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THE SON OF THE MILLER OF LEGUERNO.
We have said that at the very moment when Morgan and his three companions stopped the Geneva diligence between Bar-sur-Seine and Chatillon, Roland was entering Nantes.
If we are to know the result of his mission we must not grope our way, step by step, through the darkness in which the Abbe Bernier wrapped his ambitious projects, but we must join him later at the village of Muzillac, between Ambon and Guernic, six miles above the little bay into which the Vilaine River falls.
There we find ourselves in the heart of the Morbihan; that is to say, in the region that gave birth to the Chouannerie.

It was close to Laval, on the little farm of the Poiriers, that the four Chouan brothers were born to Pierre Cottereau and Jeanne Moyne.

One of their ancestors, a misanthropical woodcutter, a morose peasant, kept himself aloof from the other peasants as the _chat-huant_ (screech-owl) keeps aloof from the other birds; hence the name Chouan, a corruption of _chat-huant_.
The name became that of a party.

On the right bank of the Loire they said Chouans when they meant Bretons, just as on the left bank they said brigands when they meant Vendeans.
It is not for us to relate the death and destruction of that heroic family, nor follow to the scaffold the two sisters and a brother, nor tell of battlefields where Jean and Rene, martyrs to their faith, lay dying or dead.