The tales, true or not, have proved to be a rich source of literary inspiration. Most notably, Honoré de Balzac drew from this history in writing the last of his series of novels, La Comédie humaine—a work called "The Chouans". Nonetheless, it should be remembered that there is a history, indisputably true, associated with the figure of Jean Chouan; it is the history of a bloody and costly civil war in western France. Origins Pierre Cottereau, a lumberjack and maker of wooden shoes (sabots), lived with his wife, Jeanne Cottereau (born Jeanne Moyné), as a tenant at la Closerie des Poiriers (literally, the "pear orchard enclosure"), a farm halfway between the villages of Saint-Ouën-des-Toits and Bourgneuf-la-Forêt in Mayenne, France. (An 'enclosure' is, in fact, a small farm, usually less than twenty acres in extent, and the name comes from the need for farmers to enclose their properties with fences or hedges to prevent cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals from running free.) Tenancy on this piece of property had been established by the Moyné family about 1750. The elder Cottereau, like his father before him, made his family's living by criss-crossing the wooded regions of western France, from the forest between Mondevert and Le Pertre to the forest of Concise, felling trees, stacking and seasoning the timber, and making wooden shoes, which he sold in the villages of Mayenne. From the local parish registers, particularly those of the parish of Olivet, where the Closerie des Poiriers was located, it is clear that this was a region deep in economic misery throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. For example, in several birth records, there is the notation, "né sur la lande" (born on the land), indicating that the child's parents were likely to have been casual workers sleeping rough. So great was the misery of the forge workers at Port-Brillet, owned by the prince of Talmont-Saint-Hilaire, Antoine Philippe de La Trémoille, that they took part in the French Revolution, joined the National Guard and became ardent Republican patriots. Workers in La Brûlatte behaved similarly. The Cottereau family came from a line of merchants, notaries, and priests, and, unlike most of his neighbors, Pierre was literate and respectable. His children, however, were violent, quarrelsome, lazy, and resolutely ignorant. Without doubt, their father's prolonged absences, cutting timber in distant forests, carving shoes, selling his sabots over a wide swath of Mayenne,