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Updated: June 24, 2025
After numerous adventures and fearful afflictions, the court of France offered him a retreat in Wissembourg in Alsace. Here the ex-king remained for six years, when his beautiful daughter Mary was selected to take the place of the rejected Mary of Spain, as the wife of the young dauphin, Louis XV. In the year 1733 Augustus II. died.
"My dear Marshal," she shouted, following him out on to the steps, "pull up the windows, do not sit in a draught, to oblige me!" The Marshal, who had never been so cosseted in his life, went off smiling at Lisbeth, though his heart was aching. At the same hour Baron Hulot was quitting the War Office to call on his chief, Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg, who had sent for him.
He hailed them. "Hallo there, comrades, this way! You are 7th corps men, aren't you?" "Right you are, sir; 1st division at least I am, more by token that I was at Froeschwiller, where it was warm enough, I can tell you. The comrade, here, belongs in the 1st corps; he was at Wissembourg, another beastly hole."
This was the invasion of France. Before it Frossard recoiled, leaving the Spicheren a smoking hell; before it Douay fell above the flames of Wissembourg; and yet Gravelotte had not been, and Vionville was a peaceful name, and Mars-la-Tour lay in the sunshine, mellow with harvests, gay with the scarlet of the Garde Impériale.
Then, reverting to facts of history, he described in brief but vigorous terms the principal events of that month of terror: how Paris, recovering her sanity in a measure after the madness into which the disasters of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller had driven her, had comforted herself with hopes of future victories, had cheered herself with fresh illusions, such as lying stories of the army's successes, the appointment of Bazaine to the chief command, the levee en masse, bogus dispatches, which the ministers themselves read from the tribune, telling of hecatombs of slaughtered Prussians.
For instance, those of Wissembourg, which, covered by the Lauter flowing in front, supported by the Rhine on the right and the Vosges on the left, seemed to fulfill all the conditions of safety; and yet they were forced on every occasion when they were assailed.
The Prince de Wissembourg, knowing all about Madame Marneffe's conduct, approved of the young lawyer's secret project; he had promised him, as a President of the Council can promise, the secret assistance of the police, to enlighten Crevel and rescue a fine fortune from the clutches of the diabolical courtesan, whom he could not forgive either for causing the death of Marshal Hulot or for the Baron's utter ruin.
Like a hydra of three hideous heads the German army had pushed its course over the Saar, over the Rhine, over the Lauter; it sniffed at the frontier line; licked Wissembourg and the Spicheren with flaming tongues, shuddered, coiled, and glided over the boundary into the fair land of Lorraine.
Such a quantity of boxes and bundles arrived at the house in Paris that Mademoiselle Wissembourg was in a blue fidget, fussing about, boring me with silly, unnecessary suggestions, and asking so many useless questions that I wished her at the bottom of the Red Sea.
"Yes, Prussians and a few others Würtembergers, Saxons, Bavarians, men from Baden, from Hesse, from the Schwarzwald from Hamburg to the Tyrol they are coming in three armies. I saw the Spicheren, I saw Wissembourg I have seen and I know."
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