"Delay! delay!" murmured Petit-Pierre. "I have always heard it said that any uprising in your part of the country ought to take place during the first two weeks in May. After that the inhabitants are busy with their agriculture and are not so easily aroused. Here it is the 14th, and we are already late. As for the leaders, they are convoked, are they not?" "Yes, monsieur," said Louis Renaud, with a certain sad gravity, "they are; and I ought to add that you can hardly count on any but the leaders." Then he added, with a sigh, "And not all of them either, as M. le Marquis de Souday discovered this morning." "You surely do not mean to say that, monsieur!" cried Petit-Pierre. "Lukewarmness in La Vendée! and that too, when our friends in Marseille--and I can speak confidently, for I have just arrived from there--are so furious at their failure that they are longing to take revenge!" A pale smile crossed the lips of the young leader. "You are from the South, monsieur," he said, "though you have not the accent of it." "You are right; I am," answered Petit-Pierre. "What of it?" "You must not confound the South with the West, the Marseillais with the Vendéans. A proclamation may rouse the South, and a check rebuff it. Not so in La Vendée. When you have been here some time you will appreciate the truth of what I say. La Vendée is grave, cold, silent. All projects are discussed slowly, deliberately; the chances of success and defeat are each considered. Then, if La Vendée sees a prospect of success she holds out her hand, says _yes_, and dies, if need be, to fulfil her promise. But as she knows that _yes_ and _no_ are words of life and death to her, she is slow in uttering them." "You forget enthusiasm, monsieur," said Petit-Pierre. "Ah, enthusiasm!" he replied; "I heard that talked of in my boyhood. It is a divinity of a past age which has stepped from its pedestal since the days when so many pledges were made to our fathers only to be forgotten. Do you know what passed this morning at Saint-Philbert?" "In part, yes; the marquis told me." "But after the marquis left?" "No; I know nothing." "Well, out of the twelve leaders present who were appointed to command the twelve divisions, seven protested in the name of their men, and they have by this time sent those men back to their homes, all the while declaring, every one of them, that personally and under all circumstances, they would shed their blood for Madame; only they would not, they added, take before God the terrible responsibility of dragging their peasantry into an enterprise which promised to be nothing more, so it seemed to them, than a bloody skirmish." "Then it comes to this," said Petit-Pierre. "Must we renounce all hope, all effort?" The same sad smile crossed the lips of the young leader.