Adventure stories; Short stories, English -- Scottish authors; Soldiers -- Fiction
'To be with you, brother Jean--to fight for the Cevennes.'
'With a beardless face and a feeble hand!'
'I have about as much beard as you, mon frère; and if my hand be
feeble, it has brought down many a wolf in Mialet and the Gevaudan,'
replied Guillot, slapping the butt of his carbine emphatically.
The speakers were young Guillot Cavalier and his elder brother Jean,
who was then, at the age of _seventeen years_, actually a general and
second in command of the Camisard army, the Insurgent Protestants of
Languedoc; who fought many a battle with Villars and De Montrevel,
the best leaders of the age; who, with Roland, led the great revolt
in 1703; and who in his twentieth year became a full colonel in the
English army!
Both were very handsome lads, and both wore the white tunic (in
Languedocian, _camisa_) to distinguish themselves from their enemies,
and hence their well-known name of Camisards. Both were well armed,
with swords, silver-mounted pistols, and short carbines; but the
elder wore over his shoulder the scarf of a French general, and in
his white velvet cap the wing of an eagle. Strong--and tender as
strong--was the bond of affection between these two lads, who had
both been born in the village of Ribaute, among the pastoral
mountains north of the Valley of Garden; and though Jean was ready to
face any peril and to 'do all that may become a man' for the cause in
which he had been so suddenly made a leader, and in which he had
already won such high distinction, his heart sank at the
contemplation of Guillot--a delicate boy, and their mother's chief
care--encountering the risks of that most savage and rancorous Civil
War which now devastated Languedoc.
Jean, as a very little boy, had been bred a shepherd, and was
afterwards apprenticed to a baker at Anduze; and it was from the
employ of the latter that, with a carbine in his hand, he went forth
to become a Camisard, 'and soon proved himself to be,' as history
tells us, 'a most able general, as well as a powerful prophet and
preacher.'
'Return, Guillot--return,' he is said to have urged again; 'our poor
mother cannot spare us both.'
'La Bonne Madelon is the mother we must serve just now, and I will
not quit your camp,' replied Guillot, whose eyes lit up, as he
referred to one of those wild, half-frenzied, and wholly enthusiastic
prophetesses, or female preachers, who thronged the camps of the
Camisards, attended their councils, and followed them into battle.
'Then be it so,' said Jean Cavalier resignedly; adding, 'I have good
news for you and all the faithful, Guillot. The Queen of Great
Britain--the good Queen Anne--is sending a fleet to our aid.'
'Of what use will it be to us among the mountains?' asked Guillot,
laughing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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