Book III Chapter 8 The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
THE DISASTER
"He was a fool to meet you," was the rough comment of Cadoudal to Monsieur de Chesnières.
Constant sneered brutally. His success against a man held in some repute as a swordsman had gone to his head a little. "I left him no choice," was his vaunt.
"Indeed, you did. But he was too much of a fool to perceive it. The Chevalier de Tinténiac promised you a court martial for your insubordination. As the Chevalier's successor, Monsieur de Bellanger should have ordered your arrest and had you shot. It's what I should have done in his place. But, to be sure, I'm no fine gentleman with an over-sensitive honour and a withered reason. And now the gentlemen of the Loyal Émigrant have elected you to succeed your victim. My faith, it rounds off the mockery."
That is what had happened. The group of officers of the Loyal Émigrant who were with them had invited La Houssaye to assume command. La Houssaye, however, appalled by the disastrous shape that things had assumed, definitely declined the responsibility. After that, and in the absence of La Marche, their choice had fallen upon Chesnières, perhaps because they believed that, like Tinténiac, he was of influence with the Chouans.
Quite readily Constant had consented, and appointed his staff: La Houssaye, Lantivy, who had acted as his second, and St. Regent in the place of Cadoudal, who refused to serve under the new commander. La Marche was to be included when he rejoined with the main body of the Loyal Émigrant, left at Malestroit. Quentin, who more than any other now was to be regarded as Puisaye's representative, found himself excluded, and was content.
"Are there many more fools in your family like this cousin of yours?" Cadoudal asked him. "To take command after what he's done to ruin the enterprise is to challenge fate. I'ld not willingly stand in his shoes when he comes to meet the Comte Joseph. Meanwhile, whether I march with him at all will depend upon whither he marches. The temper of my lads grows sour. They'll be led on no more fools' errands."
The new commander's decision, however, was to make their way back to the army at Quiberon.
"The last decision I had expected from him," Cadoudal commented, "because there's sense in it."
Upon that return journey they set out next morning, and at Malestroit they came up with the émigrés who had turned faint there. By evening of that Sunday they were back at Josselin. The town, which had not yet recovered from the effects of their last passage through it, gave them a cool welcome and seemed almost eager to present them with some ugly rumours.
News had come of a great battle two days ago at Quiberon, in which the Royal and Catholic Army had been routed. Confirmation followed on the Monday morning, before they left. Yet they resisted belief. The Royalist attack had failed as a result of the lack of Tinténiac's simultaneous action. But they clung fiercely to the hope that this failure had been magnified by the tongue of rumour. That the Royal Army could have suffered the reported destruction was not to be believed.
Some of the Chouans, however, chose to believe it, and refused to go farther. They had been cheated, betrayed, ill-led and treated with scorn by those on whose behalf they had come to fight. They had endured enough. The harvest was calling them, and they would go.
The end of it was that when that evening Constant rode up the avenue of Coëtlegon, where they were again to make halt, he was followed by no more than two thousand men, all that remained of the ten thousand that Tinténiac had brought there a week ago.
To Constant's vexation, the Vicomtesse was no longer at her château, and when he angrily demanded whither she had gone, only Quentin's bitter mockery supplied an answer.
"Seek her in Hoche's camp."
In his disappointed vindictiveness he does not appear to have been greatly concerned by the fact that his mother and cousin had also departed with the rest.
For there were no ladies now to greet them at Coëtlegon, to feast them and to languish for them. The château was abandoned by all save those wounded whose hurts were too grave to admit of their being moved, and some peasant folk who out of the charity of their hearts had come to nurse them.
Instead, they found there a half-dozen fugitives from Quiberon, officers of the Royal Louis, whom a Captain de Guernissac--a distant kinsman of the Grégos--had conducted thither into hiding.
They told a dreadful tale.
Even when d'Hervilly, realizing the dangerous situation into which his obstinate policy had brought them, consented to the adoption of Puisaye's plan, he still must be asserting himself by interfering with its execution. On the evening of the 15th, when preparations for the morrow's action were being concluded, the sails of Sombreuil's expedition appeared on the horizon. The five émigré regiments that Sombreuil was known to bring, represented at such a moment the most opportune of reinforcements. Yet d'Hervilly, in the madness of those whom the gods have vowed to destruction, would not consent that they be awaited. They could not disembark until the morrow, and that was the day for the dawn of which the attack upon Hoche was planned. Puisaye, waiting this timely arrival as an eleventh-hour gift from the merciful gods for their salvation, strenuously urged a twenty-four hours' postponement. As strenuously d'Hervilly opposed it, on the ground that Tinténiac's division would be due to attack from Plouharnel. Puisaye argued in the first place that Tinténiac's orders were not to stir until he heard the guns, in the second that if anything should have happened to delay or hinder Tinténiac, Sombreuil's division would so swell their strength that the Chevalier's absence would no longer cripple them. D'Hervilly, however, in a crowning act of folly, would not yield. Asserting for the last time his usurped authority of Commander-in-Chief, he insisted that the attack be carried out as originally planned.
For his further interference with the tactics of it he paid with his foolish life. He fell when an émigré regiment which he had ordered forward was annihilated by a gale of fire from four of Hoche's batteries.
The irony of it lay in that at the very moment that the last dispositions he had made procured his own death and ensured the ruin of the Royal Army, Sombreuil was casting anchor in the bay, bearer at last of clear instructions from the British Government. In these it was made definite that the British support had been given only on the clear understanding that the supreme command should be in the hands of the Comte de Puisaye. D'Hervilly was required to understand that his authority was straitly limited to the émigré regiments, and he was ordered to take Monsieur de Puisaye's commands for all operations and in all matters concerned with general policy.
Had these definite orders reached Quiberon some twenty-four hours earlier, the situation might yet have been saved. When they arrived death had already placed d'Hervilly beyond the necessity of answering for the disastrous presumption, the very last act of which had been one of the main factors in the Royalist ruin. The other had been the absence of Tinténiac from Hoche's rear.
Routed and hurled back behind Penthièvre, the demoralized Royalists had been driven thence again under the hammer blows of the Republicans.
Sombreuil and his five regiments, one of which was commanded by Armand de Chesnières, landing to support an army that had all but ceased to exist, found the Peninsula of Quiberon become little better than a hospital. Caught in that cul-de-sac and constrained to own defeat, they capitulated to Hoche, and the Royal and Catholic Army of Puisaye's creation, upon which such high confident hopes had been justifiably founded, ceased to exist.
With this dreadful tale those fugitives came to deepen the despair in which the remains of Tinténiac's division had staggered back to Coëtlegon. But it was hardly told in those terms; for Guernissac, like most of the émigrés, was a partisan of d'Hervilly, and hostile to Puisaye. So that when Cadoudal, who was of the audience, in a voice broken by grief, desired news of the fate of the Comte Joseph, Guernissac let loose his venom.
"Puisaye? The craven scoundrel was amongst the first to save his skin."
"You lie," said a voice that produced by those two words a dreadful silence.
"Who spoke?" blazed Guernissac.
Quentin stood forward. "I did. I have some acquaintance with the man you defame."
Constant intervened ferociously. The events had not improved his temper or his manners. "Is it you again? Listen to me, you rascal, and understand. I am in command here, and I'll have no brawling. I'll make my authority respected. I've still power enough to place you under arrest if you attempt disturbances."
"I wonder if you have," put in Cadoudal. "There are a few lads of mine who'll share Monsieur le Marquis' opinion, and at need defend it. The Comte Joseph's honour is not to be blown upon by any pimp who thinks himself a soldier. To hell with your scowls, my lad! They don't frighten me. I am Georges Cadoudal. If Monsieur de Puisaye is not master of Brittany to-day, if the army which only he could have raised is not victorious, it is because of the interferences of such energumens as you, Chesnières, as d'Hervilly, as Bellanger and the rest of you strutting, posturing jackanapes." He looked fiercely at Guernissac. "Don't let me hear you adding lying calumny to the havoc your kind has made."
"Calumny!" Guernissac was white to his thin lips. A tempestuous Gascon, lithely vigorous and swarthy as a Spaniard, he was quivering with anger. "My man, I talk of what I know, of what I've seen. As these others." His sweeping gesture embraced his fellow fugitives. "Let me tell you of this precious Comte Joseph of yours. When all was in jeopardy and Quiberon a shambles, that poltroon abandoned us. He took a boat and fled to safety aboard one of the English ships. In his absence it was left for Sombreuil and Armand de Chesnières and some others to settle with Hoche the terms of the capitulation. Will you justify that desertion?"
"Justify it? I don't believe it."
Then another officer, a middle-aged man named Dumanoir, took up the invective. "We tell you that we saw it. Justified, it certainly can't be. But it can be explained. This traitor is in the pay of England; and England desires only the ruin of France. We all know that now. Why else should this sometime Republican have been supported by Pitt, who had refused to listen to the proposals of better men?"
"There were no better men," Quentin answered him. "Those others who went to Pitt had no proposals. They merely whined appeals."
"So his friends may say. But when all is known, it will be seen that the perfidious Pitt employed him just so that our ruin might be accomplished."
"You mean that until all is known, this fantastic falsehood is what you will choose to believe. It does credit to your wit."
"Bah!" said Cadoudal. "Let them stew in their nauseous vileness." He stamped out of the hall, and Quentin, who so fully shared his feelings of disgust, went with him.
Outside Quentin asked him: "What's to do now, Georges?"
At the moment Cadoudal had no answer for him. But it was not long delayed. The facts supplied it. Coëtlegon being in no case to feed the little army that had come to re-encamp there, it began almost at once to melt away. The greater part of the Chouans slunk off to their husbandry; others, inured by now to a life of banditry, sought again their forest lairs. Of the latter was Cadoudal, with a following of some three hundred men, all that remained him of his Morbihannais. For him there could be no return to civil life. He was so marked and notorious a rebel that to lay down his arms would be tantamount to suicide. He took himself off, with the announced intent to cross the Loire and join Charette, whose Vendean army continued afoot there.
Quentin, with no notion of going into the Vendée, remained behind with St. Regent, who with a bare hundred of his lads lingered at Coëtlegon when all the rest of the Chouans had gone. He was inspired to this by the need to protect and nourish the wounded who still cumbered the château. He organized foraging parties, and it was only thus that the men of the Loyal Émigrant were provided with supplies. In addition, at Quentin's instances, he sent out scouts for news in general and in particular of the ladies of Chesnières. It was chiefly a torment of anxiety on Germaine's account that still retained Quentin at Coëtlegon. Until he knew what had become of her, it was impossible for him to dispose for his own future. But for that he must have quitted a place which on every count had become hateful to him. To the émigrés he had been an object of overt hostility ever since his hot defence of Puisaye, and only the fear of his sword kept that hostility circumscribed in its expressions. Feeling himself an outcast in that society, and himself despising it, he avoided it and consorted almost exclusively with St. Regent and his men.
As the days passed the reports that came to Coëtlegon brought no comfort to its tenants.
Sombreuil and his émigrés, a long column of prisoners, had been marched in chains to Vannes, where the Representatives Tallien and Bled were dealing with them. These Royalists had capitulated to Hoche with the condition that their lives should be spared. But the politicians refused to ratify what the military had done. They took the view that these men's outlawry as émigrés antedated their surrender as prisoners of war. They were being brought in groups to summary trial, and as summarily shot on the warren of Vannes.
One day news came that the venerable old Bishop of Dol and fourteen priests, together with Sombreuil, himself, Armand de Chesnières and some of their companions in arms had been executed in a batch. They heard, too, that some three thousand Chouans had deserted to the Republicans. It was, indeed, the end of all hope, and the unfortunate Royalist remnant at Coëtlegon was brought to perceive that only flight remained.
For Quentin, however, there was relief. The same scout who brought in those grim details of the fusillades, was actually the bearer of a letter from Mademoiselle de Chesnières.
In the character of an onion seller, moving freely through the land, this peasant lad had penetrated as far as St. Malo, and there his ceaseless, shrewd inquiries had put him on a trail that led him straight to Madame de Chesnières and her niece. It might hardly have been so easy, but that he found them lodged quite openly and under their own names at the house of a baker in the shadow of the square castle.
The hurried scrawl from Germaine of which he was the bearer had brought at once peace and vexation to Quentin's hungry soul.
She wrote of her ineffable relief to learn of his safety, and prayed him to continue to care for and preserve a life upon which her own depended. Next she reassured him on her own score. Passports had been obtained for her aunt and herself, through the interest of General Hoche, and they were at the moment of her writing on the point of boarding a ship for Jersey, whence it would be an easy matter to reach England.
He understood the prudence which omitted all allusion to the military and political tragedy which had overtaken the Royalists, and gave no hint of the channel through which the interest of General Hoche had been enlisted. He guessed it, as she knew he would, and in this lay the pang of vexation that leavened his thankfulness. There is a humiliating sense of meanness in the acceptance of help or service from one whom we despise. Yet this was the course he had, himself, urged upon Germaine, with his sophistry on the employment of evil in the service of good.