The terrible winter slowly passed. The condition within the walls was most frightful. But it was not yet hopeless. The aristocrats, the leaders, suffered the most, but they suffered with white faces and resolute hearts, and in silence. Their courage still intimidated the people, and shame was still strong among them.
Then, on a certain day, when the spring winds blew softly, and the fields beyond the towers and the walls were green and shimmering as new emeralds, when gulls flew with the sunlight on their wings over the harbor, a feeble shout from the heart rose from the watchers of the sea.
For, in the distance, the thronging white sails of the English could be seen, approaching the desperate city. Fifty sails there were, strong, smooth and serene, seeming to touch the distant clouds that floated through the polished young sky. They cast their shadows on the opalescent sea. The gulls wheeled about them, like the doves of heavenly messengers. They came under the direction of Denbigh, the brother-in-law of the assassinated Buckingham.
Of the more than twenty-five thousand inhabitants of La Rochelle, ten thousand of the weak, the old, the women and the children, had died of starvation and misery and disease. The winds and clouds and storms of winter, the hunger and hopelessness, had lain in the streets like a poisonous fog, stifling and strangling. Grief and agony had resounded in every house. But, with the coming of the English—the blessed English!—joy awoke again with irresistible brilliance, and the streets became alive with singing, weeping, rejoicing crowds. Now, they were to be rescued! Now the troops and the priests of the foul Catholics, the murderers, were to be routed, driven away! God had prevailed.
Thousands crowded the battlements like skeleton birds. Thousands of famished and sinking faces, radiant with joy, turned seawards. Inexorably, the English approached. Then, the ships appeared to move no more. They stood like a bowing tall barrier near the harbor, the sinking sun red on their upper sails, the last light sparkling on metal and on the wet and glistening hulls. Triumphant pennants streamed in the breeze. But they did not come on, though they crowded the sea.
“Tomorrow,” said the Rochellais, “they will attack, and deliver us.”
They went to bed, gnawed by terrible hunger, but their hearts uplifted.
The watchers remained at their posts all night, their eyes fixed without rest on the ships. They could hear the far and distant sounds of those on the ships. They could hear the wind rushing between the fairy sails. They could hear the plunging of the anchored keels, the shriek of ropes. They could see the glittering restless lights, and they could just catch the thin brilliant notes of trumpets.
The night passed. Then, one by one, the watchers began to blink. Where were the lights? Were their eyes too strained? Had they become blind? Only darkness now rested on the ocean, profound and smothering. Now there was no sound. No man dared speak to his neighbor of what he discerned, lest a wild scream of agony arise from him. Oh, it was only that the English—the clever unpredictable English!—had extinguished their lights in order that their nearer approach to the harbor might be concealed. It was a narrow channel, that, between the curve of the harbor and the mole! They must slip between them, dark and unseen. At dawn, they would be within the harbor, beyond the mole!
The dawn came, gray and floating, as unreal as a dream. And then the watches saw that the ocean was empty. The English had fled.
No man spoke. No man looked at his neighbor. But they gazed out upon the sea with dead eyes. There was no question in their hearts, no asking if the English had found it impossible to enter the harbor. It was enough that they had gone, that La Rochelle was doomed, that the English had taken with them the souls and the courage, the hope and the faith, of Frenchmen, of a whole continent, of dedicated men and heroic hearts. They had taken with them, in their fault, or their lack of fault, the banners of freedom and peace. A world had gone down in the wake of their fleeing ships. For countless generations, for centuries, that world would be submerged, its lights drowned, its banners lost, its brave spirits mute and sleeping. They had taken with them all reason, all the hope of deliverance, all the ghosts of noble men who had died in the ruck of centuries that other men might be free. They had taken the shades of Luther, of Huss, of Erasmus, of Knox and Calvin, and those shades were dumb and weeping. The flags of freedom were gone, and there was only the scarlet dawn presaging a thousand thousand scarlet dawns of slavery and death and blood, of hatred and fury.
There was no need for the watchers to descend and inform the city. While they stood there, like statues of frozen snow, the city knew.
No sound arose from the cobbled streets, from the houses. There was no word. There was no outcry of denunciation or despair. There was only the staring of dead faces, the feeble touch of dying hands.
The siege continued. The dying dropped in the streets. Children wailing for food were suddenly strangled by a merciful death. Now the spring storms came, beating over the silent and deserted city. Hundreds thronged to the churches, but they could not pray. They could only kneel there, with bent heads and hanging hands, their lightless eyes fixed unseeingly on the stones beneath their knees.
The old Duchesse, as indomitable as ever, but with her old face sunken and gray, summoned the Mayor. She sat in her gaunt splendor before her empty fireplace, and looked at him with eyes that still glowed.
“My dear Guiton,” she said, her voice still clear but very feeble, “we must do something for the children, for the weaker women.”
He inclined his head. He was almost beyond speech, so famished was he.
“Open the gates sufficiently for some hundreds of them to leave. The Cardinal will be merciful. He will feed them. And just now,” she added wryly, “food is more important than freedom, to these poor bewildered ones.”
Her heart, always so cold and majestic, was touched by the sufferings of the anonymous people, as it had never been touched before. She, like the Cardinal, had had to revise much of her former convictions.
“I will ask them,” said the Mayor, hoarsely. “Perhaps they will not desire to leave.”
The Duchesse smiled darkly. “They will,” she said.
So, within a week, over six hundred women and children received the last kisses of their weeping husbands and fathers, and the gates were opened.
Now hell itself must have been plotting. The Cardinal had had a very bad night. He was sleeping late. He knew nothing of this exodus. But the priests knew. They gave their orders. The women and the children, ragged, fainting, staggering, accompanied by their old men, crept through the gates between the lines of the silent troops. The women carried their babes in their arms, and other of their children unable to walk. They passed through the lines of troops, their haggard faces searching for one eye of pity and compassion, one eye of mercy. But they saw only burly redcheeked men with lifted pikes and swords and ready muskets.
The last of that most dolorous procession trickled through the gates. A promise of mercy had been given under a flag of truce, a promise of gentle Christian succor. Ah, but the priests had promised everything!
The gates, groaning and creaking, closed. The procession went farther from the gates.
Then, at a given signal from some horrible creature in the robes of religion, the troopers fell upon those hundreds of women, girls, babes and old men and massacred them in swift and frightful silence. They did not bleed much, as they fell, with one last sigh, one last groan, one last lifting of skeleton hands. There was not much blood left in their tortured bodies. The corpses were piled up, like tossed fragments of wood and cloth. Babe after babe died in its mother’s clinging arms. Between the trenches and the walls they died silently, old men collapsing on new life, the hair of women mingling, face crushed into face, empty body seeming to dissolve into other empty bodies, staring eye fixed into staring eye.
The sun, bright and gay in its springtime splendor, looked down on that dreadful and piteous scene. The arms of the Christian murderers rose and fell, until they were exhausted, and their swords ran with red rivers. Only those faint sighs and groans, and the occasional firing of a musket when sword-arm could no longer be lifted strongly, had broken the morning calm.
The Church had been triumphant! Let the Te Deum now sound from every gilt and scarlet church! Let Rome rejoice! The helpless and the innocent, reason and enlightenment, had suffered another death, another assassination! The tide of liberation had been forced to retreat once more into the dark and formless future. The sleeping ages still slept in the womb of time, awaiting the avenging hour, awaiting the foolish voices who would declare; “But that was long ago!” Awaiting the form and the substance of heroic men who knew that tyranny and hatred never slept, and watched only for the hour to arise again.
The Cardinal, when he awoke at noon, was appraised of what had taken place by the Capuchin, Père Joseph. He went mad. He was beside himself. He raved like an insane man. Then, he became very calm and cold, and the Capuchin rejoiced that at last reason had returned to his friend. He was none too easy, himself. He was angered that he had not been consulted, but that his subordinates had perpetrated this thing. Nevertheless, the Church must not be attacked, nor denounced.
There was a fatal light in the Cardinal’s eye, which the Capuchin, in his relief, did not discern.
The Cardinal called the officers and questioned them in a quiet voice. He gave his commands, over the protestations of the sickened commanders, who had declared that orders had been given the troops without their knowledge. It had been the priests—
That night, at sundown, one hundred of the murderers were ruthlessly selected and shot against the very walls of La Rochelle. The agonized defenders heard those shots, the sounds of the vengeance done in the name of their murdered loved ones. They paused in their weeping long enough to listen. They did not know that the Cardinal had forbidden the administering of the last sacrament to the executed, that the priests smoldered in their huts and whispered among each other, that the Cardinal witnessed the executions with a fierce and contorted face. They did not rejoice at these deaths. Their anguish was too great.
“Your priests,” said the Cardinal to Père Joseph, in a tone which had never been addressed to him before, “are guilty of the deaths of the murdered and the murderers. Nevertheless, it is apparently impossible to punish them. Let them be happy, therefore—for it may not be long.”
“I do not know you in this mood,” said Père Joseph, sternly.
The Cardinal lifted his unfathomable and peculiar eyes to the other’s russet face, and they were very calm. “You never knew me, Joseph,” he replied.
He sent his own Captain, Bassompierre, alone, to the gates of La Rochelle, with a message for the Duchesse. “I weep with you, my dear old friend,” he had written. “Hold it not against my soul in the final judgment, that I have approved or ordered this thing.”
The Duchesse, sitting alone that night, held the note in her hand. She had never wept since her early childhood, not even at the deaths of those she dearly loved. She did not weep now, though her heart was like a wound, for she had already wept too much that day.
That day, she had ridden slowly through the desolate streets in her great gilt carriage. At every door where she saw the signs of mourning, she alighted, and without the assistance of footman or friend, she entered each house, her tiny majestic figure erect and quiet. She went in through the door like any humble townwoman, offering no platitudes, no exhortations, no pious consolations, no urgings to courage. She had stood with the mourners and had mingled her tears with theirs, in silence. “I have nothing to give you but my tears,’ she had said, over and over, in the final moments. Had the Cardinal heard this, he would have started, remembering another whom he could not console but with whom he could only weep.
The people received her apathetically at first, instinctively shrinking away from the expected words of noble hypocrisy. But when she merely extended her hands, and her tears ran down her face, they crept about her, knowing that she suffered as they suffered. She saw their pathetic faces. But where she had once seen slyness, fear and stupidity, she now saw the courage that only death can bring, a simple courage so noble that it broke her heart and inspired her soul.
Now she sat with the Cardinal’s note in her cold withered fingers, and looked at her cold fireplace. That haughty and imperial face was old and softened. There was a knock on her door, and her friend, Alphonse Champaigne, entered, a strong short man, once burly, but now completely emaciated. There were furrows on the face from the tears he had been shedding for his adored mistress. He knelt before her, and laid his clasped hands on her knees, imploringly.
“Madame la Duchesse,” he said, in his weak and failing voice, “I beg you to flee, either seaward where small boats may still make their passage, or landward, to the Cardinal who is your friend. He will receive you with kindness. Flee, before it is too late, and you have died with us.”
The Duchesse did not speak. Her expression did not change. In his fear, he began to speak with rising passion:
“Why does Madame remain? Who will be grateful? The canaille who would betray her eagerly, if it would save their cattle-hides? The canaille who would leave her to starve, so long as they had a crust of bread to satisfy their bellies? The canaille, who are the natural enemies of such as Madame? Who bear a natural hatred for her, and would destroy her for a centime? What loyalty does Madame hold to these? She has always despised them, with justification. Surely Madame will not remain with them?”
So weak from hunger and grief was she, that it took almost superhuman strength for her to turn her old stately head and speak to him, very gently, but absently:
“I have changed my mind.”
The man was astonished. He felt that she hardly addressed these words to him, but to herself. He wrinkled his exhausted brow.
“Then Madame has contemplated fleeing? I did not know this! But I rejoice. Let Madame consider again.”
But she only repeated: “I have changed my mind.”
This seemed heroic sacrifice to him. He did not comprehend.
Later, the fat, well-fed and sleek Feuquieres begged admittance to her to offer his condolences. She received him with a rigid but punctilious courtesy, as befitted one aristocrat to another. But strangely, as she looked at him, after he had sought permission to sit near her, her face changed as if with astounded horror and revelation. He, too, after she had listened to his condolences in silence, implored her to flee, to go to the Cardinal.
Then he saw a mysterious thing happen to that imperious countenance. It became the face of an old peasant woman, acquainted with the fields, acquainted with hunger and suffering and long patience. It was no longer the face and the eyes of the Duchesse de Rohan that were turned to him.
“Why should I flee?” she asked, and even the intonations of her voice had changed. “My sisters and my brothers cannot flee.”
After a long embarrassed moment of confusion, he offered to supply her with the rich viands of his own table, which were sent to him by the Cardinal. Now her eye lighted. “Bring me as much as you can spare,” she said. “My people are hungry. They are starving.”
He was not affronted, for he had seen her face. Huge baskets of food were brought three times a day to the Hôtel de Rohan, and the Duchesse took only a morsel. The rest was distributed among the people. The Cardinal remarked to Père Joseph that Feuquières seemed to have developed an enormous appetite lately. “Probably from comparison,” he said, wryly. “He demands enough for ten men.”
But as the summer wheeled towards winter, scores, hundreds, of the Rochellais died of starvation and disease in the streets and houses of the city. The animals of the city, the donkeys, the dogs, the cats, the horses, the doves, had long ago been devoured. The people ate rats when they could catch them. They stripped the trees of their green leaves; they dug up the grass that grew in the gutters, in the squares, between the paving stones. They boiled leather, harnesses and hats and belts. They picked among offal for scraps.
If possible, those of the Duchesse’s household, and her friends, ate less than the people themselves. Their misery was indescribable. But they did not complain, as the simpler people complained. They came to her table, to dine off gilt and silver plate on which reposed stews of grass, leaves, mice and rats, resplendently dressed as always, punctilious in their courtesy, deep in their bows, witty in their jests. Never had Madame’s remarks and epigrams been so dry and devastating, for she was of the old and noble Lusignan blood. The people were brave, but they whimpered. The Duchesse and her friends were brave. And they never whimpered. They might be too weak even for a laugh, and only smiled. Their bodies might be so shrunken and emaciated that their rich and splendid garments hung on them like clothing draped on sticks. Their voices might not be able to rise above a whisper. But they remained gallant and composed, if they had only a twinkle of a sunken eye to answer the Duchesse’s quips and naughty remarks.
Now only half of the Rochellais remained alive. The Duchesse visited them on foot. Her horses had been eaten by the people, the harness boiled. She walked proudly, even if she staggered, and had to support herself by touching the adjacent walls. But she visited constantly. If she had no smiles left for her friends, she had them for her people.
“Though we die,” she said to her household, “the world shall not forget this siege. It will remember. It will remember the enemy, and be fortified against him.”
Now more broadsheets were distributed among the Rochellais by the Catholics, and they had a genuine note of distress in them. “Frenchmen!” they implored. “Surrender. Our hearts are breaking for you. The massacre of your innocents was done by those already punished by our own hands. This shall not happen again. Open your gates to our bread, meat and wine, and your friends. We swear by all that is holy to us that we shall treat you only as brothers, and that nothing shall be taken from you but much given.”
The Duchesse read these broadsheets with darkened eyes and heavy heart. She went among the people. She would have had no blame for them, but only a sigh, if they were wavering, if they desired to surrender. But to her amazement, and her broken-hearted tears, she saw only fortitude, only resolution, in those dying and skeleton faces. They touched her garments, these fainting people, and gazed at her humbly. She returned to her hôtel, and broke into a wild storm of weeping. She fell on her knees. She dropped her old white head to the rich rug on her floors. She whispered: “Forgive me!”
But those who heard, in silence and astonishment, did not know for what she implored forgiveness.