The Trojan war had begun.
For a highly sporting and poetical and altogether deathless account of that contest, I commend you to Homer's "Iliad." This is the story of Argive Helen, not an uncensored bulletin from the trenches.
For ten years the conflict waged, with varying fortunes. Again and again, as the tide of battle rolled up to the city's very walls, Helen stood on the ramparts and watched her former husband and the other men who had sworn eternal love for her, fighting and dying for her worthless sake.
Once, as she stood thus, she found at her side the group of aged men who were Priam's counselors. Gray-bearded they were, and feeble, and long past the time when love can set the pulse a-flutter, and they hated Helen with a mighty loathing for the disaster she had brought upon their dear fatherland. Even now, they had come forth upon the ramparts to berate her with her sin.
Helen turned and faced them. The afternoon sun poured down upon her white-clad form and upon her wonder face with its crown of ruddy hair. And, at sight of her, these ancient moralists forgot why they had come hither. With one voice, cried they aloud that the love of so glorious a woman were well worth the loss of Troy—aye, of all the world.
A hundred commentators have said that this tribute of the graybeards is the most supreme compliment ever paid to mortal woman's charms.
Paris was at last challenged by Menelaus to mortal combat. He accepted the challenge, but later fled, in terror, from the man he had wronged. Soon afterward, he led a sortie one night against the Greeks. A man on the outskirts of the Grecian camp gave the alarm and let fly an arrow at the advancing Trojans. The shaft struck Paris, inflicting a mortal wound.
The dying man was borne back into the city, and to the palace where the thoroughly disillusioned Helen awaited him. Since his cowardice in fleeing from Menelaus, she had taken no pains to hide her contempt for him. Now, as he lay dying, she looked down without emotion on the sharer of her crime. And Paris, seeing her bend over him, spoke the pitiful farewell that Andrew Lang's verse has made sublime, and that, even in mere prose, cannot lose all its beauty. His voice weak, his eyes glazing, he said:
"Long ago, dear, we were glad—we who never more shall be together. Will you kiss me, once? It is ten weary years since you have smiled on me. But, Helen, say farewell with your old smile!"
Helen, something of her dead tenderness coming back to her, kissed him. And, with her kiss, his life went out.