s La Rouerie's right hand. When the prospect of combination with the
Powers was dissolved by Dumouriez, the character of the conspiracy
changed, and men began to think that they could fight the Convention
single-handed, while its armies were busy on the Rhine and Meuse.
Brittany had 200 miles of coast, and as the Channel Islands were in
sight, aid could come from British cruisers.

La Rouerie, who was a prodigy of inventiveness, and drew his lines
with so firm a hand that the Chouannerie, which broke out after his
death, lasted ten years and only went to pieces against Napoleon,
organised a rising, almost from Seine to Loire, for the spring of
1793. Indeed it is not enough to say that they went down before the
genius of Napoleon. The "Petite Chouannerie," as the rising of 1815
was called, contributed heavily to his downfall; for he was compelled
to send 20,000 men against it, whose presence might have turned the
fortune of the day at Waterloo.

But in January 1793 La Rouerie fell ill, the news of the king's death
made him delirious, and on the 30th he died. That the explosion might
yet take place at the appointed hour, they concealed his death, and
buried him in a wood, at midnight, filling the grave with quicklime.
The secret was betrayed, the remains were discovered, the accomplices
fled, and those who were taken died faithful to their trust.

The Breton rising had failed for the time, and royalists north of the
Loire had not recovered from the blow when La Vendee rose. The corpse
in the thicket was found February 26; the papers were seized March 3;
and it was March 12, at the moment when Brittany was paralysed, that
the conscription gave the signal of civil war. The two things are
quite separate. In one place there was a plot which came to nothing at
the time; in the other, there was an outbreak which had not been
prepared. La Vendee was not set in motion by the wires laid north of
the Loire. It broke out spontaneously, under sudden provocation. But
the Breton plot had ramified in that direction also, and there was
much expectant watching for the hour of combined action. Smugglers,
and poachers, and beggar men had carried the whispered parole, armed
with a passport in these terms: "Trust the bearer, and give him aid,
for the sake of Armand"; and certain remote and unknown country
gentlemen were affiliated, whose names soon after filled the world
with their renown. D'Elbee, the future commander-in-chief, was one of