London, April to September 1822
NEXT TO our indigent and obscure camp there was another camp, brilliant and rich. Around the headquarters, one saw a crowd of wagons loaded with victuals and a mob of cooks, footmen, and aides-de-camp. Nothing could have better represented the Court and the provinces: the monarchy that perished at Versailles and the monarchy that died on Du Guesclin’s heaths. The aides-de-camp had become odious to us. When there was a skirmish near Thionville, we shouted, “Forward, aides-de-camp!” as the patriots shouted, “Forward, officers!”
I felt my heart grow heavy when, one gloomy day, we came in sight of some woods that lined the horizon and were told these woods were France. Crossing the border of my own country with a musket in my hand had an indescribable effect on me: I had a kind of revelation of things to come, the more so since I did not share my comrades’ illusions, either about the cause they were supporting, or about the triumphal dreams with which they deluded themselves. I was like Falkland in the army of Charles I.[27] There was not one Knight of La Mancha, sick, lame, and sporting a nightcap beneath his beaver-skin tricorn, who didn’t firmly believe himself capable of putting to flight, all by himself, at least fifty vigorous young patriots. Such honorable and amusing pride, the source of prodigious feats in another era, never afflicted me: I did not feel so persuaded of the power of my invincible arm.
We clattered into Thionville on September 1 undefeated, for we had encountered no one on our way. The cavalry camped on the right and the infantry on the left of the highway that ran from the heart of town to the German border. From this campsite we could not quite see the fortress, but six hundred paces away, on the crest of a hill, the eye plunged down into the Moselle River Valley. The mounted marines linked the right flank of our infantry to the Prince of Waldeck’s Austrian corps, and the left flank of this same infantry was covered by eighteen hundred horsemen of the Maison-Rouge and the Royal German Regiments. We dug a trench in front of our position along which we arranged our weapons stacks. The eight Breton companies occupied two cross-streets of camp, and below us were my old comrades, the officers of Navarre.
When, after three days, our labors were finished, Monsieur and the Comte d’Artois arrived. They reconnoitered the place, which was called to surrender in vain, although Wimpffen did seem inclined to yield it.[28] We would not win the Battle of Rocroi, like the Great Condé, and therefore we could not capture Thionville; but we were at least not defeated beneath its walls, like Feuquières.[29] We took up a position on the public road above a village that served as a suburb of town and beyond the outworks that defended the bridge over the Moselle. Shots were fired from house to house. Our post kept possession of what it had taken. I myself was not present at this first engagement, but my cousin Armand took part and conducted himself bravely. My company, during this skirmish in the suburbs, was ordered to build a battery at the edge of the woods that crowned the summit of a hill. Vineyards wound down the slope of this hill all the way to the plains that bordered the outer fortifications of Thionville.
The engineer who oversaw our labors made us raise a sod-covered mound on which to mount our guns. Then, in a parallel line, we dug an open trench to place us below the range of bullets and balls. The digging went slowly, for none of us, young or old, was used to the weight of mattocks and shovels. Without wheelbarrows, we had to carry the earth in our coats, which we used as sacks. Shots were fired from a lunette, which inconvenienced us all the more since we could not return fire: two eight-pound cannon and a Cohorn howitzer with a range too short to do any good formed the whole of our artillery. The first shell we launched from the Cohorn fell short even of the glacis and prompted derisive howls from the garrison. A few days later, the Austrian guns and gunners arrived. A hundred infantrymen and a picket of mounted marines relieved the battery every twenty-four hours. The besieged were preparing to counterattack. Through the telescope, we observed some activity on the ramparts. At nightfall a column marched, under the protection of a covered passage, from one of the posterns to a position behind the lunette. My company was ordered to reinforce the battery. At daybreak five or six hundred patriots launched an attack on the village from the highway above town; then, turning to the left, they crossed the vineyards and took our battery in flank. The mounted marines charged bravely, but they were routed and this left us vulnerable. We were still too poorly armed to return fire, and so we marched forward with bayonets drawn. For whatever reason, the assailants retreated. If they had kept on, they would have smashed us.
We suffered several wounded and a few dead, among them the Chevalier de La Baronnais, the captain of one of the Breton companies. I brought him bad luck. The bullet that robbed him of his life had ricocheted off the barrel of my rifle and struck him with such force that it pierced both his temples; his brains sprayed me in the face. What a useless, noble victim of a lost cause! When Marshal d’Aubeterre traveled to the Estates of Brittany, he lodged at the house of M. de La Baronnais, the dead man’s father, a poor gentleman who lived in Dinard, near Saint-Malo. The Marshal, who had implored him not to invite anyone, entered the house and, seeing the table set with twenty-five covers, gently reproached his host. “But Monseigneur,” said M. de La Baronnais, “I have invited only my children.” M. de La Baronnais had twenty-two sons and one daughter, all by the same mother. The Revolution mowed this rich family harvest before it had time to ripen.