I looked at myself in the mirror on the wall. There was a great weal on my face where the man had laid his whip, and it was bleeding too. I did not mind the pain, but the shock of what had happened made me feel faint. I put my handkerchief to my face and sat on the bed, trembling.
“Are you hurt?” asked Emile anxiously.
“No,” I said, “no, it’s not that.”
It was what one person could do to another. The man driving the cart, not knowing me, cracking my face with his whip. It was Edmé, shooting wildly from the window. It was the crowd, in ’89, before the Abbey of St. Vincent. It was the two men being butchered at Ballon…
“I’m going to see what’s happening below,” said Edmé.
I went on sitting on the bed, holding the handkerchief to my face.
When she came up again, and Emile with her—I had not noticed he had followed her—she said that the man with half a leg was delirious, moaning and thrashing about, his bandages loose.
“There’s blood all over the settee and on the floor,” said Emile.
“He’ll die if a doctor does not see him,” said Edmé.
I stared at her. “Perhaps we should try and clean the wound?” I said.
“Why should we?” she answered. “The sooner he dies the better. It would be one Vendean the less.”
She went over again to the window and stared down into the street.
Presently, when I felt better, I went downstairs myself to look at the injured man. There was no one else in the salon, all the others had gone. The man was muttering and moaning, and the blood had soaked right through the bandages to the couch and onto the floor. I went through the salon and opened the door of the inner room. The stench was unbearable. Instinctively, I clapped my handkerchief over my nose and mouth. One man lay on his back dead. I knew he was dead because of the stiffness. The other, the one who had spoken courteously the day before, lifted his head from his mattress as I entered.
“My friend is dead,” he murmured. “I am going to die too. If you could ask the priest to come…”
I went out and shut the door. I went back to the wounded man and stared down at his bandage. At least, if I cut away the bandages and put a clean cloth on the wound, it might help to staunch the blood. I might have known, though, that the Vendeans would have stripped the linen closet too. It was empty. I found a white petticoat in Pierre’s and Marie’s room which the woman in the green dress had picked up and thrown aside. This I tore into strips to make a clean bandage for the wounded man.
When I tried to take away the soaked old bandage I found it stuck to the gaping wound beneath, and I was too sick to try and cut it away, so I put the new bandage on top of the old. Somehow, to my ignorant eye, it looked better, cleaner. I tried to give the man some water to drink, but he was too delirious to take it, and swept the cup aside.
“They’ll have to have a priest,” I remember thinking. “We can’t do any more for these men. They must have a priest.”
Edmé and Emile were still above, and the rest of the family shut away in the room at the back. Nothing any longer went by rule—I did not even know the time of day. I went out into the street to find a priest. The first I saw was in so great a hurry to attend a meeting of the Vendean chiefs that he made a cross in the air above my head, after expressing his regrets, and went his way.
The second, when I told him men were dying, replied, “There are thousands dying, all asking to be shriven. Yours must await their turn. What is your address?” I gave it to him, and he too went his way.
Curiosity—for no one took any notice of me—made me walk as far as the municipality, and I saw, without surprise, that the Vendeans were serving it much as they had served us. Numbers of them were flinging things out of the windows into the street below, not to bear off as trophies, but for destruction. They had a fire burning before the building, and were feeding it with tables, chairs, and rugs.
The crowds assembled were like nothing I had ever seen in Paris, before ’89 or after it. There were peasants barefoot, with sabots looped from a string round their necks, their women hanging on to them, and soldiers too, wearing the white cockade, and ladies of the former aristocracy wrapped in coats, their ringlets falling from beneath enormous hats. It was a masquerade of olden times, a scene from an opera. Had I not known their origin I should have said that these people had dressed up for the occasion, instead of fighting their way from the coast across the Loire to Normandy and back.
Suddenly there appeared two Vendean chiefs riding in the midst of them, and the crowd fell apart, making way. They were fantastic, like engravings out of history, with great white plumes soaring from their hats after the style of Henri IV, and the broad white sash encircling their waists. Their breeches were the color of chamois, their boots were buskin, and their swords were curved like scimitars.
No wonder that the peasants about me curtseyed, making the sign of the cross at their approach.
“It’s the prince Tallemont,” said a woman near to me. “It’s he who wants us to march to Paris.”
I continued walking, looking for a priest to come to the dying men, but everywhere people were piling carts and horses with the loot they had taken from the houses and the shops, and whoever I asked brushed my question aside, repeating the saying of the second priest that many people were dying, there was no time to attend to all of them, and anyway the city was to be evacuated the next day.
Here at least was something to cling to, even if we were left with dying men. I went back to the house without a priest, and we waited there through the rest of the day, but no one came, not even our peasant lodgers. They must have found more food and better quarters elsewhere.
When, just before dusk, I went into the little room through the salon, I saw that the man with the dysentery who had asked for the priest was dead. I found something to cover both their bodies, and shut the door. The man with half a leg was no longer delirious. He stared at me with hollow eyes, and begged for water. I gave him some, and when I asked after his wound he said it no longer pained him, but he had stomach cramps. He began to roll from side to side, gasping with this new pain, and then I saw that he too had dysentery. There was nothing I could do. I stayed with him a moment and left the water by his side, then shut the door and went upstairs.
Soon darkness came, and the long night. Nothing happened. Nobody came. Next day bugles sounded the alert, echoing from every quarter of the city, and, just as we had done the day before at the sound of the church bells, so we rushed again to the window, and flung aside the shutters.
“It’s the call to arms,” shouted Emile. “They’re leaving us… they’re going.”
The Vendeans were running out of the houses opposite, some of them still barefoot, clutching their weapons. We could hear artillery in the distance.
“It’s our army,” said Edmé, “it’s Westermann and the republicans at last.”
Emile wanted to run out into the streets at once, and we had to hold him back.
“They’re not here yet, Emile,” I told him. “There may be heavy fighting in the city. We don’t know which way the battle will go.”
“I can at least help it to go our way,” said Edmé, and she reached for the musket and took careful aim out of the window. This time, when she fired, she had an easier target, for she picked off a Vendean standing in the middle of the road, uncertain which way to run. He fell instantly, his left leg kicking like a hare. Then he lay still.
“I’ve hit him,” said Edmé, her voice unsteady. “I’ve killed him.”
The three of us stared down at the doubled-up body in the street.
“There’s another,” cried Emile, jumping up and down. “Hit that one coming out of the door.”
Edmé did not do anything. She just stared out of the window. The Vendeans came pouring out of the houses to the summons of the bugle. They took no notice of the man Edmé had shot. They shouted to one another distraught, asking which way to go. I heard one of them say, “The blues are
attacking the city. The blues must have captured the bridge.” They all started running up the street to the sound of the bugle, panic-stricken, in no sort of order, and out of the houses came the women too, some of them with children, running this way and that, like frightened geese. Then one of them saw the man Edmé had shot. She ran to his side and turned him over.
“It’s Jean-Louis,” she cried, “he’s dead. Someone has shot him.”
She began to scream, rocking backwards and forwards, and the child with her stared, his finger in his mouth. One of the peasants came and led them both away, the woman protesting, looking back over her shoulder.
“I’ll go and tell them all in the back room,” said Emile excitedly. “I’ll go and tell them tante Edmé has shot a brigand.”
He ran from the room, calling his news loudly. Edmé leaned the musket against the window.
“I don’t know why it had to be that one,” she said, her voice unsteady still. “He wasn’t doing anything. If it could have been the man who cracked his whip…”
“It never is,” I said. “It’s never the right man. That’s why it’s so useless.”
I turned away from the window, and went downstairs into the salon. The man with half a leg had fallen off the couch onto the floor. He was still breathing. He was not dead.
There was a great hubbub above. Emile had unlocked the door and told everyone that the brigands were running away, and Edmé had shot one who was lying dead in the street. The younger boys wanted to see. Even the dog came tearing down the stairs, barking excitedly to go out.
“No,” I said, “go back, everybody. Nothing is over yet. They’re fighting in the streets.”
I saw the shocked white face of the widow staring down at the wounded man from the head of the staircase.
“Go back,” I said. “Please all of you go back.”
I shut the dog in the kitchen—the scraps and litter on the floor would quieten her. I could hear Edmé persuading the others to go back into their room until the fighting was over.
Through the rest of the day, all through the night, the battle continued, and next morning, about seven, we heard musket shots near to us in the street, and the sound of cavalry too.
Inevitably we went to our vantage point beside the window, and we saw that the Vendeans had come back to our street once more, but this time not as conquerors. They were running for their lives, seeking shelter. Men, women, children, they were running down the street, their mouths open wide in terror, their arms outstretched, and our hussars were after them, cutting them down with their sabers, sparing no one. The women were screaming, and the children too, but our hussars were yelling and shouting in triumph.
“Get them… get them… get them…” cried Edmé savagely, and she picked up the musket once more and fired it blindly into the retreating crowd. Somebody fell, to be trampled in his turn by others.
The National Guard came running down the street behind the hussars, and they were shooting too, and suddenly I saw Pierre, carrying no weapon, his right arm in a sling, his uniform stripped and torn, and he was shouting at the top of his voice, “No… no… Stop the slaughter of the women and children… Stop the slaughter…”
Emile leaned out of the window, laughing excitedly. “We’re here, Papa,” he called. “Look at us, we’re here, we’re safe.”
Edmé picked off another Vendean who had sheltered in a doorway, and the man’s companion, firing blindly in self-defense, returned the shot, not looking, then ran on down the street.
The shot struck Emile full in the face and he fell backwards into my arms, choking, his face bespattered with blood.
He uttered no other sound, but from the street below came the screams of the Vendean women as they were cut down by our hussars.
Pierre did not see the shot that killed his son. He was still standing in the street, crying out to his companions of the National Guard, who took no notice of him, “Stop the slaughter! Stop the hussars from killing those women and children.”
I knelt on the floor, clasping Emile to me, rocking backwards and forwards as I had seen the Vendean woman do earlier in the day when she found the dead man in the street.
“Oh, Lamb of God,” I said, “oh, Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us.…”
Somewhere, at the far end of the street, I heard a burst of cheering, and our men singing the Marseillaise.
17
All resistance had ended before midday on Friday the 13th of December, and the defeated rebel army fled in disorder south towards the Loire, leaving no Vendeans in Le Mans save those hundreds of women and children, the sick and the wounded, and their own dead.
If I do not speak of those first days following upon the battle it is because memory, mercifully blunted, contains few images. Our own grief for Emile, and the attempt to console his stricken mother and bring some sort of order back to the house, filled our hours. I remember that Pierre, when he knew that nothing could be done for his son, knelt by the side of the wounded man below and tended him until he died; and the knowledge that my brother could somehow assuage his own sorrow thus gave me courage to endure the days ahead.
The victory, though complete, held such an aftermath of horror that much of it is best forgotten. Our soldiers, outraged at their earlier defeats, returned measure for measure, not only when in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, but upon those Vendean women and children remaining in the city.
The officials of the municipality had not yet returned from Chartres, and a body of citizens, my brother Pierre among them, formed a temporary administration to try and restore order. But they were not helped in their work by a large number of the population whose houses had been pillaged just as ours had been, and who saw, in those wretched prisoners left behind by the retreating rebels, a ready target for their feelings of revenge.
I thanked God I was not present when some twenty-two women and children who had been found straying on the roads outside the city were brought back and set upon in the place des Jacobins by a crowd of Manceaux, who, so Edmé informed me afterwards, tore them to pieces, aided by the hussars. Such scenes could not quieten grief, or bring back the dead. They only added to the burden of sorrow. One of the sights that most sickened me, during the Saturday when I was in the town trying to buy bread for the household, was seeing a heap of bodies being tossed into a cart, preparatory to burial, like a load of dung, and on the top of them, spreadeagled, green skirts about her head, our red-haired lodger.
Michel appeared for a brief moment, on the Friday. It showed how all of us had lost count of the days in that he saw nothing strange in my presence in the city, or even questioned me. He and his men—he had lost some twenty of them in skirmishes with the Vendeans—had been lying in wait somewhere in the countryside the past few days, biding their time to join the republican armies. Now, with the Vendeans totally routed and in full retreat, he was returning in haste to Mondoubleau to tell the authorities of the rebel defeat.
“Nearly one hundred thousand of the brigands crossed the Loire two months ago,” said Michel. “They may count themselves lucky if four thousand stragglers live to cross it once again. Those who do reach home will regret it. Our armies have orders from the Convention to raze every village to the ground. There will be no Vendée left.”
It was a legacy of hatred to confer upon the west. Even those Vendeans who had not marched with the others, but had stayed peaceably in their homes, were as guilty as the rest. Not one of them was held innocent, no matter the age, no matter the sex. The oldest man must suffer with the youngest child. These were the orders.
Happily some of our generals, among them Kléber, who was to win greater fame in later years, protested against the severity of the decrees passed on to him, and the worst atrocities did not take place under his command. Others of the leaders were less humane. Like my brother Michel, they believed that the only way to crush a revolt for all time was to leave no one alive who could rebel. r />
I stayed a week with Pierre and his unhappy family, doing what I could to help in the house. Then François came from le Chesne-Bidault to fetch me home, and we took the two youngest boys back with us, and the terrier and puppies. My sister-in-law, still prostrate, would not leave Pierre, and Edmé stayed behind to look after the pair of them.
My brother’s chambers had been broken into by the Vendeans and more ruthlessly pillaged than his house. His furniture, his files, the documents of all his clients had been senselessly destroyed by a band of intruders who must have burned whatever they could lay their hands on for the joy of seeing the flames.
Pierre’s one concern was for the property of his clients. Some, poorer than their fellows, whose homes had been broken into in similar fashion and who had lost almost all they possessed, were not deprived for long. The necessities of life became theirs again; furniture, food, bedding was supplied by Pierre out of his own funds.
It was not until long afterwards that I heard the tale from Edmé. He all but beggared himself in the process, without a word to anyone but her, and was forced to sell his practice, a year later, and accept payment from the municipality as a public notary. I think, if anyone lived up to the principles of equality and brotherhood that had first inspired our revolution, it was my brother Pierre.
The “original” who, according to my father, would never make anything of his life, who refused to earn his living—returning from Martinique at seventeen with a trunkload of colored waistcoats and a parrot on either shoulder—was now, at forty-one, not only a leading patriot but one of the best-loved citizens in Le Mans.
Not so my brother Michel. Idolized by a section of his workmen, who admired his leadership and courage, and had shared in his exploits during the past few years, he was feared by a large number of them, and criticized for the ruthless discipline which he imposed upon the National Guard. The families of those who had lost their lives in the last campaign against the Vendeans murmured that their men had been sacrificed in vain. They had been enrolled to defend their parish, not to march for two days and attack against overwhelming odds.