Cholet is one of the greatest cattle markets, if not the greatest, in the land. The farmers of the surrounding country buy _boeufs maigres_ in the southwest and centre of France and transform them into good fat cattle which in every way rival what is known in England as "best English." This is accomplished cheaply and readily by feeding them with cabbage stalks. On Saturdays, on the Champ de Foire, the aspect is most animated, and any painter who is desirous of emulating Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" (painted at the great cattle market of Bernay, in Normandy) cannot find a better vantage-ground than here, for one may see gathered together nearly all the cattle types of Poitou, the Vendée, Anjou, Bas Maine, and of Bretagne Nantaise. In earlier days Cholet was far more sad than it is to-day; but there remain practically no souvenirs of its past. The wars of the Vendée left, it is said, but three houses standing when the riot and bloodshed was over. Two of the greatest battles of this furious struggle were fought here. On the site of the present railroad station Kleber and Moreau fought the royalists, and the heroic Bonchamps received the wound of which he died at St. Florent, just after he had put into execution the order of release for five thousand Republican prisoners. This was on the 17th October, 1793. Five months later Stofflet possessed himself of the town and burned it nearly to the ground. Not much is left to remind one of these eventful times, save the public garden, which was built on the site of the old château. [Illustration: _Donjon of the Château de Clisson_] La Moine, a tiny and most picturesque river, still flows under the antique arches of the old bridge, which was held in turn by the Vendeans and the Republicans. To the west of Cholet runs another line of railway, direct through the heart of the Sèvre-Nantaise, one of those _petits pays_ whose old-time identity is now all but lost, even more celebrated in bloody annals than is that region lying to the eastward. Here was a country entirely sacked and impoverished. Mortagne was completely ruined, though it has yet left substantial remains of its fourteenth and fifteenth century château. Torfou was the scene of a bloody encounter between the Vendean hordes and Kleber's two thousand _héroiques de Mayence_. The able Vendean chiefs who opposed him, Bonchamps, D'Elbée, and Lescure, captured his artillery and massacred all the wounded. At the extremity of this line was the stronghold of Clisson, which itself finally succumbed, but later gave birth to a new town to take the place of that which perished in the Vendean convulsion.