The strength and beauty of the cause vanished with Henri. The war did not end for more than a twelve-month; fresh recruits carried it on with wonderful persistence and pluck, under Charette, still in the Marais, Stofflet in the interior, and the Chouan leaders in Brittany. But towards the close, itself the disciple of accursed experience, it became merely “a war of ruffians, carried on by treachery,” and accomplished in carnage and wrath; its last flutter on Quiberon sands, its last allaying, far gentler than any anticipation of it, from the steady hand of General Hoche.
“So quick bright things come to confusion!”
The Vendean captains were patriots, as is well said in the preface to Mr. George J. Hill’s admirable little book, “whose _patria_ was not of this world,” Cathelineau, with his thirty-six kinsmen, Bonchamp and Lescure, gloriously perished while yet hope was high; D’Elbée, in a sick-chair in his own garden, laden with abuse, and bearing himself gallantly, was shot at Noirmoutiers; Mondyon and other faithful youths “died into life” at Angers, bound in couples like dogs; Stofflet paid the wages of his exceeding loyalty in the same rocky town; Bernard de Marigny was cut off in his prime by the acquiescence of Stofflet, who was under an evil influence, and by the orders of Charette, to the bitter sorrow, afterwards, of the former; Charette himself, having made terms to his advantage in March of 1795, at Nantes, and renewing hostilities for what he thought to be sufficient cause, though offered a thousand pounds and free passage to England for his good-will, kept up to the last the unequal struggle with Travot, and, closing a career of signal splendor, was taken and put to death, lion-stanch, with a salute to the King upon his lips. As soon as his grave was dug, General Hoche withdrew his forces. The war was finished.
It is the word of homage to be spoken of the Vendeans, that they fought long with honor and with pity, in the face of unnameable brutality and treachery. During the first Royalist occupation of Chollet, when it was for a while Cathelineau’s gay and free little capital, full of festivity and transient peace, the public treasury, known to be packed, was not touched. Tributes to facts of this kind are to be gathered from the pages of every hostile or neutral annalist. And Madame de La Rochejaquelein recalled, for the amusement of another generation, her own amusement at Bressuire in 1793, when the rueful masters of the situation complained to her that they had no money to buy tobacco, it never having occurred to them to seize it in the shops! It is clear that persons who so scrupled to appropriate the goods the gods provided, were not destined easily to become experts in wanton slaughter, which relieved no need of their honest stomachs. The Republicans began their business at once with the master-stroke of homicide, and forecasted the immortal axiom of De Quincey, that when once a man indulges in murder he soon gets to think little of robbing and lying, of drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and even of incivility and procrastination. But in La Vendée they had a breed of misgiving hearts. Marigny, indeed, mild and brotherly towards his own, was as a demon towards his foes; Charette, the very Charette who had put a stop to the cruelties of Souchu at the beginning, was, with D’Elbée, the first to sanction reprisals. But Cathelineau, Bonchamp, Lescure, La Rochejaquelein and priests innumerable stood then, and stand always, ranged on the side of Christ-like charity.