This side-show of the great Revolution was a magnificent spectacle, and unique in the world’s annals. The seat of war, _Vendée militaire_, may be described roughly as being bounded on the north by the Loire from Saumur to the sea; on the west by the Atlantic; on the south by a line drawn from Sables d’Olonne across to Parthenay; and on the east by another line from Parthenay up again to Saumur. It was then comprised in some square leagues of old Anjou, Poitou, and Nantes; it is now divided into the four modern departments of Loire-Inférieure, Maine-et-Loire, Deux-Sèvres, and Vendée. The name Vendée, at first, indeed, minor and local, rose and spread after the affair at Challans on the twelfth of March, until it became representative of the people and their cause. And Vendée, once mentioned, means two things: the Marais, or low sea-coast district, a great meadow honey-combed with canals from the island of Bouin to Saint-Hilairie-de-Rie; and the inland Bocage, or thicket, in its own way quite as inaccessible. The latter, the centre of agitation, was settled by rugged, simple, honorable folk. It was glossy with woods of golden furze and pollard oaks, and broken everywhere with little hollows and little streams. It was a rough and arid place; it had few roads, and these were clayey and difficult; it was full of rocky pastures, hedge-rows, and trenches; dull in color, crabbed in outline, niggardly of distance. It had not a mountain nor any considerable landmark save the Hill of Larks. In the narrow flats it was all but impossible for the enemy to form; and utterly impossible for one detachment to communicate with another by signals. The puzzling Bocage was a glorious vantage-ground, however, for its own sons. The race which mastered it had great agility and nerve: Cæsar had called them invincible. They were not of a volatile humor, as were their compatriots in northern France; and yet they moved habitually in the very gravity and temperance of cheerfulness. The patriarchal life survived among them: the noble divided the proceeds of the land with his farmers; and he was his own steward, attending personally to business, and having for his tenants those with whom he had played as a boy. The ladies’ carriages were drawn by bullocks. On fête-days the wives and daughters of the hall danced with the peasants. After the Sunday services, among his devout flock the good _curé_ read aloud the place of meeting for the week’s hunts. There were no feuds; a scandal was unheard of; a lawsuit was a twenty years’ wonder. The keys of the jail had taken to chronic rust. The shut-in Bocage had seen the beginnings of the national upheaval with but faint concern. Its own clergy were poor, its own gentry magnanimous; its liberties were entire; it had no great public abuses calling for reform. And through the outlying districts things were much the same. It was impossible, as Jeffrey wrote soon after in the _Quarterly_, to “revolutionize” a people so circumstanced.