The wretched throng were exiled, as completely as they would have been had they crossed the Pyrenees. Seven months of intense activity, seven months of successful fight, even while they were surrounded like sheep in a pen, had resulted only in this: that no single general, at his allotted post, had been able to beat back the Revolution from La Vendée; that the restoration of the monarchy, the remoter and greater object, was more visionary and hypothetical than ever. They hurried northward feverishly, pursued always by an immense force, subject to continuous cold rains, obliged to leave at every stopping-place the wounded and the sick, the women and babes, to mark their trail and to perish by massacre. Kléber had his keen eye upon Henri: “I do not believe he can hold out long, away from his own country.” But Henri proceeded to defeat the garrison at Château-Gontier, to crush L’Echelle’s division at Entrammes, and to score a double triumph at Laval. It was at Château-Gontier that the venerable Monsieur de Royrand, who had sustained the war in Lower Poitou from the very beginning, breathed his last. His regiments ceased firing, and mourned aloud. Henri hurried into the midst of them, his own tears flowing. “Come, come!” he cried; “we will weep and pray for the dear friend to-morrow. Let us avenge him to-day!” Then he swooped like an eagle on the troops of the state, with Royrand’s orphans at his heels. These were the days of what the peasants called “the reign of Monsieur Henri.” Power and the opportunity of dictatorship, which prove the ruin of much excellence, seemed to awaken in him only fresh virtues. So sound was his temperament, that the less unhampered he became the more intelligently he was able to serve his cause; and his manner of serving, as we know, was not to draw charts in his tent. Incapable of turning his little finger to benefit himself, he was a perennial benefit to all around him. His glad irrepressible gusto leavened the spirits of thousands. Providence, he liked to think, took care of him while he was needed. Now that he had a community depending upon him, as if he were a patriarch of old, his conduct came to be more and more temperate. For his habitual rashness, criminal under other conditions, he ought not at any time to be blamed. A verse from the most masculine ode in English literature might be borrowed to describe La Rochejaquelein, who, ----“like the three-fork’d lightning first Breaking the clouds where it was nurst, Did thorough his own side His fiery way divide.”