y, his plans were soon formed. The troops of Dauphiny and
Provence, always among the most reluctant to leave their homes, had long
been clamoring for permission to return. It was now impossible to retain
them. On the fourteenth of October they started from Angouleme, whither
they had gone without consulting the Protestant generals, and, under the
leadership of Montbrun and Mirabel, directed their course toward their
native provinces. In two days they reached the river Dordogne at Souillac,
where a part of their body, while seeking to cross, was attacked by the
Roman Catholics, and suffered great loss. The rest pushed forward to
Aurillac, in Auvergne, which had recently been captured by a Huguenot
captain, and soon found their way to Privas, Aubenas, and the banks of the
Rhone.[749] Thence, after refreshing themselves for a few days, they
crossed into Dauphiny to renew the struggle for their own firesides.[750]

[Sidenote: Plan of the admiral's bold march.]

On the eighteenth of October, four days after the departure of the
Dauphinese troops from Angouleme, Coligny set forth from Saintes upon an
expedition as remarkable for boldness of conception as for its singularly
skilful and successful execution--an expedition which is entitled to rank
among the most remarkable military operations of modern times.[751] In the
face of an enemy flushed with victory, and himself leading an army reduced
to the mere shadow of its former size, the admiral deliberately drew up
the plan of a march of eight or nine months, through a hostile territory,
and terminating in the vicinity of the capital itself. As sketched by
Michel de Castelnau from the admiral's own words in conversation with him,
the objects of the Protestant general were principally these: to satisfy
the claims of his mutinous German mercenaries by the reduction of some of
the enemy's rich cities in Guyenne; to strengthen himself by forming a
junction with the army of Montgomery and such fresh troops as "the
viscounts" might be able to raise; to meet on the lower Rhone the
recruited forces of Montbrun and Mirabel; thence to turn northward, and,
having reached the borders of Lorraine, to welcome the Germans whom the
Elector Palatine and William of Orange would hold in readiness; and, at
last, to bring the war to an end by forcing the Roman Catholics to give
battle, under circumstances more advantageous to the reformed, in the
immediate vicinity of Paris.[752]

[Sidenote: He sw