Introductory material (continued 4)

He played for the furtherance of this end upon a spirit which he flattered and nourished, but did not fulfil—the spirit of Catalan independence.

The great Spanish monarchy, almost the master of the world, had, in the century before, firmly established itself over the whole Peninsula, suppressing local liberties, centralizing, despotic. Against that awful monarchy, against its symbol, the angry Catalans had risen; and, supporting that rising in the enormous duel between the house of Spain and the house of France, Richelieu had permitted the rebels to elect his master their Count.

On January 23, 1641, following upon treaties of alliance between the Catalan rebels and the French Crown, Louis XIII. was admitted Count of Barcelona, monarch of all that country on either side of the hills. But the game which Richelieu played had not Barcelona for its stakes; he was gambling for the Roussillon only, and for Perpignan.

All the strength of Castille, all the men Spain could spare from the universal war, were poured into the defence of Perpignan, and La Rena was sent as governor to hold that northern bastion, and prevent the French advance to the Pyrenees.

The town lies sloping downwards westward from its citadel. It stands in a sheet of vineyards; a plain having to the east, solemnly dominating it, all the huge mass of the Canigou. La Rena held it strongly. He would quarter his soldiers upon the townsmen. They resisted. He turned his guns from the citadel upon the burghers, and they surrendered, but not before nearly six hundred of their houses had been ruined by the fire. They had attempted a truce; the bishop had gone up to the citadel with the Sacrament in a procession. They obtained no truce; goods were looted, gallows were raised in the market-place, and Olivares, the great minister of the Spanish king, was supreme.

So Perpignan was held in that summer of 1641 for Spain.

The plain around was flooded with the French. South, north, east, west of the city their eight thousand infantry, their two regiments of cavalry, garrisoned the villages and towns, until at last, by the end of the year, Perpignan itself was blockaded, and before any siege lines were formed a famine had begun. In that winter, in the January of 1642, the struggle opened between the two powers. Brézé, coming to Catalonia as the Viceroy of Louis XIII., sat down before Perpignan; but he could not quite cut off relief—some wheat got in before the end of the month. From Castille no further troops could come in relief. Still the French flooded on, La Meilleraye at their head; and with him, second in command, a name that was to be more than famous—Turenne.

By April the last of the small desperate Spanish garrisons in the neighbourhood of Collioure had surrendered, but Perpignan still held.

All France seemed to be pressing on to that one point. The Cardinal himself took the long journey, fell ill, and stopped at Narbonne. His master, the king, Louis XIII., went forward, and on the 23rd May took up his station in the farm which used to be called the Mas of John Pauques, which is still known to-day as the King’s Farm; near St. Stevens, looking upon the city.

By this time all Europe looked on.

The cavalry of the guard was there: Enghien, Polignac, Cinq-Mars, Schomberg—all the great names; and the musketeers of the Cardinal were there as well. Nearly thirty thousand men stood thus before the walls, which had become the test of whether the government of Paris should or should not come up to the Pyrenees.

Behind those walls, unsuccoured, the last veterans of the Thirty Years’ War—not three thousand of them, and of these but a nucleus Castillian—still held. They were the men whom all Europe had learnt to regard as masters, but the odds were too great. They could stand one to ten, even famished, behind a formidable trench and wall, but as they stood they died of the fever and of the famine.

As the heat grew, and as the grapes began to show their first clusters in the great sweep of vineyards under that mound which watched the drama from the west, the two captains, Avila and Cavabro, refused to treat. The citizens had been made their slaves. The citadel was their vantage ground, and from it a ceaseless pillage ruined the town. If ever the moral force of civilians counts in war, it was here accumulated against the fierce and terrible captains of Castille, as strong as iron in pride, but now doomed.

Every animal in the place was eaten. The citizens were thrown back upon the rooks and the rats; the wounded in the hospital ate the straw of their beds, and men were seen in the streets of the city gathering the weeds of the wayside.

The captains of Philip IV. still held.

He made a desperate effort at relief. He drove the French from Barcelona; but he could not find more men, harassed as he was all over Europe, for that one essential point of Perpignan. A little body came up under Torrecusa; La Mothe-Houdancourt held it off beyond the hills.

It was the height of summer, and under the burning sun the ill fortune of the Spanish star saw to it that, as a last resort, a fleet attempting a diversion by the coast should have a tempest raised against it and should fly to the Balearics.

Then it was at last that Avila despaired. But even then he could not sign a capitulation. He signed only a document by which he pledged himself to surrender if no help should come before a date which was discussed by the starving men and fixed at last upon the 9th of September. The 9th of September came; no succour had arrived. The gates were opened, the keys delivered, and the play was done.

The Castillians had demanded and obtained the honours of war. The French in two ranks saw passing between them the haggard remnant of all this heroism, still attempting some severity of demeanour. A generous instinct had moved the French command to see that none of the Catalans, none of the town folk in their hatred of the Spanish garrison, should be seen. It was the northern soldiers of Louis XIII. who held them back as the tiny garrison marched out, concealing its weakness under a mask of order and of discipline.

Their officers saluted the French flag, and at their head Avila rode one of the last horses. The ceremony was over; the Castillians, not prisoners, were outside the lines.

Avila dismounted, knelt upon the ground, looked south towards Spain and to the arms of Spain upon the gate. His eyes were full of tears. As he knelt he raised his right hand towards the town, and made a great sign of the Cross against the sky, so bidding it farewell for ever.

It was by the Canet Gate that these few heroes went forth after the last effort for their king. It was by the Gate of Elne that there marched in at the same moment the fresh, the well-fed, strong-bodied northern Frenchmen, six thousand strong, and behind them an immense train of wagons, filled with wheat, barley, oats, bread ready-baked, bacon and fresh meat—food for a year.

In the Cathedral of St. John the Archbishop of Narbonne and the Bishops of Nîmes and Albi, crowded around by the enthusiastic men of the Catalans, sang the Te Deum. But far off in the Escorial, Olivares, having heard the news, leant for the moment against the stone wall, and the palm of his left hand pressed upon it, and then moved towards the little room where the king was still reading and signing his papers.

He fell upon his knees and wept, and said that it was time that he, Olivares, should, by his own wish, die; and even so, he dared not say the words that would give the reason of his despair. He waited until his master spoke and asked him what so moved him.

“Sire,” said that strong man, sobbing, and still upon his knees, “you have lost Perpignan!”

Then Philip answered in a low voice, but gravely: “We must submit to the will of God.”

THE EXILE

(December 30, 1688)

There are many squares of soil where the histories of nations touch and the fate of the one is intermixed with the fate of the other upon a few roods of land.

There are the battlefields, of course—but that is obvious. There are the conference rooms: the rooms in which treaties were signed; though most treaties do not mean very much to history, some are of prodigious effect—witness the Treaty of the Pyrenees. There are the universally sacred sites—like the pavement of St. Peter’s, old and new. There are the sites of Decisions, like the quays of Calais; like the palaces of Vienna—where the agents of Governments have met and have doubtfully decided, for a little time, the inferior interests of men—the mechanical interests of men.

But there are also less known places where the fates of nations met oddly, sharply, sometimes fruitfully, sometimes unfruitfully.

For instance, just outside Montreuil, two coaches passed each other in the night—the one going north, the other going south. The one going south was that of the British envoy prepared for war with the French Republic in 1793; the one going north was that bearing the French envoy with orders to prevent war if possibly that could be done.

Of those squares of land, one is not as famous as it should be. It is the land upon which stands the seventeenth-century palace of St. Germains, with the terrace just outside overlooking the plain of the Seine and the low grey line of Paris far beyond, and the distant, diminished towers of St. Denis.

Had the Stuarts returned to the throne of England, that place would be famous enough. It would be counted as the point of their departure, as the rallying place of their cause, as the seed of a new time. It would be a place of national pilgrimage and sacred in English eyes; for there it was that James II., the rightful English king, came as an exile to meet his cousin of France. But the Stuarts did not return; and, therefore, the incident has been pushed away into the lumber-room. There is thought to be something futile about St. Germains. Even Culloden is more famous.

Yet St. Germains has good material for a shrine. It remains just what it was. The past lives there. It is what it is, although success did not follow on the meeting it saw. It is precisely what it would have been had success followed that meeting. It is still itself. I could wish that the tragedy of that palace were better known.

Mary of Modena had come over hurriedly with the child, the heir to the English throne. She had been housed in this palace by the gratitude, the courtesy, and the high policy of Louis XIV., King of France. She was the Queen of England, and the usurpers were (officially) of no account to Versailles. The fatigue of the journey, of the alarms, of the perils, had oppressed the young woman; she had taken to her bed. In a fine cradle, worthy of royalty, swinging in the same room, lay that little baby who was later to be James III.., and never to reign.

Louis XIV. had returned to visit this lady; he had come to her bedside again, making obeisance and reverence, as king to queen. They awaited James himself, for they knew that if he could escape the plots of his enemies he would reach them. The news had come of his landing. He had reached port in the dead of the Christmas dark, at three in the morning. He had travelled down from the sea-coast with haste. He came in no very great state to the doors of that palace, late upon this December (for the French this January) day. The weather was stormy; he had had no relief from travel; his great boots were splashed with mud, and the tails of his long coat also; and his odd, energetic, somewhat pinched face showed his fatigue. Yet he was the King of England, and kingship was the high political note of the time. He was the son of Henrietta Maria, consort of Charles I. No one had a moment’s right against himself—least of all his disappointed, soured, usurping daughter; his alien, vicious, usurping son-in-law.

The man who had had, in varying proportions, ill-fortune to oppress him, ill-judgment to urge him on (but much more ill-fortune than ill-judgment), this courageous, intelligent, tenacious, but now defeated man, stepped down unaided, but awkwardly, from the coach. He was cramped by his journey.

Notice had been given to Louis XIV., sitting there by the bedside in the room above; and that great king, holding the highest throne in Europe, came down at once, almost eagerly, almost forgetting the ritual of his position, to honour such an occasion and such an exile.

The rain still fell slantwise in the open courtyard of that palace of brick and cornered stone. Louis XIV., in plumed hat, and cloak, and sword, and buckled shoes, walked through the weather, indifferent, his gentlemen about him—walked, I say, even eagerly, with some forgetfulness of what he owed to his own royalty, so sharply did he feel the strength of the occasion.

They met under the arch of the portcullis where the guard were mounted, on the house side of the drawbridge, and in that meeting there was something consonant to the ideas of their time, grotesque to those of ours. For you must know that the men of that time bowed low to their superiors—lower and lower in proportion, not to their own inferiority, but to the greatness of him whom they saluted. Now, here were two equals—the King of England and the King of France—meeting to salute the one the other; so each bowed lower and lower as they approached, each sweeping his hat in his hand before him, and modulating his steps exactly as the ritual of that time demanded: the left foot advanced, then the right at right angles to it, in something more like a dance than a walk.

With all this they must give each other the accolade: they were equals; they must embrace as equals. So the arms of the one man, bowed down and obeisant with his head (a large wig upon it), were spread out, inviting, upon either side of his body, the right hand holding the large plumed hat, the left hand making gestures with its fingers in the air.

At last, in such a progress, the two bodies must meet; and so they did. The reception of the one to the other was what we, to-day, mocking such things, might compare to the beginning of a wrestling match. But the onlookers had no such profanity in their minds. For them (and they were right) this strange ceremony was a high symbol. The Great King was treating the ruined Exile as an equal, and some future might be built upon such a foundation. The Stuarts might yet return. For that meeting—to us, as we call up its physical details, grotesque; to them, sublime—might well have been the beginning of a true Restoration, and of an England happier and better than she has been—perhaps less wealthy.

It was not so to be. The ceremony was sterile. It bred no issue. There was to come the Boyne, the ’Fifteen, the ’Forty-five—and nothingness; at last a grave in Rome, and that small, noble memorial in St. Peter’s, which I, for my part, never pass without a movement of the heart. The Stuarts were not to return.

Next day the great king came back to his exiles at St. Germains, and later in the week he came once more. Each time he visited them with an increasing sincerity and fervour of support. He leaned long over the cradle and gazed down at the little Heir of England, with more feeling than he had been known to show in looking at any of his own children.

But, high above men, the fates had decided and the stars were set. For business of this sort works out very slowly; and not within the lives of two or three men that meet, but in many generations, are the ultimate purposes accomplished; and though the Stuarts did not return, perhaps they are to watch their revenge.

THE MONEY-LENDER

(May 6, 1708)

A fine day in May, and the spring had been early that year. The trees were well out. A soft wind under a benignant sun came up from the valley of the Seine, through the woods, and blessed the formal new greatness of Marly; the splendour and melancholy of the great water-basins, the majesty of the walls, were still new. The trees had not yet that height which adds nobility to the noble lines of the place. But already there was upon it the stamp of so great a reign. Largeness and order and perfection of proportion were everywhere.

The palace stood alone, its dependencies grouped about it with a space between. The front court and approach were deserted; but in the grounds behind groups had formed: knots of courtiers were discussing some coming thing, and all the life of the monarchy was disturbed in that fine spring leisure, both in the great rooms of the palace and in the gardens.

Twelve pavilions or lodges stood in formal order round behind the main building, the lawns between. They were habitations for men and women favoured of the king. Before one of these stood a man whose long acquaintance with affairs on the one hand, with the Court upon the other, had not quite rid him of awkwardness; for he remembered his humble birth. It was Desmarets, the Controller of Finance, a man of fifty. By his side, of equal age, stood, simply dressed, demure, but a little sullen, a stout figure, odd in such surroundings—Bernard the Jew. One or two others talked to him, some commonplaces or other, as they thus stood before the pavilion. It looked like a chance group; yet it was designed. And why it was designed one must go back some weeks, some months, to understand.

Desmarets, coming back to the control of Louis XIV.’s finance in the winter before that spring, in the February, knew not which way to turn for monies in the conduct of the war. He bethought him of one who had become the richest man in Europe—Bernard the Banker.

He knew his task to be difficult: the credit of the king was bad, the war was a bottomless pit, swallowing million after million, the security of the taxes was exhausted; he also knew Bernard by repute: that repute was not in favour of the task.

Bernard was a man notoriously cold in judgment—and notoriously right. So it was that he had built up his immense wealth. He had been born the son of an artist, an etcher and engraver, indifferent to anything but his art. He had been born the son of one of those Jewish men of talent, whose every mark it is to concentrate wholly upon the business of their lives, without concern for wealth, or even (very much) for fame. From such a beginning, young in such surroundings, Samuel Bernard the younger had re-acted toward a patient accumulation of gold. His art, his task, had been that. Amply had he succeeded; but when Desmarets approached him in the desperate crisis of that year, not a gold piece was forthcoming.

In those days men were free, and the rulers of a state could not ruin them for a whim—even a whim of war. How, then, was Bernard to be persuaded?

Desmarets had seen the king, and what followed here at Marly was the fruit of what the king had heard.

Desmarets had told the king that not a gold piece was forthcoming.

Bernard was hard as a rock. He had wasted no time in courtesy. He had not even wasted time on insult; he had not sneered with the sneer that is common to such occasions. He had said, simply and briefly enough, that there was no security. Where might not such a beginning lead? The money would be poured out like water upon sand. The war was interminable, and the people could bear no more taxes. In our time a man like Desmarets could have threatened. In that time he could not threaten, but he bethought himself of something else, and it was upon this something else that he had spoken to the king.

Hence it was, these few months after, in the opening of the spring, in the May following that February, that he, Desmarets, and Bernard, happened to be standing near the pavilion at the back of the palace of Marly. Bernard sullen, as I have said, and wondering why he had been asked here to no purpose; Desmarets affecting indifference and leisure, but inwardly on thorns.

Just as this waiting of theirs was getting too awkward (Desmarets wondering how much longer it would last, Bernard wondering what it was all about, and almost proposing to go) there appeared, sauntering towards them with dignity and at leisure, speaking in low tones to the couple that were with him (and who showed an exaggerated deference in their demeanour), a man of singular appearance.

It was the king.

He was seventy years of age. His years showed, not in his gait (for that had always been leisurely and dignified), nor in his carriage, for his pride kept him upright to the end; nor even in his body, dressed as it was for his part. He had a double chin, but not exaggerated; the strong, continuous line of his arched nose and high forehead showed now in profile even more than they had done in his youth; his mouth was firm; his eyes, though veiled with age, were still vigorous. Where you saw the approach of his end was in the fatigue of the face at its sides—the many wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the weakening flesh of the cheeks, and the slight droop at the corners of the lips. But a man accustomed throughout a lifetime to full command, and commanding with vigour and with judgment, he remained to the end inspired by such a spiritual posture. He was about to demean himself spiritually very much indeed, but the garments, the exteriors of dignity, he never lost.

When he had come within a few yards of Desmarets and of Bernard, he looked up as though surprised to see them, while they uncovered and bowed.

“Why, Desmarets,” said he, “whom have you here?”

“It is Mr. Samuel Bernard.”

“I thought as much.... Mr. Bernard,” Louis added, as though it were a sudden thought and a pleasant one, “I wonder if you have ever looked round my gardens here at Marly?”

The king’s companions stepped back somewhat, and left him alone with those other two. Bernard replied with an awed mumble.... His whole being was filled with the greatness of the occasion.

It was one thing to be proud of his money and to found himself upon it solidly in his office with some fellow or other who had risen to the control of the finance, and who might be called Desmarets. It was another to be in the presence of Louis XIV. He felt himself a little weak at the knees, and yet happy to be in a new heavenly world. He bowed awkwardly again at the wrong time, and once again he mumbled.

“Why,” said the old king, with a false sprightliness and affected gaiety, “you must see my gardens.... Come with me.... Desmarets,” he added, turning to that courtier with an assumed ease, “I will not deprive you long of Mr. Bernard’s company; I am sure you will be eager to have him back. I only want to show him the gardens.”

Desmarets bowed again in a trained manner, Bernard awkwardly; and the king took Bernard off to see the gardens: a nice little way-mark in the social history of Europe!

One companion the king kept with him as a sort of foil, for with Bernard alone he would have felt like a man alone with a monster. Louis dared not trust himself with Bernard alone, therefore did he keep that one companion as a foil. But the companion was to remain silent while Louis did the honours.

“Are not they well chosen, these chestnuts? Not one has failed!... They are young yet, Mr. Bernard. You will see them grow tall.... But I am an old man.... Their alignment is perfect.”

Bernard said in a husky voice, forcing himself to speak, “All these hills are market-garden country. The soil is good. The best trees are nourished here....” Then he added, “Sire,” and gulped.

The king approved his judgment.

“You are right, Mr. Bernard,” he said, trying to be as little pompous as he could. “You are curiously right.... It is a most interesting view.” He then added (lying), “Few have remarked this. It is most interesting that you should have remarked it. We have here at Marly an excellent soil for the rapid growth of great trees. Now I see there a poplar: we have also poplars ... but their arrangement seems to me a little spoilt by the cross paths. There is something irregular about the genius of these trees. I should have had them set farther back, as with a hint of forestry.”

Saying this, the king halted, leaned back, gazed at the unoffending poplars with severity, then turned, looked at Bernard, and smiled painfully.

“Your Majesty is right,” said Bernard. “You are right ...” (correcting himself), “Sire.”

The banker had not meant the phrase to be blunt, yet Louis restrained himself like a man who feels a sudden pain; then he continued rapidly, and as though to forget what had just passed,⁠—

“You have studied gardens, Mr. Bernard?” (Without waiting for an answer) “They are the most charming of studies. They never grow stale. There is a book I must show you” (he shuddered inwardly as he said it), “the plans of which perpetually please me, though they are only plans. I conjure up gardens as I look at them. One is at Tarbles.... I shall never see it” (a little sadly), “but I almost seem to know it from the plans.”

Bernard answered, “One must always see the plan first,” and there was silence for a full sixty seconds as they continued that mortal progress. But Bernard already trod on air for all his bulk and for all his furious shyness in such company.

The king, without glancing sideways (which would have been an unkingly thing to do), gauged in his mind the distance between the place which they had reached and the point to which they must return. He decided to suggest the return.

Now when the king would suggest a change of direction from one path to another, those of the Court needed no direction. Their eyes were upon the master, who was also the nation, and, for that matter, the summit of Europe; and while they said this or that, in the careful wit of their time, they saw exactly which way the royal hands waved, and which way the royal feet were turning.

Not so Bernard; he had not the habit. Therefore, when the steps of Louis turned to the right, to go back towards the pavilion by the farther path, the banker almost stumbled into the king.

Louis, with perfect restraint, half halted for a moment. Bernard recovered himself and murmured an apology of the middle classes. The king was too well-bred even to hear it, and the retreat upon Marly began.

There was no awkwardness. The same fatuous phrases—or if not fatuous, only not fatuous because there was tradition behind the whole affair—proceeded one after the other from the lips of France; the same rare, uncertain agreement, increasingly filled with awe, came, murmured rather than spoken, from the lips of Bernard.

He was returned to Desmarets. The goods were delivered.

It had been a wonderful quarter of an hour for Bernard! The king had shewn him Marly! He could say all his life, and his children could say to their children, “The king himself took me all round his gardens at Marly!” To tell the full truth, he hardly knew what he had seen. He remembered six young chestnuts and a mist of poplars, and he had been conscious of a Presence always there upon his left, and that he was making history.

Already Bernard was a different man. The king, lingering just enough to make the parting easy, moved off, erect, and, as it would have seemed to a very acute observer, a little less restrained. A very acute observer would have noted in the gesture of his arms and in the carriage of his body, as Louis moved off, something of relief. But only a very acute observer could have noticed this. It was the slightest of slight changes.

Meanwhile Bernard, left behind, had become voluble. He began to talk at large upon Marly, upon the glories of the gardens. He bored Desmarets most damnably, but Desmarets affected an equal eagerness, pretended surprise, put on a familiar astonishment at each new detail, and with slow, familiar steps took Bernard back to his sumptuous carriage at the gates. He held his smile well back as the banker was helped into the cushions by absurdly obsequious servants. He saw the splendid four horses stamp off down the big cobblestones of the yard.

The man gone, Desmarets sat himself down frankly, without ceremony, upon a bench, as though to rest from a great strain. A courtier came up to him. He did not rise. The courtier said,⁠—

“That’s all over!”

But Desmarets answered,⁠—

“There is much more in Bernard than one might think.... I like him.” Which was a lie.

And a very few days later the Crown began its drain of nine millions upon Bernard.

THE CHÂTEAU

(October 1759)

There is a great house which stood once in the woods of a small village some three miles from Versailles. It still stands, and woods about it. I know it well.

It is built in the majestic and sober manner of its time—not quite two hundred years ago; airy, in great suites of rooms, with the windows lighting them from either side. The ground falls away from before it in a park with tall trees forming a sweep of descending lawn, and is faced by the enclosing hills, where the trees hide all but the summit of a long, arched aqueduct, which furnished the fountains of the king’s palace. The west illumines that slope at evening; the summer sun sets behind the arches of that old, high aqueduct on its ridges of the hills, and far away beyond, miles away, are the farther hills, which are the threshold of the Vexin; while to the right, to the northwards, lies mistedly the plain of the Seine. In this house, in the very heart of the eighteenth century, and in the crisis of its fate, Louis, the king of France, the fifteenth of that name, sat waiting by the fire; for it was autumn, and they had brought in chestnut logs from the woods and lit them.

The coach stood outside the glass-roofed porch, having just brought its master—for he had come suddenly, capriciously, without warning, as was his habit in these last years—and the Pompadour was within.

He sat there waiting for her, putting out his hands in a simple gesture towards the fire, unwatched, alone; his fine deep eyes were full of mood and reverie, and also of the beginnings of despair; but he had come for companionship.

The brief two years of passion, the three years of intimacy, had passed, but something more enduring remained in that strange soul which could not tear itself away from any roots, and yet could not act: full of energy within, of emotion, even of desire; but lacking the strength to pierce that shell which cursedly fenced it from the outside world. There he sat, waiting for the Pompadour, and still putting out his hands to the warmth of the fire after the damp coldness of that autumn drive.

In the vestibule without, four gentlemen whispered; and in the far staircases of the place a discreet servant had brought the message to his friend.

Before that fire, less lonely for his loneliness, the last of the undisturbed kings, the last secure king of that tremendous line, communed with his own mind.

It was not a communion of despair, though despair was creeping in to the outer parts of his soul; it was a communion of hopeless fatigue—not fatigue as yet of the body, but an impossible fatigue of the soul; his body was still strong; his soul could still perfectly use that instrument—yet there was nothing left; he had tried all things. He had discovered in childhood how this half-divine position cut him off from men. He had hated, he had accepted, he had used his isolation; he had tried to be two men—and the end of that is destruction. He had tried to be what all his duty should make him, and yet to be a man surrounded by habits and by a domestic air. Under the twin effort he had fallen to be a man entirely alone, yet with certain friends; yet with one friend—no longer a lover, but notedly a friend.

The restlessness which came of his unhappy mood stirred him as he thus sat alone. He swung up suddenly from his chair, turned round, peered here and there at ornaments in the room before him, looked closely at a piece of Chinese work upon a shelf, thought it odd, yet discovered at once its genius; then strolled to the long window upon his right, and looked with eyes too full of reminiscence towards the aqueduct and the wooded hill. The autumn evening was reddening, but there was sun behind the clouds, and, far on the horizon, a shaft of light against which St. Germains stood delicately.... All his life had run in that little groove of one countryside—the Parisis. He had lost power to feel other things, and yet he remembered one or two longer drives, and he smiled as he thought of the noise, the peril, the wind, the acclamations of Fontenoy, and the repose of that battle-evening after victory.

It was more than four years gone; he was in the fifth year from that great day. But five years seems long in what is still the active middle of life. Too soon was he to know how five years would race by in the degradation of sense, when the later years of a man have led him into a closed labyrinth of lust.

As he still stood looking to the north through the window across that afternoon autumn air, with the majesty of the high trees framing his landscape, he heard a step he thought he knew. His attitude changed. He started round. It died away again. She was long in coming!

He felt the chill of his place, and, sensitive to every slight impression of the body, long steeped in immediate enjoyment of every detail of luxury, he moved at once instinctively back to that chair before the fire and sat him down again; but this time leaning backwards, his arms on the arms of the gilded thing that supported him, and a deeper reverie in his eyes.

The chestnut logs had caught; they made a murmuring which effaced time and were a sort of lullaby. For some few moments he did not know that he was waiting for a step and a voice, though they were those of a friend. For some few moments he did but dream, and there passed before his mind certain odd convictions which inhabited it, and certain common terrors; both of these stood against a background of disappointment and of nothingness.... None of his line could be lost ... none of his line could be lost.... St. Louis had baptized them all into a sort of security.... If only the poor were not oppressed, if only he were always master of the rich, and a true king, his soul would be at last secure.... Nor was he too much to blame. These awful and remote dignities of kingship must be counterweighted by something human; it was a crying need; and affection, though passing, was still affection.... There was no gallery of faces in his mind ... he had been good to all these women, and would be good to all to come.

But there had now come upon him friendship. Though the particular love had passed and all its habits, friendship remained; and friendship, even to a man so jaded, was a profound thing.

Even as he thus mused he heard the step which was unmistakable, and a particular voice greeting his gentlemen without salutations in the vestibule. That charming voice answered their respect without any insolence and yet with a certain frankness which was properly bred of a great, a thoroughly exalted place now long enjoyed. Then the tall white-and-gilt door was opened—one leaf of it—by a hand delicate and poised, shut at once, and he took her hands.

Now at last he was at home, and for some few minutes the intolerable tedium, the inexorable weight of what life had come to be for him, would be lifted; the voice was enough for that, and the gestures, and the more than kindness of the face; the sympathy in everything of the senses, and common memories apparently unregretted, and permitting her apparently (he did not deceive himself, he believed it, though to her it was bitter enough), a powerful abandonment of the past.

She had all that remains of youth in the beginning of her maturity, which endeared her the more to him, and an acquiescence in this new relation, in this frank friendship, which yet again endeared her to him. Yes ... he was sure ... affection was a stronger motive with her than the mere desire to retain a power in great affairs, though this she also loved.

That fresh, that musical, that companionable voice soothed him, supported him, and nourished him; he was steeped in home.

So those two sat together before that fire, using little names they had used for so many years; he receiving what he had never known with any other—I mean the maternity and the sisterhood of women, so strongly reinforced by recently remembered, recently practised love. She alone could ask him, without his first speaking, whether he would not remain. (In the kitchens towards the Ménage what courses had she not prepared!) But the Furies were upon him again, the cold Furies of the body and of the soul, the Furies of exhausted passions, which led to no end, the Furies of the flesh. He could not rest; he rose again. They had been together twenty minutes. It was enough for him, and he could not think of her save as in relation to himself. Yet was this man not selfish, only cursed; but this curse could not now be lifted. He might once have conjured it away, not so long ago—it was now too late.

The gentlemen in the vestibule drew themselves up as they heard his step, not stiffly, but with just that rectitude which marked the obeisance of great names to their master, and he and she went out, talking almost gaily, to the doors of the coach. He gave her an appointment, not for the morrow, for he had public business that he hated, but for the morrow after, and at Versailles. He needed her advice with the envoys, and she must meet these foreigners. Whereat they smiled at each other. Then went he into his coach, and his gentlemen with him. They drove up to the great iron gates before this little palace; they turned to the right along the road to Versailles.

She went about her business in the house; she could not help but listen with a part of her mind, strangely detached though it were, to the last clatter of the horses beyond the wall; and neither he nor she understood that the monarchy had been wasted, lost, thrown away.

THE THREE PLACES: FONTAINEBLEAU, MADRID, SARATOGA

(October 16, 1777)

The 16th of October is a date of some import in French annals. On that day Marie Antoinette was killed before her Tuileries gardens. On that day was Wattignies won: “The chief feat of arms of the Republic.” On that day also—years before—were done, in three widely distance places, four very different acts; if we see these acts, first each separate, then all combined, they show us the magnitude and the irony of our lives. Sharply do these four acts in these three places illuminate the story of France and of the world.

For now two years the American colonies of England had been in organized rebellion. The lingering of that war, its distance, its varied and (in the eyes of Europe) petty episodes, had arrested but not determined opinion. The enemies of England had watched it at first with hope, then with anxiety, and at last with tedium. It dragged out; its issue became more and more clear. The rebels all together made up not half the colonists. Their active forces were but a small fraction of the total manhood. Their failure was foredoomed.

The French monarchy (the great but increasingly embarrassed counterweight to the growing power of London) had missed its chance to strike. The issue was now certain: the colonies (already secured through the defeat of the French before Quebec but a few years ago) would now fall back to the English crown. No solid judgment could doubt that. The drama was ending.

The very young King of France—large, lethargic, slow to comprehend and slower to decide—had earned (over and above the effect of such disabilities) the contempt of his immediate servants. It was not for nothing that Louis XVI. was ponderous with German blood. To all this was added a public negligence, for he had (and it was said, could have) no heir. His young queen had entered that road of abrupt, nervous dissipation, had sown that undeserved enmity, which together would lead on to such a close. The whole air of the Court already threatened. The great strains were at work beneath the even ritual and weighted grandeur of what still governed the nation: the brick behind the encrusted marble was giving way.

The end approached; but, before it came, an accident—a side effect—was to arise. It seemed but a divergence at the time. It proved itself, in its conclusion, something almost as large as the revolution itself.

It was Thursday, the 16th of October, in the palace of Fontainebleau. The Court of France had withdrawn thither for the autumn’s hunting. Its concern was with its own splendour and with its innumerable personal dramas. No large affair was toward.

The season was benignant, the woods were still gorgeous, the forest beyond the palace was full of fruition and repose; something of a late summer still lingered.

There had been hunting in the rides between the trees that day, but long before sunset the most tardy of the followers had returned, their mud upon them. Evening had come, the horses were stabled, the day’s work was long over. The magnificence of the public banquet was extinguished; even the eternal card-playing had tired itself out, and the silence had come. In their distant rooms two separate men began to work alone: each to think in silence before he put pen to paper. One was Vergennes, the other Goltz.

Vergennes, Foreign Minister to the King of France, a man of sixty, tried, careful, covered his face with his hand as he sat and wove within his mind. His every energy had been bent to the undoing of the war which had lost Canada—and much more. He sought an issue and he found none. There had been a moment.... There had been a moment.... Best when the formal declaration of independence was known in Europe: recoverable that summer when the ships with the American envoys on board had been seen from the British coast. But the moment had passed.... He saw no issue. He considered the play of the forces in Europe. He considered the decision of his master, the king. He saw, as in a picture, the fleets and their balanced powers, the prestige, the promptitude of the British admirals. He felt, like the memory of a voice, the hesitation of any king to help rebels in arms. He remembered the way in which the Spanish Court (Bourbons also) had failed them. He feared it would fail them still. Spain would not move. He stirred a moment, as though to rise and seek some paper in a drawer. He lifted his hand from his eyes and blinked at the candlelight. Then he sank back again. Of what purport could it be to find the precise words? His one ally, the Spanish Court, had failed him and would fail him. Perhaps they were right. The American colonies could now claim no friends. Their sovereign was too strong, and, after all, his rule was legitimate. The British would make good at last.

All such meditation done, the man changed his place, pulled his chair up towards the desk, settled his papers, and set him down to write. It was more than deep night. For all the fast shut windows and heavy curtains, one could smell the early morning. There was no sound in the vast house. All slept (he thought) save him. In such a silence and such a darkness he put down his judgment—that the Ministers of George III. now thought themselves independent of the world; that while it was true that the two Bourbon Courts must go warily, yet had he worked hard and felt broken hearted. He paused a moment in his writing, then set down, to guide himself, what was true enough, “He had no wish for war.... But neither had he any wish for humiliation. But what should he do if the triumphant British Government demanded of him that he should treat the Americans as outlaws and as pirates?” It was an inconclusive jumble: no more than the fixing of his mind by repetition of what he had written publicly that day. Not often do men of such powers leave work of such sort incomplete. But he left it thus; summoned his servant, who had fallen asleep in the room without, and himself went through the great doors to the inner room to sleep.

In that same night, in another room, far more simply furnished, the envoy of the Prussian king—Goltz—entered, in his precise idiom and hand, another conclusion, which showed how all minds at that instant worked together. He wrote down that the French had had their opportunity and had lost it, and that George III. was now secure in the mastery of the two worlds.

In Madrid, on that same night, Florida Blanca wrote for his master also. He drafted advice, and made a memorandum of the advice he had drafted. It was advice to his colleague of the Court of France. It was a judgment of the King of Spain for his brother Bourbon of France. There was but one thing to be done—regrettable, no doubt, but necessary. Perhaps there had been a chance, but the chance was lost. The immediate, the practical, unquestioned concern of any sane man now was to walk very carefully where Britain was concerned. Everything must be forgone which could even raise complaint from St. James’s, for said he to himself, as he rose from this brief exercise and made also himself for his own chamber: “The thing is now settled and history cannot be re-written. It would have been better otherwise, no doubt, but the American Colonies are destined to be British Colonies again, and for ever. All that talk I have heard young men indulge in, of a new State beyond the Atlantic, is young men’s talk.”

At that phrase he smiled, and in his turn summoned his servants and went to his repose.

But in the woods above the Hudson Valley, on the heights of Saratoga, on that same Thursday, the 16th of October, 1777, a lost body of only four thousand effectives all told, under the British general Burgoyne, with its guns (not three dozen left), had completed its surrender to the colonial levies. And in much those same hours of which I speak, those European midnight hours and hours of the early morning, the late evening of the West had seen this small thing quite completed. A little force, such a force as to-day we might almost put upon a couple of transports, had laid down its arms to an uncertain gathering of irregulars.

And what a consequence!

Some three weeks later a rumour was abroad, no one knew why it came, or how. Another week and men asked why it was that Ministers in England said nothing of the Hudson, and spoke only of successes elsewhere. Moved by we know not what instinct, Vergennes sat him down at last and wrote a note insisting that the new State should be recognized.

It was the 4th of December. Upon the very morrow the full news was known. Upon the 6th the young king—Heaven knows with what hesitation and with what future regrets—put, in his large round hand, at the foot of that document, “Approved.” Upon the 8th Franklin and his companions, sitting at Passy, wrote out and signed their acceptance of the French Alliance.

THE END OF CHATEAUBRIAND

(November 27, 1843–July 18, 1848)

Chateaubriand was in England. He was at 35 Berkeley Square—a very old man (he was in his seventy-fifth year), and nearer the tomb than he knew. His legs, very thin and feeble, supported him ill. His hands, gouty and knotted, trembled a little. Even his fine eyes had lost much of their brilliance. He stooped in his slow walk, but he was supported by pride. He had determined to return to England where, fifty years before, in the eagerness of his young manhood, he had first loved. For of all his unstable, self-reflecting, unrooted adventures in those affairs, two only left something permanent with him—one the parson’s daughter of his youth in Bungay, and the other the strong friendship of his last hours. He returned to the country where he had been ambassador and in the height of his fame.

It was the heir of France in exile who had bidden him come, and it was certainly in loyalty to the throne—to that immemorial line, to the institution which was the soul of his country, to the Capetians—that the old man had made the journey. It was not for memories of Bungay, still less for memories of the Embassy.

It was November—the most lonely month of the year. It was the 27th of that month. Chateaubriand had already been in London three days. The young heir of France in exile, the Comte de Chambord, bade him to that house, giving him for his use all the ground floor (for the great man dared not face stairs, though he still could move), and when, the next day, the prince received, he had himself helped and carried up to the main room, where a crowded mass of curious English, of loyal or interested French, passed before the prince in exile and bowed in turn to him. At the back of that crowd the Comte de Chambord saw, standing with difficulty among the rest in the press, the figure of the man whom he had brought at such a season overseas. He moved towards him at once, vigorously and spontaneously; without care for his own position at the moment; eager to salute the man whose greatness he sincerely recognized, whose usefulness to the throne had been a tradition for that younger generation (the prince was but twenty-three), and whose name was at the moment greater than any other name in France. He took both his poor gouty hands and said Chateaubriand must not stand. He put a chair for him. He told him, without flattery, that he depended upon his presence.

There was no one in that room like him, and Chateaubriand himself complained how many French had stayed away from fear—he had also complained, without reason, that official England had shunned the exile—there was no one in that room, I say, but saw two figures supreme among them: the exile, who later might, if he would, have been king; and that old man of the laurels, who knew himself, and was known by all of them already, to be a sort of immortal—such a pen had he.

The reception was over, the blaze of candles extinguished, the old man had been helped back again to his rooms below. He took paper and, as best he could with his failing fingers, noted the points of what next day he must dictate—as next day he did—to his last friend. Next day also that long letter was written and remains to us. It has a phrase upon the Comte de Chambord, upon Henry V., which is not to be forgotten:⁠—

“The kings would have done well to have saluted this young ghost of a time outworn. They would have done well not to insult, as he passed, a traveller who had nothing to show but a broken sceptre in his hand. They laughed: they did not see that the world has grown tired of them, and that time will force them at last to take that same road as has been taken by the great royal line which protected them all and lent them a life which fails them now.”

Chateaubriand was in the rue du Bac, in those rooms on the ground floor where he was to end. The great windows opened upon a town garden, dark with trees in spite of the light of July.

His friend, Jeanne Françoise Récamier, was awaiting, herself in old age, ready to join him again.

Everything that he had been, all that had made up himself—his vivacity and changeableness of love, and tenacious hate—seemed to have departed, and he lay as though he had already fallen into the power of death, though his eyes still shone. He heard, but with difficulty. He spoke hardly at all, and then in but few, murmuring words. Over his paralysed body they had thrown a coverlet, upon which his hands lay still. He was waiting for the advent of the friend whose friendship alone remained to him of life. But she herself, who had been the most famous of beautiful women as he had been the most famous of lyrical men, had come also to the term of things; and those eyes of hers, which had held captive a generation, were now nearly blind. As he so lay, awaiting her, there returned to his weakened mind a certain phrase of his own writing not so long before, where he had spoken of human affection and had said of love that time changes our hearts as it does our complexion and our years. Nevertheless there is one exception amid all this infirmity of human things, for it does come about sometimes that in some strong soul one love lasts long enough to be transformed into a passionate friendship, to take on the qualities of duty, and almost those of virtue. Then does love lose the decadence of our nature and lives on, supported by an immortal principle.

She to whom—or rather, round whom—those words were written was brought in, a ghost of the past, as he was a ghost of the past, to sit by him as he lay there, silent and deafened, on the edge of death. There could pass very little between them. They had neither of them the strength to speak at any length: nor she in a voice which he could well hear, nor he in a voice strong enough to reach her ears. But her presence was a final consolation.

When she left him after that singular interval of communion and silence he slept a little, and the next day he knew that his end had come.

It was Sunday, the 2nd of July. Outside, in the streets, the noise of the popular revolt had hardly died down, and contrasted with that too great energy of sound and of young fury was this silent room opening upon the garden, and the figure lying there. He asked in a whisper for the Sacraments—he who had said in a phrase which showed the man like lightning: “No Christian believes as I do, nor is any man more sceptical than I.”

On the next day, Monday, the 3rd, his life still dragged on and diminished, yet he whispered to his nephew, who took down the words from his lips: “I declare before God my retraction of all there may be in my writings contrary to the Faith, to good morals, and in general to the principles which are conservative of good.” And his nephew put down beneath those lines: “Signed for my uncle, whose hand can no longer sign.” He had the declaration read to him; he tried to read it with his own failing eyes. Yet another night dragged on; but it was not until Tuesday, the 4th, that he died, and there had come back to that death-bed the friend, the old woman—Madame Récamier. Besides her there was but his nephew, his confessor, and a Sister of Charity. It was a little after eight in the morning. The priest and the Sister of Charity were kneeling at the end of the bed; the two others stood and saw his passing.

So he died.

A fortnight later, upon Tuesday, July 18, 1848, they brought the body of Chateaubriand for burial to the place which he had chosen. That insecure, moving, intense soul of his was steeped in its own time, thinking that sublime which to-day we think grotesque, and which to-morrow our descendants may think sublime again. He had determined, in his passion for things both singular and glorious, in his vanity, but also in his love of greatness, upon a peculiar tomb, and it was now to receive him.

The Cathedral of Saint Malo was filled with the sailors of the place, with peasants come in from the countryside, with the clergy of the province, with all the officials of the town and even of Rennes—a vast crowd. They laid the coffin in the Chapel of the Sacred Heart, blazing with candles, and all that afternoon and all night long the crowd kept pouring in to pass by this lying-in-state and to pray, in a stream that did not end hour after hour.

On the next day, the Wednesday after the last Mass to be said over him, the runners harnessed the horses, and the whole train set out for that rock which is an island at high tide and in which his tomb had been cut. It had been placed for him alone, and he had ordered—a last singularity—that there should be no name or inscription upon it whatsoever. As they laid him in his tomb the guns sounded a last salute, the walls of the city were covered with men and women watching that strange sight, and even the rocks to seaward and along the shore were black with people. They say that fifty thousand stood by and saw the sight.

And there he is to-day; and no one can say at all whether, with the passage of time, he who was at that moment the greatest of the great will become greater still, or insignificant.

A SOLDIER OF ’70

(June 1870)

In the height of a scorching summer, in June 1870, a young man, tall, lean, long in features, active in gesture, something fanatical, with deep-set and fixing eyes, pushed a perambulator (of all things!) along a pavement of the South Bank in Paris. By his side was the mother of the child: nor was she his wife.

I have said “young man,” but in years he was a boy. He was but twenty years old. That household he had set up was a curious adventure indeed. His parents, as he thought, knew nothing of it; and perhaps he was right. The strict laws of the French family would have forbidden a marriage. But his allowance was sufficient and his happiness was complete. At that age one is immortal; and as he lived in an undefeated society at the height of its hope and wealth, as he had himself hope and wealth beneath him in the largest measure for his foundation, nothing mattered but the intensity of his affection in this opening of his life.

There he was, in this comically small domestic manner, at the summit of whatever this life can bring, and trusting rightly to chance for the regulation of all things.

It was, I say, in the middle of that burning summer, and if the foreign affairs of the country were talked of at all (after small but supposedly splendid foreign victories), they were for him and his like but newspaper talk. They did not touch realities between waking and sleeping.

There was this difference between him and his like—that he had in him a certain material which could catch fire, and having caught fire would blaze unfed until he should die.

Ten weeks later this young man, or boy, having volunteered, was on the field of Sedan. The capitulation was announced; the men were already beginning to pile arms, and he, by a chance, was arguing with certain bearers who were moving a body. They maintained that the man was dead; he said that he was alive. He had his way, and he proved right. This also was a sharp point in his life, which he remembered always, even more clearly than any other episode of that disaster: how, while it was yet full light, he had argued with the bearers. The man whom he had saved he kept close to years after, making him a friend; for they went off as prisoners together into the Germanies.

That young man broke prison, and found his way to the Rhine and farther. He spoke no German; he did but ask his way; and when he had reached his own country again he went to the nearest centre and re-enlisted.

They sent him to the Loire. All this while he had heard nothing from his own people, or from what was nearer to him than his own people. So he served through that memorable and terrible winter under Chanzy, and saw the failure to relieve the capital. In those snows he came of age.

He did not see Paris again until he came there with the rank of captain in the troops of Thiers, for the suppression of the Commune. It was against one of the last barricades, near the foot of the Northern Hill, that he received his third wound in all that fighting, national and civil. To his old age he remembered that scene as a comedy for all its slaughter. He saw himself something of a chromo-lithograph, waving a sword and leading his men, who were Bretons. He turned his face toward the barricade, and at that moment saw, peering between two stones, the face of a boy younger than himself—a boy in no uniform, with a bandolier slung over the blue canvas of his blouse. He saw the boy’s musket resting on the stones and pointed towards him. He remembered that it was singularly fore-shortened ... and almost in the same instant that he saw this thing he felt as though a horse had kicked him with full strength on the left arm. He fell down, stunned, without pain; but a very few moments afterwards, as they carried him back, the pain grew intolerable. It was the worst thing he had suffered in all those months, and it was a day before the confusion of his thoughts relaxed. When his mind grew slowly clear again, he saw (more vividly than the dirty walls of the gaunt ward in which he lay) the barricade, and the boy in the blue canvas, and the fore-shortened barrel.

All these enormous things had run their course, and reached a settlement: the empire gone, Prussia supreme, the nation half murdered—a stillness and bitterness over everything. That which had been his life such a very little time before had ceased for him altogether. Some who read this would know too well whom I mean if I were to give the details of his misfortune, or of how he followed, but only at a distance, and supported his child: of how he learnt that the mother had left him for ever.

Note this strange thing: that to this young man, even now not yet in his twenty-third year, the torrents of violent emotion had settled into a sort of lake; a permanent feeling, profound, unchangeable, nourishing an unvarying output of appeal. Whatever he had lived, in whatever ways, his own small concealed home, his family for a moment estranged, his tradition and his proud name—all these had distilled into a lyrical patriotism, the fruits of which seemed at first more than half contemptible to the hard French temper about him. Those fruits took many forms. In the first place, he expended his whole self in a perpetual and open insistence upon the necessity for raising the nation against its conqueror; and this he did in a society where all such open and direct expression is greeted as insufficient and unworthy.

He acted thus, ingenuous and direct, in the midst of a Paris and of a France especially bent upon reserve, and he maintained that form of expression in spite of a much ridiculing and, what wounded him more, a patronizing affection. Through all his youth, through all his manhood, on into his middle age and to the verge of old age, this exalted mood affected him to verse, most of it of the second-rate sort; all of it rhetorical; all of it sincere. You may guess how this popular versifying jarred on the critical French ear and soul.

There was no occasion during thirty years, during forty years, in which he did not make it his business to preach continually the duty of reassertion and of warring down a conqueror who had become now assured in strength and rooted, and of whose achievement and mastery there seemed at last no question. It was the moment when Renan said: “France is dying. Let us not brawl at her death-bed.”

Long after Alsace-Lorraine had become mere names to a younger generation which knew nothing of the war, through mighty civil contests of opinion and even of religion (which the French alone wage in our time), his simple note sounded continually: at first acclaimed by the poor; always ridiculed by the too-cultured or the too-fatigued: latterly almost grotesque, still sounding in a world which had completely changed. In some part of his expression he had aged prematurely. In body he was still alert, though his last illness was upon him; in the vigour of his gesture, the fire of his glance, he was more than he had ever been.

By the year 1912—so oddly do human things turn about in the short unit of one lifetime—his career, his verse, his rhetoric, his perpetual insistence, had become a sort of institution for the nation. Societies love to take those of an older generation and to make them symbols. Even his literary insufficiency was half forgiven, and men talked of him as a sort of curious relic from the days when war was possible, and when the glory of a national rehabilitation (now impossible) could be reasonably entertained. But with this position of his among his fellow-citizens (which was quaintly mixed up with the love we bear for ancient things, almost because they are odd, and largely because we are sure they can never return) there now went something of grandeur. He was now, they said, an old man; and his very insistence in harping upon so single and so unfertile a theme had given him his definite place. And just as men would say, “So and so is now our great poet, So and so our great actor, So and so this, and So and so that,” in the same way they pointed to the man now grown old and said, “He, of course, is our great patriot,” but they said it with a smile. One man, however, who loved him, called him “Tyrtæus”: quizzically enough, I think.

No one thought it possible that his war would come.

His illness grew upon him fast. By one of those accidents which show the lives of men to be ordered, as the parts of an actor are ordered upon the stage, this man died just in those days before the war, when it was far too late for any man to remember great wars in Western Europe as a reality, and still some weeks too early for men to have grown uneasy and to think they already heard the guns. But as though so simple, so direct, and so very great a life were a presage, his funeral made a great picture.

There was a sort of silence after his death, like that which comes before a storm. Nor was the moment long delayed.

Upon a certain day, memorable to all of us, the Cabinet of Berlin presented a brief note to the Government of Paris. Prussia would fight in the East, and demanded as a guarantee the frontier garrisons of the French, over and above a promise of neutrality. We know the reply, and we know what followed.

The first young men to cross the frontier in arms (which was in the pine forests on the crests of the Vosges) pulled up the frontier post for a trophy. There was no discussion as to what should be done with that trophy. The decision seemed inevitable. It was sent back to be set upon this man’s grave, and there I saw it the other day. It had been set up hurriedly, and was leaning a little sideways. It always remains in my mind as the most significant monument in Europe. The grave is in a small cemetery upon the country hills which lie to the west of Paris, a cemetery so domestic and of such small consequence to the little village it belongs to that no good road leads to it, but the dead of the village are brought up from the main road a quarter of a mile off by bearers who follow a rough track.

Up this track, with a ritual dear to the French people, did certain delegates bear that frontier post, as we bear dead men for whom we proclaim the resurrection. They took it through the rustic gate into that small, neglected place, and put it upon the grave of the man who had lived so strange and inartistic a life: who stirred, and was gladdened in his sleep.

TWO MEN OF THE MARNE

(September 9, 1914)

It was a little after five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 9th September, when a general officer with the Ninth French Army rode with one companion up the road from Sezanne. He had clearly in his mind on a landscape map the memory of three disastrous days just past. He saw the line upon that map like a small, vivid picture; he saw it as it was also in reality—the crushing of his centre back and back, day after succeeding day, through the Sunday, the Monday, the Tuesday, and the early hours of this the Wednesday, in which the crisis had come: the crisis of the Marne.

To the north the ceaseless noise of the guns which had filled those four days still rolled, and as he heard it he considered the 42nd Division. It had just arrived behind the gap opening between the 11th and the 9th Corps. To his right, and also to the northward, but behind the line of the battle, a great storm-cloud was growing to cover the sky, and beneath it, where it darkened the last brilliance of that intensely hot day, the sharp edge of the Champagne hills, the steep down near the marshes of St. Gond, and the strangely isolated height of the Mont Aimé stood out unnaturally clear, the latter with the western light of the declining sun full on it against the ominous livid purple of the thunder-cloud. At its base the Prussian Guard had stretched out to the limit of their numbers; they were already too far extended; they were still advancing. Behind again to the right (he did not know in what confusion, but the confusion had come) bunched the Saxons.

That vast modern battle was not one in which, as in those of our fathers’ time, the decisive moment was grasped by the eye, and the decisive manœuvre conducted upon a field actually seen by the man deciding it. In that vast modern battle the critical moment was the end of calculation infinitely complex and stretching back for days; yet there was, in this moment of the late afternoon, on that Wednesday, essentially the same process maturing in a length of days which had with the great Napoleon matured in an hour; and what was about to be done was essentially the same as what Marlborough had done at Blenheim, when he drew that heavy phalanx of white-coated German cavalry from the right, under the heights, and launched it at the French left centre and decided Blenheim; for the enemy line, though still advancing, was stretched to its utmost, was breaking: the gap in the German line had been perceived, and proved fatal to the Germans.

The general officer returned from his ride a little after six o’clock. He sat in the room of a private house, which during the last twenty-four hours had been the conning tower of the fight. He had the great map before him, scored with rough chalk. He saw through the tall windows before him the lowering sky. He received minute by minute the telephone messages, and marked their news in sharp pencil jabs upon the sheet. The dull noise to the north was the same; the reports pouring in from the front showed little change, but that little change was as significant as the slight movement after slack water in a harbour, when the tide begins to turn.

It was still full daylight; the storm had broken on those northern hills; there were lightning flashes against the dead cloud, and the noise of distant thunder mingled with the ceaseless thudding of the guns. The general ceased his labour and could lean back in his chair, resting his eyes from the map, and make certain that the thing was accomplished. An order had been given upon the enemy’s side, and it was an order for retreat....

The evening fell, the rain drove through darkness, the thunder lessened, grumbled and withdrew. None slept. All followed the more distant, the withdrawing signal of the artillery. The reserve troops came marching through, hurrying to the north. The tide had indeed turned.

The general officer was mounted again with his few companions and riding north with the rest through the storm. Before midnight a great glare was seen on the horizon, blurred with rain. He informed himself what it was, and heard it was the station of La Fère Champenoise burning: the enemy had abandoned it three hours before. And still they went northwards, and still the far noise of the guns retired before them, miles away.

There is a house in Luxembourg built for a large school and standing upon the public square opposite the post office. Here was housed, in that same September of 1914, the Central Command of the German armies. Hence proceeded the central determining orders which moulded the battle reaching along one hundred and fifty miles of front, two hundred miles away.

The little hill-town on its splendid gorge was quiet enough. The German officers came and went through the streets, courteous, not ill-liked, among a people whom they had always regarded as one of their own; no cruelties had marked this violation of what they thought to be no more than a technical neutrality. The coinage, the customs, the railways had been German for a lifetime; German speech was all about them, and the traditions they knew. The afternoon was fair and warm in Luxembourg, high though the town stands. Here was all the odd, ironic air of peace, though here was the heart of the attack and of the enormous war.

Into that great empty building, now filled with its busy groups of writing and telephoning men, its big, bare deal tables with their masses of maps pinned down, its walls covered with further maps, lines in blue and red chalk drawn upon them and numbers hastily inscribed, came for the first time, after so many days of triumphant advance, the note of change. There was half an hour of too great calm, during which decision wrestled against decision and a proud refusal to accept inevitable things; but the moment came; it was the reflex of that same moment, a little after five o’clock, when the thunderstorm had broken far away beyond the reedy belts of the Marne River. An order had been given at the front: the man upon whose responsibility it went—a man already broken with illness—rose and went out uncertainly, as though he were far older than his age, leaning upon the plain iron rail of the school staircase as he painfully descended the steps; then slowly, with bent head, wandered into the neglected court and garden.

Between him and the public square there was but a low wall supporting high, open rails far apart. He came in his full uniform, this general officer, who had accepted and ordered the retirement. He was a nobleman, superior in military talent to his fellows, even amid that great organization, which was the best designed for war in Europe. He leaned against the railings a moment with his left hand, his whole body was bowed, and then he sat him down, careless of dignity, careless of prestige. He sat down publicly on the low stone wall that supported the railings, his head bending more and more forward, and staring on the ground. He bore a name with very different memories of cold triumph. It was Moltke.

A group of boys playing in the square ceased from play to gaze at the old boy, timidly approached the railings, and stared at that poor, broken figure. They could know nothing of the traditions of the Prussian army, nor of how strange a sight they saw, but they felt its enormity. He, for his part, had forgotten what was around him—the place, the children; he stared at the ground, remembering as in a vivid dream his urgent appeal to his emperor, his agony at defeat, his intelligence too great for his heart, and the knell still ringing there: “The campaign has failed.... The campaign has failed.”

THE END

Biography and Memoirs

JOHN WANAMAKER By Herbert Adams Gibbons

“A correct perspective of the man and his work ... has been admirably supplied in a new and adequate biography. It may be said at the outset that the author was not only peculiarly fitted for his task, he has performed it with distinction. Understanding his subject, and familiar with the scenes of his business and civic life, he has written with facility and authority.”—Philadelphia Public Ledger.

THROUGH MANY WINDOWS By Helen Woodward

“Not only the epic of a woman’s battles in New York for her place in the sun, but it is a study in business psychology, the best, the raciest and the frankest I have ever read.”—Benjamin de Casseres, New York Evening Post. “Every American ought to read it,” Dorothy Canfield.

A MUSICIAN AND HIS WIFE By Mrs. Reginald de Koven

“The author has lived among the great folk of the world, and has written in a way to give the reader a glimpse not only of herself and her illustrious husband but of their times. This we believe is the ideal autobiographical method and that pursued by autobiographers who have lived. Mrs. de Koven is a charming raconteur.”—Musical Leader.

MY LIFE AND TIMES By Jerome K. Jerome

Of this fascinating story of the life of the famous author of “The Passing of the Third Floor Back” and “Three Men in a Boat” Richard Le Gallienne says: “This very companionable book of memories will the more endear him to his many friends. It is full of humanity, good sense and good fun, and it is admirably written with the ease of a born causeur.”

PORTRAITS AND PORTENTS By A. G. Gardiner

The distinguished author of “War Lords” and “Priests, Prophets and Kings” here presents a striking series of pictures of contemporary celebrities. The editor for nearly twenty years of the London Daily News, A. G. Gardiner has had unusual opportunities for intimate contacts with leaders of opinion and action, not only in England, but all over the world.

HARPER & BROTHERS Publishers Since 1817 New York

Books of Travel

GIFTS OF FORTUNE By H. M. Tomlinson

Among modern writers of travel books H. M. Tomlinson is preëminent in the ability to convey the sense of actuality and the thrill of adventure. With that skill which is peculiarly his own he again writes of unconventional voyages—in the islands of the East, in the Malay forests, in the South American jungle and in many other remote sections of the world.

CONSTANTINOPLE By H. G. Dwight

“No American has ever better caught the spirit of Turkey than Harry Dwight. He has a sense of humor and leisure that are altogether Oriental; and he always writes with charm and distinction.”—Herbert Adams Gibbons.

ROYAL SEVILLE By E. Allison Peers

“According to Mr. Peers, there is no other place like Seville. And indeed, unique in its way as Venice, it does intrigue as uniquely. It is this peculiarly individual appeal that Mr. Peers not only describes but interprets. He disclaims an attempt or even desire to write a guidebook of the delectable city, Seville. Rather has he written desultorily of the magic of its enticement....”—Boston Transcript.

TOM-TOM By John W. Vandercook

“Wonderful stories of ‘magic’ in the jungles of Raleigh’s ‘El Dorado’ are told by Mr. John W. Vandercook, author of Tom-Tom, a fascinating account of the habits, the beliefs, and the jungle-science of the black men who inhabit Suriname—the hinterland of Dutch Guiana.”—London Daily Express.

TALES OF THE ANGLER’S EL DORADO—NEW ZEALAND By Zane Grey

“Uniquely remarkable as each fishing adventure seems to the ‘compleat angler,’ it is really so when its scenes are as little known to us as antipodal New Zealand. Mr. Grey is not only the creator of the verbal descriptions of its scenic beauty and its sturdy, progressive people, but of the photographs illustrating both, full page in the majority of cases and beyond words beautiful.”—Boston Transcript.

HARPER & BROTHERS Publishers Since 1817 New York