The Vendean peasantry were thus free to draw the charitable but untrue conclusion that he went to his duties at Château-Foix. Yet in any other part of France his conduct would have passed as exemplary, but here, in the midst of a people ardently faithful, it had not that complexion. And this, with a priest always at hand as counsellor! Counsellor, indeed, M. des Graves had been, and what a good one! Indeed, it sometimes seemed to the Marquise that almost all through her married life he had been explaining something to some one of them—her husband, herself, her son. Eight years ago, in that episode of supreme joy which shone out amidst her grief, when Gilbert had taken the resolution of living on his estates, it was to the Curé that he had turned for help in his unfamiliar task. And the priest had given him the most unstinted aid. But it was not difficult to see his capacity for assistance in matters of larger import, and Gilbert had discussed with him every political crisis of which the last three years had been so prodigal, from the calling of the States-General in ’89, at which, as a good Liberal, he had rejoiced, to the declaration of war against Austria in the spring of the present year, which had not pleased him at all. There was, indeed, in recent events material enough for many and many a conference on the terrace walk. In the great flood which was changing the face of France there ran a tide bearing the provinces of the West to a destination which no man could see—a tide whose waves threatened, with the submerging of every familiar landmark, to engulf more particularly M. des Graves and all his caste. Since the suppression of the religious orders, the sales of ecclesiastical property, and the promulgation of the civil constitution of the clergy in 1790, no part of France had suffered more severely from the anti-clerical policy of the Government. Hundreds of parishes had been deprived of the priest who refused the civil oath. In some the “constitutional” curé, the “intrus,” celebrated Masses which the faithful would not attend; in some the church had been devoted to other uses, while the non-juror, if he were not in hiding, or in a foreign country, was probably eating out his heart in the _chef-lieu_ of the department, cut off from his people, and forced to report himself every morning to the authorities. For the Vendean peasant, with his fervid piety, no more cruel persecution could have been devised. But though hundreds of priests were interned at Angers, in order to prevent them from preparing their flocks for the Easter communion, Vendée proper had not suffered to such an extent as the neighbouring departments until, in the early spring of 1792, the authorities decreed that all non-jurors residing there for less than a year, should leave it in a week.