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But his thoughts were in Valmy, a thin, tired voice whispering in his ears, a white face whose eyes smouldered fire looking into his. With a shiver he roused himself. "Yes, I came from Valmy, and I must go back to Valmy; I must go this very night. Saxe used to keep a horse always ready," he ended, with the bitterness of shame in his voice. "Stephen, was it for this?" "I suppose so.
After Valmy, Dumouriez had pursued the retreating foreigners across the Rhine and had carried the war into the Austrian Netherlands, where a large party regarded the French as deliverers. Dumouriez entered Brussels without serious resistance, and was speedily master of the whole country.
Saxe had thrown off his nervousness. He no longer shuffled his feet but stood breast square to the world. Commines' questions had loosened the thread of his story, and he was ready to run it off the reel without a tangle. "He said the King was very sick in Valmy, so sick and full of suffering that every hour of life was an hour of misery.
The thought in his mind seemed at variance with his assertions of maturity and manhood, but he spoke it with characteristic frankness. "Valmy frightens me." "Why?" repeated Commines. "Because of its silences, its coldness, its inhumanity no, not inhumanity, its inhumanness. In Valmy no man sings; in Valmy few men laugh. When they speak they say little and their eyes are always afraid.
At Châlons the allies would be but ninety miles from Paris, and then nothing would remain but vengeance, and vengeance the more complete the greater the crime had been. All went well with them up to Valmy. The German advance on August 11, 1792, reached Rodemach, and on August 19, the bulk of the Prussian army crossed the frontier at Rédagne.
On one occasion during the campaign of Valmy, eight battalions of federates, intoxicated with massacre and sedition, joined the forces under Dumouriez, and soon threatened to uproot all discipline, saying openly that the ancient officers were traitors, and that it was necessary to purge the army, as they had Paris, of its aristocrats.
"Mademoiselle, am I forgiven for my folly of yesterday?" He knew he was, but for a cunning reason of his own he wished to hear her say so. "Can I blame you?" she answered, making no pretence at misunderstanding him. "You, too, are from Valmy. No, no. I do not mean that.
The fact that an army reputed invincible had been forced to retreat gave boldness to the young revolutionary troops, and everywhere they took the offensive. In a few weeks the soldiers of Valmy had chased the Austrians out of Belgium, where they were welcomed as liberators. But it was under the Convention that the war assumed such importance.
"I see," she said, some of the old bitterness creeping into her tone, "the prodigal of twelve years old who is rioting in Amboise you see how he riots should ask forgiveness," and as she spoke Stephen La Mothe, with a sudden sense of chill, remembered that other prodigal of twelve years old who was hung on the Valmy gallows that the roads of France might be safe.
Had the old French generals been beaten at Valmy, the Prussians would have entered Paris in a few days, the monarchy would have been restored, and the name of Bonaparte never would have been heard; and equally unknown would have been the names of a hundred other French leaders, who distinguished themselves in the three-and-twenty years that followed the first successes of Dumouriez and Kellermann.
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