The Marquis de Flavigny never sent his unfinished letters to England. If he had completed them they would not have been very pleasant reading. Even the Comte d'Hervilly realised the disastrous consequences of being shut into Quiberon. The night after the influx of the fugitives he attacked the Republicans (who were taken by surprise), pushed his onset up to their very outworks, lost his head, and abandoned the attack, for no apparent reason, just at the very moment of success. _Quem Deus vult perdere_ . . . After that abortive attack on Ste. Barbe things went quickly from bad to worse. The sixth of July had been on all counts an unmitigated disaster; the Chouan defeat did not fail to have a bad moral effect on the Bretons of the interior, and the useless mouths, as La Vireville had only too truly called them, brought the number of souls on the narrow strip of land up to fourteen thousand. It became a difficulty to feed the refugees; and most of them were not of the slightest military value. Old men, women, and children, they had to subsist as best they were able, shelterless, and cooking what they could get on fires of dung and seaweed. And even the Chouans were sullen and discontented; it was hard to make them work at the entrenchments with any zeal, and if they were reproached with their idleness they invariably replied that they had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. In fact, a small ration of salt meat and biscuit did seem insufficient to a peasant accustomed to more solid nourishment. The Comte de Puisaye, indeed, announced in the order of the day that he wished the brave Chouans, those dauntless supporters of the altar and the throne, to be particularly well treated, but as, this order once promulgated, he took no steps whatever to see that it was carried out, it frequently happened that the supporters of the altar and the throne went very hungry.