THE BLACK COCKADE.

Unpublished reminisCENCES OF A FRENCH émigré.

Up the long straight finger of the peninsula of Quiberon runs, as inexorable as destiny, one of the most suggestive little roads in the world-the road to Auray. Whether it crosses the bare, stonewalled, windmilled country round Quiberon itself, or slips through the astonishingly narrow neck of land where Fort Penthièvre still rears its grass-grown counterscarp, or engages itself among the fr coppices of the mainland, it is always the same, heartbreaking i its monotony and its memories. Along that road, on the aftern of July 21, 1795, disarmed, half stripped, and drenched with ra the broken remnants of nine regiments of émigrés tramped between their guards towards Auray and death. This is the story of an émigré who, though he saw it, had the fortune never to tread that road.

He was born at Verdun in Lorraine in June 1765-the eldest son of Jean-Baptiste-César Catoire and Madeleine Henry his wife. The elder Catoire, father of three sons and four daughters, seems to have held some small post in the revenue. Our hero (who, curiously enough, never mentions his own Christian name) was put to school at ten years of age, and, according to himself, made passable progress in his studies, though his grammar, not to speak of his spelling, does not indicate any high level of attainment.' When he was 'en seconde' his father's uncle, who had a living in his gift, announced his intention of resigning it to his great-nephew. The boy was therefore taken to Rheims to receive the tonsure, but did not take orders, and returned to his native town to finish his studies until such time as his great-uncle should resign him the living, which he did in 1789. But the young layman did not long enjoy his benefice, in which, after a custom once usual enough, but then dying out, he would instal a vicaire, for next year the civil oath of allegiance was demanded from the clergy, and young Catoire, though only, as he says, 'simple tonsuré,' saw no way of avoiding what was to him 'l'abominable serment' but by enlisting. Like

'His language is much the spoken French of country districts to-day.

Aramis of immortal memory, he exchanged the cassock, which certainly hung on him but loosely, for the sword, and entered as a cadet in the line regiment of Royal-Vaisseaux, then in garrison at Verdun.

Nearly all the French infantry regiments were by this time disaffected, and though Royal-Vaisseaux seems from the sequel to have been an exception, it was a distinctly insubordinate corps.1 Shortly after Catoire had joined it was ordered to Sedan, where a sojourn of some months brought the recruit into relation with an event even more painful to his convictions than the civil oath. It was June 1791, and along the road from Clermont to Varennes, some thirty-five miles away, a large yellow berline, piled with luggage, was making its way towards Montmédy, the frontier, and safety. How news of a secret so well kept could have got to Sedan in the time is not clear, but Royal-Vaisseaux suddenly received marching orders, ostensibly for Sarrelouis. In reality it was leaving Sedan, as Catoire soon found out to his horror, 'to arrest our poor King.' Whether the bulk of the regiment disliked their errand or no their colonel, the Comte de Gouvernet, was a staunch Royalist, and it was the officers who, according to Catoire, had recourse to the extraordinary expedient of substituting cartridges filled with onionseed for the powder which was served out to the men. Naturally this priming' n'eut pas son effet,' as Catoire complacently observes, but in any case it was not used. Counter-orders reached RoyalVaisseaux on the road, for the postmaster of Ste. Ménehould, aided by destiny, had proved sufficient to overthrow all Bouillé's careful plans for his sovereign's escape.

The arrest of the King lay heavy on Catoire's heart for more than a year, and when, about July 1792, finding himself with his battalion (the first) as near Verdun as Marville, he got leave of absence to visit his home, he evidently intended his congé to be final. By not rejoining his regiment he came in for the siege of his native town by the Prussians, the result of France's declaration of war in April against their allies the Austrians. The Prussians crossed the frontier on August 19; on August 23 Longwy capitulated, and six days later Verdun was formally in a state of siege.

'Early in the year, when in garrison at Lille, it had taken a principal part in the forcible introduction into that town of a large quantity of contraband spirit. In April a collision had occurred with the chasseurs de Normandie, and in the course of an eight-hours' fight seven soldiers and some townsmen had been killed, while the chasseurs had subsequently to stand a three days' siege in the citadel.

Surrounded on all sides by its vine-clad slopes, it was an ill place to defend. When it refused, on August 31, to surrender, Brunswick bombarded it all night. Yet there were Royalist sympathiserslike Catoire himself-in town and garrison, and even the council of defence was divided. It was plain at least to Beaurepaire, the commandant, which way the tide was setting, and in the dark of the morning of September 2 he blew out his brains rather than sign the capitulation which he foresaw. His suicide did not avert the surrender. Later in the same day the young Marceau bore to Brunswick the town's acceptance of his terms-an inauspicious beginning of a brief and brilliant career. Later still the defenders marched out and the Prussians entered.

He

Catoire must have been in Verdun through the siege. states that he remained hidden in his home from September 3 to October 15; and it may be true that he somewhat unaccountab concealed himself the day after the Prussians entered, but he can hardly have obtained leave of absence from his regiment on that date, and he could not have got in during the investment. But his memory for dates is not good, though he is prodigal of them. However it may be, he evidently remained in hiding all through the Prussian occupation, not emerging, apparently, even at the entry of the King's brothers with their train of Royalists. Three days after the invaders withdrew-on October 12-he was denounced to the authorities by the curé of his parish, a constitutional' priest. He did not wait for the stroke of vengeance, and therein he did wisely, for, as a deserter, he was certainly more culpable than the women and girls who, some eighteen months later, paid on the scaffold the price of their visit to the Prussian camp. The story of the Virgins of Verdun '-how, dressed in white, they played something the part of our own Maids of Taunton, presenting the invader not with a Bible, but with sweetmeats and flowers, may be inaccurate in detail, but the fate of the victims is not a fiction. More fortunate, the cadet of Royal-Vaisseaux started at once for the frontier. He got as far as the little town of Bouillon, and there was arrested by four gendarmes. Fifteen days in prison followed, at the end of which a court-martial condemned him, not to a firing-party, but to the guillotine.

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That Catoire should perish untimely on the scaffold was not, however, the design of Providence, which, 'reserving me, perhaps,' as he quaintly says, 'for another occasion,' inspired his jailor, a person of Royalist sympathies, to connive at his escape. By means

of two sheets knotted together the young man let himself down one night from the window of his prison, and gaining the frontier by unfrequented roads, made his way to that focus of emigration, Coblentz. But Coblentz was no longer the refuge which it had been. Custine's successes, and his threatening neighbourhood at Mayence, were scattering most of its floating population. Yet Catoire was at Coblentz for the next ten months or so, though of his manner of life there he gives no hint. Probably he found existence far from easy. In the end, like the majority of the émigrés, he enlisted, and at Maestricht exchanged the white and red uniform of Royal-Vaisseaux, with its blue facings, for the light blue and black and white of the Légion de Damas, and fastened to his shako not the white, but the black cockade.

The corps of émigrés which Catoire joined was in process of being raised, for Dutch service in the Allied Army, by the Comte Étienne de Damas. It consisted of two companies of chasseurs nobles and four of fusiliers. As Catoire was not nobly born, he was presumably enrolled in the latter. Two of these came from the Irish regiments of France, so that in the muster rolls of Damas the names of O'Meara, Macdermott, and Geoghegan shouldered those of Savignac and Cardon Vidampierre. Not being in French service, but in the pay of the Allies, the Légion de Damas and the hussars of Béon (raised at the same time, and fated to serve side by side) were obliged to wear the black cockade, an emblem common to the British and Austrian troops alike. The expression émigrés à cocarde noire distinguished the émigré regiments which had served on the Continent-such as those of Damas, Béon, Périgord, Rohan, Salm, and Loyal-Emigrant from those raised later in England and flung directly on to French soil.

The newly formed corps left Maestricht in September 1793 for Maubeuge, on the French side of the Hainault border, which the Austrians were besieging with 14,000 men. The covering army contained nearly twice that number, while Frederick Duke of York, with Austrian as well as British troops, had the task of protecting Flanders along a forty-five-mile front.

It would be impossible to give in a very short space the chief events of the Allied campaign of 1793-5 in the Netherlands, and wearisome though feasible-to trace week by week the share borne by the Légion de Damas. It is enough to say that the English and Austrians were gradually driven back from the Austrian Netherlands to the United Provinces-in more modern phrase

from Belgium to Holland-and were finally obliged to abandon even the latter. If it be permitted to conceive of the Low Countries as a tree of a slightly pyramidal shape, with rivers for branches, then the motions of the Allies-and more particularly of the English resemble those of a bird forced by the advance of a larger animal to flit upwards from branch to branch. From the Sambre they withdrew to the Scheldt, from the Scheldt they fel back on the Maas, from the Maas they were driven on to the great Rhine mouths, the Waal and the Leck, and from these to the last and perpendicular bough, the Yssel. After that they flew off the tree altogether.

Into this war of outposts and sieges, of harassing retreats and comfortless bivouacs, the ex-soldier of Royal-Vaisseaux disappea for the next year and a half. The personal note, however, r sometimes to the surface in his short, dry and somewhat inaccu account of the campaign, as when he speaks of Brabant, ce misérable et funeste province, où j'ai essuié bien de la misère, a blames Prince Frederick Josias of Coburg-Saalfeldt, the Austrian commander-in-chief, for throwing away the victory at Fleurus. Fortunately other wearers of the black cockade have been more communicative. Two in particular stand out in excellence and contrast the level-headed Tercier, who, with twenty years service and the rank of captain behind him, entered as a volunteer in the chasseurs nobles of Damas, and the young hussar of the Légion de Béon, the Comte de Neuilly, through whose entrancing pages a high-spirited boy of seventeen rides laughing at danger and privation with even more than traditional French wit and grace.

There was need enough of buoyancy of soul, or of the spirit which gave the Vendean peasant his first amazing victories—the spirit which brought all Damas and Béon to their knees in thankfulness in the church of Waterloo after a hot and difficult retreat, which moved even the light-hearted Neuilly, crossing himself with his comrades when their chaplain gave them all absolution in extremis as the first cannon were heard at Rouveroy. For war had hard conditions for the French exiles. They were fighting against their countrymen side by side with their hereditary foes, under the orders of a Dutch, an Austrian, or a British prince or general; and Riese, Haddick, Sztaray, Abercromby, Harcourt, Guezeau, with whom they served in turn, were commanders equally foreign to them. In that heterogeneous army they had strange comrades in arms. Damas was once encamped with a Croat