In a little wood to the south of Auray, and in an exceedingly bad temper, the Chevalier de la Vireville sat on a fallen tree and surveyed his small band of Chouans, who, lying, seated or crouched round him on their heels, looked at him with the expression of dogs who know that they deserve a beating--though wearing, indeed, the appearance of dogs who have already received one. It was the evening of the third of July, six days after the landing at Carnac. During those days Auray and Landévant had already been taken by the Chouans and abandoned again for lack of support. Last night had come peremptory orders from Carnac that they were to be retaken; so the Comte du Boisberthelot and La Vireville had set out at eleven that morning, without a single piece of artillery, to recapture Auray, which was garrisoned by a thousand men under the Republican adjutant-general Mermet. At the same time Tinténiac, although he knew the task to be impossible, had attacked Landévant. Mermet's sentries were not on the alert, and so the Comte du Boisberthelot, who was a sailor, came charging in at the head of his men by the route de l'Eglise, and drove out the Republicans. But outside the town was Hoche himself, who ordered them to retake it at any price. Mermet, in obeying this order, fell into the neat ambush which La Vireville had prepared for him in a copse by the Faubourg St. Goustan, and his column was on the point of breaking up in disorder when Hoche came quickly up with his grenadiers and two pieces of artillery. To stop his advance--a hopeless attempt it was--La Vireville transferred himself and his Bretons to the bridge into the town, cast up a barricade with carts and casks and beams, and could probably have held this obstacle for a long time against hand-to-hand fighting, or if he had possessed the smallest piece of artillery. It was the want of that which had caused him to grind his teeth as his men fired and reloaded and fired behind the rapidly vanishing barricade, their own numbers dwindling in proportion. For it was Hoche who had the cannon.