"Sire," the Duc de Raguse replied, "I offer my king a final proof of fidelity by counselling him to retreat."
"Good, Monsieur le Maréchal," said Charles X. "Let everything be ready for our departure to-morrow at seven in the morning."
Alas! thus it was that, compelled, driven into a corner by circumstances, this last of our knightly kings yielded up his sword, not, however, like King John or François I., who did not consider that it could be surrendered except on the field of battle.
But the royal cause now suffered a more disastrous defeat than those at Poitiers or Pavia.
Whilst all these grave concerns were being debated between the powerful or, rather, between the weak ones of the earth (for were not these kings who had to go away, each in his turn, and die in exile at Goritz or at Claremont among the weakest of men?), I, who had had nearly as much difficulty to conquer my straw stack as Louis-Philippe had to conquer his throne, certainly slept better under my straw roof than the king under his velvet canopy. Towards four or five o'clock in the morning, I was awakened by a well-sustained fusillade; the bullets whizzed past one another and the fiacres which were meant to serve us as barricades against the attack of the Swiss and Royal Guards, ran away in all directions across the plain as fast as their horses could gallop. It proved a false alarm! Good Heavens! what would have happened had the alarm been real? This was what had taken place. Some men had let off their guns as they ran away from Rambouillet, and the camp thought the fight had begun: it rose half asleep and fired haphazard; the first instinct of any man who has a gun in his hands is to use it, and hence the firing and cross-firing which awaked me. Finally, it was all explained and cleared up, and nothing worse resulted than one man killed and two or three wounded; the army thundered out a tremendous Marseillaise and went on its way back to Paris. But Delanoue and I made the journey on foot: our fiacre had been one of the first among the deserters and it was impossible for us to lay hands on it. I remember we returned as far as Versailles across the fields with my dear good friends Alfred and Tony Johannot, who both died before their time, brothers in death as well as in life! At Versailles, we took a carriage back to Paris.
But we must relate what became of the general and staff of the Expeditionary Army of the West. Pajol mounted his horse at the first sound of firing and rode through the midst, trying vainly to make his voice heard above the hubbub. Bullets were raining round him, but he did not trouble himself about them any more than he would have done had they been hailstones. I once recalled this incident to him and complimented him upon his courage and sang-froid.
"Bah!" he said, "it would have been a fine thing indeed if an old soldier who had been through all the upheavals of the Empire had taken any notice of a little wall-peppering like that!"
The storm calmed down round him as it did round us, but everyone was not as disposed to retreat as we were: one portion of the Expeditionary Army did not see the fun of having come to Cognières for nothing, and decided to push on to Rambouillet. Pajol looked after these fanatics with a certain feeling of terror and sent Charras and Degousée at their head; but those two leaders soon saw the hopelessness of holding this human flood in bounds and allowed themselves to be borne along with it. They advanced as far as the courtyard of the château de Rambouillet, where the mayor of the town pointed out below his breath, in secrecy, an ammunition waggon, the keys of which he had handed to Marshal Maison. This waggon contained the crown jewels, valued at eighty millions.
"Good!" said Charras: "they must be confided to the care of the people; it is the only way to prevent them coming to harm."
They concocted a little tricoloured flag upon which they inscribed in black letters "The Crown Jewels": this flag they planted on the waggon and there the matter ended. Then they proclaimed that any who wished to return in company of, and to guard, the crown jewels could travel in the king's coaches. This device of Degousée's was to prevent them setting fire to these carriages. But part of the volunteers preferred to give themselves the pleasure of shooting, and went off into the royal park in pursuit of deer, does and hinds. Others established themselves in the château, made vast orgies of the scraps found about the kitchens of the ex-king and drank the best wines in the cellars. At last, the most reasonable or, perhaps, the vainest among them, climbed into the royal carriages and drove them back to Paris, with the waggon containing the crown jewels in the middle, treated with as much respect as the Israelites showed to the sacred Ark. The comparison is all the more complete as any imprudent man who had dared to lay a finger tip on this modern ark would, assuredly, have been killed and by a very different method of death from that of which the sacrilegious person died who touched the ancient Ark. The whole procession was extraordinary by the contrasts it afforded between lackeys in grand liveries, magnificent harness, and gilded coaches and men in rags riding in carriages. When it had passed at a solemn slow pace along the quai de Passy, the quai de Billy, the quai de la Conférence and the quai des Tuileries, it crossed the Carrousel and stopped in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal. I need hardly say that every one of these unlucky men who accompanied, escorted and mounted guard over eighty millions' worth of jewels were dying of hunger, not having had anything that day but one portion of bread which had been sent the night before by the Prefect of Seine-et-Oise. And as these bread carts had been pillaged, some had only had a half ration and others, again, only a quarter; some, none at all. The lieutenant-general came down and thanked them, smiled upon them and went up again.