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The duchesse d'Aiguillon and my female friends hastened to question me relative to the duke's visit. I showed them the lettre de cachet, which confirmed the misfortune they had suspected from seeing Hamond, who was to be my escort, waiting in the anteroom to conduct me to the abbey of Pont aux Dames, near Meaux, the place of my exile.
The great theologians who surrounded Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux, had died one by one, and had left successors who were partly pagan, partly atheist. Art and literature tripped after the flowered skirts of the emancipated Duchess of Maine.
The German army having met with no resistance whatever in its march on Paris, its advance approached the capital rapidly, and by the 14th of September the royal headquarters moved by a fine macadamized road to the Chateau Thierry, and on the 5th reached Meaux, about twenty-eight miles from Paris, where we remained four days awaiting the reconstruction of some railroad and canal bridges.
"Strange! strange!" murmured Catherine, kneeling down by the side of the prince, or rather of the corpse, no one being in the room, with her but the two old servants; and while the messengers were dispatched in every quarter of the town to find the prince's physician, and while a courier galloped off to Paris in order to hasten the attendance of the king's physicians, who had remained at Meaux with the queen, Catherine, with less knowledge, very probably, but not with less perspicacity than Miron himself could possibly have shown, examined the diagnostics of that singular malady which had struck down her son so suddenly.
"Nothing is more simple. I was close to the desk to reply, and close to the door for the purpose of flight. The professor gazed at me with a certain intensity. All of a sudden, Blondeau, who must be the malicious nose alluded to by Boileau, skipped to the letter L. L is my letter. I am from Meaux, and my name is Lesgle." "L'Aigle!" interrupted Marius, "what fine name!"
Many thousand Protestants throughout the kingdom in these ways escaped. But in nearly all the populous towns, where the Catholic population predominated, the massacre was universal and indiscriminate. In Meaux, four hundred houses of Protestants were pillaged and devastated, and the inmates, without regard to age or sex, utterly exterminated. At Orleans there were three thousand Protestants.
But we were all too soon on the road again for Meaux and Paris, passing slowly through the ruined streets of Vaux, with Bouresches and Belleau Wood to our right, and behind us the great main road from Soissons to Chateau Thierry, for the command of which in its northern sector, the American divisions under General Mangin, and in its southern portion those commanded by General Dégoutte, had fought so stoutly last July.
"I promise you that I will most gladly," answered Nigel, wondering what the old steward could mean. Wishing his worthy friend good-bye, he pushed on to overtake his travelling companions. On entering Meaux, they found the town in a strange commotion, the people all rushing with eager looks to the market-place, in which, as they reached it, they found a large crowd assembled.
Thereupon Rigoux disappeared, but returning between seven and eight in the evening, took him round the waist and carried him back to the sacristy, promising to come again for him the next day. This he accordingly did, and told De la Rue to take off his habit, get him gone from the convent, and meet him near a great tree on the high-road from Meaux to Vaulx-Courtois.
The allies remained five days at Meaux, and leaving that place on the 27th, arrived in the neighbourhood of Chelles, on the last day but one of the summer. They had a united force of five thousand cavalry and eighteen thousand foot. The summer of horrors was over, and thus with the first days of autumn there had come a ray of hope for the proud city which was lying at its last gasp.
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