happiness almost too rare for our subdued spirits. | bishop elated with the near prospect of our speedy I then turned towards Alphonsine, and perceived deliverance. For himself, he refused to accompany the tears coursing down her marble cheeks. "Oh! my well beloved," cried I; "give this day at least to smiles, and let the current of our destiny, if it must form to itself a channel of tears, flow round the tranquil island of this present happiness, even though it meet to-morrow, to unite the past and the future in one stream of sorrow!" I could not adopt another tone, though I felt how impossible it was for such language to establish confidence within her breast. We had gone through too much our fortunes had been of too eventful and too terrible a cast, to make the idea of security anything but a mockery. It was better to be true than to be cheerful, and in a minute my tears mixed with hers. In a few days, perhaps, Alphonsine, we may feel that there is a life before us. I admit that as yet we cannot reckon upon an hour." Yes, Charles, until then we have only to hope the best, and be prepared for the worst. Your gift is yet upon my bosom"-here she showed me the golden guillotine suspended from her neck. "As long as I wear this I am reminded that I belong half to death, half to life. Only when we are safe will I remove it from its present place, and preserve it as a relic of dangers-and pleasures that are past. So saying, she replaced it in the folds of her dress next her heart, and a smile, the last I ever saw her wear, dawned upon her pallid countenance. If I imprinted a kiss upon those lips, and drew that form to my breast, it was with so largely mingled a sense of foreboding, and so evasive and unrealized a throb of joy, that it became a question with me, in after years, whether the bliss of that instant did not belong to the domain of dreams, and deserve a place among the other aspirations after which a heart destined to misfortune feebly flutters out of the shadow of a doom it cannot escape. The first buds of spring tipped the fruit-trees of the garden. An hundred birds sported from branch to branch, and the frosty dew of the morning yet hung upon the early flowers. We could not but feel all this. These simple things, of all other things, went most to our hearts. We fell upon our knees, and prayed there under the open sky. And there I quitted her. Oh, God! can I go on? The archbishop and I found the town in a state of fierce excitement. Recent arrivals from Paris had still further inflamed the revolutionary zeal of the inhabitants, whose vicinity to the seat of the Vendean war had rendered them from the first ardent partisans of the Montagne. Riotous parties paraded the streets, armed with weapons, carrying fire-brands, and shouting their wild carmagnoles, and all business was suspended. It was with difficulty, even under the favor of our disguise, that we evaded these bands, and made our way across the bridge, to the right bank, towards St. Cyr and Luynes. At last, however, we reached the hamlet; and my companion's former knowledge of the inhabitants enabled us to bribe an old boatman, whom he remembered to have been less imbued with the new ideas than his neighbors, to drop the party down during the night below Saumur, where we could put ourselves at once in communication with certain Seigneurs of the Bocage, in whom we knew we should find stanch friends. Having settled this matter to our satisfaction, we turned our steps towards Tours again, my heart in a glow of anticipation, and even the good arch us. He trusted to some faithful friends, and a knowledge of the hiding-places about his own palace, and preferred awaiting a turn of affairs, which it was his fixed opinion would speedily arrive. It was evening before we drew near the city; but long before we reached the barriers, the shouts of the mob were audible, and to our alarm we heard the tocsin ringing from the great Abbey of St. Martin. We hastened our steps, only to discover on entering the town that a dreadful scene of havoc and devastation was going forward. Above the shouts of the mob screams arose, as if from victims of their barbarity; and now and then there shot up a lurid glare towards the sky, which betokened too plainly that the ravagos of fire were to be added that night to those of violence and plunder. Advancing in an easterly direction, we discovered that the ancient Abbey Church of St. Martin, the pride of central France, from whence the tocsin had been sounding, was the principal object of the fury of the mob, probably for that very reason. It was in flames before we arrived there, and we met many wretches escaping with the sacred vessels and ornaments, their share of the spoil. Hurrying our steps towards the Cathedral, we found the mob less numerous and violent in that direction, and, although St. Julien was on fire, it was evident that the set of the raging tide was towards St. Martin, and that the quarters in our neighborhood were emptying themselves of their population, to swell the main flood thereabouts. This process appeared to me, I remember, even in that hurried and anxious moment, to go forward according to an organized system, and as if under the guidance of certain recognized leaders; for I repeatedly heard the words à droit, à gauche, given at the head of these gangs, by voices which they seemed instructed to obey. The precincts of the palace were completely deserted. Not a sound was to be heard but the distant hubbub of the rioters, and occasionally the distant crash of a roof or tower of one of the burning edifices. When this occurred, we were further notified of the catastrophe by the sudden leap of the towers of the Cathedral out of the darkness, as they were smitten by the red-hot glow from behind us. With trembling joy we believed all safe; and, stealing cautiously up, descended into the concealed passage leading to our hiding-place. Traversing it as quickly as we could in the pitchy darkness, we both of us stopped simultaneously. It was-it must be-a dream. We rubbed our eyes. Where we had left the chamber we emerged into this open cavern, into which the lurid sky darted its dull glances, and the cries we had left found their way with the vapors and exhalations of the night. Nobody was there. Nothing was to be seen but ruin. Not a vestige. Not a piece of furniture. Not an article of clothing. Nothing but these huge fragments scattered about, and the desperate marks of wedges and crowbars, and other mechanical means of aiding human fury. Like lightning, Levasseur darted across my mind. "He is alive!" I shrieked, dashing my hands up towards heaven.-The next moment I had fled out through the aperture into the darkness, leaving the archbishop motionless where he had first become aware of the catastrophe. For weeks my existence is a dream. I be La tete tombe, le cœur reste. lieve I was mad. Levelled with the beasts, I and of mothers and daughters of stranded corpses, acquired the keen scent and sagacity of these croakings of quarrelling ravens, and the imprecatribes, when instinct draws them after their tions of desperate outlaws, who dispute the bones prey. I remember myself at Saumur, at Angers of a comrade. There I stand, looking seawards, in the forests of Brittany, subsisting upon roots. for I know that ocean has an account to render up The slot of my enemy lay towards Nantes. There to me, and that it will fulfil its trust. And it is Carrier was multiplying his human sacrifices. without shuddering, therefore, that I find at my Blood was too slow in flowing. The river offered feet a thing of human outline, having mark and more speedy execution, and a roomier grave. token which may be recognized, such as a ribbon Shoals of victims choked the channels of the with a golden ornament attached, and on the orLoire, and turned its waters into putridity.nament the words inscribedThere were people about, here and there, who could afford some inklings. Kennelling as I did with the wolves, with them I made nightly descents upon habitual places, and the abodes of men. As these bore away lambs and other weaklings of the flock, so I fragments of intelligence, whispers, hearsays, eavesdroppings, and vague surmises of the bloodshot stranger who was urging some females westward. I saw whither all this was tending. Hope had left my bosom; I scarcely cared to accomplish a rescue; and dared not think upon anything but revenge. To enter Nantes was certain death, and death would frustrate all my objects, and crown his with triumph-so I reserved myself to the consummation. Yes, boy, I am prepared for all that; and with my sword I dig a hole in the sand, high up, above the reach of the tides, and there I cover up that human remnant, after placing the ornament in my bosom; then, having taken the bearings, I plunge into the woods again, and whet my blunted sword against the first smooth stone I find. One object was left me in life. It wore a definite aspect; but the means of obtaining it were difficult and circuitous. For many a month I herded with the Chouans of Bretagne; a wild, irregular banditti. The gang I led hovered closer to the enemy than the rest of our adherents, and addicted themI joined the remnant of the Vendeans, wandering selves less to plunder. Something which might be houselessly through Brittany, and prowling about called strategy marked our movements, and the since the battle of Savenay in bands of fifties and information we acquired from prisoners was frehundreds, with every man's hand against them.quently of considerable service to the cause of the For such I was a fit companion. They armed me; royalists in communication with Puisaye and the I clasped my sword like a friend who was to do British government. me a service. Thenceforth it was my closest com- Since the discovery of the body my character panion. had undergone a change. I was no longer the Daring as were these Chouans, they found in reckless madman who inspired respect only by his me one whom they could not hope to rival. The personal daring. My mind now controlled without gang I led gained a name for its desperate audac-impeding the impetuosity of my animal nature. ity, and carried Terror even to the gates of Nantes, In particular, a certain tact and subtlety I evinced within which unhappy town likewise that fearful in the examination of prisoners and deserters, presence now stalked abroad in visible shape, and caused that department at last to be left exclusdaily devoured its victims wholesale. The river, ively to me; and it was during this period that which had flowed past the walls ever since they I perfected and brought to the condition of a were built, bearing blessings on its bosom and re-system, that theory of the investigation of characflecting heaven on its surface, now yawned like a ter, which I put in practice on my first encounterjudgment close at hand, and into its depths con- ing you. tinually travelled the youth and bravery and beauty and virtue and loyalty of Nantes. We, when we were caught, were shot; but it was not easy to catch us and we generally obtained more than life for life. Ever and anon, I was able to glean some intelligence respecting my enemy. He was near me. When Carrier was superseded at Nantes, he was for a time in disgrace as his friend; but soon associated himself with Hoche, and distinguished It was the spring equinox. Carrier's noyades himself, one deserter informed me, by the sanguiwent on; it was now whole ship-loads of victims nary zeal he showed in prosecuting the design of that he sent down the stream, to be sunk bodily his chief, which consisted, as in La Vendée, in at its mouth, where he believed the ocean would hemming in the remnants of the insurgents by a do the rest, and rid him of further trouble. But narrowing cordon, out of which they had no posocean itself began to show symptoms of refusing to sible escape, and within which, unless some sudden dispose of more dead than lay to its own account. blow was struck, they must be all finally enveloped It had enough to answer for already. Renouncing and taken. With a counter-instinct to mine, he, complicity in these deeds of earth, it at last took too, I felt, knew that the man he had wronged was advantage of a mighty west wind and cast the un-here, and that he must we got rid of to make life buried mass of mortality at the mouth of the stream that had rejected it. The whole population flocked down to discover and reclaim its dead. What it found it had to dispute with the ospreys and vultures, and the loathsome familiarity of wild beasts, which struggled between the legs of the human throng, in the absorbing fascination of such a banquet. safe. This was what infused such uncompromising ferocity into his conduct, and gave his acts so sanguinary a complexion, as to call more than once for a reprimand and rebuke from his chief. It was a single combat between us; we both of us strengthened the ranks of two opposing armies, and advanced the causes of royalty and republicanism respectively, only in order that we, the centre of our war and of our world, might meet at last and terminate the struggle with the existence of one or both of us. And like a fascinated wild beast there am I. The storm howls across the bleak sands, carrying the grains along like a mist, mingled with the surf and foam-flakes. And the blast, as it howls, You know how events hurried on. How an bears other sounds upon it-shrieks of sea-mews, lamnesty was offered to us if we would lay down A moment's agony passed across my brow, like the glow of a fierce fire. This was the only contingency I had not foreseen; my enemy and I might be close to each other in the darkness, with our arms. Lay down our arms! I grasped my The emigrant army landed from the English fleet at Quiberon. The noblest blood of France was there assembled; and I found myself once more associated with the Polignacs, and the Clermont-Tonnerres, and the Condés, and the D'Orsays. I was assigned the command I most coveted, however that of my own Chouans, whom I knew, and who knew me. Had all known themselves and each other as we did, the expedition might have turned out differently. Ꭵ soon saw that things were going wrong; I had become lynx-eyed. There was no concentration, no organized system. There was no prince, of the house of Bourbon around whom to rally. Puisaye and D'Hervilly quarrelled. Instead of an instantaneous advance, as urged by Tinteniac and me, days were wasted in consultations and disputes, which came to nothing. I soon saw that we were to be victims-but I was determined to achieve my object. The republican armies closed round us. Desperately we confronted them; but individual valor could not make amends for the want of unity of plan. Hoche drove us in from point to point: and at length, having taken St. Barbe, shut us up in the narrow peninsula of Quiberon, whence we must either escape to the British fleet, or die without hope of quarter. As the republican front closed with us, I became, from day to day, more intimately acquainted with Levasseur's movements. Every prisoner had something to tell. His blood-thirsty ferocity had gained him celebrity amongst them. I knew his division, his quarters, his assigned place on each day's march-nay, his very uniform, and the color of his horse. I kept myself so thoroughly in the secret of the man's movements, that whenever we should meet in open field, I should be able without difficulty to mark him out, and have him before me in thickest confusion of battle. My worst suspicions were the best founded. Fort Penthièvre had been surprised and taken-we were now at the mercy of the republican army. All those within reach of me rose along with me, and obeying the word of command, placed themselves in order, and rushed upon the advancing enemy. The collision was tremendous. Hoche's guns had already begun to play, and in a few minutes the English squadron, which had been obliged to keep out to sea in consequence of the tempest, announced their presence by the roer of their artillery. From the first I say that resistance was hopeless; and that escape was almost equally so. D'Hervilly was mortally wounded; Sombreuil, who succeeded him, was a stranger to the place, and lost his presence of mind. It was a hopeless carnage; and my men fell around me in heaps. Nevertheless, I assumed the command which others were unable to exercise, and contrived for some time to protect the masses of emigrants who, with their wives and children, were rushing into the water to embark on board the English boats. I must have been calm; for while engaged in this arduous duty, I took advantage of every cannon shot fired close to me, to survey the opposite ranks in search of Levasseur. In so dark a night, the flash of the discharge from a piece of ordnance throws an intense glare for a considerable space; and as I had habituated my eyes to take in numerous objects distinctly at a sudden glance, I was now, after one or two of these momentary surveys, able to ascertain with tolerable accuracy the order of the hostile column, and where I ought to look for him. I found that in order to confront him, I must move to the right, or as close to the edge of the sea as possible. This was difficult, in the face of the enemy; but finding that Sombreuil had just come up to the point I defended with a fresh body of emigrants, I drew my exhausted men off for a moment, and moving round a small sandy eminence, threw them once more upon the hostile army, almost within the surf of the shoreward waves. Certain The result was as I had anticipated. signs gave evidence of Levasseur's vicinity. I recognized the uniform of his corps, and at last had the inexpressible satisfaction of hearing his voice, above the roar of the waves, urging on his men. By this time matters had drawn to a conclusion. The two armies were mingled together in the darkness. The few boats which had succeeded in gaining the shore, had either sunk or were sheering off overloaded with fugitives; in all directions cries were heard of "quarter! quarter!" a boon which in some instances was accorded by the The night of the 20th of July, 1795, fell dark soldiers, as the despairing emigrants or Chouans and tempestuous. The waves rolled in with fury laid down their arms; though in most these upon the narrow strip of sand we yet retained wretches were cut down without mercy. From upon the shore of France. Our only barrier the sea, the frightful confusion was added to by against the enemy was Fort Penthièvre, which the broadsides of the British fleet poured in upon stood, a darker mass, against the dark sky. I lay upon the sand, with my sword-my inseparable companion-in my grasp. Suddenly, a shout was heard above the roar of the waters. I started up -but could see nothing. It proceeded from the direction of the fort, and I knew that a surprise was at least attempted, if it had not succeeded. the shore, and sweeping off friend and foe in indiscriminate slaughter. I had almost given up the hope of surviving to fulfil my mission, when a sudden flash discovered Levasseur within five yards of me, a little advanced before his men, in the act of pointing a gun at a boat which had just quitted the shore, filled with women and children. I might have rushed forward and cut him down. | nessed the blackness of his brow fade into the I do not know why I did not do so. I walked up spectral pallor of death, upon which the gory to him, and laid my hand upon his shoulder, utter- letters came out like faint writing held against a ing in his ear the word "Levasseur!" He started fire. up from the stooping posture, and in an instant drew a pistol from his belt, and fired. Had he not been disconcerted, he must have killed me; as it was, his ball grazed my ribs. He drew back, aghast. "Coward!" cried I; "draw your sword, I shall wait until you can defend yourself." The object of my life was accomplished; a dizziness came over me. I believed that I died. I recovered my consciousness on board of a British man-of-war. It was not for some days afterwards that I discovered how I had been saved. An officer who, taking advantage of the darkness, had pushed boldly on shore in a boat just after the termination of the action, in the hope of saving somebody, and who saw me lying wounded and had, at the risk of his own, cutlass in hand, rescued me from two republican soldiers who were just about to knock me on the head and plunder me, and borne me aboard Admiral Warren's squadron. We could see each other, now we were so close, by the gleaming of the cannonade. Even at that desperate moment, I was startled as I suddenly be-motionless, but, with some signs of life about me, came conscious that a change had taken place in his appearance. His black hair had grown white. The confirmation of an original surmise flashed across my mind. He must have existed for a greater or less period of time under the belief that, at the moment of his mortal sin, he had fallen into the hands of the LIVING GOD. "Why should we fight?" he now exclaimed, in a subdued voice. "She is dead, long ago." "And buried!" cried I, holding up to his eyes the Golden Guillotine. "God! Whence has that come?" "From the depths of the ocean, in which thy bones shall whiten ere long. Thoughtst thou that thou wert to escape the Avenger of Blood, because thou hadst placed a mill-stone round the neck of thy secret, and sunk it in the sea?" "De Martigny, thou wast my rival-thou soughtest to strangle me-was it not so?” With death staring him in the face, he was yearning to extract some expression which should relieve him once for all from the remnants of the horrible suspicion that had once haunted him. I saw that; and at the same time felt myself growing weak from loss of blood; yet, so much was I still overpowered with the thought of the fiery tortures the wretch must have gone through to turn the stony blackness of his locks into silver in the time, that I could not bring myself to sabre him, and have done with him. Young man, little more remains to be said. When, years afterwards, royalty had been restored to France, I repaired to the lonely beach at the mouth of the Loire, and had the bones of all that had once made life dear reverently removed to this sacred precinct, where, with the consent of the archbishop, they were buried privately, and a certain number of masses appointed to be said for the soul of the departed. Over this grave I posted myself a sentinel for life. Here I pass my daysoften my nights. The venerable archbishop would have solaced my watchings by his presence over and over again, but I withstood him. I preferred performing this duty alone. Nevertheless, when he died, I was smitten to the heart, as you saw-for I had lost my last friend. Here ended Lenoir's or De Martigny's-narration. To say to him, at its close, that I trusted he would consider himself as having gained a new one, might be supposed a natural impulse. Nevertheless I could not bring myself to utter the words. Not the story alone, but the sentiments, the feelings, the morality, were French, and did not altogether square with the principles I had been brought up to respect and cherish. I looked upon this man as a formidable relic of formida ble times;-as one, in short, who, with all his fancied theories, had been rather the slave than the master of those sudden impulses that had so deeply tinctured his life; and I felt a corresponding doubt as to how far an inoculation with ideas of the kind might benefit myself. Nor had I need. He had just observed my growing faintness, and was planting his feet to commence the combat in which the chances began to show in his favor, when a ball from an English line-of-battle ship ploughed the sand over both of us, and in its ricochet tore Levasseur's right arm from its socket, laying the ribs of the same side bare to the waist. We fell together-he in the agonies of death, I from the shock and previous The embarrassment caused by these reflections loss of blood. I had strength left to dip my must have shown itself somehow or other at the finger in the pool of gore between us-whether surface, for, with one of his electric glances, the his or mine I knew not, or both mingled together recluse abruptly rose, and, without uttering anoth-and write upon his forehead the single word-er word, stepped forth before me into the now ALPHONSINE. This I did that the devils might know what to do with him. Our men, on both sides, had missed us, and as the action now confined itself to another quarter, they had drawn off to lend their aid at that point. I was left alone with the dying man; and wit MYSTERIOUS Night! when our first parent knew black void outside the grotto; and as he led the way back to the street, his dark cloak, agitated by the wind, flapped heavily before me, and his whitened hair streamed over his shoulders like a meteor. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed J. Blanco White. LIVING. From Chambers' Journal. compared with life? Life, the great miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our AMONG the brief sayings of men of genius, infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, there are not many of a more pointed and pro- and in living we lose the apprehension of life. found significance than this of Goethe:-"Think What are we? Whence do we come? and whither of living." For, in strict reality, the art of living do we go?" To these questions we must refer wisely is one of the most difficult and indispensa- elsewhere for a suitable answer; contenting ourple of all attainments; and a just and adequate selves here with discerning, that "Man is a being consideration of it may be said to include every of lofty aspirations, looking before and after, thing that is most worthy of a thought. There is whose thoughts wander through eternity, disno loftier subject of meditation to be offered to the claiming alliance with transience and decay." mind of man. Life is, indeed, the "perennial The strong sense we have of God in w, standing miracle of the universe." Forever wonMakes us believe the soul can never cease.t derful, unexplainable, it is yet intensely, most indubitably real. This fact of being alive is not This, which we call life, is not a fleeting and perto be denied or questioned; if all else were doubt-ishable apparition, but something which is conful, this is certain-here we are! conscious living tinuous and perpetual-a power that transcends beings, with an actual destiny in the present and the limitations of time and of all sublunary in the future, the issues and the mystery whereof conditions, and ranges through duration with an our deepest intuitions cannot fathom. inextinguishable subsistency. The "longing after It is really well to think of living." It is well immortality" which is born with us, would seem for us to pause amid the excitements of material to be the prophecy and assurance of our deathlesspleasure and occupation, to contemplate this mys-ness, the foreshadowing of the soul's prolonged tical solemnity of Being-this deep-flowing river and indefinite continuance, the revelation of its of human consciousness, whose sources lie above triumph over the change that wears the semblance us at an invisible remoteness, and whose outlet of destruction. carries us beyond the boundaries of time, into the It is wise, then, to think of living. Consider shadowy and uncertain regions of the Unknown. these manifold capacities for action, feeling, and There is something grand, astonishing, and awful reflection, and ponder the responsibilities that in the contemplation. As Sterling has beautifully must arise from their employment. For what purwritten: "Life of any kind is a confounding mys- poses, for what end, have we been invested with tery; nay, that which we commonly do not call this wondrous personality, this conscious and dislife-the principle of existence in a stone, or a cerning being, this capability to think and do? drop of water-is an inscrutable wonder. That in Assuredly, there is a destination open to us comthe infinity of Time and Space anything should be, mensurate with the powers we possess. We have hould have a distinct existence, should be more not been cast at random into the universe, unatthan nothing! The thought of an immense abys- tached and unrelated to its laws; but we have mal Nothing is awful, only less so than that of All rights and duties here which demand the exercise and God; and thus a grain of sand, being a fact, of all our faculties, and are to be severally pursued a reality, rises before us into something prodigious, with an unflinching conscientiousness. This is immeasurable a fact that opposes and counterbal- discernible from the consequences which proceed ances the immensity of non-existence. And if this from every irregular and perverted application of be so, what a thing is the life of man, which not the human powers, from every abuse or false emonly is, but knows that it is; and not only is won-ployment of our bodily, mental, or moral energies drous, but wonders!"* This wondering, reflective from every instance of neglect in the training human Soul, how marvellous and strange it is in or rightful use of the endowments, impulses, and all its attributes and longings; how it scans the aspirations that are constitutionally subsistent in hard problems of the universe, and elicits light out our nature. The ascertainable experience of manof the darkness of creation; moving with intrepid kind proclaims that these consequences are invasteps across the continents of things that are, and riably and inevitably disastrous. There is no true searching after the secrets of the unseen; yet for- happiness, or well-being, approachable otherwise ever is thrown back on the mystery of itself, and than by the paths of rectitude-the naturally can never, with its utmost soaring, ascend to the ordained conditions by which God himself has apprehension of that which constitutes its own unchangeably appointed us to live. If men are vitality and being! foiled and miserable here, it is because they have failed to conform themselves to the Divine appointments; because, through ignorance, wilfulness, or, perchance, the force of circumstances, they have violated or neglected the conditions on which success and welfare are dependent. It is only within the stream of that prevailing tendency, which flows with everlasting constancy through the centre of created things, and has its source in the sublime darkness, where the Absolute and the Holy is enthroned-it is only by shaping his course of being and activity in accordance with this tendency, that a man can by any chance succeed; by this alone can he realize any true or permanent results, and get his deeds accredited in the final arbitration whereunto all human proceedings and concerns will be irrevocably referred. *Shelley's Essays. Nothing but the mist of familiarity could obscure from us the intrinsic wonder of our exist ence. We note with admiration many of its transient manifestations, but discern not that it itself is most essentially astonishing. Yet, when we come to ponder it, the fact is plain, incontestable, and overwhelming. "What," says Shelley, are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction of religious and political systems, to this grand reality of life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions and their destiny, *Thoughts and Images. † Bailey's Festus. |