The citizens made one more attempt to break through that inflexible ring of death. Ten thousand of the strongest men who could still carry arms were picked out from the garrison, and every atom of eatable substance in the town was swept and scraped together to give them such a pittance as was grimly supposed to sustain them for two days. Two thousand of them dashed out of the Porte St. Hilaire and feverishly made for the headquarters of the King. Their very desperation sent them momentary victory, but their movement was only intended as a blind to the main attack arranged from the castle gate, behind which eight thousand undaunted skeletons rattled in their armour and prepared to deliver their last blow for freedom. Their front ranks were already past the moat, and the weight of their main column was upon the bridge, when suddenly the massive timbers groaned beneath them, and some thousand men-at-arms fell down into the ditch beneath. Cut off from their own men, those who had already passed were shot down at leisure by the English, while the ditch was filled with maimed and dead. Those who had not had time to cross were obliged to make a circuit and try to give assistance to their isolated friends outside by way of the Porte Bouvreuil further to the north and east. The miserable heroes who had attacked the royal camp were only got back into the town with fearful loss. To the discouragement of the failure was added the bitter suspicion of treason, for the great beams of the bridge were found to have been half sawn through. Their despair was accentuated by the death of the brave Laghen, who had at last succumbed to the fatigues of fighting without proper food.
At the imminent peril of their lives, but preferring death in the open to the starvation of rats in a hole, four nobles and four burgesses got through the English lines once more, with a last appeal to the Duke of Burgundy and the King, roundly denying all allegiance to them if no attempt to help were made. The Duke himself was base enough to answer that on the fourth day after Christmas help would come, and this though he must have known that there was no real chance of succour. But with a pitiable confidence in their leaders the envoys dragged themselves back to Rouen and bade the garrison hold out only for another fifteen days, and then they should be rescued. To men already starving we can scarce imagine what the delay of another fortnight meant. It was drawing near to Christmas. From the English camp two priests were seen advancing towards those phantoms of still visible humanity that stretched their fleshless arms to heaven from the city moat. The King was sending food and drink to them for the love of Him whose birth was celebrated on the morrow. The miserable creatures ate and drank with hideous cries that brought the starving garrison to the walls to watch them; but they only gained the strength to suffer pain a little longer, for the next day the English lines closed up again and no more food was to be had.
One more bitter disappointment the citizens were destined to suffer before the end came. From the right bank of the Seine two Norman nobles, Jacques d'Harcourt and the Sire de Moreuil attempted to draw the English into an ambuscade. They had only two thousand men, but they might well have created sufficient diversion to render a victorious sally possible from the city, for the English imagined it was the royal army of rescue come at last. But the eager watchers from the walls of Rouen had the mortification of seeing their compatriots put to flight by a far smaller body of the enemy, and their last hope faded like dew before the sun. Then the fateful twenty-ninth of December came, and went, without a sign of royal or Burgundian help. For two more miserable days the citizens waited in vain, and not till fifty thousand persons had died of famine did they think of surrender. Their walls were still intact, their hearts as stout as ever, but starvation began to make irreparable breaches where the enemy's artillery had been of no avail. So on the eve of New Year's Day, the envoys chosen by the meeting in the Hôtel de Ville, went out to parley with the English.
They wandered in vain from one camp to another, until they were obliged to cross over to St. Sever, and there they found Sir Gilbert d'Umfreville, whose Norman lineage perhaps made him kinder than the rest. He was at last prevailed upon to take them on the second day of the year, a Monday, into the presence of the King. Though every hour meant a prolonging of their torture, the ambassadors fought foot by foot the conditions of surrender and calmly argued every sentence of the treaty with that Norman love of litigation which now rose to its highest and most impassioned point. In the great hall of the Chartreuse de la Rose, they saw the cold, impassive, handsome countenance of the young English King, with that touch of sadness on it that foretold his early death,[42] and the detached nobility of manner which fitted a King who had exhausted every pleasure before he took, and worthily wielded, the responsibilities of power.
The first request of the ambassadors was for the succour of the poor outcasts in the moat all round the town. But Henry only announced his firm resolve to take Rouen and all its citizens and to make those who had opposed his will "remember me until the Day of Judgment." At last an armistice of two or three days was granted, and on the third of January a solemn meeting of the picked ambassadors of either side took place between the Chartreuse and the Porte St. Hilaire, where all the splendour of the English noblemen's caparisons and furniture was displayed, and the starving commissioners from Rouen made the bravest show they could beneath the Fleurs de Lys of France. Close to all this magnificence was the yet living horror of the moat, which was now almost filled up with dead. From time to time the heap of rags and withered anatomies heaved slowly, and the little spectre of a child crawled out, imploring food. And all day long the solemn arguments went on beneath the sumptuous pavilions of the English, until, after three days of discussion, the ambassadors of Rouen went back, unsatisfied, into their city.
"We askid mykille," says the poet, "they proferid smal,
That is yuelle to accorde with alle.
Tho thay tretid an xiiij nyzt
And zit accorde they ne myzt."
THE APSE OF ST. OUEN, SHOWING THE TOUR AUX CLERCS ON
THE RIGHT, SEEN FROM THE GARDENS OF THE HÔTEL DE VILLE
Both sides were indeed so resolute, that they "might have argued for a fortnight without coming to an agreement." But the people of the city had starved long enough, and they drove back their emissaries to the Porte St. Hilaire, after one proposal, born of madness, had been made, to set fire to the town and then by every gate at once to pour out upon the English camp with the whole population in a flood, and so win through or die at least with weapons in their hands. Some news of this despairing possibility may have suggested to King Henry that the representations of the Archbishop of Canterbury were not without their value. At any rate he yielded to solicitation, granted another truce, and on the ninth of January opened negotiations once again.
This time the pressure of famine was so hard upon the ambassadors themselves that they went on with discussions night and day, burning torches and candles when the sun set. At last a definite instrument was signed and sealed that guaranteed life and a free pass to the garrison, their goods to the citizens, and great portion of its privileges to the town. But the terms were hard enough. Three hundred thousand crowns of gold[43] was fixed as the ransom of the city; the chains were to be taken down from every street; ground sufficient for an English palace was to be given up, which was eventually chosen at the south-west corner of the town near the river; nine persons, among whom were the Canon Robert de Livet and Alain Blanchart, were exempted from the capitulation and "reserved to the mercy of the King," which in one case at least meant death.