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Updated: June 9, 2025
Boulanger went out by a side door, leaving his friends disappointed and furious to announce to the waiting crowd that the General had gone home. He could certainly have got to the Elysée that night. How long he would have stayed, and whom he would have put there, we shall never know. MAREUIL, October 31st.
The road along the canal and through Mareuil is the one over which the German cavalry would have advanced had von Kluck's army succeeded in crossing the Marne at Meaux, and it was patrolled and guarded by the Yorkshire boys on September 2, and the Bedfords from the night of the 3d to the morning of the 5th.
"What was marvellously surprising, and gave a good idea of the world and its vanity," says his contemporary, the Marquis of Fontaine Mareuil, "was that this man, so great and so powerful, found himself, nevertheless, to such a degree abandoned and despised, that for two days, during which he was in agony, there was scarcely one of his people who would stay in his room, the door being open all the time, and anybody who pleased coming in, as if he had been the most insignificant of men; and when his body was taken to be interred, I suppose, to his duchy of Luynes, instead of priests to pray for him, I saw some of his valets playing piquet on his bier whilst they were having their horses baited."
The King of Navarre, having notice thereof, instructed one of his agents, the Bastard de Mareuil, to go with a troop of men-at-arms and surprise him in that town; and he himself remained outside the walls, awaiting the result of his design. At break of day, he saw galloping up the Bastard de Mareuil, who shouted to him from afar, "'Tis done." "What is done?" asked Charles.
The road from the canal to the river, separated here by only a few yards, leads through a wide avenue, across a private estate belonging to the proprietor of the plaster quarries at Mareuil, to a ferry, beside which was the lavoir. There is a sunken and terraced fruit garden below the road, and an extensive enclosure for fancy fowl. The bank of the river showed me a sad sight.
All the land had been purchased northward on the plateau, from the farm of Mareuil to the farm of Lillebonne; there was not a copse that did not belong to the Froments, and thus beside the surging sea of corn there rose a royal park of centenarian trees.
It was some days before his wife could get the story out of him. He owns a field about halfway between Voisins and Mareuil, close to the route de Pavé du Roi, and on the morning that the battle began he was digging potatoes there. Suddenly he saw a small group of horsemen riding down from the canal, and by their spiked helmets he knew them for Germans. His first idea, naturally, was to escape.
She still obeyed docilely the orders of her eldest son, the genius, fallen though he was; but Saccard, whatever he might do, had also a part in her heart, from his indomitable determination to succeed, and she was also proud of Maxime, Clotilde's brother, who had taken up his quarters again, after the war, in his mansion in the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, where he was consuming the fortune left him by his wife, Louise de Mareuil, become prudent, with the wisdom of a man struck in a vital part, and trying to cheat the paralysis which threatened him.
So, as the Germans could not have crossed the Marne here, the canal bridge was not destroyed, though it was mined. The barricades of loose stones which the English built three weeks ago, both at the bridgehead and at a bend in the road just before it is reached, where the road to Mareuil sur Marne turns off, were still there.
Just beyond, the long stretches of green pasture lands, cut every now and then by narrow lanes with apple trees and hawthorn in flower, and the canal winding along between the green walls of poplars the whole hemmed in by the dark blue line of the Villers-Cotteret forest, which makes a grand sweep on the horizon. It was lovely driving back to Mareuil, toward the bright sunset clouds.
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