Excerpt from The Chouans Quite a different interest to the crowd. An observer experienced in the civil discord which then agitated France would have had no difficulty in distinguishing the small number of citizens on whom the Republic could count in this assembly, composed, as it was, almost entirely of men who four years before had been in open war against her. One last and striking trait gave an infallible indication of the discordant sympathies of the gathering. Only the Republicans showed any sort of alacrity in their march. For the other members of the troop, though the disparity of their costume was notice able enough, their faces and their bearing exhibited the monotonous air of misfortune. Townsmen and peasants alike, melancholy marked them all deeply for her own; their very silence had a touch of ferocity in it, and they seemed weighed down by the burden of the same thought. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.