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It must be added, if we would form a fair conception of the enterprise, that Napoleon well knew not one-third of these men had ever seen a shot fired in earnest. The difficulties encountered by Moncey, Thureau, and Chabran will be sufficiently understood from the narrative of Buonaparte's own march.
The day is drawing to a close; they reach their goal, a miserable, grey, draggled town at the mouth of the Vilaine, and are roughly brought before the arbiter of their lives Thureau himself, the monstrous excrescence of the times, who, like Marat and Carrier, sees nothing in the new freedom but a free opening for the lowest instincts of ferocity.
Chapon and Thureau threatened Turin by two different routes; and Melas, at last roused to a sense of his imminent danger, abandoned the open country of Piedmont, took up his headquarters at Alessandria, and began to draw together his widely separated columns, and concentrate them for the inevitable battle which must decide the fate of Italy.
The left wing, under Moncey, consisting of 15,000 detached from the army of Moreau, was ordered to debouch by the way of St. Gothard. The corps of Thureau, 5000 strong, took the direction of Mount Cenis: that of Chabran, of similar strength, moved by the Little St. Bernard.
All the divisions of Bonaparte's army assembled by degrees; the corps of Moncey debouched by the St. Gothard, 4000 men under the orders of General Thureau crossed by Mont Cenis. General Melas still refused to believe in the danger which menaced him, and already an imposing army was advancing against his scattered and divided forces.
I ought really to send you as a present to the Convention, but I am too soft-hearted, you see, my pigeons; and so, to save time and make sure, we will marry you to-day." One of the officers whispers some words in his ear, which Thureau, suddenly growing purple with rage, denies with a foul oath and an emphatic thump of his huge fist on the table. "Hoche has forbidden it, has he?
For the usual fate of Chouan prisoners swiftly overtakes the surviving leaders of the Savenaye "band of brigands," as that doughty knot of loyalists was termed by their arch-enemy, Thureau.
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