Dinarzade's rapier was planted stiff and straight between his knees. Seated and leaning forward with our pipes, we made a garland of fire-flakes beneath him, like Saturn's ring. Suddenly Dinarzade shouted, as though beside himself:
"Well, gentlemen, the Lady of Great Companies was Death!"
And the captain, breaking the ranks and shouting "Death! Death!" put the canteen-women to flight. The meeting was closed: the uproar was great, the laughter prolonged. We approached Thionville amid the roar of the cannon of the place.
*
The siege continued, or rather, there was no siege, for the trenches were not opened, and troops were wanting to invest the place regularly. We reckoned on receiving intelligence, and waited for news of the successes of the Prussian Army or of Clerfayt's[106] Army, with which was the French corps of the Duc de Bourbon. Our scanty supplies were becoming exhausted; Paris seemed to draw farther away. The bad weather never ceased; we were flooded in the midst of our works; I sometimes woke in a trench with water up to my neck: the next day, I was a cripple.
Among my fellow-Bretons I had met Ferron de La Sigonnière[107], my old class-fellow at Dinan. We slept badly under our tent; our heads went beyond the canvas and received the rain from that sort of gutter. I would get up and go with Ferron to walk in front of the stacked arms; for all our evenings were not so gay as those with Dinarzade. We walked in silence, listening to the voices of the sentries, looking at the lights of our streets of tents as we had formerly watched the lamps in the passages at our college. We discussed the past and the future, the mistakes that had been made, those that would still be made; we deplored the blindness of our Princes, who imagined that they could return to their country with a handful of adherents and consolidate the crown on their brother's head with the aid of the foreigner. I remember saying to my friend, in the course of these conversations, that France wished to imitate England, that the King would perish on the scaffold, and that our expedition before Thionville would probably be one of the principal counts in the indictment of Louis XVI. Ferron was struck by my prophecy: it was the first I ever made. Since that time, I have made many others quite as true, quite as unheeded: when the accident occurred, the others took shelter and left me to struggle with the misfortune which I had foreseen. When the Dutch encounter a squall on the open sea, they retreat to the interior of the ship, close the hatches, and drink punch, leaving a dog on deck to bark at the storm; the danger past, Trust is sent back to his kennel in the hold, and the captain returns to enjoy the fine weather on the quarter-deck. I have been the Dutch dog of the Legitimist ship.
The memories of my life as a soldier have engraved themselves upon my thoughts; I have related them in the sixth book of the Martyrs. Armorican barbarian in the Princes' camp as I was, I carried Homer with my sword; I preferred "my country, the poor, small isle of Aaron, to the hundred cities of Crete." I said with Telemachus:
"The harsh country which only feeds goats is dearer to me than those in which horses are reared[108]."
My words would have brought a smile to the lips of the warlike Menelaus: άγάθος Μενἐλαος.