began with the flight in a panic from
the field of the vanquished Normans, and ended with the flight in a
panic from the field of their victorious enemies the Parisians--the
indignant Bretons and the Poitevins marched away to wage that contest
for their homes and their altars which has immortalized the name of La
Vendee. The less impassioned Normans made terms and took things as they
were. To this day what is called the 'little Church' exists in Brittany,
made up of peasants who regard the Concordat as an unworthy compact made
with the persecutors and the plunderers of the Church of their fathers.

The feeling of the Norman Catholics after Pacy and the miserable failure
of the Girondist resistance to the Mountain took the form of silent
disgust with the Republic and all its works. The Norman heroine in whose
heart this silent disgust named up till it made her the avenger of
innocent blood upon the most noisome reptile of the Revolution, had
ceased to be a Catholic before the shame of her country moved her to her
glorious and dreadful deed. But if the Catholics of the Calvados are
less intense, they are not less sincere, than the Catholics of Brittany
or Poitou. It is no indifference in matters of religion which makes them
co-operate so cordially with their Protestant friends and
representatives. It is because they value their religion, and mean that
it shall be respected, that they honour the memory of the great minister
who held sacred and inviolable the right of the parent to be heard and
obeyed in the matter of the religious education of his children. The two
daughters of M. Guizot married two brothers, the heirs of one of the
most illustrious names in the annals of European liberty. One of these
brothers, M. Conrad de Witt, now lives at Val Richer, and administers
his large agricultural property lying there in the commune of
St.-Ouen-le-Pin. Many years ago he won the gold medal of the French
Society of Agriculture, and for twenty years past he has been President
of the Agricultural Society of Pont-l'Eveque. In 1861, under the Empire,
his fellow-citizens made him a Councillor-General for the Canton of
Cambremer, in the Department of the Calvados, and he has kept his seat
in that body ever since, until he last year declined a re-election, and
made way for the candidacy of his nephew, M. Pierre de Witt. It was my
good fortune to be at Val Richer when the election came off. The canvass
had been carefully pushed; for, alt