United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was as intelligent, brave, and full of resources as he was energetic; and leaving his house of Grainville-la-Teinturière at Caux, he went to La Rochelle, where he met the Chevalier Gadifer de la Salle, and having explained his project to him, they decided to go to the Canary Islands together.
The one nobleman, in consideration of his royal blood, was simply beheaded; the other was drawn and quartered. We hear of no more attempts of the kind during Henry's reign. With a fleet of one thousand five hundred sail Henry crossed the sea and landed without opposition at Chef de Caux, near Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine.
But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they sped had once and not so many years ago been the border of the bed of the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river, and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville, having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the craft on its bosom steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as The Flying Dutchman in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hôtel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties only when the chauffeur turned and said: "Voil
"Regarde, comme il va vite," the inventor cried, and he showed the paper with the most extraordinary wavy lines. Every one laughed, and no one more than Comte Solms himself. Six o'clock came very quickly, and the Empress, rising, gave the signal for our departure. The Marquis de Caux took me in to dinner. He is the most popular and sought-after gentleman in all Paris.
We divine its vastness and immensity beyond the dusky lanes that give glimpses of it. In front of one of those luminous chinks, under a rounded archway, an old woman stands motionless; she is clad like the women of the Pays de Caux: a black dress gathered in thick pleats around the waist, a brown apron and a smooth, white cap flattened down over her forehead.
Caux and her sisters. My first duty is towards them. I gave my promise to their father, and although it is not probable that I can be of any use to them, I will at any rate, if possible, be at hand should occasion arise." On the evening of the 30th they returned to Paris, and took two fresh apartments at a distance from their former quarters.
Harry fumbled in his breast pocket for the document which his father had obtained for him from the foreign office, duly viseed by the French ambassador, notifying that Henry Sandwith, age sixteen, height five feet eight, hair brown, eyes gray, nose short, mouth large, was about to reside in France in the family of the Marquis de St. Caux.
Victor exclaimed anxiously; "and why are you in disguise, Monsieur Sandwith?" "A great number of arrests have taken place in the night, among them that of the Marquis de St. Caux and your father. Men are waiting inside your house to arrest you as you enter." Victor uttered an exclamation of anger. "That is why I have been sent away," he said.
As the stage was small, it could not contain more than two couples at a time, so they were brought on in pairs. Madame de Bourgogne and Count Grammont were a Chinese chop-sticking couple. When wound up, their chop-sticks went everywhere except into their mouths. The Marquise de Chasselouplobat and the Marquis de Caux were shepherd and shepherdess, with the usual rakes, baskets, ribbons, etc.
"We have not the wherewithal," they answered; and the king gave them a hundred francs. Negotiations were recommenced. The king required that Harfleur and all the places in the district of Caux should be given up to him. "Ah! as for Harfleur, that cannot be," said the Duke of Somerset; "it is the first town which surrendered to our glorious king, Henry V., thirty-five years ago."
Word Of The Day