The conflict was sanguinary,

of the Vendeans. The first

the advancing army of the republic. but ended most decidedly in favour encounter was in the night, and was characterized with more than the usual confusion of night attack. The two armies crossed each

other in so extraordinary a manner, that the artillery of each was supplied, for a part of the battle, from the caissons of the enemy; and one of the Vendean leaders, after exposing himself to great hazard in helping a brother officer, as he took him to be, out of a ditch, discovered, by the next flash of the cannon, that it was an enemy-and immediately cut him down. After day-break the battle became more orderly, and ended in a complete victory. This was the last grand crisis of the insurrection. The way to La Vendée was once more open; and the fugitives had it in their power to return triumphant to their fastnesses and their homes, after rousing Brittany by the example of their valour and success. M. de. L. and Henri both inclined to this course; but other counsels prevailed. Some were for marching on to Nantes-others for proceeding to Rennes-and some, more sanguinary than the rest, for pushing directly for Paris. Time was irretrievably lost in these deliberations; and the republicans had leisure to rally, and bring up their reinforcements, before any thing was definitively settled.

In the meantime, M. de L. became visibly worse; and one morning, when his wife alone was in the room, he called her to him, and told her that he felt his death was at hand;-that his only regret was for leaving her in the midst of such a war, with a helpless child, and in a state of pregnancy. For himself, he added, he died happy, and with humble reliance on the Divine mercy;-but her sorrow he could not bear to think of;-and he entreated her pardon for any neglect or unkindness he might ever have shown her. He added many other expressions of tenderness and consolation; and, seeing her overwhelmed with anguish at the despairing tone in which he spoke, concluded by saying that he might perhaps be mistaken in his prognosis; and hoped still to live for her. Next day they were under the necessity of moving forward; and, on the journey, he learned accidentally from one of the officers the dreadful details of the Queen's execution, which his wife had been at great pains to keep from his knowledge. This intelligence seemed to bring back his fever,—though he still spoke of living to avenge her. 'If I do live," he said, "it shall now be for

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vengeance only no more mercy from me!" That evening, Madame de L., entirely overcome with anxiety and fatigue, had fallen into a deep sleep on a mat before his bed; and, soon after, his condition became altogether desperate, He was now speechless, and nearly insensible; the sacraments were administered, and various applica tions made, without awaking the unhappy sleeper by his side. Soon after midnight, however, she started up, and instantly became aware of the full extent of her misery. To fill up its measure, it was announced in the course of the morning that they must immediately resume their march with the last division of the army. The thing appeared altogether impossible; Madame de L. declared she would rather die by the hands of the republicans, than permit her husband to be moved in the condi tion in which he then was. When she recollected, however, that these barbarous enemies had of late not only butchered the wounded that fell into their power, but mutilated and insulted their remains, she submitted to the alternative, and prepared for this miserable journey with a heart bursting with anguish. The dying man was roused only to heavy moaning by the pain of lifting him into the car. riage-where his faithful Agatha again supported his head, and a surgeon watched all the changes of his condition. Madame de L. was placed on horseback; and, surrounded by her father and mother, and a number of officers, went forward, scarcely conscious of any thing that was passing only that sometimes, in the bitterness of her heart, when she saw the dead bodies of the republican soldiers on the road, she made her horse trample upon them as if in vengeance for the slaughter of her husband. In the course of little more than an hour, she thought she heard some little stir in the carriage, and insisted upon stopping to inquire into the cause. The officers, however, crowded around her; and then her father came up and said that M. de L. was in the same state as before, but that he suffered dreadfully from the cold, and would be very much distressed if the door was again to be opened. Obliged to be satisfied with this answer, she went on in a sullen and gloomy silence for some hours longer, in a dark and rainy day of November. It was night when they reached the town of Fougères; and, when lifted from her horse at the gate, she was unable either to stand or walk: she was carried into a wretched house, crowded with troops of all descriptions, where she waited two hours in agony till she heard that the carriage with M. de L. was

come up. She was left alone for a dreadful moment with her mother; and then M. de Beauvolliers came in, bathed in tears, and, taking both her hands, told her she must now think only of saving the child she carried within her! Her husband had expired when she heard the noise in the carriage, soon after their setting out, and the surgeon had accordingly left it as soon as the order of the march had carried her ahead; but the faithful Agatha, fearful lest her appearance might alarm her mistress in the midst of the journey, had remained alone with the dead body for all the rest of the day! Fatigue, grief, and anguish of mind now threatened Madame de L. with consequences which it seems altogether miraculous that she should have escaped. She was seized with violent pains, and was threatened with a miscarriage in a room which served as a common passage to the crowded and miserable lodging she had procured. It was thought necessary to bleed her; and, after some difficulty, a surgeon was procured. She can never forget, she says, the formidable apparition of this warlike phlebotomist. A figure six feet high, with ferocious whiskers, a great sabre at his side, and four huge pistols in his belt, stalked up with a fierce and careless air to her bedside; and, when she said she was timid about the operation, answered harshly, "So am not I. I have killed three hundred men and upwards in the field in my time, one of them only this morning; I think, then, I may venture to bleed a woman. Come, come, let us see your arm." She was bled accordingly; and, contrary to all expectation, was pretty well again in the morning.. She insisted for a long time in carrying the body of her husband in the carriage along with her; but her father, after indulging her for a few days, contrived to fall behind with this precious deposit, and informed her, when he came up again, that it had been found necessary to bury it privately in a spot which he would not specify.

After a series of murderous battles, to which the mutual refusal of quarter gave an exasperation unknown in any other history, and which left the field so encumbered with dead bodies that Madame de L. assures us that it was dreadful to feel the lifting of the wheels, and the cracking of the bones, as her heavy carriage passed over them, the wreck of the Vendeans succeeded in reaching Angers upon the Loire, and trusted to a furious assault upon that place for the means of repassing the river, and regaining their beloved country. The garrison, however, proved stronger and more resolute than they had expected.

Their own gay and enthusiastic courage had sunk under a long course of suffering and disaster; and, after losing a great number of men before the walls, they were obliged to turn back in confusion, they did not well know whither, but farther and farther from the land to which all their hopes and wishes were directed. In the tumult of this retreat, Madame de L. lost sight of her venerable aunt, who had hitherto been the mild and patient companion of their wanderings; and learned afterwards that she had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and, at the age of eighty, been publicly executed at Rennes, for the crime of rebellion! At Fougères, at Laval, at Dol, and Savenay, the dwindled force of the insurgents had to sustain new attacks from their indefatigable pursuers, in which the officers and most of the soldiery gave still more extraordinary proofs, than any we have yet recorded, of undaunted valour, and constancy worthy of better fortune. The weather was now, in the latter end of November, extremely cold and rainy, the roads almost impassable, and provisions very scarce. Often, after a march of ten hours, Madame de L. has been obliged to fish for a few cold potatoes in the bottom of a dirty cauldron, filled with greasy water, and polluted by the hands of half the army. Her child sickened from its teething, and insufficient nourishment; and every day she witnessed the death of some of those gallant leaders whom the spring had seen assembled in her halls in all the flush of youthful confidence and glory. After many a weary march, and desperate struggle, about 10,000 sad survivors got again to the banks of that fatal Loire, which now seemed to divide them from hope and protection. Henri, who had arranged the whole operation with consummate judgment, found the shores on both sides free of the enemy. But all the boats had been removed; and, after leaving orders to construct rafts with all possible despatch, he himself, with a few attendants, ventured over in a little wherry, which he had brought with him on a cart, to make arrangements for covering their landing. But they never saw the daring Henri again! The vigilant enemy came down upon them at this critical moment— intercepted his return-and, stationing several armed vessels in the stream, rendered the passage of the army altogether impossible. They fell back in despair upon Savenay; and there the brave and indefatigable Marigny told Madame de L. that all was now over-that it was altogether impossible to resist the attack that would be made next day -and advised her to seek her safety in flight and disguise, without the

loss of an instant. She set out accordingly, with her mother in a gloomy day of December, under the conduct of a drunken peasant; and, after being out most of the night, at length obtained shelter in a dirty farm-house, from which, in the course of the day, she had the misery of seeing her unfortunate countrymen scattered over the whole open country, chased and butchered without mercy by the republicans, who now took a final vengeance for all the losses they had sustained. She had long been clothed in shreds and patches, and needed no disguise to conceal her quality. She was sometimes hidden in the mill when the troopers came to search for fugitives in her lonely retreat; and oftener sent, in the midst of winter, to herd the sheep or cattle of her faithful and compassionate host, along with his rawboned daughter. In this situation they remained till late in the following spring; and it would be endless to enumerate the hairbreadth 'scapes and unparalleled sufferings to which they were every day exposed; reduced frequently to live upon alms, and forced every two or three days to shift their quarters, in the middle of the night, from one royalist cabin to another. Such was the long-continued and vindictive rigour of the republican party, that the most eager and unrelaxing search was made for fugitives of all descriptions; and every adherent of the insurgent faction who fell into their hands was barbarously murdered, without the least regard to age, sex, or individual innocence! While skulking about in this state of peril and desolation, they had glimpses and occasional rencounters with some of their former companions, whom similar misfortune had driven upon similar schemes of concealment. In particular, they twice saw the daring and unsubduable M. de Marigny, who had wandered over the whole country from Angers to Nantes; and, notwithstanding his gigantic form and remarkable features, had contrived so to disguise himself as to elude all detection or pursuit. He could counterfeit all ages and dialects, and speak in perfection the patois of every village. He now appeared before them in the character of an itinerant dealer in poultry, and retired unsuspected by all but themselves. In this wretched condition, the term of Madame de L.'s confinement drew on; and, after a thousand frights and disasters, she was delivered of two daughters, without any other assistance than that of her mother. One of the infants had its wrist dislocated; and so subdued was the poor mother's mind to the level of her fallen fortunes, that she had now no other anxiety than that she