or shoes and gaiters, they
exhibited as many and as remarkable differences in their costume as the
peasants themselves. About a dozen of them wore the republican jacket
known by the name of "la carmagnole." Others, well-to-do mechanics, no
doubt, were clothed from head to foot in one color. Those who had most
pretension to their dress wore swallow-tail coats or surtouts of blue
or green cloth, more or less defaced. These last, evidently characters,
marched in boots of various kinds, swinging heavy canes with the air and
manner of those who take heart under misfortune. A few heads carefully
powdered, and some queues tolerably well braided showed the sort of
care which a beginning of education or prosperity inspires. A casual
spectator observing these men, all surprised to find themselves in one
another's company, would have thought them the inhabitants of a village
driven out by a conflagration. But the period and the region in which
they were gave an altogether different interest to this body of men.
Any one initiated into the secrets of the civil discords which were then
agitating the whole of France could easily have distinguished the few
individuals on whose fidelity the Republic might count among these
groups, almost entirely made up of men who four years earlier were at
war with her.

One other and rather noticeable sign left no doubt upon the opinions
which divided the detachment. The Republicans alone marched with an air
of gaiety. As to the other individuals of the troop, if their clothes
showed marked differences, their faces at least and their attitudes wore
a uniform expression of ill-fortune. Citizens and peasantry, their faces
all bore the imprint of deepest melancholy; their silence had something
sullen in it; they all seemed crushed under the yoke of a single
thought, terrible no doubt but carefully concealed, for their faces were
impenetrable, the slowness of their gait alone betraying their inward
communings. From time to time a few of them, noticeable for the rosaries
hanging from their necks (dangerous as it was to carry that sign of a
religion which was suppressed, rather than abolished) shook their long
hair and raised their heads defiantly. They covertly examined the woods,
and paths, and masses of rock which flanked the road, after the manner
of a dog with his nose to the wind trying to scent his game; and then,
hearing nothing but the monotonous tramp of the silent company, they
lowered their hea