As he stood there looking down from the height where the road bifurcates, all the battle was plain to him, but his sapper’s eye for a plan watched the wings much more anxiously than they watched the centre before him. The stunted spire of Wattignies a long way off to the east, the clump that hid St. Remy to the west, marked strong bodies of the enemy, and, in the open plateau beyond, their numerous cavalry could crush either extremity of his line (which at either extremity was weak) should either be tempted forward before the centre had succeeded. The front was long—over five miles—he could not enforce sagacity nor even be certain of intelligence, and as he doubted and feared the action of his distant lieutenants, he saw the centre advancing beneath his eyes.
The Austrian cannon had abandoned the duel. The French fine approached Dourlers, deployed, and began the ascent. A sudden and heavy fire of musketry from the hollow road and from the hedges met the sixteen thousand as they charged; they did not waver, they reached the garden walls, and closed until, to those watching from the hill, the attempt was confused and hidden by a rolling smoke and the clustered houses of the village. It was past mid-morning.
Oct. 15, 1793. In Paris, 7.30 a.m.
In Paris they had wakened the Queen, tardily. She wondered perhaps to see Busne not there. He had suffered arrest in the night; he was detained to see if he could tell the Court or the Committee some secret gathered from his prisoner. It was under another guard that she left her cell.
It was nearly nine before the Court assembled in the dull light, and later before the futile drag of evidence was renewed.
Whether sleep had revived her, or whether some remnant of her old energy had returned to her for such an occasion, no further weakness was perceived in the Queen. She sat, as she had sat all the day before until her faintness had come upon her, very ill, pale, and restrained, but erect and ready for every reply. Moreover, in that morning the weary monotony of such hours was broken by an incident which illuminated, though it made more bitter, the last of her sad days; for after D’Estaing, the Admiral, had been heard to no purpose, another noble, also a prisoner, was called; and as she saw his face she remembered better times, when the struggle was keen and not hopeless, and when this bewildering Beast that called itself now “Freedom,” now “The Nation,” had been tamed by the class which still governed Europe outside and which in that day controlled her kingdom also. It was Latour du Pin, the soldier who had been responsible for the repression of the Mutiny at Nancy three years—three centuries—before.
He still lived. Against no man had ’93 a better ground for hate, and indeed the time came when the Revolution sent him down also to meet his victims under the earth, but so far his commanding head was firm upon his shoulders. He enjoyed, as did all the prisoners of that time, the full use of his wealth. He was clothed and fed in the manner of his rank. He entered, therefore, with pride and with that mixture of gaiety and courage upon which, since the wars of religion, all his kind had justly plumed themselves: and as he entered he bowed with an excessive ceremony to the Queen.
The Judge asked him the formal question: Whether he recognised the prisoner? He bowed again and answered: “Indeed I know this Lady very well;” and in a few moments of his examination he defended himself and her with a disdainful ease that brought Versailles back vividly out of its tomb.
Revived or stung by such a memory, the Queen replied to question after question exactly and even with some power: upon her frivolities, her expenses, her Trianon—all the legends of debauch which were based upon that very real and very violent fugue of pleasure in which she had wasted her brilliant years. The close of that dialogue alone has a strict interest for history, when Herman came at last to the necklace. Trianon had been on his lips a dozen times, and as he spoke the word he remembered that other fatal thing:—