Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/46

18 the real supporters of the Monarchy came in search of recruits among this ignorant and combative population, they tried, and tried in vain, when they ranged the Chouans under the white flag, to infuse some larger ideas into the enterprises which had made Chouannerie detested. The Chouans remained a memorable instance of the dangers incurred by stirring up the masses of a half-civilized country.

The scene that the first Breton valley offers to the traveler's eyes, the picture that has been given of the men who composed the detachment of requisitionaries, the description of the gars who appeared on the summit of the Pèlerine, would give altogether an accurate idea of the province and of those who dwelt in it. From those details an expert imagination could construct the theatre and the machinery of war; therein lay all the elements.

Concealed enemies were lurking behind those hedges, with the autumn flowers in them, in every lovely valley. Every field was a fortress, every tree was a snare in disguise, not an old hollow willow trunk but concealed a stratagem. The field of battle lay in all directions. At every corner of the road muskets were lying in wait for the Blues; young girls, smiling as they went, would think it no treachery to lure them under the fire of cannon, and go afterwards with their fathers and brothers on pilgrimage to ask for absolution, and to pray to be inspired with fresh deceits, at the shrine of some carved and gilded Virgin. The religion, or rather the fetichism, of these ignorant folk had deprived murder of all sense of remorse.

So it befell that when the struggle had once begun, there was danger everywhere throughout the length and breadth of the country; in sound as in silence, in pardon or in terror, and by the fireside just as much as on the highroad. They were conscientiously treacherous, these savages who were serving God and the King by making war like Mohicans. Yet if the historian is to give a true and faithful picture of the struggle, in every particular, he ought to add that as soon as Hoche's treaty was signed the whole country became