La Vendée | Page 2

of Louis XVI, remained in Paris. At the
time when the King was first subjected to actual personal restraint, a
few young noblemen and gentlemen had formed themselves into a
private club, and held their sittings in the Rue Vivienne. Their object
was to assist the King in the difficulties with which he was surrounded,
and their immediate aim was to withdraw him from the metropolis;
Louis' own oft-repeated indecision alone prevented them from being
successful. These royalists were chiefly from the province of Poitou,
and as their meetings gradually became known and talked of in Paris,
they were called the Poitevins.
They had among them one or two members of the Assembly, but the
club chiefly consisted of young noblemen attached to the Court, or of
officers in the body-guard of the King; their object, at first, had been to
maintain, undiminished, the power of the throne; but they had long
since forgotten their solicitude for the King's power, in their anxiety for
his safety and personal freedom.
The storming of the Tuilleries, and the imprisonment of Louis,
completely destroyed their body as a club; but the energy of each
separate member was raised to the highest pitch. The Poitevins no
longer met in the Rue Vivienne, but they separated with a
determination on the part of each individual royalist to use every effort
to replace the King.
There were three young men in this club, who were destined to play a
conspicuous part in the great effort about to be made, in a portion of
France, for the restitution of the monarchy; their fathers had lived
within a few miles of each other, and though of different ages, and very
different dispositions, they had come to Paris together since the
commencement of the revolution.
M. de Lescure was a married man, about twenty-seven years of age, of
grave and studious habits, but nevertheless of an active temperament.
He was humane, charitable, and benevolent: his strongest passion was
the love of his fellow-creatures; his pure heart had glowed, at an early
age, with unutterable longings for the benefits promised to the human
race by the school of philosophy from which the revolution originated.

Liberty and fraternity had been with him principles, to have realized
which he would willingly have sacrificed his all; but at the
commencement of the revolution he had seen with horror the
successive encroachments of the lower classes, and from conscience
had attached himself to the Crown. Hitherto he had been without
opportunity of showing the courage for which he was afterwards so
conspicuous; he did not even himself know that he was a brave man;
before, however, his career was ended, he had displayed the chivalry of
a Bayard, and performed the feats of a Duguescin. A perfect man, we
are told, would be a monster; and a certain dry obstinacy of manner,
rather than of purpose, preserved de Lescure from the monstrosity of
perfection. Circumstances decreed that the latter years of his life should
be spent among scenes of bloodshed; that he should be concerned in all
the horrors of civil war; that instruments of death should be familiar to
his hands, and the groans of the dying continually in his ears. But
though the horrors of war were awfully familiar to him, the harshness
of war never became so; he spilt no blood that he could spare, he took
no life that he could save. The cruelty of his enemies was unable to
stifle the humanity of his heart; even a soldier and a servant of the
republic became his friend as soon as he was vanquished.
Two young friends had followed M. de Lescure to Paris--Henri de
Larochejaquelin and Adolphe Denot. The former was the son of the
Marquis de Larochejaquelin, and the heir of an extensive property in
Poitou; M. de Lescure and he were cousins, and the strictest friendship
had long existed between the families. Young Larochejaquelin was of a
temperament very different from that of his friend: he was eager,
impetuous, warm-tempered, and fond of society; but he had formed his
principles on those of M. de Lescure. The love of his fellow-creatures
was not with him the leading passion of his heart, as it was with the
other; but humanity had early been instilled into him as the virtue most
necessary to cultivate, and he consequently fully appreciated and
endeavoured to imitate the philanthropy of his friend.
At the time alluded to, Henri de Larochejaquelin was not quite twenty
years of age. He was a lieutenant in the body-guard immediately
attached to the King's person, and called the "Garde du Roi." At any

other period, he would hardly yet have finished his education, but the
revolution gave a precocious manhood to the rising generation. Henri's
father, moreover, was very old;