Paulveau. Bodin repulses the second French column.
The first right-hand column set out by the Gros-Morne road to take Maurepas in the rear; the second right-hand column crossed the Lacoupe Aubert plantation and came out in the mountains in sight of Paulveau, which Bodin, a man of color, colonel of the 9th, held with the third battalion of his demi-brigade. The left-hand column followed the Le Cap road as far as the Laveaux Lapointe plantation: it scaled the lookout of Lapointe, entered the mountains by the Chapron plantation, and halted at Brossier, a quarter of a league from Maurepas’s camp. The center column, of 800 men, with which Debelle marched, followed the main mountain road and reached the Trois Pavillons, where René Vincent was entrenched. For more than an hour it made signals, waving long poles topped with flags. The first right-hand column, which was to take General Maurepas in the rear, had orders to answer these signals as soon as it saw them and to begin the attack, so that the enemy would be caught between two fires. Debelle, seeing no signal in the air from the direction of the Gros-Morne road, nevertheless ordered the firing to begin, impatient to come to grips.
The fight was joined with fury. While René Vincent resisted the impetuosity of the French with intrepidity, Debelle heard the cannon of the second right-hand column, which was fighting Colonel Bodin at Paulveau.
As soon as he had learned that the left-hand column was on the glacis of Brossier, Maurepas had ordered the national guard of the mountain to block the path by which it had just come with tree trunks and stones covered with earth, and to lie in ambush both behind this rampart and on either side of the road. The French, if they retreated, were to be exterminated. The white women and the colonists, gathered on the Brossier plantation, had cast discouragement into the souls of the French soldiers, already disheartened by their earlier defeats, by painting the Indigenous to them as inexorable barbarians. As soon as they opened fire, Maurepas sent a few cannonballs among them, which spread a panic terror. They took to flight and were pursued relentlessly by the chasseurs of the 9th, most of them skillful marksmen and agile mountaineers. When they reached the place where the national guard had raised a rampart, they were assailed by a most lively fire and nearly all perished. At the same time René Vincent was withstanding Debelle’s onset with difficulty; his soldiers wavered; he was losing ground; at last his grenadiers, overthrown by the French impetuosity, were taking flight, when Maurepas, victor over the left-hand column, seeing some fugitives arrive in his camp, sent a hundred fresh and rested grenadiers with a four-pounder to support him. The fight was restored. The French, raked with grapeshot at point-blank range, retreated in good order, abandoning a battlefield strewn with dead and wounded.
Had the left-hand column made the slightest resistance on the glacis of Brossier, René Vincent, overthrown, would have been pursued by Debelle, who would have attacked General Maurepas in the flank and infallibly defeated him.
For his part Bodin, entrenched at Paulveau, had seen the second column flee after a most murderous fight; it returned at nightfall to Port-de-Paix, where it rejoined General Debelle.