The Queen was led to her cell, keeping as she left her place, in spite of her hopeless fatigue, the steady step wherewith she had entered; and as she passed she heard one woman in the press sneering at her pride.
It was three o’clock. The first act in that long agony had lasted, without food or breathing time, for seven hours.
Oct. 14, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 8 a.m.
While the Republic thus held the old world prisoner in Paris and tortured it in the person of the Queen, out on the frontier in the water-meadows of Avesnes, the Republic lay in its chief peril from the old world free and armed. Coburg and every privilege held the crest of the hills invincibly, and Maubeuge was caught fast, unreachable beyond the entrenchments of that ridge.
Carnot, looking westward down the valley of the Helpe, saw the deep orchards laden with October, nourished by the small and very winding stream. He saw the last French frontier hamlets and their mills: St. Hilaire, Dompierre, Tenieres, dwindling away to where, far off in its broad trench, ran the Sambre.
Before him also in this valley, as he looked westward down it, he saw stretched for some ten miles the encampment of his army: bivouac after bivouac, one beyond the other along the lines, and smoke rising from them. Tall hedges, not yet bare, divided the floor of the valley and the village grounds: here also Cæsar had marched through against the Nervii: for this corner of Europe is a pack of battlefields. Malplaquet lay just before the army; within a march, Fleurus; within sound of cannon, Jemappes.
Up above them beyond that wood of Avesnes, the line of the heights along the sky, was the enemy. It had loomed so dark before the late, dull and rainy dawn, that they had seen the notches in that line which were the emplacement of guns. The early afternoon had shone upon the sides of the hills, and the French outposts had seen the outposts of the enemy busy in the little villages that mark the foot of the slopes: St. Vaast, Dourlers, Foursies. And all day long boomed to the north behind the hills the sullen guns before Maubeuge. At any hour that dull repeated sound might cease, and it would mean that the last fortress had fallen.
All that day Carnot passed in silence. The troops, some last detachments of which had but just marched in, lay dully in such repose as soldiers can steal: a jumble of forty patchwork battalions, militia, regulars, loud volunteers, old stark gunners; they listened to the distant and regular thunder of the siege. In some stations the few horses were grooming: in others, fewer still, the rare guns were cleaned.
Oct. 14, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 4 p.m.