Chouans -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English
to whom the crippled mother of Pierre Leroi (otherwise called
Marche-a-Terre) came to pray, and was cured of all her pains, because
of her son’s good deeds. You see her there in the midst of you, and
you know that she walks without assistance. It was a miracle--a miracle
intended, like the resurrection of Marie Lambrequin to prove to you that
God will never forsake the Breton cause so long as the people fight for
his servants and for the king. Therefore, my dear brothers, if you wish
to save your souls and show yourselves defenders of God and the king,
you will obey all the orders of the man whom God has sent to us, and
whom we call THE GARS. Then indeed, you will no longer be Mahometans;
you will rank with all the gars of Brittany under the flag of God. You
can take from the pockets of the Blues the money they have stolen from
you; for, if the fields have to go uncultivated while you are making
war, God and the king will deliver to you the spoils of your enemies.
Shall it be said, Christians, that the gars of Marignay are behind the
gars of the Morbihan, the gars of Saint-Georges, of Vitre, or Antrain,
who are all faithful to God and the king? Will you let them get all the
spoils? Will you stand like heretics, with your arms folded, when other
Bretons are saving their souls and saving their king? ‘Forsake all,
and follow me,’ says the Gospel. Have we not forsaken our tithes, we
priests? And you, I say to you, forsake all for this holy war! You
shall be like the Maccabees. All will be forgiven you. You will find the
priests and curates in your midst, and you will conquer! Pay attention
to these words, Christians,” he said, as he ended; “for this day only
have we the power to bless your guns. Those who do not take advantage of
the Saint’s favor will not find her merciful; she will not forgive them
or listen to them as she did in the last war.”
This appeal, enforced by the power of a loud voice and by many gestures,
the vehemence of which bathed the orator in perspiration, produced,
apparently, very little effect. The peasants stood motionless, their
eyes on the speaker, like statues; but Mademoiselle de Verneuil
presently noticed that this universal attitude was the result of a
spell cast by the abbe on the crowd. He had, like great actors, held his
audience as one man by addressing their passions and self-interests. He
had absolved excesses before committal, and broken the only bonds which
held these boorish men to the practice of religious and social precepts.
He had prostituted his sacred office to political interests; but it must
be said that, in these times of revolution, every man made a weapon
of whatever he possessed for the benefit of his party, and the pacific
cross of Jesus became as much an instrument of war as the peasant’s
plough-share.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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