Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/29

Rh title of colonel, then rejected by patriots as too aristocratic. The soldiers belonged to a demi-brigade of infantry stationed in the depot at Mayenne. In those disturbed times the soldiers of the Republic were all dubbed Blues by the population of the West. The blue and red uniforms of the early days of the Republic, which are too well remembered even yet to require description, had given rise to this nickname. So the detachment of Blues was serving as an escort to this assemblage, consisting of men who were nearly all ill satisfied at being thus directed upon Mayenne, there to be submitted to a military discipline which must shortly clothe them all alike, and drill a uniformity into their march and ways of thinking which was at present entirely lacking among them.

This column was the contingent of Fougères, obtained thence with great difficulty ; and representing its share of the levy which the Directory of the French Republic had required by a law passed on the tenth day of the previous Messidor. The Government had asked for a subsidy of a hundred millions, and for a hundred thousand men, so as to send reinforcements at once to their armies, then defeated by the Austrians in Italy and by the Prussians in Germany; while Suwarroff, who had aroused Russia's hopes of making a conquest of France, menaced them from Switzerland. Then it was that the departments of the West known as la Vendée, Brittany, and part of Lower Normandy, which had been pacified three years ago by the efforts of General Hoche after four years of hard fighting, appeared to think that the moment had come to renew the struggle.

Attacked thus in so many directions, the Republic seemed to be visited with a return of her early vigor. At first the defence of the departments thus threatened had been intrusted to the patriotic residents by one of the provisions of that same law of Messidor. The Government, as a matter of fact, had neither troops nor money available for the prosecution of civil warfare, so the difficulty was evaded by a bit of bombast on the part of the Legislature. They could