M. du Theil[231], who had charge of the affairs of M. le Comte d'Artois in London, had hastened to seek out Fontanes; the latter asked me to take him to the agent of the Princes. We found him surrounded by all the defenders of the Throne and the Altar who were idling about Piccadilly, by a crowd of spies and sharpers who had escaped from Paris under various names and disguises, and by a swarm of adventurers, Belgians, Germans, Irishmen, dealers in the Counter-revolution. In a corner of the crowd was a man of thirty or thirty-two, at whom nobody looked, and who himself seemed interested only in an engraving of the Death of General Wolfe. Struck by his appearance, I asked who he was: one of my neighbours answered: "It's nobody; it's a Vendean peasant who has brought a letter from his leaders." This man, who was "nobody," had seen the deaths of Cathelineau[232], the first general of the Vendée and a peasant like himself; Bonchamps, in whom Bayard had come to life again; Lescure[233], armed with a hair-cloth which was not bullet-proof; d'Elbée[234], shot in an armchair, his wounds not permitting him to embrace death standing; La Rochejacquelein[235], whose body was ordered to be "verified" in order to reassure the Convention in the midst of its victories. That man, who was "nobody," had assisted at two hundred captures and recaptures of towns, villages, and redoubts, at seven hundred skirmishes, and seventeen pitched battles; he had fought against three hundred thousand regular troops and six or seven hundred thousand recruits and national guards; he had assisted in taking one hundred guns and fifty thousand muskets; he had passed through the "infernal columns," companies of incendiaries commanded by Conventional; he had been in the midst of the ocean of fire which, three several times, rolled its waves over the woods of the Vendée; lastly, he had seen three hundred thousand Hercules of the plough, the associates of his work, die, and one hundred square leagues of fertile country change into a desert of ashes. The two Frances met upon this soil levelled by them. All that remained in blood and memory of the France of the Crusades fought against the new blood and hopes of the France of the Revolution. The conqueror recognised the greatness of the conquered. Turreau[236], the Republican general, declared that "the Vendeans would take their place in history in the first rank of soldier peoples." Another general wrote to Merlin de Thionville[237]: "Troops which have beaten such Frenchmen as those may well hope to beat all other nations." The legions of Probus[238], in their song, said as much of our fathers. Bonaparte called the combats of the Vendée "combats of giants." [Sidenote: A Vendean peasant.]