Condé was everywhere! "A demon!" said the soldiers of the King; "superhuman" his own men called him. Like the preux chevaliers of the legends, he plunged into the fray, went down and rose with cuirass dented and red with blood, to plunge and to come forth again.
The friends dearest to his heart fell at his feet, and still he bore his part. He fought with all-mastering courage; he inspired his men; and the stolid bourgeois and the common people upon the ramparts, moved to great pity, cried out with indignation that it was a shame to France to leave such a man to perish. That combat was like a dream to the survivors. Condé's orders were so sharp and clear that they rang like the notes of a trumpet; his action was miraculous, and in after years, when his officers talked of Roland or of Rodrigue, they asserted, to the astonishment of their hearers, that they had known both those redoubtable warriors and fought in their company on many a hard won, or a hard lost, field. To their minds there was neither Rodrigue nor Roland; they knew but one hero, and he was "Condé."
That day in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, at the gates of Paris, bathed with the blood and the sweat of the combat, when he had all but swooned in his cuirass, he rushed from the field, stripped, and rolled in the grass as a horse rolls; then slipped into his war harness and took his place at the head of his army, as fresh as he had been before the battle.
But neither his courage nor his strength could have saved him, and he, and all his men, would have perished by the city ditch if Mademoiselle had not forced Paris to open the gates.
Some one living in the rue Saint Antoine offered Mademoiselle shelter, and she retired an instant from the field. Soon after she entered her refuge Condé visited her and she thus recorded her impressions of the day:
As soon as I entered the house M. le Prince came in to see me. He was in piteous case. His face was covered with dust two inches deep; his hair was tangled, and although he had not been wounded, his collar and shirt were full of blood. His cuirass was dented; he held his bare sword in his hand; he had lost the scabbard. He gave his sword to my equerry and said to me: "You see before you a despairing man! I have lost all my friends!" ... Then he fell weeping upon a chair and begged me to forgive him for showing his sorrow,—and to think that people say that Condé cannot love! I have always known that he can love, and that when he loves he is fond and gentle.
PRINCE DE CONDÉ