London, April to September 1822.

We raised the siege of Thionville and left for Verdun, which had surrendered to the Allies on the 2nd of September. Longwy, the birthplace of François de Mercy had fallen on the 23rd of August. Everywhere, wreaths and festoons of flowers, attested to the passage of Frederick-William II.

I remarked, amongst the peaceful trophies, the Prussian eagle planted on Vauban’s fortifications: it would not stay there for long; as for the flowers, they would soon see the innocent creatures who had gathered them fade like themselves. One of the most atrocious massacres of the Terror was that of the young girls of Verdun.

‘Forty young women of Verdun’, says Riouffe, ‘of unparalleled innocence, having the appearance of young virgins dressed for a public feast, were led to the scaffold together. They vanished suddenly, culled in their springtime; the Cour des femmes, the day after their death, looked like a flower-bed stripped of its flowers by some storm. I have never seen such despair among us to equal that which was stirred by this barbarity.’

Verdun is celebrated for its female sacrifices. According to Gregory of Tours, Deuteria, wishing to hide her daughter from her husband Theodebert’s attentions, placed her in a wagon hitched to two wild oxen, and precipitated her into the Meuse. The instigator of the massacre of the young girls at Verdun, was the minor regicide-poet, Pons de Verdun, relentless against his native town. That the Almanach des Muses furnished agents of the Terror seems incredible: the vanity of mediocrities in waiting produced as many revolutionaries as wounded pride did runts and amputees: appalling analogy between the infirmities of the mind and those of the body. Pons pierced his dull epigrams with a dagger-point. Apparently loyal to Greek tradition, the poet would only offer the blood of virgins to his gods: for the Convention decreed, on his advice, that no pregnant woman could be tried. He too had the sentence annulled that condemned Madame de Bonchamp to death, the widow of the celebrated general of the Vendée. Alas! We other Royalists in the Princes’ following achieved the Vendéans’ reverse without having passed through their glory.

To pass the time, at Verdun, we lacked the presence of ‘that famous Comtesse de Saint-Balmon, who, after abandoning female dress, mounted a horse and herself served as guard to the ladies accompanying her, whom she had left in her carriage…’ We were not passionate about Old Gaul, and we did not send each other notes in the language of Amadis (Arnauld).

The Prussian sickness (dysentery) spread to our army; I was stricken. Our cavalry had left to meet Frederick-William at Valmy. We had no idea what was happening, and waited from hour to hour for the order to advance; we received one instead to beat a retreat.

Extremely weak, and with my irritating wound only allowing me to walk with pain, I dragged myself along as best I could at the tail of my company, which soon scattered. Jean Balue, son of a miller of Verdun, when very young left his father’s house with a monk who entrusted him with his knapsack. Leaving Verdun, the town at the ford according to Saumaise (ver dunum), I carried the monarchy’s knapsack, though I did not become a controller of finances, a bishop, or a cardinal.

If, in the novels I have written, I have utilised my own history, in the histories I have recounted I have incorporated memories of the living history in which I have taken part. So, in my life of the Duc de Berry, I have retraced some of the scenes which passed before my eyes:

‘When one dismisses an army, it leaves for home; but where was home for Condé’s army? Where would the sticks they were permitted to cut in the woods of Germany lead them, once they laid down the muskets they had seized to defend their King? ....They were forced to disperse. Brothers in arms exchanged a last farewell, and took their separate earthly paths. Before leaving, all of them went to salute their father and captain, the aged white-haired Condé: the patriarch of glory gave his blessing to his children, wept over his dispersing tribe, and watched his camp’s tents lowered with the grief of a man seeing his paternal roofs demolished.’

Less than twenty years later, the leader of the new French army, Bonaparte, also took leave of his comrades; so many men and empires swiftly vanish! The most extraordinary fame does not prevent the most ordinary of endings!

We left Verdun. Rain had destroyed the roads; everywhere we found ammunition-wagons, gun-carriages, embedded canon, overturned carts, sutlers with their children on their back, soldiers in the mud, dead or dying. Crossing a ploughed field, I sank in up to my knees; Ferron and another of my friends pulled me out, against my wishes: I begged them to leave me there; I wanted to die.

The company captain, Monsieur de Gouyon-Miniac, handed me, on the 16th of October, in camp near Longwy, a certificate granting me leave with all honour. At Arlon, we saw a file of horse-drawn wagons on the highway; the horses, some standing, some kneeling, others with their noses resting on the ground; were all dead; and their bodies had stiffened between the shafts: they might have been the ghosts of some battle resting by the banks of the Styx. Ferron asked me what I intended to do, I replied: ‘If I can reach Ostend, I will sail to Jersey and find my uncle Bedée; from there, I will be able to rejoin the Royalists in Brittany!’

The fever was eroding my strength; I could only support myself on my wounded thigh with difficulty. I felt myself gripped by a new illness. After twenty-four hours of vomiting, my face and body were covered with an eruption; confluent smallpox had declared itself; it came and went with the variations in air temperature. In this condition, I set out, on foot, on a five hundred mile journey, rich in that I possessed eighteen livres Tournois; all for the greater glory of the monarchy. Ferron, who had loaned me my six crowns of three francs each, and was expected in Luxembourg, left me.