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M. de Turenne drew his sword, and said to me, with the calm and undisturbed air he commonly puts on when he calls for his dinner, or gives battle, "Come, let us go and see who they are." "Whom should we see?" said I, for I believed we had all lost our senses. He answered, "I verily think they are devils."
Condé, judging from what he now saw, believed the position in the hands of Turenne to be impregnable; and it being too late to execute any other manoeuvres with success during that day, he continued to cannonade the royalist army till the evening, without any other attempt to bring it to a battle. Napoleon has not spared Condé in this affair any more than other critics.
Too weak to maintain his wretched quarters against the Swedish general, when he opened the campaign in the winter of 1648, and marched against Hesse, he was obliged to retire with disgrace, and take refuge on the banks of the Danube. France had once more disappointed the expectations of Sweden; and the army of Turenne, disregarding the remonstrances of Wrangel, had remained upon the Rhine.
Meanwhile the United Provinces, weary of a war which fettered their commerce, and skilfully courted by their old masters, had just concluded a private treaty with Spain; the emperor was trying, but to no purpose, to detach the Swedes likewise from the French alliance, when the victory of Lens, gained on the 20th of August, 1648, over Archduke Leopold and General Beck, came to throw into the balance the weight of a success as splendid as it was unexpected; one more campaign, and Turenne might be threatening Vienna whilst Conde entered Brussels; the emperor saw there was no help for it, and bent his head.
'I wagered that sum with Turenne that he could not bribe you, he answered, smiling. 'And see, he continued, selecting from some on the table the same parchment I had seen before, 'here is the bribe. Take it; it is yours. I have given a score to-day, but none with the same pleasure. Let me be the first to congratulate the Lieutenant-Governor of the Armagnac.
My eyes are moist; I know it, Sir, I know it. The old battered broken soldier, who made his first campaigns when that which is now dust was the idol of France and the pupil of Turenne, the old soldier's eyes shall not be dry, though there is not another tear shed in the whole of this great empire." "Your three sons?" said I; "you did not weep for them?"
Turenne, on his part, took pleasure in instructing a pupil who was at once so eager to learn, and who showed himself so apt in profiting by his teaching. "You see," he said, "I am concerned rather in defensive positions at present than in seeing how we could best turn an enemy barring our advance.
The declaration of M. de Turenne is the only means to unite Spain with the Parliament for our defence, which we could not have as much as hoped for otherwise; it gives us an opportunity to engage with Parliament, in concert with whom we cannot act amiss, and this is the only moment when such an engagement is both possible and profitable.
He composed himself a little, thanked her passionately, swallowed down some wine, begged her to remain at hand, then rushed off again to endeavour to save his friends, now that the retreat was opened to them. Indeed, we heard that M. de Turenne said it seemed to him that he did not meet one but twelve Princes of Conde in that battle, for it seemed as if he were everywhere at once.
The Poitou regiment, which was the only French battalion in the army of Turenne, had been placed with the Hessians in the second line. It had fought with distinguished bravery on the crest of the Weinberg, and had publicly been thanked by Enghien, who had on the day of the battle ridden by the side of Hector at their head when they fell upon the Imperialists.
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