The picture of the war [in which Madame de la Rochejaquelein figured so prominently, and in which she lost her young husband] is shaded with deep horrors. The convention issued the barbarous decree that the country [La Vendee], which still continued its resistance, should be desolated, that the whole inhabitants should be exterminated without distinction of age or sex, the habitations consumed with fire, and the trees cut down by the axe. A multitude of sanguinary conflicts ensued, and the insurgents succeeded in resisting this desolating invasion. Among the slain in one of those engagements the republicans found the body of a young woman, which, Madame de la Rochejaquelein informs us, gave occasion to a number of idle reports, many giving it out that it was she herself, or a sister of M. de la Rochejaquelein, who had no sister, or a new Joan of Arc, who had kept up the spirit of the peasantry by her enthusiastic predictions. The truth was, that it was the body of an innocent peasant who had always lived a remarkably quiet and pious life till recently before this action, when she had been seized with an irresistible desire to take a part in the conflict. [She deserved to be "a woman of history," but her name has not been preserved.] She had discovered herself some time before to Madame de la Rochejaquelein, and begged of her a shift of a peculiar fabric. The night before the battle, she also revealed herself to M. de la Rochejaquelein, asking him to give her a pair of shoes, and promising to behave in such a manner in the morrow's fight that he would never think of parting with her. Accordingly, she kept near his person through the whole of the battle, and conducted herself with the most heroic bravery. Two or three times, in the very heat of the fight, she said to him: "No, mon general, you shall not get before me; I shall always be closer up to the enemy even than you." Early in the day she was hurt pretty severely in the hand, but held it up, laughing, to her general, and said, "It is nothing at all." In the end of the battle, she was surrounded in a charge, and fell fighting like a desperado. There were about ten other women who took up arms, Madame de la Rochejaquelein says, in this cause: two sisters under fifteen, and a tall beauty who wore the dress of an officer.