London, April to September 1822
WE RAISED the siege of Thionville and left for Verdun, which had surrendered to our allies on September 2. Longwy, the birthplace of François de Mercy, had fallen on August 23. Wreaths and flowers everywhere attested to the passage of Frederick William.
High above these trophies of peace, I observed the Prussian eagle affixed to the fortifications of Vauban: it was not to remain there long. As for the flowers, they were soon to see the innocent creatures who had gathered them fade like themselves. One of the most atrocious murders of the Terror was the murder of the young girls of Verdun.
“Fourteen young girls of Verdun,” writes Riouffe, “of unparalleled purity, and with the look of young virgins bedecked for a festival, were led together to the scaffold. They disappeared suddenly and were harvested in their springtime; the Cour des Femmes, the morning after their death, had the air of a garden deflowered by a storm. I have never seen among us such despair as that which followed this barbarous act.”[38]
Verdun is famous for its female sacrifices. According to Gregory of Tours, Deuteric, wishing to protect his daughter from the persecutions of Théodebert I, put her in a tumbrel drawn by two untamed oxen and had her thrown into the Meuse. The instigator of the massacre of the young girls of Verdun was the regicidal poetaster Pons de Verdun, who showed himself ruthless toward his native town. That the Almanach des Muses furnished so many agents of the Terror is incredible. The wounded vanity of mediocre men produced as many revolutionaries as the wounded pride of legless cripples and runts: a revolting parallel between infirmities of the mind and those of the body. Pons signed his dull epigrams with the point of a dagger. Apparently faithful to the traditions of Greece, the poet wanted to offer only the blood of virgins to his gods: for the Convention decreed, on his account, that no pregnant woman could be put on trial. He was also responsible for annulling the sentence that had condemned to death Madame de Bonchamp, the widow of the famous Vendean general. Alas! We Royalists in the train of the Princes have all now reached the far side of the Vendée, but without having gone through its glory.[39]
We had nothing in Verdun to pass the time. We found no “famous Comtesse de Saint-Balmon, who, having cast aside female dress, mounted a horse and served as an escort to the ladies in her coach. . . .” We felt no passion for the “Old Gauls,” and we did not write each other “notes in the language of Amadis” (Arnauld).[40]
The Prussian malady was spreading through our little army, and I was soon stricken.[41] Our cavalry had gone to join Frederick William at Valmy. We had no idea what was transpiring. We were expecting an order to advance at any moment. Eventually, we received an order to retreat.
Sapped of strength, and with my troublesome wound making it impossible for me to walk without pain, I hobbled as best I could behind my company, which soon disbanded. Jean Balue, a miller son’s from Verdun, was taken from his father’s house at a very young age by a monk who made him carry his sack. On leaving Verdun, the “hill of the ford” according to Saumaise (ver dunum), I was carrying the sack of the monarchy; but I never did manage to become a comptroller of finances, a bishop, or a cardinal.[42]
If, in the novels I have written, I have sometimes drawn on my own history, so in the histories I have written have I sometimes drawn on memories of the living history in which I played a part. Thus, in my life of the Duc de Berry, I have sketched some of the scenes that I witnessed with my own eyes:
When an army is dismissed, the men return to their hearths; but where were the hearths of Condé’s soldiers? Where would they be led by those walking sticks, which they had hardly had time to cut from the German woods, now that they had laid down the muskets that they had taken up to defend their King?. . . .
They had to go their separate ways. Brothers-in-arms said their last goodbyes and set out to follow different paths over the earth. All went, before they departed, to salute their father and their captain, the white-haired Condé, the old patriarch of glory, who gave his blessing to his children, and wept over his scattered tribe, and watched the tents of his camp dismantled with all the sadness of a man who sees his father’s house crumbling into rubble.
Less than twenty years later, Bonaparte, the leader of yet another French army, would also say farewell to his companions.—So many men and empires, so swiftly passing! Not even the most extraordinary fame is safe from the most ordinary destiny.
We left Verdun. Heavy rains had wrecked the roads. Everywhere we saw wagons, gun carriages, cannon enmired, carts overturned, provisioners carrying their children on their backs, soldiers dead or dying in the mud. Crossing a plowed field, I sank into clay up to my knees. Ferron and another of my comrades dragged me out despite my protests: I was begging them to leave me there. I wanted to die.
On October 16, in a camp near Longwy, the captain of my company, M. de Goyon-Miniac, handed me a certificate of very honorable discharge. In Arlon, we saw a line of hitched wagons on the highway. The horses, some standing, some kneeling, others fallen facedown in the mud, were all dead, and their corpses had gone rigid between the shafts. You might have said they were the ghosts of a battle, bivouacking on the bank of the Styx. Ferron asked me what I intended to do, and I replied, “If I can get to Ostend, I shall sail for Jersey and find my uncle de Bedée. There I should be able to join the Royalists in Brittany.”
The fever was taking its toll. It caused me great pain to hold myself upright on my swollen thigh. Then I felt myself seized by another sickness. After twenty-four hours of vomiting, an eruption broke out over my face and body: an attack of confluent smallpox,[43] which came and went according to changes in the air. In this condition, I set out on foot to make a journey of two hundred leagues, enriched by eighteen livres tournois: all this for the greater glory of the monarchy. Ferron, who had lent me these six small coins worth three francs each, was expected in Luxembourg. And so he left me.