“Who cares about l-logic?” answered Michel. “Louis is a t-traitor, we all know it. One sign of weakness on the p-part of the Convention, and every aristocrat and p-priest in the country will be rubbing their hands with j-joy. They should g-guillotine the lot.”
“Why not send the royal family into exile? Wouldn’t that be punishment enough?” I asked.
A groan went up from my two brothers, and my husband too.
“Exile?” exclaimed Pierre. “And let them use their influence to win more support for their cause? Imagine the Queen in Austria, for example! No, imprisonment for life is the only solution.”
Michel gestured with his thumb towards the ground. “One answer, and one only,” he said. “As long as those p-people live, above all that woman, they’re a menace to s-security.”
As it turned out, when judgment was passed against the King and he went to his death on the 21st of January, we were in trouble ourselves.
A court of enquiry was held at Gault by the département authorities on the holding of the primary elections, and the part my husband and my brother had played in them. It seemed that the mayor of Gault, and other officials, had forwarded a complaint to the Minister of the Interior, Monsieur Roland, who then ordered the investigation. It did not surprise me when the various citizens of Gault and other parishes appeared as witnesses for the prosecution.
The enquiry was held on the 22nd and 23rd of January (the day after the King was guillotined in Paris). Whether the authorities of our district in Loir-et-Cher held a secret sympathy or not for the fallen Louis I do not know, but they certainly came out strongly against violence, and both Michel and François were severely reprimanded.
“This Court finds that Messieurs Busson-Challoir and Duval acted illegally in expelling the ex-aristocrats and the clergy from the primary elections the preceding August, that they acted with excess towards the president of the assembly, that the workmen from the foundry of le Chesne-Bidault threatened many peaceable citizens, that public tranquility was disturbed, and that in the eyes of the law and justice such conduct is reprehensible, and Messieurs Busson-Challoir and Duval should be denounced before the tribunal and suffer whatever penalty the law pronounces against those who disturb public order.”
So ran the indictment, and it was only the intervention of my brother-in-law that saved François and Michel from serving a term in prison. A heavy fine got them out of their scrape, and Michel lost his status in the National Guard as adjutant-general for the district. The incident, far from subduing his patriotism, made him more fanatical than ever.
During that winter of ’93, as we read our Ami du Peuple and learned of the continuing divisions within the Convention, with ministers like Roland—who had instituted the enquiry against Michel and François—relaxing controls and allowing grain prices to soar, despite the opposition of Robespierre and his Jacobin associates, who warned them of the dangers of inflation, it was only persuasion on the part of Pierre that prevented Michel from leaving us and throwing in his lot with the extremists in Paris.
There were continuous riots in the capital through February and March, the people complaining of the price of sugar, soap, and candles. Once again the journalist Marat acted as their spokesman, suggesting that the only way to bring down prices was to hang a number of grocers over their own doorstep.
“By heaven, he’s right,” said my youngest brother. “I don’t know why all P-Paris doesn’t rise and make that f-fellow a dictator.”
Certainly our Republic, which we had toasted so hopefully in September, was beset with enemies, both beyond our frontiers and within them.
After February I gave up all hope of hearing from my brother Robert again. The Convention had declared war against both England and Holland, and Robert, if he were still in London, would not only be an émigré but perhaps actively employed against his own country. If so, he would be as great a traitor as those thousands of our fellow countrymen who, at this moment of extreme danger to the Republic from the Allies abroad, chose to launch a revolt in the west and plunge us all into the horrors of civil war.
The priests were behind the insurrection. Resentful of the loss of those privileges which they had held for centuries, and the seizure of their lands and property, they had been playing for months past upon the superstitions of the peasants, who, slow to welcome change, mistrusted the decrees passed by the Convention. Above all, the peasants feared the military call-up passed the last week in February, which summoned to the colors every able-bodied unmarried man between the ages of eighteen and forty who could be spared from his ordinary work.
The King’s execution and this conscription were the two final factors to rouse the peasants in the west, spurred on by the nonjuring priests and disgruntled ex-aristocrats. The rebellion, once alight, spread like a forest fire, or, worse, like a disease, infecting all those malcontents who, for one reason or another, had lost faith in the Revolution.
By April the Vendée, the Basse-Vendée, the Bocage, Anjou, the Loire-Inférieure, all were in revolt. Thousands of peasants, armed with any weapons from ancient muskets to hatchets and harvest sickles, pillaging as they went, led by men of indomitable courage who had nothing but their lives to lose, pressed forward across the Loire, meeting no resistance at first save from the terrified inhabitants of the villages and towns, which they promptly sacked. The republican armies were engaged on the frontier, repulsing the Allied invaders, and only a few companies of the National Guard were free to withstand this new and appalling onslaught from the west.
The rebels triumphed, encircling Nantes, pushing on to Angers and Saumur, driving prisoners and refugees before them, escorted on their march by wagonloads of women and children, peasant families and the wives and mistresses of the former aristocrats, all living off the country, robbing and destroying as they went.
Heaven knows we hated the Allied invaders, and the émigrés who inspired them, but we hated the Vendeans, as the rebel army came to be called, even more. The hypocrisy of their war cry, “For Jesus,” and of the banners of the Sacred Heart which they brandished, as though upon some new crusade, was only surpassed by their brutality in action. Slaughter on a scale far greater than any attempted by the Paris mob was the portion of those village patriots who dared to resist them. Women and children were not spared, men were thrown, while still alive, into ditches piled high with corpses. Clergy who had sworn the oath to the Constitution were tied to horses and dragged on the dusty roads to a terrible death. Here at last, in flesh and blood, with no rumor about them, were the “brigands” we had feared in ’89. Wearing white ribands and white cockades, the royalist leaders urged their ignorant peasant armies forward, with the promise of more loot and further conquests, the priests in the rear summoning them to Mass before each battle. On their knees before the crucifix at dawn, cutting their way through undefended villages at midday, drunk with slaughter and success by sundown, the conquering, ill-disciplined yet courageous rabble, calling themselves God’s soldiers, marched on through April and May to what seemed victory.
It was a struggle, as my brother Pierre said, between the Te Deum and the Marseillaise, and through that agonizing summer of ’93 the singers of the Marseillaise suffered one humiliating defeat after another.
The Convention in Paris, torn by dissension within their own ranks, gave contradictory orders to those generals, hastily recalled from the frontier, who now found themselves faced with the task of quelling the rebellion. It was not until the republican armies had been regrouped, at the end of September, that the long series of Vendean victories came to an end. Robespierre, now supreme in the Convention, and leading member of the Committee of Public Safety, was determined to crush the rebellion, and the generals were ordered to annihilate the rebels, giving no quarter, taking no prisoners.
On the 17th of October the Vendeans suffered a terrible defeat at Cholet, in Maine-et-Loire, where two of their chiefs, d’Elbée and Bonchamp, were severely wounded. It was the beginning of the end for the re
bel army, though they did not know it; and instead of retreating across the Loire, and making a stand on their own ground, they pushed on towards the north, with the idea of taking Granville, the Channel port, for the English were said to be preparing a huge fleet to help them. The people of Granville, to their eternal credit, resisted the rebels, and in mid-November the long retreat back to the Loire began, with the republican armies closing in upon the Vendeans from every side.
Work had come almost to a standstill at le Chesne-Bidault, for although the rebels were well to the west of us, in Mayenne, we could never be certain, living as we did on the borders of Sarthe and Loir-et-Cher, that their leaders might not take it into their heads to strike across country into our own département. Michel and the workmen were in a constant state of alert, and in his capacity as captain of the National Guard of le Plessis-Dorin my brother was itching to be off with his men and in the thick of the fighting. Duty, however, constrained him to keep to the defense of the village, should it be threatened; and although I felt that he and his handful of workmen would do little against the Vendean thousands, if they came our way, the very sight of them in their uniform parading the foundry yard gave me confidence.
The preservation of life had become sweet to me once more, for my baby Zoë Suzanne, born on the 27th of May, was now six months old. Plump and healthy, she had shown more vigor from the first day than the two babies I had lost, and my mother, who had come up from St. Christophe to see us during the summer, predicted a normal childhood. Once the Vendeans had been defeated, we might all relax—those of us who were patriots. Robespierre’s stern rule, though it sent hundreds to the guillotine, including the Queen and Robert’s onetime patron, Philippe-Egalité, the duc d’Orléans, had not only saved the country from defeat but made day-to-day living easier for the people, with his Law of the Maximum limiting the price of food, essential goods, and labor.
Our great concern during the autumn was for Pierre, his family, and Edmé. The Vendeans, when they passed through Laval on their way north to the coast, were not nineteen leagues distant from Le Mans, and during the retreat, a month later, they traversed the same territory again. Mayenne, Laval, Sablé, la Flèche, each day we had the news of the progress south, the rebel army low in morale and riddled with dysentery, discipline lax, and considerably hampered by the numbers of women, children, nuns, and priests who followed in its train.
On Tuesday the 13th Frimaire (the 3rd of December) we heard that they had reached Angers, and were preparing to lay siege to the city. Jacques Duval was living with us at the time, and he brought the news from Mondoubleau, where he had gone to consult with the authorities.
“All is well,” he said. “Angers will resist, our army under Westermann is in pursuit, and we shall trap them before they can cross the Loire.”
Angers was twenty-two leagues southwest of Le Mans, more than a day’s march from the city, and a wave of thankfulness came over me for Pierre and Edmé, Marie and the boys.
“This will be their end,” went on my brother-in-law. “They will be caught there in a pincer movement between our armies. We can deal with the stragglers and the deserters ourselves.”
I saw Michel look across at François, and I guessed what was coming.
“If the National G-Guard of every parish went off in s-strength,” he said, “we could cut them to p-pieces if they dared march east again.”
He crossed to the window, and, opening it, shouted to André Delalande, who was crossing the foundry yard.
“S-sound the alert,” he called. “Have every man p-parade within the hour with f-full equipment. We’re off in pursuit of the s-sacré brigands.”
It was shortly after two when they set forth, three hundred of them, carrying the tricolor and beating drums, with Michel at their head. Had my father been alive he would have been proud of that youngest son of his whom, more than thirty years ago, he used to blame for his sullen ways and his stammer.
We were at the mercy of rumor during the rest of the week, except for the news that the Vendeans had been thwarted in their attack on Angers. The city, gallantly defended, had not fallen, and the rebel leaders were now trying to decide where and when they could cross the Loire before the republican armies attacked them in the rear.
I might have known that hearsay is never to be trusted, that rumor, in the past, had spoken of brigands when brigands were not there. This time it was the other way about. Victory was claimed before victory was achieved.
“We’ve been without news of Pierre for long enough,” I said to François the following Monday, when we awoke. “I propose to have Marcel drive me to Le Mans today and spend the night with them, and, if all is well, return tomorrow morning.”
He at once demurred, as husbands will, saying that if any harm had come to Pierre we should have heard of it long since. The roads were still unsafe, the weather threatening. Let Marcel go with a message if need be, but I must stay at le Chesne-Bidault. In any event, the baby would be restless in the night without me.
“We have had no broken nights with Zoë since she was born,” I told him, “and she can sleep in her cradle beside Madame Verdelet. I shall be gone for half a day and a night, no more than that, and if Edmé and Marie and the boys wish to do so, I shall bring them back here with me when I return.”
Obstinacy, no doubt, made me hold to my plan. I had seen my brother Michel march off the week before in pursuit of the Vendeans, and his courage had made me bold. Besides, had not Jacques Duval assured me that the “brigands,” as we so rightly called them, were routed, struggling, as best they could, to make their way across the Loire?
Perhaps, and this I hardly admitted even to myself, I also felt that François lagged behind Michel. My husband, unlike my brother, had not volunteered to accompany the National Guard on their expedition. He could learn that his wife did not share his scruples.
Marcel and I set forth as soon as we had breakfasted. François, seeing that nothing would make me change my mind, said at the last moment that he would drive me. I would have none of it, however, and bade him stay at home and mind his daughter.
“If we do see any brigands,” I told him as I said goodbye, “we’ll give a good account of ourselves”—patting the two muskets strapped to the roof of the carriole. My words were spoken in jest; I little thought how near they would come to the truth.
Once past Vibraye I saw that my husband had been right about one thing—the weather. It turned bitterly cold, and started to rain and sleet. I was warmly wrapped, nevertheless my hands and feet were soon numb with the cold, and Marcel, peering into the driving rain ahead, looked disconcerted.
“You haven’t chosen a good day for your venture, citoyenne,” he said.
We had been careful, ever since the September decrees, to adopt the new courtesies. Monsieur and madame were things of the past, like the old calendar. I had to remind myself also that today was the 19th Frimaire, Year II of the Republic, and no longer the 9th of December, 1793.
“Perhaps not,” I answered, “but at least we have a roof to the carriole and keep dry, which is more than our National Guard can say, closing in upon the brigands, perhaps at this very moment.”
Luckily for my peace of mind I saw them jubilant, not outnumbered and in full retreat, as was the truth.
We reached Le Mans by early afternoon, but because of the weather it was already almost dark, and there were sentries guarding the bridge across the Huisne.
They came forward to take our passports, and I saw that they were not members of the National Guard but ordinary citizens, with armbands, armed with muskets. I recognized the leader—he had been a client of Pierre’s—and at sight of me he waved his men aside and came to the carriole himself.
“Citoyenne Duval?” he called out, in astonishment. “What in the world are you doing here at such a moment?”
“I’ve come to see my brother,” I told him. “I’ve been anxious about him and his family for the past weeks, as you may imagine. Now the worst is over I??
?ve seized the first opportunity to come and visit him.”
He stared at me as if I had lost my senses. “Over?” he repeated. “Haven’t you heard the news?”
“News? What news?”
“The Vendeans have retaken la Flèche and may well march upon Le Mans tomorrow,” he answered. “There are nearly eighty thousand of them, desperate with hunger and disease, preparing to strike east, with some wild talk of taking Paris. Almost every man here in the garrison has gone south to try and stop them, but they won’t have much hope, some 1,500 of them, against that band of brigands.”
I had thought it was the icy wind that had turned him pale from cold, but now I saw that it was fear as well.
“We heard there had been a victory at Angers,” I said, my heart sinking. “What in the world are we to do? We’ve been half the day on the road from le Plessis-Dorin, and now it’s almost dark.”
“Go back there, if you have any sense,” he answered, “or seek shelter for the night in some farmhouse out in the country.”
I glanced at Marcel. The poor fellow was as white as the rest of them.
“The horse will never do the journey twice,” I said, “nor will anyone in the country take us in, with this news. Doors and windows will be barred everywhere.”
The citoyen Roger—I remembered his name, in a flash—stared up at me, the raindrops falling from his hat.
“I can’t advise you,” he said. “Thank God I’m unmarried. But if I had a wife I would not let her enter the city, not with this threat hanging over it.”
My obstinacy was well paid. What mockery it had been to leave le Chesne-Bidault without having waited for further news.
“If the brigands are coming,” I said, “I’d rather face them with my brother in Le Mans than out here in the country beneath a hedge.”
Pierre’s client handed me back the passports and shrugged his shoulders.