It was October 1781: Cornwallis was surrounded in Yorktown: the British fleet had failed to relieve him and the siege advanced; the parallels were opened; they were firing at six hundred yards, and Cornwallis still held on. The third week, and they were firing at three hundred: two redoubts still forbade a nearer approach. On the 14th the two redoubts were carried by the French, and next day came the storming.
The river lay near a mile broad behind Yorktown: Cornwallis might yet cross to Gloucester; his guns were dismantled and his force shattered, more by sickness than by fire, but he made the attempt, and the wind defeated him. Upon that ominous Friday, the 19th, he laid down his arms, and England had lost the war. By an accident native to lingering campaigns a series of chances and one coincidence at the end—the entry of the French fleet—had suddenly determined the issue: the young Boys of the French Court, heretofore grumbling and themselves disliked, were suddenly become heroes; the colonists, “half savages,” “mostly traitors to the English,” were suddenly become “the athletes of Liberty”; many in England and all the Rivals of England made up their minds that the business of England in the history of the world was at an end.
It was Fersen, with his command of French and English, who had negotiated that surrender. Soon he would return.
THE COUNTESS OF PROVENCE
FROM THE BUST AT VERSAILLES
At Versailles that October Friday and the week-end following it were still. For the few days the Court was silent. The issue of the expected childbirth had been debated or feared; it was now not mentioned in an intensity of expectation. The morning of the Monday that silence continued. The King had ordered his hunt; four of the carriages had already started, when he bethought him before he left to see the Queen again. He thought her to be in pain, and though she denied the pain, he ordered the Hunt to return, and an unusual rumour and press at once filled the great galleries. It was a little after eleven o’clock when the passages and halls were full of a gathering crowd, and the cold and splendid staircase which made the royal life at Versailles a public thing, a thing of the open air, were already crammed before noon by a mob of the populace; but this time custom was disdained and the doors were shut fast. Within, the Queen lay groaning on her pallet-bed before the fireplace, but there was air around her: no such press as had all but killed her three years before. Yet that exclusion of the populace helped to kill the Monarchy.
At one o’clock a Swedish noble, chancing to be at the Queen’s door, was told the news. He was caught and electrified by it as though he had been of the French blood. He turned to the first woman he met and said: “We have an heir!” Now that woman happened to be Provence’s wife, and the scene—her red anger and her disdain, his bewilderment—were taken up at once into the laughter of the moment. All the world laughed or cried: it was like the excitement of a great victory turning the tide of a disastrous war.
The Queen, when she could speak, noting the silence round her pallet and hearing the noise without, said faintly and smiling: “I have been a good patient.... Tell me the truth.” They were still silent, and she was sure that another daughter had been born, till the King came in and said to her:—