LA VENDÉE
False starts are usually forgotten in the early phases of an athlete's development. Young boys and girls may try their hand at several different sports and then gravitate toward the best opportunities for "showcasing their talents." Writers presumably conduct their own trials and errors, too, with the misbegotten products left buried in desk drawers, if not destroyed. Anthony Trollope's false start, La Vendée, a historical romance, was published, but it's fair to say that it has not been remembered. It was his third novel, following two Irish novels, The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Kellys and the O'Kellys, and it was followed four years later by the first of his Barsetshire novels, The Warden, which was a great success. By then Trollope knew where his strength lay; he followed with Barchester Towers and thereafter he stuck to the world (mostly England) of his own day. He did not attempt any more historical novels.
The worst thing about La Vendée is the dialogue. Here's a conversation between husband and wife as he prepares to leave for war:
"I know, Victorine," said he, when they were alone together in the evening, when not even his own dear sister Marie was there to mar the sacred sweetness of their conference, "I know that I am doing right, and that gives me strength to leave you, and our darling child."
He goes on for another paragraph or two.
Except for the stilted, wordy dialogue, the story is not so bad. It follows a lost cause, that of the citizens of La Vendée, an agricultural region in the west of France that my wife and I drove through on our way from Normandy to Bordeaux several years ago. These faithful servants of the king opposed the republican forces of the French Revolution, and they were annihilated. We follow the men and women of the doomed faction: Jacques Cathelineau, the humble postilion who is elected first military leader of the royalists, and who is loved by the noble and lovely Agatha Larochejaquelin; Agatha's brother Henri, who succeeds Cathelineau as general of the royalist forces, and who loves Marie de Lescure; and Marie's brother Charles and his wife Victorine. That makes three couples. There is also a little comic relief of sorts with Jacques Chapeau, Henri Larochejacquelin's servant, who woos Annot Stein, daughter of the blacksmith Michael Stein. A saucy wench, Annot teases Jacques by praising Cathelineau the general.
There is also Adolphe Denot, Henri's proud friend who loves Adolphe's sister Agatha and is rejected in a dramatic proposal scene, so prolonged that "Agatha began to fear that at this rate the interview would have no end. If Adolphe remained with his arm on the marble slab, and his head on one side, making sentimental speeches till she should give him encouragement to fall at her feet, it certainly would not be ended by bedtime." Adolphe is a strange case. Stung by Agatha's refusal, he goes forth to battle determined to die, but he disgraces himself by failing to support M. de Lescure in storming a breach in the wall. He then disappears, switches sides, and leads the republican forces into battle. Finally he reappears as the "Mad Captain," leading the royalist forces in suicidal charges.
The battle scenes are well described, detained only by a few lengthy speeches by the heroes as they swing their swords.
Fictional characters mingle with the historical ones, and even Robespierre appears in two consecutive chapters unto himself. The upper classes of England were horrified by the French Revolution, and the author's judgment of Robespierre is an example:
Honesty, moral conduct, industry, constancy of purpose, temperance in power, courage, and love of country: these virtues all belonged to Robespierre; … Why, instead of the Messiah of freedom, which he believed himself to be, has his name become a byword, a reproach, and an enormity? Because he wanted faith! He believed in nothing but himself, and the reasoning faculty with which he felt himself to be endowed. He thought himself perfect in his own human nature, and wishing to make others perfect as he was, he fell into the lowest abyss of crime and misery in which a poor human creature ever wallowed. He seems almost to have been sent into the world to prove the inefficacy of human reason to effect human happiness.