On the civil side, bread riots and brigandage were the order of the day at Chartres, but at last, under the Directory, comparative quiet began to be restored. The town, however, was accused of not supporting that highly centralised administration with sufficient warmth, and, indeed, Delarue, the deputy of the Five Hundred, made a report, in which he stated that the Chartrains ‘had furnished arms and ammunition to five hundred brigands to suppress the liberty of the legislative body.’ The municipal administration defended themselves vigorously against this charge. It was probably true enough that Chartres was not in favour of the Directory, which, from the beginning, rested on the support of the army, and thus began that process which was to end in the Consulate--when the army set up its own man. From this time forth the army is France. It had been enormously improved since 1792. Out of the unskilled rabble that had fled before the Allies without striking a blow it had been converted into an organised machine. Under Carnot, at the War Office, good men were coming to the front. In 1796 they took the offensive, and arranged a big triple advance upon Vienna. Jourdan was to advance from the Netherlands, Moreau from Alsace, Bonaparte through North Italy. The brilliant successes of the latter covered the failure of the other two, who were beaten back to the French frontier. But before their retirement the Battle of Altenkirchen had been fought, and there had fallen the young Chartrain, General Marceau--François Séverin Marceau-Degraviers--whose statue stands in the centre of the Place des Épars. He was only twenty-seven years of age at the time of his death. His praises were pronounced to the Council of the Five Hundred by his old friend and comrade in arms, Jourdan, who secured for his mother a handsome pension. Marceau represents to the Chartrains the ideal of that military ardour which is the keynote of modern France. Nothing could be more eloquent of the difference between mediæval and modern France, of the change from the rule of Church and King to the domination of the established army, than the present state of the old Benedictine Abbey of S. Pierre, locally called S. Père, and its precincts. For the site of the old dormitory, refectory and cloisters is now used for cavalry barracks, and Chasseurs d’Afrique now stable their horses where once the cloistered monk tended his garden and fish ponds.