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The next day we made a breakfast of the meal which had been prepared for our supper, and we slept at Fontainebleau, where I enjoyed Adele for the last time. In the morning I promised to come and see her at Louviers, when I returned from England, but I could not keep my word. We took four hours to get from Fontainebleau to Paris, but how quickly the time passed.
"I only met Robespierre in society once," said the King to me. "It was at a place called Mignot, near Poissy, which still exists. It belonged to a wealthy cloth manufacturer of Louviers, named M. Decreteau. It was in ninety-one or two. M. Decreteau one day invited me to dinner at Mignot. I went. When the time came we took our places at table.
A broad plain, watered by many rivers, showed the towers of Louviers and red roofs cinctured by the greatest of them; short of the walls were the ranked white tents, columned smoke, waggons, with men and horses, as purposeless, little, and busy as a swarm of bees. In the midst of this array was a red pavilion with a standard at the side, too heavy for the wind.
Compunction was one: you could touch him on the heart and bring him weeping to his knees; affection was another: if he loved the petitioner he yielded handsomely. Now, this time it was Jehane and not his conscience which had sent him to Louviers. First of all Jehane had pleaded the Sepulchre, his old father, filial obedience, and he had laughed at the sweet fool.
She tried no more that night, fearing that his love so keen-edged might make his will ride rough. The watch-fires at Louviers trembled and streamed up in the north. There was no need for candles in the Dark Tower. They rose up early to a fair dawn. The cloud-wrack was blown off, leaving the sky a lake of burnt yellow, pure, sweet, and cool.
From one you could only see the shores of the Seine, and the three barren islands, of which two were subsequently joined together to form the Ile Saint-Louis; the third was the Ile de Louviers.
He greeted me well, and was richly clad, and prosperous to behold. But it gave me greater joy that he spoke of some secret enterprise which should shortly be put in hand, when the spring came. "For I have good intelligence," he said, "that the Bastard of Orleans will ride privily to Louviers with men-at-arms.
Then I put on my disguise, and we started in different directions, he making south for the river, which I trust the good fellow managed to reach and cross safely, while I struck north. "My wine and bread lasted me for four days, by which time I had arrived at Louviers, on the Seine. I was now a hundred miles from Le Mans, and altogether beyond the line of action. I felt comparatively safe.
This, he knew, would draw the poison-bag. The Frenchmen arrived at Louviers none too soon. As well mix fire and ice as Poictevin with Norman or Angevin with Angevin. The princes stalked about with claws out of velvet, the nobles bickered fiercely, and the men-at-arms did after their kind. There was open fighting.
Both were corpses, but stood in grim death like a group of statuary. I received to-day a letter from my gardener at Vernon. He says that the roads are filled with refugees, who are being sent on to Brittany by way of Louviers. Motorists along the roads say that they have passed continuous lines of refugees, sometimes seventy kilometers in length.
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