There is also Adolphe Denot, Henri's proud friend who loves Adolphe's sister Agatha and is rejected in a dramatic proposal scene, so prolonged that "Agatha began to fear that at this rate the interview would have no end. If Adolphe remained with his arm on the marble slab, and his head on one side, making sentimental speeches till she should give him encouragement to fall at her feet, it certainly would not be ended by bedtime." Adolphe is a strange case. Stung by Agatha's refusal, he goes forth to battle determined to die, but he disgraces himself by failing to support M. de Lescure in storming a breach in the wall. He then disappears, switches sides, and leads the republican forces into battle. Finally he reappears as the "Mad Captain," leading the royalist forces in suicidal charges. The battle scenes are well described, detained only by a few lengthy speeches by the heroes as they swing their swords. Fictional characters mingle with the historical ones, and even Robespierre appears in two consecutive chapters unto himself. The upper classes of England were horrified by the French Revolution, and the author's judgment of Robespierre is an example: Honesty, moral conduct, industry, constancy of purpose, temperance in power, courage, and love of country: these virtues all belonged to Robespierre; . . . Why, instead of the Messiah of freedom, which he believed himself to be, has his name become a byword, a reproach, and an enormity? Because he wanted faith! He believed in nothing but himself, and the reasoning faculty with which he felt himself to be endowed. He thought himself perfect in his own human nature, and wishing to make others perfect as he was, he fell into the lowest abyss of crime and misery in which a poor human creature ever wallowed. He seems almost to have been sent into the world to prove the inefficacy of human reason to effect human happiness. We see Robespierre directly only in these two chapters toward the end of the book. Trollope was not above passing judgment on his characters, but I don't recall another exclamation like, "Because he wanted faith!" These two didactic chapters are not necessary to the story line, but the horrors of the French Revolution are hardly amenable to understatement. Though they would be the first to go in any abridgement, they do help put the whole story into historical perspective. Trollope never visited La Vendée. His story is based primarily on the memoirs of Madame de la Rochejacquelin, who appears in the book with the name of her first husband, M. de Lescure. She subsequently married the younger brother of Henri de Larochejacquelin and bore him eight children before he was killed in a second Vendean revolt in 1815. Among the fictional characters were Marie Larochejacquelin and Adolphe Denot. How would Trollope end his story of this disaster? He created a happy interlude, and he made the best of it.