Memoirs of Chateaubriand Volume II — Part I Book VII 2

* We received orders to march on Thionville.

We did five to six leagues a day.

The weather was terrible; we tramped through the rain and slush singing, _Ô Richard!

ô mon roi!

_ and _Pauvre Jacques!

_[84] On arriving at the encamping-place, having neither wagons nor provisions, we went with donkeys, which followed the column like an Arab caravan, to hunt for food in the farms and villages.

We paid for everything scrupulously; nevertheless I had to do fatigue duty for taking two pears from the garden of a country-house without thinking.

A great steeple, a great river and a great lord are bad neighbours, says the proverb.

We pitched our tents at random, and were constantly obliged to beat the canvas in order to flatten out the threads and prevent the water from coming through.

We were ten soldiers to every tent; each in turn took charge of the cooking: one went for meat, another for bread, another for wood, another for straw.

I made wonderful soup; I received great compliments on it, especially when I mixed milk and cabbage with the stew, in the Breton way.

I had learnt among the Iroquois not to mind smoke, so that I bore myself bravely before my fire of green and damp boughs.

This soldier's life is very amusing; I imagined myself still among the Indians.

As we sat at mess in our tent my comrades asked me for tales of my travels; they told me some fine stories in return;

we all lied like a corporal in a tavern, with a conscript paying the reckoning.

One thing tired me: washing my linen; it had to be done, and often, for the obliging robber had left me only one shirt, borrowed from my cousin Armand, besides the one on my back.

When I lay soaping my stockings, my pocket-handkerchiefs and my shirt by the edge of a stream, with my head down and my loins up, I was seized with fits of giddiness; the motion of the arms gave me an unbearable pain in the chest.

I was obliged to sit down among the horsetails and watercress;

and, in the midst of the stir of war, I amused myself by watching the water flow peacefully past.

Lope de Vega[85] makes a shepherdess wash the bandage of Love; that shepherdess would have been very useful to me for a little birch-cloth turban which my Floridans had given me.

An army is generally composed of soldiers of nearly the same age, the same height, the same strength.

Very different was ours, a jumbled gathering of grown men, old men, children fresh from the dovecot, jabbering Norman, Breton, Picard, Auvergnat, Gascon, Provençal, Languedocian.

A father served with his sons, a father-in-law with his son-in-law, an uncle with his nephews, a brother with a brother, a cousin with a cousin.

This _arrière ban_, ridiculous as it appeared, had something honourable and touching about it, because it was animated with sincere convictions; it presented the spectacle of the old monarchy and afforded a last glimpse of a dying world.

I have seen old noblemen, with stern looks, grey hair, torn coats, knapsack on back, musket slung over the shoulder, drag themselves along with a stick and supported by the arm by one of their sons; I have seen M. de Boishue, the father of my schoolfellow killed at the States of Rennes in my sight, march solitary and sad, with his bare feet in the mud, carrying his shoes at the point of his bayonet for fear of wearing them out;

I have seen young wounded men lie under a tree, while a chaplain, in surtout and stole, knelt by their side, sending them to St. Louis, whose heirs they had striven to defend.

The whole of this needy band, which received not a sou from the Princes, made war at its own expense, while the decrees finished despoiling it and threw our wives and mothers into prison.

The old men of former times were less unhappy and less lonely than those of to-day: if, in lingering upon earth, they had lost their friends, there was but little changed around them besides; they were strangers to youth, but not to society.

Nowadays, a lagger in this world has witnessed the death not only of men, but of ideas: principles, manners, tastes, pleasures, pains, opinions, none of these resemble what he used to know.

He belongs to a race different from that among which he ends his days.

[Sidenote: Old France.

] And yet, O nineteenth-century France, learn to prize that old France which was as good as you.

You will grow old in your turn and you will be accused, as we were accused, of clinging to obsolete ideas.

The men whom you have vanquished are your fathers; do not deny them, you are sprung from their blood.

Had they not been generously faithful to the ancient traditions, you would not have drawn from that native fidelity the energy which has been the cause of your glory in the new traditions: between the old France and the new, all that has happened is a transformation of virtue.

* Near our poor and obscure camp was another which was brilliant and rich.

At the staff, one saw nothing but wagons full of eatables, met with none save cooks, valets, aides-de-camp.

Nothing could have better reproduced the Court and the provinces, the monarchy expiring at Versailles and the monarchy dying on Du Guesclin's heaths.

We had grown to hate the aides-de-camp; whenever there was an engagement outside Thionville, we shouted, "Forward, the aides-de-camp!"

just as the patriots used to shout, "Forward, the officers!"

I felt a chill at my heart when, arriving one dark day in sight of some woods that lined the horizon, we were told that those woods were in France.

To cross the frontier of my country in arms had an effect upon me which I am unable to convey.

I had, as it were, a sort of revelation of the future, inasmuch as I shared none of my comrades' illusions, either with regard to the cause they were supporting or the thoughts of triumph with which they deluded themselves: I was there like Falkland[86] in the army of Charles I. There was not a Knight of the Mancha, sick, lame, wearing a night-cap under his three-cornered beaver, but was most firmly convinced of his ability, unaided, to put fifty young and vigorous patriots to flight.

This honourable and agreeable pride, at another time the source of prodigies, had not attacked me: I did not feel so sure of the strength of my invincible arm.

We reached Thionville unconquered on the 1st of September; for we had met nobody on the road.

The cavalry encamped to the right, the infantry to the left of the high-road running from the town towards Germany.

The fortress was not visible from the camping-ground, but, six hundred paces ahead, one came to the ridge of a hill whence the eye swept the Valley of the Moselle.

The mounted men of the navy joined the right of our infantry to the Austrian corps of the Prince of Waldeck[87], while the left of the infantry was covered by 1800 horse of the Maison-Rouge and Royal German Regiments.

We entrenched our front with a fosse, along which the arms were stalked in line.

The eight Breton companies occupied two intersecting streets of the camp, and below us was dressed the company of the Navarre officers, my former messmates.

When these field-works, which took three days, were completed, Monsieur and the Comte d'Artois arrived; they reconnoitred the place, which was called upon in vain to surrender, although Wimpfen[88] seemed willing to do so.

Like the Grand Condé[89], we had not won the Battle of Rocroi, and so we were not able to capture Thionville; but we were not beaten under its walls, like Feuquières[90].

We took up a position on the high-road, at the end of a village which formed a suburb of the town, outside the horn-work which defended the bridge over the Moselle.

The troops fired at each other from the houses; our post remained in possession of those which it had taken.

I was not present at this first action.

Armand, my cousin, was there and behaved well.

While they were fighting in the village, my company was requisitioned to establish a battery on the skirt of a wood which capped the summit of a hill.

Along the slope of this hill, vineyards ran down to the plain joining the outer fortifications of Thionville.

[Sidenote: The siege of Thionville.

] The engineer directing us made us throw up a gazoned cavalier for our guns; we drew a parallel open trench to place us below the cannon-balls.

These earthworks took long in making, for we were all, young officers and old alike, unaccustomed to wield the mattock and spade.

We had no wheelbarrows and carried the earth in our coats, which we used as sacks.

Fire was opened on us from a lunette; it was the more irksome to us in that we were unable to reply: eight-pounders and a Cohorn howitzer, which was outranged, formed all our artillery.

The first shell we fired fell outside the glacis and aroused the jeers of the garrison.

A few days later, we were joined by some Austrian guns and gunners.

One hundred infantry men and a picket of the naval cavalry were relieved at this battery every twenty-four hours.

The besieged prepared to attack it; we could distinguish a movement on the rampart through the telescope.

When night fell, we saw a column issue through a postern and reach the lunette under shelter of the covert way.

My company was ordered up as a reinforcement.

At daybreak, five or six hundred patriots began operations in the village, on the high-road above the town; then, turning to the left, they came through the vineyards to take our battery in flank.

The sailors charged bravely, but were overthrown and unmasked us.

We were too badly armed to return the fire; we pushed forward with fixed bayonets.

The attacking party retreated, I know not why; had they held their ground, they would have wiped us out.

We had several wounded and a few dead, among others the Chevalier de La Baronnais[91], captain of one of the Breton companies.

I brought him ill-luck: the bullet which took his life ricochetted against the barrel of my musket and struck him with such force as to pierce both his temples; his brains were scattered over my face.

Noble and unnecessary victim of a lost cause!

When the Maréchal d'Aubeterre[92] held the States of Brittany, he went to M. de La Baronnais, the father, a poor nobleman, living at Dinard, near Saint-Malo.

The Marshal, who had begged him to invite nobody, saw, on entering, a table laid for twenty-five, and scolded his host in friendly fashion.

"Monseigneur," said M. de La Baronnais, "I have only my children to dinner."

M.

de La Baronnais had twenty-two boys and a girl, all by the same mother.

The Revolution reaped this rich family harvest before it was ripe.

* Waldeck's Austrian corps began operations.

The attack became livelier on our side.

It was a fine spectacle at night: fire-pots lit up the works of the place covered with soldiers; sudden gleams struck the clouds or the blue firmament when the guns were fired, and the bombs, crossing each other in the air, described a parabola of light.

In the intervals between the reports, one heard drums rolling, gusts of military music, and the voices of the sentries on the ramparts of Thionville and at our own posts; unfortunately, they called out in French in both camps: "_Sentinelles, prenez garde à vous!

_ All's well!"

When the fighting took place, at dawn, it would happen that the lark's morning hymn followed upon the sound of musketry, while the guns, which had ceased firing, silently stared at us, with gaping mouths, through the embrasures.

The song of the bird, recalling the memories of pastoral life, seemed to utter a reproach to mankind.

It was the same when I came across some dead bodies in the middle of fields of lucerne in flower, or by the edge of a stream of water which bathed the hair of the slain.

In the woods, at a few steps from the stress of war, I found little statues of the Saints and the Virgin.

A goat-herd, a neat-herd, a beggar carrying his wallet knelt beside these peace-makers, telling their beads to the distant sound of cannon.

A whole township once came with its minister to present flowers to the patron of a neighbouring parish, whose image dwelt in a wood, opposite a spring.

The curate was blind: a soldier in God's army, he had lost his sight in doing good works, like a grenadier on the battlefield.

The vicar administered communion for his curate, because the latter could not have laid the consecrated wafer upon the lips of the communicants.

During this ceremony, and from the depths of night, he blessed the light!

Our fathers believed that the patrons of the hamlets, John "the Silent[93]," Dominic "Loricatus[94]," James "Intercisus[95]," Paul "the Simple[96]," Basil "the Hermit[97]," and so many others, were no strangers to the triumph of the arms which protect the harvests.

On the very day of the Battle of Bouvines[98], robbers broke into a convent dedicated to St. Germanus[99] at Auxerre, and stole the consecrated vessels.

The sacristan went to the shrine of the blessed bishop and said plaintively: "Germanus, where wert thou when those thieves dared to violate thy sanctuary?"

A voice issuing from the shrine replied: "I was near Cisoing, not far from Bouvines Bridge; together with other saints, I was helping the French and their King, to whom a brilliant victory has been given by our aid: _cui fuit auxilio victoria præstita nostro.

_" * [Sidenote: Fierce fighting.

] We beat the plain and pushed as far as the hamlets lying under the first entrenchments of Thionville.

The village on the high-road crossing the Moselle was constantly being captured and recaptured.

I

took part in two of these assaults.

The patriots abused us as "enemies of liberty," "aristocrats" and "Capet's satellites."

We called them "brigands," "murderers," "traitors" and "revolutionaries."

Sometimes we stopped fighting while a duel took place in the midst of the combatants, who became impartial seconds: O strange French character, which even passions were unable to stifle!

One day, I was on patrol in a vineyard; twenty paces from me was an old sporting nobleman who banged the muzzle of his musket against the vine-stocks, as though to start a hare, and then looked sharply round, in the hope of seeing a "patriot" leap out: every one had brought his own habits with him.

Another day, I went to visit the Austrian camp.

Between the camp and that of the naval cavalry, a wood spread its screen, against which the place was directing an inexpedient fire; the town was shooting too much, it believed us to be more numerous than we were, which explains the pompous bulletins of the commander of Thionville.

While crossing this wood, I saw something move in the grass: a man lay stretched at full length with his nose against the ground, showing only his broad back.

I thought he was wounded: I took him by the nape of the neck and half lifted his head.

He opened a pair of terror-struck eyes and raised himself a little upon his hands.

I burst out laughing: it was my cousin Moreau!

I had not seen him since our visit to Madame de Chastenay.

He had lain flat on his stomach to escape a bomb, and found it impossible to get up again.

I had all the difficulty in the world to set him on his legs; his paunch was three times its former size.

He told me that he was serving on the commissariat, and that he was on his way to offer some oxen to the Prince of Waldeck.

In addition to this, he carried a rosary.

Hugues Métel[100] tells of a wolf which resolved to embrace the monastic condition, but which, failing to accustom itself to the fasting diet, became a canon.

As I returned to camp, an officer of engineers passed close by me, leading his horse by the bridle; a cannon-ball struck the animal in the narrowest part of the neck and cut it right off; the head and neck remained hanging in the officer's hand and dragged him to the ground with their weight.

I had seen a bomb fall in the middle of a ring of naval officers who were sitting eating in a circle.

The mess-platter disappeared; the officers, tumbling head over heels and run, as it were, on a sand-bank, shouted like the old sea captain: "Fire starboard guns, fire larboard guns, fire all guns, fire my wig!"

These singular shots seem to pertain to Thionville.

In 1558, François de Guise[101] laid siege to the place.

Marshal Strozzi[102] was killed, "while talking in the trenches to the aforesaid Sieur de Guise, who had his hand on his shoulder at the time."

* [Sidenote: Market in camp.

] A sort of market had been formed behind our camp.

The peasants had brought octaves of white Moselle wine, which remained on the wagons: the horses were taken out and ate fastened to one end of the cart, while the soldiers drank at the other end.

Here and there gleamed the fires of ovens.

Sausages were fried in pans, hasty puddings boiled in basins, pancakes tossed on iron dishes, puffcakes swollen out on hampers.

Cakes flavoured with aniseed, rye loaves at one sou, maize cakes, green apples, red and white eggs, pipes and tobacco were sold under a tree from whose branches hung coarse cloth great-coats, for which the passers-by haggled.

Village women, seated astride portable stools, milked cows, while each presented his cup to the dairy-woman and waited his turn.

Before the stoves roamed cutlers in smocks and soldiers in uniform.

The canteen-women went about crying aloud in German and French.

There were groups standing, others seated at deal tables planted askew on the uneven ground.

One sought shelter at random under a packing cloth or under branches cut in the forest, as on Palm Sunday.

I believe also that there were weddings in the covered wagons, in memory of the Frankish kings.

The patriots could easily have followed Majorian's[103] example and carried away the bride's chariot: _Rapit esseda victor, nubentemque nurum.

_[104] All sang, laughed, smoked.

The scene was extremely gay at night, between the fires which lit up the earth and the stars shining overhead.

When I was neither on guard at the batteries nor on duty in the tent, I liked supping at the fair.

There the stories of the camp were told again; but under the influence of liquor and good cheer they became much finer.

One of our fellows, a brevet-captain, whose name I have forgotten in that of "Dinarzade" which we gave him, was famous for his yarns; it would have been more correct to say "Scheherazade," but we were not so careful as that.

As soon as we saw him, we ran up to him, fought for him: we vied with each other as to who should have him on his score.

Short of body, long of leg, with sunk cheeks, drooping mustachios, eyebrows forming a comma at the outer angle, a hollow voice, a huge sword in a coffee-coloured scabbard, the carriage of a soldier poet, something between the suicide and the jolly dog, that solemn wag Dinarzade never laughed, and it was impossible to look at him without laughing.

He was the necessary second in all the duels and the lover of all the barmaids.

He viewed all he said on the dark side, and interrupted his recitals only to take a pull at a bottle, relight his pipe, or swallow a sausage.

One night, when it was drizzling, we were seated round the tap of a wine-cask tilted towards us in a cart with its shafts in the air.

A candle stuck on the cask lighted us; a piece of packing-cloth, stretched from the end of the shafts to two posts, served us for a roof.

Dinarzade, with his sword awry after the manner of Frederic II.

, stood between one of the wheels and a horse's crupper, telling a story to our great content.

The canteen-women who brought us our rations stayed with us to listen to our Arab.

The attentive group of bacchantes and Silenuses which formed the chorus accompanied the narrative with marks of its surprise, approval, or disapproval.

"Gentlemen," said the story-teller, "you all knew the Green Knight, who lived in the days of King John[105]?"

Every one said: "Yes, yes."

Dinarzade swallowed down a rolled pancake, burning himself as he did so.

"This Green Knight, gentlemen, as you know, since you have seen him, was very good-looking: when the wind blew back his ruddy locks over his casque, it looked like a twist of tow round a green turban."

The audience: "Bravo!"

[Sidenote: Dinarzade's tales.

] "One evening in May, he sounded his horn at the draw-bridge of a castle in Picardy, or Auvergne, no matter which.

In that castle lived "the Lady of Great Companies."

She welcomed the knight, told her servants to disarm him and lead him to the bath, and came and sat with him at a splendid table; and the pages-in-waiting were mute."

The audience: "Oh, oh!"

"The lady, gentlemen, was tall, flat, lean, and shambling, like the major's wife; otherwise she had plenty of expression and an arch look.

When she laughed and showed her long teeth beneath her stumpy nose, one did not know what one was about.

She fell in love with the knight and the knight with her, although he was afraid of her."

Dinarzade emptied the ashes of his pipe on the rim of the wheel and wanted to refill his cutty; they made him continue: "The Green Knight, utterly dumfoundered, resolved to leave the castle; but, before taking his leave, he asked the lady of the keep for an explanation of many strange things; at the same time he made her an offer of marriage, always provided she was not a witch."

Dinarzade's rapier was planted stiff and straight between his knees.

Seated and leaning forward with our pipes, we made a garland of fire-flakes beneath him, like Saturn's ring.

Suddenly Dinarzade shouted, as though beside himself: "Well, gentlemen, the Lady of Great Companies was Death!"

And the captain, breaking the ranks and shouting "Death!

Death!"

put the canteen-women to flight.

The meeting was closed: the uproar was great, the laughter prolonged.

We approached Thionville amid the roar of the cannon of the place.

* The siege continued, or rather, there was no siege, for the trenches were not opened, and troops were wanting to invest the place regularly.

We reckoned on receiving intelligence, and waited for news of the successes of the Prussian Army or of Clerfayt's[106] Army, with which was the French corps of the Duc de Bourbon.

Our scanty supplies were becoming exhausted; Paris seemed to draw farther away.

The bad weather never ceased; we were flooded in the midst of our works; I sometimes woke in a trench with water up to my neck: the next day, I was a cripple.

Among my fellow-Bretons I had met Ferron de La Sigonnière[107], my old class-fellow at Dinan.

We slept badly under our tent; our heads went beyond the canvas and received the rain from that sort of gutter.

I

would get up and go with Ferron to walk in front of the stacked arms;

for all our evenings were not so gay as those with Dinarzade.

We walked in silence, listening to the voices of the sentries, looking at the lights of our streets of tents as we had formerly watched the lamps in the passages at our college.

We discussed the past and the future, the mistakes that had been made, those that would still be made; we deplored the blindness of our Princes, who imagined that they could return to their country with a handful of adherents and consolidate the crown on their brother's head with the aid of the foreigner.

I remember saying to my friend, in the course of these conversations, that France wished to imitate England, that the King would perish on the scaffold, and that our expedition before Thionville would probably be one of the principal counts in the indictment of Louis XVI.

Ferron was struck by my prophecy: it was the first I ever made.

Since that time, I have made many others quite as true, quite as unheeded: when the accident occurred, the others took shelter and left me to struggle with the misfortune which I had foreseen.

When the Dutch encounter a squall on the open sea, they retreat to the interior of the ship, close the hatches, and drink punch, leaving a dog on deck to bark at the storm;

the danger past, Trust is sent back to his kennel in the hold, and the captain returns to enjoy the fine weather on the quarter-deck.

I have been the Dutch dog of the Legitimist ship.

The memories of my life as a soldier have engraved themselves upon my thoughts; I have related them in the sixth book of the _Martyrs.

_ Armorican barbarian in the Princes' camp as I was, I carried Homer with my sword; I preferred "my country, the poor, small isle of Aaron, to the hundred cities of Crete."

I said with Telemachus: "The harsh country which only feeds goats is dearer to me than those in which horses are reared[108]."

My words would have brought a smile to the lips of the warlike Menelaus: άγάθος Μενἐλαος.

The rumour spread that we were at last coming to action; the Prince of Waldeck was to attempt an assault while we were to cross the river and make a diversion by a feint attack on the place from the French side.

[Sidenote: My company.

] Five Breton companies, including mine, the company of the Picardy and Navarre officers, and the regiment of volunteers, composed of young Lorraine peasants and of deserters from various regiments, were ordered up for duty.

We were to be supported by the Royal Germans, the squadrons of musketeers and the different corps of dragoons which covered our left: my brother was with this cavalry with the Baron de Montboissier, who had married a daughter of M. de Malesherbes, sister to Madame de Rosanbo, and therefore aunt to my sister-in-law.

We escorted three companies of Austrian artillery with heavy guns and a battery of three mortars.

We started at six o'clock in the evening; at ten we crossed the Moselle, above Thionville, on a coppered pontoon bridge: Amæna fluenta Subterlabentis tacito rumore Mosellæ[109].

At daybreak, we were drawn up in order of battle on the left bank, with the heavy cavalry in echelons on both flanks, and the light cavalry in front.

At our second movement, we formed in column and began to defile.

At about nine o'clock, we heard a volley fired on our left.

A carabineer officer came dashing up at full speed to tell us that a detachment of Kellermann's army was about to join issue with us, and that the action had already begun between the skirmishers.

The officer's horse had been struck by a bullet on the forehead; it reared, with the foam streaming from its mouth and the blood from its nostrils: the carabineer, seated sword in hand on this wounded horse, was superb.

The corps which had come out of Metz manœuvred to take us in flank: they had field-pieces with them, whose fire reached our volunteer regiment.

I heard the exclamations of some recruits struck by the cannon-balls; the last cries of youth snatched living from life gave me a feeling of profound pity: I thought of the poor mothers.

The drums beat the charge, and we rushed in disorder upon the enemy.

We came so close that the smoke did not prevent us from seeing the terrible expression on the faces of men ready to shed your blood.

The patriots had not yet acquired the assurance that comes from the long habit of fighting and victory.

Their movements were slack, they felt their way; fifty grenadiers of the Old Guard would have made head against an heterogeneous mass of undisciplined nobles, old and young: ten to twelve hundred foot-soldiers were taken aback by a few gun-shots from the Austrian heavy artillery; they retreated; our cavalry pursued them for two leagues.

A deaf-and-dumb German girl, called Libbe, or Libba, had become attached to my cousin Armand and had followed him.

I found her sitting on the grass, which stained her dress with blood: her elbow rested on her upturned knees; her hand, passed through her tangled yellow tresses, supported her head.

She wept as she looked at three or four killed men, new deaf-mutes, lying around her.

She had not heard the clap of the thunderbolts of which she saw the effect, nor could she hear the sighs which escaped her lips when she looked at Armand; she had never heard the sound of the voice of him she loved, and she would not hear the first cry of the child she bore in her womb: if the grave contained only silence, she would not know that she had sunk into it.

For that matter, fields of slaughter lie on every hand: in the Eastern Cemetery[110] in Paris, twenty-seven thousand tombstones, two hundred and thirty thousand corpses, will show you the extent of the battle which death wages day and night at your doors.

[Sidenote: The assault of Thionville.

] After a somewhat long halt, we resumed our march, and arrived under the walls of Thionville at nightfall.

The drums did not beat; the word of command was given in a whisper.

The cavalry, in order to repulse any sortie, stole along the roads and hedges to the gate which we were to cannonade.

The Austrian artillery, protected by our infantry, took up a position at fifty yards from the advanced works, behind a hastily thrown-up epaulement of gabions.

At one o'clock on the morning of the 1st of September, a rocket, sent up from the Prince of Waldeck's camp on the other side of the place, gave the signal.

The Prince commenced a smart fire, to which the town made a vigorous reply.

We began to fire forthwith.

The besieged, not thinking that we had troops on that side, and not foreseeing this assault, had left the southern ramparts unprotected; we did not lose for waiting: the garrison armed a double battery, which penetrated our epaulements and dismounted two of our guns.

The sky was aflame; we were shrouded in torrents of smoke.

I behaved like a little Alexander: weakened by fatigue, I fell sound asleep, almost under the wheels of the gun-carriage where I was on guard.

A shell, bursting six inches off the ground, sent a splinter into my right thigh.

I awoke with the shock, but felt no pain, and perceived only by my blood that I was wounded.

I bound up my thigh with my hand-kerchief.

In the affair on the plain, two bullets had struck my knapsack during a wheeling movement.

_Atala_, like a devoted daughter, placed herself between her father and the lead of the enemy: she had still to withstand the fire of the Abbé Morellet[111].

At four o'clock in the morning, the Prince of Waldeck's fire ceased: we thought the town had surrendered; but the gates were not opened, and we had to think of retiring.

We returned to our positions, after a tiring march of three days.

The Prince of Waldeck had gone as far as the edge of the ditches, which he had tried to cross, hoping to bring about a surrender by means of the simultaneous attack: divisions were still supposed to exist in the town, and we flattered ourselves that the Royalist party would bring the keys to the Princes.

The Austrians, having fired in barbette, lost a considerable number of men; the Prince of Waldeck had an arm shot off.

While a few drops of blood flowed under the walls of Thionville, blood was flowing in torrents in the prisons of Paris: my wife and sisters were in greater danger than I. * We raised the siege of Thionville and set out for Verdun, which had been restored to the Allies on the 2nd of September.

Longwy, the birthplace of François de Mercy[112], had fallen on the 23rd of August.

Wreaths and festoons of flowers bore evidence on every side of the passage of Frederic William.

Among the peaceful trophies, I observed the Prussian Eagle affixed to Vauban's[113] fortifications: it was not to stay there long; as to the flowers, they were soon to see the innocent creatures who had gathered them fade away like themselves.

One of the most atrocious murders of the Terror was that of the young girls of Verdun.

"Fourteen young girls of Verdun," says Riouffe[114], "of unexampled purity, who had the air of young virgins decked for a public festival, were led together to the scaffold.

They disappeared suddenly and were gathered in their springtime; the 'Court of Women,' on the morrow of their death, looked like a garden-plot stripped of its flowers by a storm.

Never have I witnessed such despair as that which this act of barbarity excited among us."

Verdun is famous for its female sacrifices.

According to Gregory of Tours[115], Deuteric, to protect his daughter from the prosecution of Theodebert[116], placed her in a cart drawn by two untamed oxen and had her flung into the Meuse.

The instigator of the massacre of the young girls of Verdun was the regicide poetaster Pons de Verdun[117], who was infuriated against his native city.

The number of agents of the Terror supplied by the _Almanach des Muses_ is incredible; the unsatisfied vanity of the mediocrities produced as many revolutionaries as the wounded pride of the cripples and abortions: a revolt analogous to that of the infirmities of mind and body.

Pons attached the point of a dagger to his blunt epigrams.

Faithful, as it seemed, to the traditions of Greece, the poet was willing to offer none save the blood of virgins to his gods: for the Convention decreed, on his motion, that no woman with child could be put on her trial.

He also caused the sentence to be annulled condemning Madame de Bonchamps to death, the widow of the celebrated Vendean general[118].

Alas, we Royalists in the train of the Princes attained the reverses of the Vendée without passing through its glory!

We had not at Verdun, to pass the time, "that famous Comtesse de Saint-Balmont[119], who laid aside her female apparel, mounted on horseback, and herself served as an escort to the ladies who accompanied her or whom she had left in her chariot..."

We had no passion for "old Gallic," nor did we write "notes in the language of Amadis[120]."

The Prussian evil[121] communicated itself to our little army: I caught it.

Our cavalry had gone to join Frederic William at Valmy.

We knew nothing of what was happening, and were hourly expecting the order to march forward: we received the order to beat a retreat.

[Sidenote: I am weakened by my wound.

] Very greatly weakened, and prevented by my troublesome wound from walking without pain, I dragged myself as best I could in the wake of my company, which soon dispersed.

Jean Balue[122], son of a miller at Verdun, left his father's house at a very early age with a monk, who burdened him with his wallet.

On leaving Verdun, "Ford Hill" according to Saumaise[123], _ver dunum_, I carried the wallet of the Monarchy, but I did not become Comptroller of Finance, nor a bishop or cardinal.

If, in the novels which I have written, I have drawn upon my own history, in the histories which I have told I have placed memories of the living history in which I took part.

Thus, in my life of the Duc de Berry[124], I described some of the scenes which took place before my eyes: "When an army is disbanded, it returns to its homes; but had the soldiers of Condé's Army any homes?

Whither was the stick to lead them which they were hardly permitted to cut in the forests of Germany, after laying down the musket which they had taken up in defense of their King?...

"The time had come to part.

The brothers-in-arms bade each other a last farewell, and took different roads on earth.

All, before setting out, went to salute their father and captain, white-haired old Condé: the patriarch of glory gave his blessing to his children, wept over his dispersed tribe, and saw the tents of his camp fall with the grief of a man witnessing the destruction of his ancestral roof[125]."

Less than twenty years later, the leader of the new French Army, Bonaparte, also took leave of his companions: so quickly do men and empires pass, so little does the most extraordinary renown save one from the most common destiny!

We left Verdun.

The rains had broken up the roads; everywhere one saw ammunition-wagons, gun-carriages, cannon stuck in the mire, chariots overturned, cutler-women with their children on their backs, soldiers dying or dead in the mud.

Crossing a ploughed field, I sank down to my knees; Ferron and another comrade dragged me out despite myself: I begged them to leave me there; I had rather died.

On the 16th of October, at the camp near Longwy, the captain of my company, M. de Goyon-Miniac, handed me a very honourable certificate.

At Arlon, we saw a file of wagons with their teams on the high-road: the horses, some standing, others kneeling down, others with their noses on the ground, were dead, and their bodies had grown stiff between the shafts: it was as though one saw the shades of a battlefield bivouacking on the shores of Styx.

Ferron asked me what I meant to do, and I answered that, if I could go as far as Ostend, I would take ship for Jersey, where I should find my uncle de Bedée; from there I should be able to join the Royalists in Brittany.

[Sidenote: And catch the smallpox.

] The fever was sapping my strength; I could only with difficulty support myself on my swollen thigh.

I felt a new ailment lay hold of me.

After twenty-four hours' vomiting, my face and body were covered with an eruption: confluent smallpox broke out; it appeared to be affected by the temperature of the air.

In this condition, I set out on foot to make a journey of two hundred leagues, rich as I was to the extent of eighteen livres Tournois: all this for the greater glory of the Monarchy.

Ferron, who had lent me my six small crowns of three francs, left me, he having arranged to be met in Luxembourg.

* As I was leaving Arlon, a peasant took me up in his cart for the sum of four sous, and put me down five leagues farther on a heap of stones.

I

hopped a few paces with the aid of my crutch, and washed the bandage round my scratch, which had developed into a sore, in a spring rustling by the roadside, which did me a great deal of good.

The smallpox had come quite out, and I felt relieved.

I had not abandoned my knapsack, the straps of which cut my shoulders.

I spent that first night in a barn, and had nothing to eat.

The wife of the farmer who owned the barn refused payment for my lodging.

At daybreak she brought me a great basin of coffee and milk, with a black loaf which I thought excellent.

I resumed my road quite merrily, although I often fell.

I was joined by four or five of my comrades, who carried my knapsack; they were also very ill.

We met villagers;

by taking cart after cart we covered a sufficient distance in the Ardennes, in five days, to reach Attert, Flamizoul, and Bellevue.

On the sixth day I found myself alone.

My smallpox had grown paler and was less puffy.

After walking two leagues, which took me six hours, I saw a gipsy family encamped behind a ditch around a furze fire, with two goats and a donkey.

I had no sooner reached them than I let myself drop to the ground, and the strange creatures hastened to succour me.