Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 19, 2025
Had sorrow and slight unsettled his reason? If they had, there was "method in his madness," for his steps were ever directed toward the same place, the hotel of the Duke of Orleans. On this fourth day after the ball, at dusk, Eugene left the Hotel de Soissons, and took the way, as usual, toward the Palais Royal. Its long facade was dimly lighted, and every thing within seemed hushed.
Having prevailed upon Olivarez to strenuously support those requirements which the Count de Soissons and the Duke de Bouillon sought at his hands, she despatched letters by a secret agent in the service of Spain to the Duke de Lorraine, entreating him not to fail her in this supreme opportunity of repairing her past misfortunes and of dealing a mortal blow to their remorseless enemy.
"Employ more than a hundred," returned Eugene, "and it can be done in a day. Indeed it must be done, and I ask of you as a favor not to mention to any one in what style you are decorating the Hotel de Soissons."
Now I saw like a flash that, come what might, I should be chased, and on a horse which had already done a long twelve leagues. But it was better to be chased onwards than to be chased back. On this moonlit night, with fresh horses behind me, I must take my risk in either case; but if I were to shake them off, I preferred that it should be near Senlis than near Soissons.
"Has your highness decided on that?" "Yes; Chateau-Thierry suits me in all respects; it is a good distance from Paris, about twenty-eight leagues, and I can watch from thence MM. de Guise, who are half the year at Soissons. So bring the beautiful unknown to Chateau-Thierry." "But, monsieur, perhaps she will not be brought."
A double feeling of curiosity and love set his heart beating as if he were a youth of twenty. When he had got beyond Soissons, he judged that Marie Louise could not be far distant, and he alighted at a village called Courcelles. The Empress meanwhile had been journeying ever since the morning in the same carriage as her sister-in-law, Queen Caroline, with no idea of what was going to happen.
Such a load of intricacies and exaggerated anxieties hanging on it, the royal mind goes like the most confused smoke-jack, sure only to HAVE revolutions; and we know how, afar from Soissons, and at home in Tobacco-Parliament, the machine is influenced! Enough, the explosive procedures continue, and are on the increasing hand.
The Emperor wished to reach Soissons before the allies; but although they had been obliged to traverse roads which were practically impassable, they had arrived before our troops, and as he entered La Ferte his Majesty saw them retiring to Soissons. The Emperor was rejoiced at this sight.
Where would be the sense of my writing you that the battle-front has settled down to uncomfortable trench work on the Aisne; that Manoury is holding the line in front of us from Compiègne to Soissons, with Castelnau to the north of him, with his left wing resting on the Somme; that Maud'huy was behind Albert; and that Rheims cathedral had been persistently and brutally shelled since September 18?
The fact is or so it seemed to me that while the British Army salutes with all its heart, the glorious record of that veteran Army of France which bore the brunt of the first years of war, which held the gate at Verdun at whatever cost in heroic lives, and inscribed upon its shield last year the counter-attacks in the Marne salient, and the superb stand of General Gouraud in Champagne; and while, at the same time, it realises and acknowledges to the full the enormous moral and military effect of the warm American tide, as it came rushing over France through the early summer of last year, and the gallantry of those splendid American lads, who, making mock of death, held the crossing of the Marne, took Bouresches and Belleau Wood, fought their hardest under General Mangin in the Soissons counter-attack of July 18th, and gallantly pushed their way, in spite of heavy losses, through the Argonne to the Meuse at the end of the campaign there is yet no doubt in any British military mind that it was the British Army which brought the war to its victorious end.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking