Excerpt from The Anglo American Magazine, Vol. 3: July to December, 1853

While he 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 now in power, whose last, worst madness it was to decree the extinction of religion and the overthrow of everything that outwardly symbolized it, through out 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 where ever 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 bye way, 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 soonias 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. Everywhere the people remained true to their faith; everywhere the priests stood firm by them in their sorest need. The executioners of the republic had been sent to make Brittany a country of apostates: they did their worst, and left it a country of martyrs.

One evening while this frightful persecution was still raging, Gabriel happened to be detained unusually late at the cottage of Rose's father. He had lately spent much of his time at the farm house: it was his only refuge now from that place of suffering, of silence, and of secret shame, which he had once called home! J ust as he had taken leave of Rose for the night, and was about to open the farm-house door, her father stopped him, and pointed to a chair in the chimney corner. Leave us alone, my dear, said the old man to his daughter; I want to speak to Gabriel. You can go to your mother, in the next room.

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