For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques,
not only warming him with fallen wood, but giving
him shelter in days of sore trouble, when my lord
of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets,
had been beaten from field after field into some ultimate
fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison.
In these dark days, when the watch on the church
steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line,
or a clump of spears and fluttering pensions drawing
nigh across the plain, these good folk gat them up,
with all their household gods, into the wood, whence,
from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook
the coming and going of the marauders, and see the
harvest ridden down, and church and cottage go up
to heaven all night in flame. It was but an
unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they
must abide all change of weather and keep house with
wolves and vipers. Often there was none left
alive, when they returned, to show the old divisions
of field from field. And yet, as times went,
when the wolves entered at night into depopulated
Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a company
of demons like himself, even in these caves and thickets
there were glad hearts and grateful prayers.
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages,
the forest may have served the peasant well, but at
heart it is a royal forest, and noble by old associations.
These woods have rung to the horns of all the kings
of France, from Philip Augustus downwards. They
have seen Saint Louis exercise the dogs he brought
with him from Egypt; Francis I. go a-hunting with
ten thousand horses in his train; and Peter of Russia
following his first stag. And so they are still
haunted for the imagination by royal hunts and progresses,
and peopled with the faces of memorable men of yore.
And this distinction is not only in virtue of the pastime
of dead monarchs.
Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the
affairs of men, have here left their note, here taken
shape in some significant and dramatic situation.
It was hence that Gruise and his leaguers led Charles
the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here, booted
and spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon
met the Pope beside a woodland cross. Here,
on his way to Elba not so long after, he kissed the
eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate
farewell to his soldiers. And here, after Waterloo,
rather than yield its ensign to the new power, one
of his faithful regiments burned that memorial of
so much toil and glory on the Grand Master’s
table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout priest
consumes the remnants of the Host.
