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"Amen!" said Friar Gilles, devoutly crossing himself. And so in due course on the meadow of La Biesse, by the side of the blue Loire, the evil soul of Gilles de Retz went to its own place with all the paraphernalia of repentance and in the full odour of a somewhat hectic sanctity. The day after the burning, a little company of riders left the city of Angers, journeying westward along the Loire.
He was proclaimed King at Mehun, in Berri, for the true France for the time lay on that side of the Loire, and the Regent Bedford, who took the reins at Paris, was a vigorous and powerful prince, who was not likely to give way to an idle dreamer. At the outset Charles suffered two defeats, at Crevant in 1423, and at Verneuil in 1424, and things seemed to be come to their worst.
On October 26 a truce for two years was proclaimed, each side to retain what it then possessed, but John formally abandoning all rights north of the Loire during the period of the truce. John did not return to England until near the middle of December, but even at that date Innocent III had not decided the question of the Canterbury election.
But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not only to the physiognomy of its age, but also to its country ce pays du Vendomois the names and scenery of which so often recur in it; the great Loire, with its long spaces of white sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland country, with its scattered pools of water and waste road-sides, and retired manors, with their crazy old feudal defences half fallen into decay; La Beauce, the granary of France, where the vast rolling fields of corn seem to anticipate the great western sea itself.
I hired a small carriage, called a patache, to convey me to Saumur and Tours; it is driven by a postillion with two horses, and is open in front, giving the traveller a better opportunity of viewing the country than in a close vehicle. The town of Saumur is built on both banks of the Loire, with a handsome stone bridge over it; an ancient castle, built on a high rock, commands the whole town.
Poor mothers, leaving sick children at home, stood for hours in the streets, in the bitter cold, to obtain a ration of horseflesh, or a few ounces of this unnutritious bread. After news came of the retreat of the Army of the Loire, great discouragement crept over the garrison.
The limestone in question forms a part of the formation called the Calcaire de la Beauce, which constitutes a large table-land between the basins of the Loire and the Seine. It is associated with marls and other deposits, such as may have been formed in marshes and shallow lakes in the newest part of a great delta.
The slight foundations of the Armorican republic had been repeatedly shaken, or overthrown; but the same people still guarded their domestic freedom; asserted the dignity of the Roman name; and bravely resisted the predatory inroads, and regular attacks, of Clovis, who labored to extend his conquests from the Seine to the Loire. Their successful opposition introduced an equal and honorable union.
The feeble, indifferent voice, once so full of life, the dull pallor of its tones revealed a settled grief, exhaling the breath of flowers cut and left to wither. The tempest of infidelity, like those freshets of the Loire which bury the meadows for all time in sand, had torn its way through her soul, leaving a desert where once the verdure clothed the fields.
In the next three days the Vendeans bombarded the town, and during that time fired against it everything they could cram into their cannons, in the shape of warlike missiles; and they did not do so in vain, for the walls, in portions, began to give way and to crumble into the moat, which ran round the town, and communicated with the river Loire on each side of it.
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