“MONSIEUR HENRI”:
A FOOT-NOTE TO FRENCH HISTORY.
EFORE a crowd of excited farmers, a young Frenchman, blond, enthusiastic, delicately-nurtured, made once this singular oration: “Friends! if my father were here, you would have confidence. As for me, I am only a boy, but I will prove that I deserve to lead you. When I advance, do you follow me; when I flinch, cut me down; when I fall, avenge me!” Then amid the cheers and tears of peasants, he sat in the great court-yard of his father’s abandoned house, and munched with them their coarse brown loaves. It was the first slight sign of his consecration to a cause. He had spoken famous words, hardly to be matched in history; words which have travelled far and wide, and proclaimed his spirit where his name is utterly unknown. Yesterday he was a carpet-knight; now, like “gallant Murray” in the song,
There was no retrogression. Henri du Vergier de La Rochejaquelein, twenty years old, a little indolent hitherto, an athlete, a critic of horses and hounds, was suddenly shaken out of his velvet privacy into the rude lap of the Revolution.
He was born in the village of Saint Aubin de Baubigné, near Châtillon-sur-Sèvre, in the broad-moated, wood-surrounded feudal castle of La Durbellière, on the thirtieth of August, 1772. He came of fighting stock. Among the ancestors of his name there were Crusaders, two warriors slain under Francis I. at Pavia, and a dear brother-in-arms of Henry of Navarre, who was wounded beside him on the battle-field of Arques. Henri’s father, the Marquis Henri-Louis-Auguste, died of the opening of an old scar in 1802, after able service in San Domingo, where he was defeated, with his English allies, by the blacks and the forces of Spain; his wife, a proprietress there, described in the parish books at home as “the high and powerful lady Constance-Lucie-Bonne de Caumont Dade,” was destined to survive her son also, but not long. They were the parents of two other sons and of four daughters, of all of whom it is perfect eulogy to say that they were alike. Henri, the second child and eldest boy, was intended for the military profession: while the supreme political storm was brewing he was completing his studies at Sorèze. This famous school in Lower Languedoc was just then, under the benignant rule of Dom Despaulx, in its prime. In the great plain under the shadow of Pepin’s Tower, the Benedictines could marshal their four hundred boys, in blue uniforms faced with red. Henri was probably something less than an enthusiast in botany and dancing (for all the arts had excellent show at Sorèze), but gentle as he was, he had no disrelish for the novitiate of war. He must have apprehended, even at the still college where, long after, the radical Republican, Père Lacordaire, set his bust to smile down upon the bent heads of the study hall, what strange transatlantic winds were already blowing over France. He looked forward always to a campaign, to spurs and sabres, and some mighty Jericho to assail. Courage he had as a birthright; the splendid animal nonchalance in face of danger, and, later, in a measure almost as ample, the fortitude of soul which “endures and is patient.” He went directly from school to Landrécy in 1785, joining the garrison as sub-lieutenant, his first commission being in the Royal Polish regiment, of which his father was then colonel. The marquis, a person of worth and fortune, had every reason to be pleased with his pretty cavalryman of thirteen, who had to get along as he could, without public favors, and who was treated with complimentary strictness.
Henri became one of the constitutional guard at Versailles, which had replaced the household body-guard of Louis XVI., and six years later, when this was disbanded, he remained in Paris, by order of the King. His lodgings were in the Rue Jacob. On Friday, the terrible tenth of August, 1792, he was in the Tuileries, and narrowly escaped with his life; his companion, Charles D’Autichamp, crossing the bridge over the Seine, killed several men in his own defence. It is likely that Henri forced his way on a run through the great alley of the Champs Elysées, or found passage at the Queen’s garden-gate, where most who ventured were struck down; for he was not with those who went with Choiseul, sword in hand, on that ever-dramatic day, to join their master under the protection of the Assembly. Louis-Marie de Salgues, the young Marquis of Lescure, a cousin of the La Rochejaqueleins, reached Tours safely with his wife, along a road marshalled with forty thousand hostile troops; he owed his escape to the romantic gratitude of Thomassin, Parisian commissary of police, whose pupil he had been. Haggard, wearied, wrought to the pitch of anxiety, they fled unawares into the heart of revolt and disturbance. La Durbellière was deserted; the family of La Rochejaquelein had emigrated, during the preceding December, to Germany; the parish had gone over to the will of the majority. Lescure, sheltered at his château of Clisson, in Boismé, Poitou, sent for his homeless kinsman. Thither, evading a series of perils, Henri went, stepping in among a strange huddled group of royalists: men of resources, like Bernard de Marigny, with his large joyousness of nature; men like the giddy, whimpering old Chevalier de La Cassaigne, who got the whole house into trouble by his officiousness, and whose name is often indulgently replaced by a blank; aristocrats, abbesses, notaries, old tutors, servants, distant relatives, and proscribed children, keeping vigil over the dying hopes of conservative France. Few rumors reached them of the fighting in Anjou; they ventured out into the roads but seldom, as the doors were jealously watched. They were of one heart and mind, undergoing agonies of suspense, and anon cheering one another with fireside tales, with indoor games and music. Marigny, the kind giant of a cousin, with his maskings and recitations, his mimicry of divers ages, conditions, and dialects, kept them alive with laughter. But Henri was the true centre of interest; all relied upon him, quiet and reserved as he was; from first to last he somehow made a moral brightness in the sombre lapses of those days. He was no courtier; “he had lived,” says the woman then Lescure’s bride, “but little in the world.” Here, through her, we have the earliest glimpse of his tall and comely figure, of his wheaten-yellow hair, his healthful color, his animated eyes, “his contour English rather than French.”
Like a thunder-clap came the news of the King’s death. It had been provided that word should be sent to Clisson of any impending rescue. Not a hand worth counting had been raised to save him. Lescure and La Rochejaquelein looked at each other in profound grief and dismay; and among the twenty-five men in the château capable of bearing arms, the spark of desperate merriment flickered out. So they remained for months, in the midst of threats growing from day to day. Madame de Lescure was learning to ride, as an initiation into the possible life before her, and sat trembling upon the saddle, while her husband and Henri walked on either side over the greensward, supporting her, and comforting her tears. Henri began to be more moody and preoccupied, saying little. He traversed the country alone, often facing and surmounting danger with his consummate physical skill, sometimes hiding, or galloping madly to the woods. On one occasion gendarmes made a descent on Clisson, and carried off his favorite horse. They told Lescure that “the son of Monsieur de La Rochejaquelein was much more sharply suspected” than he was. “I do not see why,” Lescure replied, with his habitual directness; “we are relatives and fast friends; our opinions are quite the same.”
Citizens were summoned to the defence of Bressuire. Lescure had been for four years back commandant of his parish of Boismé. Hourly he expected his orders to march against his insurgent neighbors: there seemed no way out of it. The men were holding a council of debate, determined, at least, to make a passive resistance when, early in April, the name of La Rochejaquelein was called to be drawn for the militia. On the track of this announcement followed a secret message, brought by a young peasant named Morin, from Henri’s unmarried aunt, living in retirement some miles away. Chollet had been taken; the people had arisen; there were wild hopes that the royalist faction might get the upperhand. The young peasant, eager and breathless, fixed his glance upon Henri. He spoke persuasively, with a fervor that seemed to thrill his whole body. “Sir, will you draw to-morrow for the militia, when your farmers are about to fight rather than be drafted? Come with us! The whole country-side looks to you; it will obey you.” “God wills it,” cried Peter the Hermit. He willed that God should will it, at any rate, and all Christendom took him at his word. The peasant boy had some spell beside eloquence, for Henri’s thinking was over. “Tell them that I will come,” he answered. That night, accompanied by one servant, a guide, and the tremulous Chevalier, afraid to stand his chances at Clisson, provided with a brace of pistols and carrying a stick, Henri mounted his horse and waved farewell. There were protestations, arguments, women’s prayers and tears; but he silently tightened his belt upon his pistols, and threw himself, at parting, into Lescure’s arms. “Then first came the eagle-look into his eyes” (says the gentle historian of La Vendée), “which never left them after.”
Machecould, the Herbiers, and Chantonnay had already been seized by the insurgents, when Henri, racing across country to evade the Blues, reached the little army on the morrow of a nearly fatal victory at Chemillé, whose fruits had to be abandoned for lack of ammunition. He turned about and made another painful journey to Mademoiselle Anne-Henriette de La Rochejaquelein; and passed Easter there with her in the roomy house of charity at Saint Aubin, Le Rabot, which she had built in 1785; then, with a few young men, he hurried to the rebels’ quarters at Tiffanges, whither they had withdrawn. Stofflet, Bonchamp, D’Elbée, even Cathelineau, were disheartened; they had now but two pounds of powder; the shabby regiments were disbanding. Henri went back, brooding and restive, to Saint Aubin. It seemed as if opportunity, after all, had failed him. But the peasants found him, calling upon him as “Monsieur Henri!” a plain name which is historic now, and promising that in the course of a day a force of ten thousand men should join him. He urged them to gather at once by night, armed only, alas! with their cudgels, spits, hay-forks, scythes, and spades. They came in droves to the castle at Saint Aubin from Nueil, Rorthais, Echaubrognes, the Cerqueux, Saint Clémentin, Voultegon, Somloire, Etusson, Izernay. Quétineau’s trained division, three thousand strong, was before them. They had but two hundred muskets and sixty pounds of blasting powder, which Henri had discovered in a mason’s cellar. At dawn he took command, with the alarum on his lips. His gayety had come back; he had found his post. What he had to say fired itself in an epigram. He was a little pale, but very earnest, and his beautiful presence was another thousand men. He was only a boy, he said; but if he flinched they might, at least, cut him down; if he fell in battle, they would, at best, avenge him. And they stormed up together against the Aubiers on the seventeenth of April, 1793, as if in the first bustling act of a bright drama.