odd corners, but crowded with tables and chairs and cupboards, for it was the top floor of a furniture dealer, where he stored his old or unfashionable goods, many of which had been piled up on the top of each other to make more room, and where two or three huge old wardrobes, jutting out like dark shadowy rocks from the walls, still further reduced the space available for occupation. Yet though it was, patently, a refuge, it was also a rendezvous.

In this spring of 1799 the Directory, the cruel and incapable, was still prolonging its dishonoured existence, and after ten years of torment the French people were still enslaved—to an oligarchy instead of to a monarchy. The liberty dangled so long before their eyes, the liberty in whose name so many terrible crimes had been committed, seemed further away than ever. Inert and exhausted, pining under a leprosy of political corruption, her credit and trade almost ruined, the mere ghost of what she had been, France was sighing for the master that she was impotent to give herself, the man who should overturn her new tyrants and raise her up once more to her full stature. And to most minds in the West, that home of loyalty, only one master was conceivable, and that was Louis XVIII., the King who had never reigned.

In the West, moreover, at this moment, the Chouannerie, that sporadic guerrilla warfare of profoundly Royalist and Catholic stamp, indigenous to Brittany, Anjou, and Maine since the overthrow of the great Vendean effort in 1793, was showing signs of reviving—under persecution. It had indeed been temporarily stamped out at the pacification of three years ago, but that pacification had left the Royalists of Brittany and the neighbouring departments in a position which gradually proved to be intolerable. They were not at war, yet they lived in continual peril, not one of them sure of his liberty or even of his life. After the scandalous coup d’état of Fructidor, ’97, the promised religious freedom was not even a name, and political freedom, especially in the western departments whose elections had been so cynically annulled, was a mere farce. It came, in fact, at last to this, that the Minister of Police could recommend that the Royalists of those regions should be “caused to disappear” if necessary; tyranny unashamed had replaced oppression.

coup d’état

Naturally enough, in 1798 the Chouan began to make his appearance once more. At first he merely robbed couriers and diligences of public money. But this not very creditable activity was on the surface; underneath, in the hands usually of gentlemen, the work went 

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