II.

Early on the morning of July 9, in the same year of 1795, any interested inhabitant of Portsmouth might have observed a stir in the flotilla of transports which had been lying off Spithead for the last few days. Probably the sight did arouse some curiosity in him, for the French émigré regiments which those ships had brought from Hanover had been ashore for a time at Portsmouth, and had even renewed acquaintance there with the Highlanders who had shared their perils at Nimeguen. And if he happened to be the merchant whom Tercier records having met at a Portsmouth inn. it is possible that he repeated the opinion which he had expressed on that occasion: 'It is a very bad expedition.'

Good or bad, the expedition weighed anchor at ten o'clock that fine July morning-five regiments of infantry with the blac cockade Damas, Béon, Salm, Périgord and Rohan-all under the command of the young colonel of hussars, the brother of the heroine of the glass of blood, Comte Charles de Sombreuil, himself perhaps the most gallant and tragic figure in all the long musterroll of those who died for the lilies. Young, brave, gifted, surpassingly handsome, he was summoned to Portsmouth on the very day that should have seen his marriage. Je meurs d'amour et de désespoir,' he wrote; but honour called-and perhaps glory too.

.. Ere the month was out he had drained the lees of disillusion and defeat, and lay dead under the convent wall at Vannes, the balls of a Republican firing-party in his heart.

The émigré regiments raised in England and Loyal-Emigrant had already sailed in the middle of June under the command of the Comte d'Hervilly, in company with Sir John Warren's squadron of eight ships; had landed at Carnac on the eastern side of Quiberon Bay; had even, in the persons of Tinténiac's and du Boisberthelot's Chouans, held for a time Auray and Landévant. But les ennemis sont dans la ratière et moi avec quelques chats à la porte,' wrote Hoche exultantly. His metaphor was only too cruelly correct, and when Sombreuil's division cast anchor, a little before sunset on July 15, in the wide and placid bay of Quiberon, they came only as fresh victims. Hoche, with his 12,000 men-three to one-had held all the regiments with the white cockade penned in the peninsula since he had taken the Chouan position on the mainland. Thousands of the loyal peasantry were herded there too; women, children, the infirm,-useless mouths, camped without shelter,

cooking what food they could get on fires of seaweed. And meanwhile there fought for Hoche the incredible mismanagement and carelessness of the Royalist commanders, and the friction produced by a command insanely divided between the irritable and incompetent d'Hervilly and the enigmatic and incompetent Puisaye.

All was soon to be made clear to the new contingent. Next day, before they could be disembarked, d'Hervilly, without waiting for their reinforcement, attacked the Republican position at Ste. Barbe, failed to carry it, got two of his best regiments almost wiped out, and received his own death-wound. Only one nail remained to be driven into the coffin of the Royalists. Fort Penthièvre effectually blocked the entrance to the lower part of the peninsula, and Fort Penthièvre was still theirs. On the night of the 20th, a dark night of rain and wind, it was surprised. There was treachery within; deserters led the grenadiers as they came creeping round, knee-deep in the sea, and the men of d'Hervilly's own regiment helped them over the parapet.

Though Catoire cannot have formed part of it, a detachment of his new regiment, Périgord, was cut to pieces on the platform. But the remains of Périgord (and presumably Catoire too) formed part of that company which turned to bay next morning with Sombreuil in the little fort on the shore by Port Haliguen, with its rusty old cannon and crumbling four-foot walls. Every hope was gone. Puisaye had saved himself by flight; there was scarcely a cartridge left. Only an English corvette, the Lark, kept up so withering a fire on the stretch of beach that Hoche's grenadiers could not approach, and so, a musket-shot away, drawn up orderly with their guns in a slight depression of the sandhills, they waited till the Royalist commander should himself throw away his one safeguard to obtain that mistaken capitulation afterwards so terribly repudiated. The corvette's guns were presently silent; a young sailor of the Comte d'Hector's regiment had swum off to her with Sombreuil's request, and had returned to die with the rest. Gesril du Papeu's brilliant devotion lives for ever in marble above the bones of his slaughtered comrades at Auray, but the spirit which moved him was not his alone. There were officers who embarked their colours and remained themselves on the shore; there was Tercier himself, to whom, with the means of escape suddenly at his hand, the thought of abandoning his regiment did not even occur; and-most poignant figure of all, and perhaps, indeed, the most heroic-Charles de Lamoignon, of Catoire's regiment, who placed

his wounded brother in a boat and came back, so loath to die that 'il pleurait à chaudes larmes.' But of all the despair, the rage, the broken hopes, the shattered faith-of the beach strewn with fugitives, with the dead, the drowned, with useless weaponsnothing remains at Quiberon to-day. The dazzling white sand is clean of blood and tears; only a few tufts of pale sea-holly shiver at the foot of the low dunes, and underneath the spot where Sombreuil gave up his sword, a child or two builds other forts of sand.

Since daylight the boats of the English squadron had been hard at work taking off fugitives, but as the day wore on a rising sea rendered the task more difficult. Nor, indeed, were there boats enough for so great a number. From what he says, Catoire evidently made an effort to escape in this way, but failed; he was lucky, however, not to be drowned, as so many were, in the attent Trying instead to get to some hiding-place, he was captured by patrol, stripped of all he possessed, and left with only an old tor. shirt in place of his own, which was new. (Not the officers, not even Sombreuil himself, were exempt from this treatment.) Worse, however, to Catoire's mind, was the destruction before his eyes of his baptismal certificate and his regimental papers; worse still the ill-usage meted out to the venerable Bishop of Dol; worst of all the massacre of a priest on whom the soldiers had found a little ciborium containing several consecrated wafers, which with blasphemies and imprecations they trampled under foot. The priest paid for his remonstrances with his life. At this frightful spectacle,' says Catoire, ' I could not help shrugging my shoulders,' which seems a mild enough manner of expressing disapprobation under the circumstances. 'One of these madmen said that I deserved the same fate, but the sergeant would not allow it. I thought that he would have let me go: not at all. I was confined in [the fort of] St. Pierre '-where Sombreuil had surrendered-'in a room where there were already three ecclesiastics of Vannes and three officers of Loyal-Emigrant who were to be shot the following morning as well as I.'1

6

Once again our hero escaped death. He owed his safety to the wine and brandy which, disembarked originally from the English

'Catoire's narrative contains no mention of the alleged capitulation nor even any definite reference to the surrender, being in fact rather scanty and confused at this point. Probably he did not think it necessary to go into details on an event so recent. On the other hand, it is impossible to avoid regarding with suspicion his statements as to the ill-treatment of the Bishop of Dol, the murder of a priest, and the summary execution of émigrés.

ships, was now enlivening the hearts of the Republican rank and file. Catoire's place of captivity looked out on to a garden. Into this garden he was let out. The two soldiers told off to guard him, laying their muskets on the ground, sat down on a stone bench and continued their interrupted potations until they were unable to stand, much less to pursue their prisoner, who slipped quietly over a low wall and hid till sundown in a dog-kennel. When night came he left his hiding-place and made his way to the village where he had been quartered the night before-St. Julien. He knocked softly at a door; it was opened, but the inmates of the house would not admit him until he had recourse to a lie, and declared himself a priest, and a chaplain to boot. Then the good Bretons took him. in, and hid him in a hayloft, lest the house should be searched. At 11 P.M. there came indeed another knock at the door, yet it was not a Republican search-party, as Catoire feared, but a priest from Quiberon village, come to see a sick person in the house. Taking the refugee for one of his own order, he conducted him to another and somewhat safer hamlet, to the dwelling of some ' pious persons,' who hid him in another loft, lit only by a small aperture two or three inches in diameter.

In this retreat Catoire remained hidden from July 21 to the beginning of October-a sojourn longer and probably more uncomfortable than his retirement at Verdun. But there were those who fared worse. Villeneuve-Larochebarnaud, of the same regiment, after some agonising days and nights in a position where he could only just kneel upright, was smuggled out of prison in a chest and hidden in a pigsty, where he had to defend himself against the attacks of the enraged inmate. Nearly all the prisoners who escaped shooting were saved by the agency of women from the prisons of Vannes and Auray. It was thus that Tercier avoided death, though he owed much to his own coolness in slipping out through the open door when the gaoler was reading out the list of condemned. Catoire's case has something of a parallel in that of Boishérault d'Oyron, who threw the gold he had on him to the firing-party which had already despatched sixty-nine of his comrades, and ran off while they were scrambling for it. This was at Quiberon too. He hid all night in a field of corn, and lay for three months in a barn, escaping at last disguised as a fisherman. It was in some such travesty as this-habillé en pauvre,' he says-that Catoire at last succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the Republicans, and, getting clear of the fatal peninsula, was conducted

by a guide to the curé of Locmariaquer, whence, after a week's delay, a little coasting vessel conveyed him to the English convoy, at anchor off the island of Hoedic.

Here, in the Arethusa (la Retus' he phonetically calls her), Catoire found his colonel, Bozon de Périgord, who had succeeded, at the time of the surrender, in getting off in a boat to Warren's squadron. But his regiment no longer existed. The debris had been drafted with the rest into Loyal-Emigrant. Not knowing what to do, Catoire seems to have gone on to Île d'Yeu, whence the Comte d'Artois, so anxiously looked for among the insurgents of the mainland, was just about this time despatching to Charette the stunning intelligence that he would not land after all till a more convenient season. There was no help at Île d'Yeu, where Doyle's contingent were already short of provisions and forage, and Cator. who did not, like so many of his comrades, attempt to join the Chouans, returned to Hodic. He was still passing himself off as a priest, and was further counselled by a gentleman of his regiment on board the Arethusa to declare himself a chaplain, though I was not and never have been a priest, and have never received even the four minor orders.' His advisers moreover suggested his going to Jersey instead of to England, especially as French was spoken in the former island. Thither he accordingly set out in an English transport. And still, as he thought (mistakenly) that no émigré not a priest was in receipt of relief from the English Government, j'eus la foiblesse de me dire prêtre et aumônier pour avoir des secours.' Had he but known it, he was entitled to a larger sum as a layman.

The point approaches when it can no longer be concealed why M. Catoire wrote this Recit des avanture (sic) qui me sont arrivé (sic) avant pendant et après mon émigration.' No thought of the interest of posterity urged his pen; it was present difficulties which caused him to take in hand that somewhat unaccustomed implement. The true motive has something of real pathos, something of a certain grim humour, and the whole is an excellent moral lesson against the practice of lying. Catoire's little sketch of his life was drawn to soften the hearts of those who dispensed the charity of the Emigrant Office, or more probably-since it lies at this day among his papers in the Record Office-that of the Prince de Bouillon, who performed the same office in Jersey. For Catoire's lie came home to roost, and rendered a destitute man more destitute still.

Five days before Christmas the exile landed in Jersey from the transport. A few more houses had doubtless risen along the port