risks of that most savage and rancorous Civil War which now devastated Languedoc.
Jean, as a very little boy, had been bred a shepherd, and was afterwards apprenticed to a baker at Anduze; and it was from the employ of the latter that, with a carbine in his hand, he went forth to become a Camisard, 'and soon proved himself to be,' as history tells us, 'a most able general, as well as a powerful prophet and preacher.'
'Return, Guillot—return,' he is said to have urged again; 'our poor mother cannot spare us both.'
'La Bonne Madelon is the mother we must serve just now, and I will not quit your camp,' replied Guillot, whose eyes lit up, as he referred to one of those wild, half-frenzied, and wholly enthusiastic prophetesses, or female preachers, who thronged the camps of the Camisards, attended their councils, and followed them into battle.