The cavalry bestrode steeds of divers eccentricities, but at the tails of one and all figured the enemy’s derided tri-color cockade. Ropes were stirrups to these gallant paladins, and their sabres hung by packthreads. They had small leisure for the conventions of the toilet: their hair and beards looked like Orson’s. The officers wore woollen blouses and gaiters, having, like the others, the little red consecrated heart sewed on their coats; they lacked at first any distinguishing dress. Neither they nor the privates received a sou for services; if a man were in want he asked for a disbursement, and, until supplies failed, he got it. Funds flowed into the general reservoir from the pockets of the gentry, and from a source as obvious--the rights of confiscation. The main army averaged twenty thousand men; at a pinch it could be doubled. Sobriety reigned in the camps, though it was the one considerable virtue to which the good peasants, un-French in most matters, were not blindly addicted. Considering the prohibition against the presence of women, it is surprising to find here and there undetected in the van some spotless amazon like Jeanne Robin, or the revered Renée Bordereau, or Dame de La Rochefoucauld, a cavalry captain, shot upon the Breton coast. Piety was universal. The scythe-bearing soldiery, meeting a wayside cross half-way to the battery, would doff hats and kneel an instant, then charge like fiends on the foe. The parishes sent carts to the road-side, laden with provisions for the passing cohorts. The women, children, and old men knelt in the cornfields, while the din went on afar off, to beseech the Lord of Hosts. At Laval and Chollet, where the sieges closed perforce in one mad scrimmage in the dark, the Vendeans fired wherever they heard an oath, surer than ever the Cromwellians were before them, that in that direction they could bag none but legitimate game.