l war. During four years the
Revolution always had force on its side. The only active opposition
had come from emigrant nobles who were a minority, acting for a class.
Not a battalion had joined Brunswick when he occupied a French
province; and the mass of the country people had been raised, under
the new order, to a better condition than they had ever known. For the
hard kernel of the revolutionary scheme, taken from agrarian Rome, was
that those who till the land shall own the land; that they should
enjoy the certainty of gathering the fruits of their toil for
themselves; that every family should possess as much as it could
cultivate. But the shock which now made the Republic tremble was an
insurrection of peasants, men of the favoured class; and the democracy
which was strong enough to meet the monarchies of Europe, saw its
armies put to flight by a rabble of field labourers and woodmen, led
by obscure commanders, of whom many had never served in war.

One of Washington's officers was a Frenchman who came out before
Lafayette, and was known as Colonel Armand. His real name was the
Marquis de La Rouerie. His stormy life had been rich in adventure and
tribulation. He had appeared on the boards of the opera; he had gone
about in company with a monkey; he had fought a duel, and believing
that he had killed his man had swallowed poison; he had been an inmate
of the monastery of La Trappe, after a temporary disappointment in
love; and he had been sent to the Bastille with other discontented
Bretons. On his voyage out his ship blew up in sight of land, and he
swam ashore. But this man who came out of the sea was found to be full
of audacity and resource. He rose to be a brigadier in the Continental
army; and when he came home, he became the organiser of the royalist
insurrection in the west. Authorised by the Princes, whom he visited
at Coblenz, he prepared a secret association in Brittany, which was to
co-operate with others in the central provinces.

While La Rouerie was adjusting his instruments and bringing the
complicated agency to perfection, the invaders came and went, and the
signal for action, when they were masters of Chalons, was never given.
When volunteers were called out to resist them, men with black
cockades went about interrupting the enrolment, and declaring that no
man should take arms, except to deliver the king. Their mysterious
leader, Cottereau, the first to bear the historic name of Jean Chouan,
wa