We cross the frontier.
On reaching Lille, we went in search of the person who was to take us across the frontier. The Emigration had its agents of safety who eventually became agents of perdition. The monarchical party was still powerful, the question undecided: the weak and cowardly served, while awaiting the turn of events. We left Lille before the gates were closed: we stopped at a remote house, and did not start until ten o'clock at night, when it was quite dark; we carried nothing with us; we had a little cane in our hands; it was no more than a year since I, in the same way, followed my Dutchman in the American forests.
We crossed cornfields through which wound hardly traceable footpaths. The French and Austrian patrols were beating the country-side: we were liable to fall in with either, or to find ourselves in front of the pistols of a vedette. We saw single horsemen in the distance, motionless, weapon in hand; we heard the hoofs of horses in the hollow roads; laying our ears against the ground, we heard the regular tramp of infantry marching. After three hours spent alternately in running and in creeping along on tiptoe, we reached a cross-road in a wood where some belated nightingales were singing. A troop of uhlans, posted behind a hedge, fell upon us with raised sabres. We shouted:
"Officers going to join the Princes!"
We asked to be taken to Tournay, saying we were in a position to make ourselves known. The officer in command placed us between his troopers and carried us off. When day broke, the uhlans perceived our national guards' uniforms under our surtouts, and insulted the colours in which France was soon to dress her vassal, Europe.
In Tournaisis, the primitive kingdom of the Franks, Clovis resided during the early years of his reign; he set out from Tournay with his companions, summoned as he was to the conquest of the Gauls: "Arms always have right on their side," says Tacitus. Through this town, from which, in 486, the first King of the First Race[65] rode to found his long and mighty monarchy, I passed in 1792 to go and join the Princes of the Third Race on foreign soil, and I passed through it again in 1815, when the last King of the French abandoned the kingdom of the first King of the Franks: omnia migrant.
When we reached Tournay, I left my brother to grapple with the authorities, and in the custody of a soldier visited the cathedral. In days of old, Odo of Orleans, the scholasticus of the cathedral, seated at night before the church porch, taught his disciples the course of the planets, and pointed out to them the Milky Way and the stars. I would rather have found this artless eleventh-century astronomer at Tournay than the Pandours. I delight in those days in which the chronicles tell me, under the year 1049, that, in Normandy, a man had been transformed into a donkey: that was like to have happened to me, as the reader knows, at the house of the Demoiselles Couppart, who taught me to read. Hildebert[66], in 1114, saw a girl from whose ears grew spikes of corn: perhaps it was Ceres. The Meuse, which I was soon to cross, was suspended in mid-air in the year 1118, as witness Guillaume de Nangis[67] and Albéric[68]. Rigord[69] assures us that, in 1194, between Compiègne and Clermont in Beauvoisis, there fell a storm of hail, mixed with ravens which carried charcoal and caused a fire. If the tempest, as Gervase of Tilbury[70] tells us, was unable to extinguish a candle on the window-sill of the priory of Saint-Michel "de Camissa," we also know through him that, in the Diocese of Uzès, there was a fair and clear spring which changed its place when anything unclean was thrown into it: our latter-day consciences do not put themselves out for so little.
Reader, I am not wasting time; I am chatting with you to keep you in patience while waiting for my brother, who is arranging things: here he comes, after explaining himself to the satisfaction of the Austrian commander. We have leave to go on to Brussels, an exile purchased with too much care and trouble.
*
Brussels.