marked the place of a buried regiment.  There Guyomar’s Brigade had been annihilated; there, the Lheritier Division had been exterminated; here the 7th Corps had perished; there, without having even reached the enemy’s infantry, had fallen “beneath the cool and well-aimed firing,” as the Prussian report states, the whole of General Margueritte’s cavalry.  From these two heights, the most elevated of this circle of hills, Daigny, opposite Givonne, which is 266 metres high, Fleigneux, opposite Illy, 296 metres high, the batteries of the Prussian Royal Guard had crushed the French Army.  It was done from above, with the terrible authority of Destiny.  It seemed as though they had come there purposely, these to kill, the others to die.  A valley for a mortar, the German Army for a pestle, such is the battle of Sedan.  I gazed, powerless to avert my eyes, at this field of disaster, at this undulating country which had proved no protection to our regiments, at this ravine where all our cavalry were demolished, at all this amphitheatre where the catastrophe was spread out, at the gloomy escarpments of La Marphee, at these thickets, at these declivities, at these precipices, at these forests filled with ambushes, and in this terrible shadow, O Thou the Invisible!  I saw Thee.

CHAPTER IX.

Never was there a more dismal fall.

No expiation can be compared with this.  The unprecedented drama was in five acts, so fierce that Aeschylus himself would not have dared to dream of them.  “The Ambush!” “The Struggle!” “The Massacre!” “The Victory!” “The Fall!” What a tangle and what an unwinding!  A poet who would have predicted it would have seemed a traitor.  God alone could permit Himself Sedan.

Everything in proportion, such is His law.  Far worse than Brumaire, it needed a more crushing retribution than Waterloo.

The first Napoleon, as we have said elsewhere,[40] had faced his destiny; he had not been dishonored by his punishment, he fell while steadfastly regarding God.  He came back to Paris, appraising the deserts of those men who overthrew him, proudly distinguishing amongst them, esteeming Lafayette and despising Dupin.  He had at the last moment wished to see clearly into his destiny, he had not allowed his eyes to be bandaged; he had accepted the catastrophe while making his conditions with it.  Here there is nothing of the kind.  One might almost say that the traitor is struck treacherously.  In this case there is a bad man who feels himself in the grasp of Destiny, and who does not know what it is doing to him.  He was at the summit of his power, the blind master of an idiot world.  He had wished for a plebiscitum, he had had one.  He had at his feet this very William.  It was at this moment that his crime suddenly seized him.  He did not struggle against it; he was the condemned man who obeys his sentence.  He submitted to everything which terrible Fate exacted from him.  Never was