assumed the uniform of the volunteers of Finisterre, and mixed with those soldiers, in order to reach Brittany. Guadet had come to rejoin them shortly afterwards at Caen, He only aided in their ruin. Buzot, Duchâtel, Bergoing, Lesage, and Valady, departed with the battalions. Lanjuinais had preceded them to Brest, scattering in all directions his indignation and his courage. Henri Larivière and Mollevault, members of the fatal Commission of the Twelve, preceded the fugitives to Quimper, and prepared them asylums, not auxiliaries. Reduced to the number of nineteen, and separated from the battalion of Finisterre, which had protected them as far as Lamballe, the deputies quitted the highways, and marched by cross roads, soliciting from cottage to cottage that hospitality which might each moment betray them. Being recognised at Moncontour by some federals, and having heard a murmur about them of "that is Pétion, -that is Buzot," they took refuge in the woods. Their retreat was suspected. They passed weary hours concealed under the leaves. The rain streamed over their benumbed bodies. A young citizen of Moncontour, who had watched their flight, came to them, and directed them that night towards a lonely house, where they had some hours' repose.

They heard the générale beaten by the drums in the village. They searched the fields, the woods, and the houses to seize them. Giroust and Lesage separated from their companions, and accepted hospitality in the suburbs. The others continued their route. They had arms. They intimidated the peasants whom they could not seduce. They escaped by a series of miracles from the dangers which surrounded them.

IV. Meanwhile hunger, thirst, anxiety, and illness decimated them. Cussy, tortured by an attack of gout, groaned at every step. Buzot, wearied out, threw away his arms, as a burden too heavy for him. Barbaroux, although scarcely twenty-eight years old, had the unwieldy stature and embonpoint of a man advanced in age. A sprain had inflamed his foot. He could not walk without the assistance of Pétion and Louvet, who by turns gave him their arm. Riouffe, his feet torn with walking, dragged himself along, staining the road with his blood. Pétion, Salles, and Louvet alone preserved their indefatigable vigour. The wounded and the sick like better to await death on the spot than to fly from

it. The energy of Barbaroux, however, made them blush at their weakness. They arose, and continued their way in silence, and laid down some leagues farther on in some high grass, which hid their bodies and protected their slumber. Overcome with fatigue, enervated by hunger, they at last reached Quimper, but dared not enter it. They sent one of their guides to warn Kervélégan of their approach, and ask from him the necessary indications to reach the retreats which his friendship had doubtless assured them. This guide did not return. They waited for two-and-thirty hours, without shelter or nourishment, beaten by the rain, and in a marsh whose freezing waters benumbed their limbs. Cussy invoked death as more clement than his agony. Riouffe and Girey-Duprey lost the gaiety of their youth, which had until then sustained them. Buzot wrapped himself up in silent melancholy; Barbaroux even felt his hope, though not his courage, vanish. Louvet pressed to his breast the loaded weapon, which contained his deliverance and his death. The image of the adored female who sought his track to rejoin him alone determined him to live. Pétion preserved the stoical indifference of a man who defies fate to precipitate him lower, after having raised him so high. He had reached the depths of misery, and reposed there.

V. In the mean time Kervélégan watched at Quimper. A messenger on horseback, sent by him, discovered the fugi

tives in the marsh. He conducted them to the house of a peasant, where fire, bread, and wine somewhat restored them. A constitutional curate of the environs received them afterwards. They there recovered their strength, and afterwards separated in different groups, where each one had a different fortune and end. Five amongst them, in which number were Salles, Girey-Duprey, and Cussy, received an asylum at Kervélégan's; Buzot was confided to the discretion of a generous citizen, in a house in the faubourg of Quimper ; Pétion and Guadet, sheltered themselves in an isolated country house; Louvet, Barbaroux, and Riouffe in the house of a patriot of the town. The beloved of Louvet had preceded him to Quimper. She brought to her friend, the devotion, the hope, and the illusion of love. As to Brissot, he was at this juncture arrested at Moulins, and transported to Paris, there to languish in prison. Vergniaud, Pétion,

Guadet, Buzot, that they might not be separated from Barbaroux, who was dying, refused to embark at Brest, and awaited in their asylums the cure of their friend. Louvet retired with Lodoiska into a cottage, which she had prepared for him. He there tasted, between two tempests, those moments of happiness so much the more poignant when menaced, that halt of the unfortunate on the road to death. Barbaroux, so light in his amours that his inconstancy never knew a durable attachment, envied, he said, this happiness which the proscribed Louvet owed to devotion and fidelity.

The news of the capture of Toulon by the English redoubled the surveillance and the persecution of the patriots towards the federalists accused of the dismemberment of the country. Louvet, Barbaroux, Buzot, and Pétion embarked at length one night in a fishing-boat, which was to conduct them to a vessel anchored off the coast. Couched under some mats in the bottom of the hold, they passed through twenty-two republican vessels without being discovered. These proscribed men entered the waters of La Gironde, and disembarked at Bec-d'Ambès, a small port in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux. They thought they had attained the land of liberty, it had become the land of death.

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VI. While the vanquished Girondists fell one by one into the hands of their enemies, or prolonged so painfully the agony of their party, by flight, the republic, established in its centre, was invaded at its extremities. The frontiers were unprotected, the places conquered by the army of Custine in Germany, and cur own places in the north, fell under the cannon of the coalition. We have seen that Custine, having fallen back in Landau, had left an imposing garrison at Mayence, as the promise of a second invasion of Germany. General Meunier, known by the marvellous works at Cherbourg, commanded the place. Kléber, Doyré,

and Dubayet, general officers as enlightened as intrepid, were his lieutenants; Rewbell and Merlin de Thionville, at once representatives and soldiers, had shut themselves up in Mayence, in order that the troops should fight under the very eye of the Convention. Two hundred pieces of ordnance defended the place.

The blockade was composed of fifty-seven battalions and forty squadrons. Grain was abundant in the city, but there

was a deficiency of powder. The prodigies of ability, of boldness, and courage which Merlin de Thionville exemplified, heart and hand, to the troops, left, nevertheless, only the hope of a heroic defence.

This defence even paralysed twenty thousand of our best soldiers, blockaded on the other side of the Rhine in their conquest. Custine sent an officer to the Prussian army. This officer demanded permission to cross the lines as a flag of truce, accompanied by a Prussian officer, to carry to Mayence the order of honourable capitulation. The commissioners of the Convention, Merlin and Rewbell, and the generals commanding the town and the troops, assembled a council of war, and energetically repelled this insinuation. The blockade was closed by the Austrians and Prussians, and converted into a siege.. The French resuming every moment the offensive by terrible sorties, forced the hostile army to conquer again each step of approach to the walls. General Meunier, struck by a ball which broke his knee, expired some days afterwards. The Prussians, seized with admiration and respect, ceased their fire, to give the French time to raise the tomb of their general in one of the bastions of the town. "I lose an enemy who has done me much mischief," exclaimed Frederic William, "but France loses a great man."

The bombardment commenced with three hundred pieces of ordnance. The mills which furnished flour to the town and its garrison were set on fire. Meat, as well as bread, was wanting. Horses, dogs, cats, and mice were devoured by the inhabitants. Pitiless famine compelled the generals to send from the town all useless mouths. Old men, women, and children, driven from its bosom to the number of two or three thousand, were equally repulsed by the Prussians, and expired, between the two armies, under the cannon of the batteries, or in the agony of hunger. The hospitals, without provisions, without medicines, without roofs, could no longer shelter the wounded. The town capitulated.

The troops departed free, with their colours and their arms, under the condition of not fighting for one year against Prussia.

Fifteen thousand soldiers, fire-proof by the long siege of Mayence, were despatched to La Vendée.

VII. At the same juncture, Condé, one of the frontier places in the north, fell. Dampierre died endeavouring to succour it. General Chancel, shut up with four thousand soldiers in the town, had neither provisions nor ammunition. The soldiers' rations were only two ounces of bread, and could not even furnish more than four days' provisions at that rate. They were obliged to surrender, as prisoners, on the 12th of July. Valenciennes, destroyed by bombs, surrendered on the 28th to the English and the Austrians. General Ferrand, that brave lieutenant of Dumouriez, though seventy years of age, had defended the town for three months, as if he desired to make his tomb of its ruins. The fortifications, shaken to their foundations by the battering of two hundred thousand balls, thirty thousand shells, and fifty thousand bombs, left breaches large enough for the passage of cavalry. The terror alone of the name of our brave soldiers, and of Ferrand, protected the place. Valenciennes at last capitulated, and the garrison, after having slain twenty thousand foes, and lost, itself, seven thousand fighting men, were permitted to return to France with their arms and colours.

The news of these disasters alarmed Paris, without discouraging it. The constancy of the Convention in the midst of reverses strengthened the public mind. Every one was afflicted, no one despaired of the country. The news from the departments reassured the Assembly. These reverses on the one side, and this success on the other, rendered the Jacobites at once mistrustful and rash.

Demonstrations against Custine multiplied, and were each moment more bitter. This general was the more readily accused, as more had been hoped from him. Bazire demanded the arrest of Custine in the midst of his army. Levasseur de la Sarthe charged himself with this perilous mission. Arrived at the camp, the representative desired a review of the troops forty thousand men were under arms. The soldiers, who suspected Levasseur of coming to carry off their chief, refused him military honours. Levasseur exacted them, and made them lower their colours. "Soldiers of the Republic!" said he to them, "the Convention has arrested General Custine." "Let him be restored to us!" cried the angry troops. The representative braved the clamour.