An awful retribution fell upon him. As soon as a sufficient force could be collected, the admiral commanded the Marquis de Briquemont to attack La Rivière in Jarnac. The town was taken by assault; but, as the inhabitants were our own people, no outrages were committed. The Catholics who surrendered received quarter, and many made their escape; but Lespinette and his band took refuge in the old keep, declaring they would hold it to the last: but, almost at the same moment that they were making this declaration, the lower part took fire. Unable to find any other means of escape, he and two of his companions determined to leap from the loopholes, which were large. But the corbels which hung over impeded them, and, in the effort to force themselves through, their armour was so tightly jammed in the stonework that no human power could remove them, and in this horrible situation they were actually burned to death in their arms.
At this period, the situation of the Protestant army became every day more and more critical. The Catholic army, nearly double in force that which we could oppose to it, was now approaching nearer and nearer, and interposing between us and the troops coming from Gascony, with the purpose of forcing us to an immediate battle. The most important points of the Charente were, it is true, in our hands; the admiral and the Prince de Condé were once more at the head of their troops; and, had their tactical skill been as well seconded by the zeal and obedience of the officers under their command, we might have set the enemy at defiance till sufficient re-enforcements had arrived to enable us to fight them.
The Duke of Anjou was advancing daily, but still his progress was delayed far more than might otherwise have been the case by the continual skirmishes which D'Andelot and the Prince de Condé contrived to treat him on his advance. Scarcely a day passed without some hundreds, sometimes thousands, of our troops being thrown unexpectedly upon some vulnerable point of the enemy's position; sometimes we advanced absolutely into the quarters of the Duke of Montpensier, and once we were actually in the lodgings of the Duke of Anjou himself.
On the latter occasion, under the command of Puiviaud, we encountered close to Auville, where the duke had established his quarters, a body of seventy or eighty gentlemen of the court, and obstinately maintaining our ground for some time till we were re-enforced, large bodies of men began to come up on either side, till it became absolutely necessary for the Protestants to withdraw, lest the skirmish should end in a general battle when neither party was prepared.
Nothing, however, could stop the progress of the enemy; and, early in March, the Duke of Anjou made himself master of Chateauneuf on the Charente. The bridge, however, was in our possession, and we had various small cars pushed across the river in different directions, in order to guard against surprise. I myself, no longer acting as a mere partisan, but attending implicitly to the orders I received as a soldier, was stationed some little way in advance of Cognac, with orders to obtain every information that I could regarding the enemy's movements, and communicate them immediately to the admiral or the Prince de Condé; and at three o'clock on the very day of my arrival, I perceived a large body of the enemy marching down towards me. The continual noise they made, the sounding of trumpets and beating of drums, made me suspect at once that their appearance was a mere feint; and, having ridden to a rising ground, which gave me a view over the country beyond, I clearly perceived that they were followed by no sufficient force to attempt the passage of the river at that point, and sent immediate intelligence of what I had observed to the admiral, in order to make sure that he was not deceived by any stratagem of the enemy. Coligny sent me down thanks in return, telling me that he was not deceived, and that, after maintaining my ground as well as I could, I might come round to join the Count de Montgomery at the village of Triac. The affair at Cognac lasted scarcely half an hour; but it was past midnight before I could bring my men, fatigued with a long march, to the quarters appointed me.
The house seemed pretty comfortable, and the stables for the horses good, with room in a granary above for the greater part of the men, and plenty of room in the house for the rest. Not a truss of straw, however, was to be found; no forage of any kind; and while I was endeavouring to obtain some in the village by sending hither and thither, I saw a head put out from one of the up-stairs windows of the house, and heard a voice call me by name. "Monsieur de Cerons, Monsieur de Cerons," said the voice, "I give you good-evening; it is long since we met."
The tones were not unfamiliar to my ear, but yet I could not recollect where I had heard them; and I merely replied, "I will come up in a minute, when I have seen the horses fed."
"Morbleu!" said Moric Endem, "you may think yourself lucky if you get a straw a horse, seigneur. These are one of the nights, I take it, which teach cavalry horses to be crib-biters, seeing that they can get nothing else to bite."
"Moric," I said, "as we passed the day before yesterday, there was a large farm I saw about a quarter of a mile out there to the right. The man would neither say whether he was Catholic or Protestant, Chemille told me. But I must have forage, whichever he is. The admiral says we must have no plunder; so take ten men with you, go to his house, and with your sword in one hand and this purse in the other, tell him you come from the Seigneur de Cerons for the forage he wants for his horses. Give him his choice of the gold or the steel, and bring back the forage at all events."
"Bravo! bravo!" cried the voice from the window above, though I certainly did not know I had been listened to; "justice and equity both together Monsieur de Cerons;" and, leaving Moric to fulfil his orders, which he did with pre-eminent success, I entered the house and mounted the creaking staircase, which seemed as if two men at a time would have brought it to the ground.