CHAPTER IV.
While Gabriel still remained prostrated under the affliction that
was wasting his energies of body and mind, Brittany was visited
by a great public calamity, in which all private misfortunes were
overwhelmed for a while.
It was now the time when the ever-gathering storm of the French
Revolution had risen to its hurricane climax. Those chiefs of the
new republic were in power whose last, worst madness it was to
decree the extinction of religion and the overthrow of everything
that outwardly symbolized it throughout the whole of the country
that they governed. Already this decree had been executed to the
letter in and around Paris; and now the soldiers of the Republic
were on their way to Brittany, headed by commanders whose
commission was to root out the Christian religion in the last and
the surest of the strongholds still left to it in France.
These men began their work in a spirit worthy of the worst of
their superiors who had sent them to do it. They gutted churches,
they demolished chapels, they overthrew road-side crosses
wherever they found them. The terrible guillotine devoured human
lives in the villages of Brittany as it had devoured them in the
streets of Paris; the musket and the sword, in highway and byway,
wreaked havoc on the people--even on women and children kneeling
in the act of prayer; the priests were tracked night and day from
one hiding-place, where they still offered up worship, to
another, and were killed as soon as overtaken--every atrocity was
committed in every district; but the Christian religion still
spread wider than the widest bloodshed; still sprang up with
ever-renewed vitality from under the very feet of the men whose
vain fury was powerless to trample it down.
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