London, April to September 1822
THE SIEGE continued, or rather there was no siege, for we dug no trenches and did not have enough troops to blockade the place. We counted on intelligence and waited for news of the Prussian Army or the Army of Clairfayt, who had with them the French corps led by the Duc de Bourbon. Our meager resources were almost exhausted, and Paris seemed to be getting further and further away. The foul weather was never-ending, and we were inundated as we worked. Several times I woke in a ditch in water up to my neck, and the next day I hobbled around camp like a cripple.
Among my fellow Bretons, I had met Ferron de la Sigonière, my old classmate at Dinan. At night we tossed and turned in our shared tent; our heads, sticking out from beneath the canvas, were drummed with rain as though beneath the spout of a gutter. Often, I used to get up and pace back and forth with Ferron before the weapons stacks, for all our nights were not as cheerful as those we spent listening to Dinazarde. We walked in silence, listening to the voices of the sentries, gazing off at the lights along the streets formed by our tents as we had once gazed at the lamps that ranged along the hallways of our school. We talked of the past and the future, the errors that we had committed and the errors that we might yet commit. We lamented the blindness of the princes who believed that they would return to their country with a handful of servants and, fortified by foreign arms, place the crown back upon their brother’s head. I remember saying to my friend, in the course of these conversations, that France would like to imitate England, that the King would die on the scaffold, and that our maneuvers in Thionville would probably form one of the principal counts against Louis XVI. Ferron was struck by my predictions, which were the first I ever made. Since that time I have made many others just as true and which have gone just as unheeded. Catastrophe comes and everyone takes shelter, abandoning me to grapple with the misfortune I alone had foreseen. When the Dutch are tossed by a high gale on the open sea, they go down to the ship’s cabins and drink punch, leaving a dog on deck to howl at the storm. Once the danger has passed, they send Fido back to his kennel in the hold, and the captain goes out to enjoy the fine weather on the quarter-deck. I have been the Dutch dog on the ship of the Legitimacy.
But the recollections of my military life are engraved in my memory: I have already traced them in the sixth book of The Martyrs.
An Armorican barbarian in the camp of the Princes, I carried Homer along with my sword; I preferred my country, poor little island of Aaron, to the hundred cities of Crete. I said, like Telemachus, “The harsh country that nourishes none but goats is lovelier to me than those that rear horses.”[33] My words would have made the simpleminded Menelaus laugh, ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος.[34]