The King of France was no longer sending adventurers to capture the outposts of England.

He was rather, in despair, beginning to wind in again the coil of disaster which had spun out through the helpless fingers of Neckar, Calonne, Brienne and the rest, and was in the end to bind his own hands for the guillotine.
The Isle of Jersey, like a scout upon the borders of a foeman's country, looked out over St.Michael's Basin to those provinces where the war of the Vendee was soon to strike France from within, while England, and presently all Europe, should strike her from without.
War, or the apprehension of war, was in the air.

The people of the little isle, living always within the influence of natural wonder and the power of the elements, were deeply superstitious; and as news of dark deeds done in Paris crept across from Carteret or St.Malo, as men-of-war anchored in the tide-way, and English troops, against the hour of trouble, came, transport after transport, into the harbour of St.Heliers, they began to see visions and dream dreams.

One peasant heard the witches singing a chorus of carnage at Rocbert; another saw, towards the Minquiers, a great army like a mirage upon the sea; others declared that certain French refugees in the island had the evil eye and bewitched their cattle; and a woman, wild with grief because her child had died of a sudden sickness, meeting a little Frenchman, the Chevalier du Champsavoys, in the Rue des Tres Pigeons, thrust at his face with her knitting-needle, and then, Protestant though she was, made the sacred sign, as though to defeat the evil eye.
This superstition and fanaticism so strong in the populace now and then burst forth in untamable fury and riot.

So that when, on the sixteenth of December 1792, the gay morning was suddenly overcast, and a black curtain was drawn over the bright sun, the people of Jersey, working in the fields, vraicking among the rocks, or knitting in their doorways, stood aghast, and knew not what was upon them.
Some began to say the Lord's Prayer, some in superstitious terror ran to the secret hole in the wall, to the chimney, or to the bedstead, or dug up the earthen floor, to find the stocking full of notes and gold, which might, perchance, come with them safe through any cataclysm, or start them again in business in another world.