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With sunrise the next morning, the army was again on the move towards Saumur: it was arranged that Cathelineau, de Lescure, Denot, and Larochejaquelin should lead the men through the trenches and into the camp; and that d'Elbe should remain on the road, prepared, if necessary, to second the attack, but ready should the first attempt be successful, to fall on the republicans as they retreated from the camp to the town, and, if possible, to follow them within the walls.
We have learned, from one of the officers who is a prisoner in our hands, that Biron is at Tours, and is endeavouring to persuade the Paris battalions that have arrived there to march, at once, to Saumur. They have absolutely refused to do so, until the arrival of the cannon that were promised to them, before they left Paris.
He thought that she could not have seen with indifference the efforts he was making in the cause which she loved so well; and he determined to throw himself at her feet before he started for Saumur, and implore her to give him a place in her affections, while her heart was softened by the emotions, which the departure of so many of her friends, on the eve of battle, would occasion.
The troops were falling into disorder, and would soon have become a disorganized mass; when a musket ball, fired from a window, struck Cathelineau in the breast as, with his officers, who had been considerably increased in number owing to the many gentlemen who had joined him at Saumur, he was leading on his troops.
Now he was dead, who was there to denounce Custine loitering in idleness in the Camp of Cæsar and refusing to relieve Valenciennes, Biron tarrying inactive in the Lower Vendée letting Saumur be taken and Nantes blockaded, Dillon betraying the Fatherland in the Argonne?... Meantime, all about him, rose momentarily higher the sinister cry: "Marat is dead; the aristocrats have killed him!"
In all Saumur there was no one not persuaded that Monsieur Grandet had a private treasure, some hiding-place full of louis, where he nightly took ineffable delight in gazing upon great masses of gold. Avaricious people gathered proof of this when they looked at the eyes of the good man, to which the yellow metal seemed to have conveyed its tints.
M. de Montsoreau, Lieutenant-Governor of Saumur almost rose from his seat in his astonishment. "What! No letters?" he cried, a hand on either arm of the chair. The Magistrates stared, one and all. "No letters?" they muttered. And "No letters?" the Provost chimed in more faintly. Count Hannibal looked smiling round the Council table. He alone was unmoved. "No," he said. "I bear none."
And none of these means were superfluous to stifle the fire of war then blaring in the West. "At this time a young man of the Maille family was despatched by the Chouans from Brittany to Saumur, to open communications between certain magnates of that town and its environs and the leaders of the Royalist party.
"Madame Grandet, go back to your loto; leave me to speak with monsieur." Then he pulled the door quickly to, and the excited players returned to their seats, but did not continue the game. "Is it any one belonging to Saumur, Monsieur des Grassins?" asked his wife. "No, it is a traveller." "He must have come from Paris."
Henri now felt the weight of those miseries which his father had foretold; when he, flushed with the victory at Saumur, returned home after the campaign in which he had first drawn his sword so gloriously.
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