PREFACE.
O little concerning the French provincial struggle of the eighteenth century has found an echo in our language, that the British Museum and the Bodleian Library have not three original references between them to add to the local archives (most of them, alas! still confused and uncatalogued), of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Madame de La Rochejaquelein’s beautiful Mémoires still serve as the basis for whatever may be said on the subject; and where I have differed from her by a hair, it has not been without reluctance, and the comparison of many oracles.
I do not plead for pardon in treating an all-but-hallowed theme in a rather high-handed fashion, since every grain here has been painfully sifted and weighed, and the material, if not the proportioning of it, is true as truth. But in so treating it, I bore in mind that excision is the best safeguard against decay, that time throws away as rag and bobtail the political specifications thought to be precious, and that we must at once, and in the nobler sense, romanticize such dry facts as we mean shall live.
It is always the character of the man which vitalizes the event; what did or did not happen is, ultimately, of minor importance beside the spectacle of a strong soul. A background may be blurred for the sake of a single figure. I tried, therefore, to paint a portrait, willing to abide by the hard saying of Northcote: “If a portrait have force, it will do for history.”
To the Rev. Walter Elliott, editor of The Catholic World, who allows me thus to incorporate and remodel a sketch first contributed to its pages; to Monsieur le Curé and Monsieur le Vicaire of Saint-Aubin-de-Baubigné, who, for the sake of the immortal Red Handkerchief unknown to English literature, brightened my frosty travels in the old Bocage; to Madame la Comtesse de Chabot of Boissière; to Mademoiselle de Chabot, Henri’s young kinswoman and annalist, whose ardent researches have verified many of the data I give, and to Monsieur de Chabot, also, who drew for his sister’s soldierly book the admirable chart now kindly lent me for transmarine use, I return, this late, my faithful and ever affectionate thanks.
L. I. G.
London, 1891.