not offer battle, we shall have to accept it; we shall be beaten, and we shall not take Arras."'

Turenne meanwhile, though he has not explained why he had separated his army in this dangerous way, had carefully reconnoitred the ground before him. Avoiding Condé's part of the lines, he had advanced close to those of the Archduke, and swiftly uniting all his forces-about 20,000 or 22,000 strong-before the northern front of the fortress, he suddenly made a night attack on the enemy's lines on August 24. The besiegers were completely surprised, and the French, forcing the obstacle at several points, effected a lodgement inside the lines, the foot men rapidly levelling these to prepare a way for the advancing cavalry. Condé, whose camp was on the southern frontthe lion was not to be provoked in his den-did wonders to avert impending defeat; and, had he received the support at hand, Napoleon thinks† he might have driven back the enemy, bewildered in the confusion and darkness. As it was he cut part of the royal troops to pieces, and fell with terrible effect on La Ferté, entangled with his men in a difficult ravine. He was, however, abandoned by his Spanish lieutenants, who drew off from Arras in precipitate haste, and, after a noble exhibition of courage and skill, all that remained to him was to collect his still unshaken forces and make the best of his way to Cambray. The retreat was effected in perfect order. Turenne did not attempt to pursue-he was busy, indeed, in relieving the fortress-and Condé always considered this fine movement one of the most remarkable of his feats of arms.

'He had a right to dwell on this reminiscence with pride. On no occasion was the force of his character more effectively and vividly seen. Alone, all alone, in the midst of the darkness of night and of a rout, he sustains, he rallies those who surround or approach him, from the Archduke to the private soldier, and he inspires them with his heroic courage, "the courage of two in the morning," so admired,

Turenne ran some risk in approaching the Archduke's lines; but he knew his adversary, and significantly remarked to officers who ventured to remonstrate, 'Je ne ferais pas une telle imprudence devant les quartiers de M. le Prince, mais je défile devant ceux des Espagnols; je connais leur esprit de subordination, leur respect de l'étiquette; avant qu'on ait pu arriver jusqu'à l'archiduc et obtenir de lui l'ordre de m'attaquer, je serai loin.'

† Napoleon, 'Corr.' 32, p. 125: Si les Espagnols eussent eu son caractère ou se fussent trouvés sous ses ordres, il est douteux que l'issue de l'attaque eût été la même.'

so envied! During ten terrible hours he incessantly devotes himself to save troops that are not his own; no misadventure finds him at fault; nothing is sufficient to trouble the clearness of his intelligence and the firmness of his will; you cannot perceive a single moment of that discouragement from which even the greatest men have not always escaped. "Everything was lost, and he saved everything." Even in this unjust cause, as Montaigne says, such an example of abnegation of self, of constancy, of manly courage, commands our admiration.'

The relief of Arras was a weighty blow to Spain, and proved a turning-point in the fortunes of the war. The power of France was beginning to revive with that rapidity which we see in her history from the peace of Vervins to the late treaty of Frankfort. Louis XIV. could say that he was really a king: he had abashed the Parliament of Paris with a frown before he had completed his twentieth year; he had laid a heavy hand on the plotters of the Fronde; and he was already the embodiment of a mighty and all-controlling monarchy. Mazarin had been recalled from a brief exile, had resumed the helm of the State when the storm had gone down, and had established a Government, faulty indeed, but orderly, regular, and, in some respects, beneficent. The finances, no doubt, were badly administered; peculation, corruption, and waste prevailed with Fouquet at the head of the treasury, and exaction and oppression were but too common. But the Cardinal, in his foreign policy, kept distinctly in view the great interests of France, and his domestic policy, if that of a despot, was infinitely better than the anarchy of previous years. Internal disorder had largely ceased to exist, even in the most agitated parts of the kingdom. Here and there the dregs of insurrection. seethed; here and there a governor betrayed his trust, and faint risings were witnessed in one or two provinces. But Guyenne, the chief seat of the late civil war, had returned to its allegiance to the Crown; the mob leaders of the Ormée had ceased to rule; the democracy of Bordeaux had sunk into silence after a Saturnalia of crime and licence, and the rebel government of Condé had disappeared. France, growing in strength abroad and at home, had won victories on the Spanish and the Italian frontiers, and her military power was being developed apace, for Turenne had obtained a seat in the royal council, and he was a military administrator of the first order. After 1654 the armies of Louis XIV., though not as yet what they became afterwards, were beginning to be formidable instruments of war, and ere long they overmatched those of Spain, even now in decline. At the

same time a series of dramatic incidents attended the almost complete extinction of the faction of Condé as a power in the State. The Prince was cited to appear before the Parliament of Paris, and to make answer to charges of levying war and of other treasons, and he was condemned as contumacious in his absence by peers who had been his trusted adherents and comrades. Madame de Longueville, meantime, had made her peace with her husband, and was no longer the fatal siren of the day, and ultimately she was to prove the truth of the Scottish proverb, Young deevils 'make auld saints,' for she was to end her days as the strictest of dévotes. But the most singular incident was this: Conti, the brother of Condé and involved in his guilt, was wedded, in great state, to Anne Mancini, not the least charming of Mazarin's gifted nieces.

Condé fought savagely against the increasing stress of fortune. The Duc d'Aumale's account of the life of the exile during the intervals between his appearances in the field is, we have said, a brilliant episode of this book. The Prince resided in state at Brussels or Namur, held a court in which a display of magnificence could not hide much distress and misery, and bore himself like one of those great soldiers of fortune who, in Italy and Germany, turned their swords into sceptres. He did all that he could against his own royal house-had emissaries with the Pope at feud with Mazarin; looked for armed assistance to the Order of Malta; and negotiated with Cromwell, as yet hesitating about a contest with France or with Spain, and vexed at the attitude of the Cardinal to the Stuart exiles. He fomented rebellion and social disorder in France wherever their traces remained, was in constant correspondence with disaffected nobles, and had recruiting parties in several provinces, who collected thousands of disbanded soldiers, of enterprising youths, of the poor and the idle, of the waifs and strays of civil war and anarchy, to the standards of a renowned leader. His hours of relaxation were given to study, for he was one of the most accomplished men of his time; to the education of the young Duc d'Enghien, to which he attended with a paternal care; to paying court to the burghers and civic dignitaries of the half-enfranchised towns of Hainault and Flanders-he was a master of the arts of a demagogue-and above all to a gay round of pleasure, in which the handsome and famous Frenchman charmed the stately ladies of the court at Brussels by his wit and his gallant and courteous bearing. The devo

tion, however, of his noble wife, and the services she had done him in Guyenne, did not efface the chief blot on his domestic life; he remained cold to the saintly Claire Clémence and indulged in countless vagrant amours, and it was the talk of Brussels that when her death seemed at hand he had turned his eyes on Mademoiselle, the Amazon of St. Antoine and the Bastille. The life of Condé was one of excitement and licence, in harmony with a lawless and passionate nature; and yet it was attended with bitter and long disappointment. The great captain, nominally in supreme command, could not make his genius for war felt; he was even in a worse position than Austrian chiefs fettered by the mandates of the Aulic Council; he was baffled and counteracted in his plans by lieutenants jealous of his high estate; and he was specially disliked by the proud nobles, who could not endure his volatile and capricious ways, and resented his success with frail dames at Brussels. The temper of Condé, always unbridled, could not bear provocations like these, and, wholly unlike a much greater man, Marlborough, he fretted against opposition of any kind, and was constantly involved in disputes and bickerings. He quarrelled with Charles of Lorraine and the Archduke Leopold; insisted on his precedence as a Son of France; exasperated and vexed punctilious Spaniards-in short, in a position of extreme delicacy played the part of a reckless and angry Hotspur. An excuse made for one of these Nos of passion by a friend reveals the character of the

Do not mind the Prince; why, he is thus to his

the increasing power of France was distinctly manifest. e campaign of 1655. Turenne took the important Landrecies, and, following the principle of his fine March and turn rather than besiege fortresses' estion of original genius-advanced between the

the Sambre and made Condé and St. Ghislain almost reached the great stronghold of Mons. had his revenge the following year, remarkable passage of arms, in which the qualities of the tagonists were brought out in the clearest 2 1656 Turenne, at the head of about ad siege to Valenciennes, already a fortress of and since made famous in many wars.

t of Valenciennes, at the highest point of the rising group of rural buildings, forming a large rectwithin lofty and thick walls, dominates the whole

adjoining country; it is the farm of Ustebise. It was on this spot that Louis XIV., in front of William III., and on horseback at the head of his troops under arms, halted, held a council of war, and finally gave up the hope of victory, not owing to personal fear, but that the King was not to be exposed to the risk of a defeat. What a scene, and what recollections! In the valley Valenciennes, hidden in the midst of trees and of wooded fields, made marshy by the Scheldt, forms a landscape, extending like a broad green line as far as Condé. Nearer at hand, before the crowned work, stormed by the musketeers of 1677 with incredible boldness, stands the monument raised to the memory of Dampierre, general-in-chief, who fell in 1793, the grandfather of the brave soldier who, seventy-seven years afterwards, was killed, under the walls of Paris, at the head of the mobiles of the Aube. And beyond, towards the west, beneath the clouds of black smoke issuing from hundreds of chimneys, is Denain, falling like a curtain, where Villars, turning to account, with admirable readiness, the mistake of a great captain, pierced the lines of Prince Eugene and saved France when exhausted.'

The Marshal drew his lines round the place; but they were much weaker than those at Arras, and they were divided by the Scheldt, and exposed to destruction by inundations let down from Bouchain. By this time the Archduke Leopold had been replaced by Don Juan of Austria, a bastard son of Philip IV. of Spain, and Condé seems to have had more freedom in military operations than he had had before. Don Juan and the Prince approached Valenciennes, but their army was hardly 20,000 strong, and Napoleon sharply censures Turenne, who certainly, in his splendid career, more than once lost an opportunity of the kind, for not attacking an enemy inferior in force. Turenne, however, was hampered by La Ferté, a brave but quite a third-rate chief; and this may have been the cause of his slackness, though in this judgement we do not concur. Turenne confessed his mistake by his conduct at Dunkirk afterwards.

*

It is

'The siege seems to absorb the whole attention of Turenne. difficult to understand—and we venture, after Napoleon, to make the remark-why he made no attempt to shake off the army of relief. His troops were superior in numbers and in quality; his entrenchments were not strong; everything indicated that he should take the offensive. But was the Marshal certain to find skilful co-operation on the part of his colleague? Did he not expect that the ardour of Condé would be paralysed by the formalities and ceremonious proceedings of

* Napoleon, Corr.' 32, p. 135: L'armée que commandait Turenne était supérieure en nombre et en qualité à l'armée espagnole. Comment a-t-il laissé celle-ci s'approcher de ses quartiers à Valenciennes, et n'est-il pas sorti de ses lignes pour la combattre?'