Chapter XVII: The March

The army of Lavalette covered all the roads that led towards Lorraine, and the aspect of the column to which our Scottish cuirassiers were attached was brilliant and imposing as it poured through the pastoral province of Champagne, with corslets and cabossets gleaming in the sun, and all their bright points glittering, their plumes and banners waving among the brigades of pikemen and musketeers, dragoons, artillery, baggage, and trains of pontooneers and petardiers.

After traversing a spacious plain we crossed the Marne at Meaux, which made a march of thirty-two miles. This was severe enough for heavily-armed cavalry, so we halted all next day and heard Father Gilbert Blackhall, a Scottish Jesuit, preach in the cathedral of St. Stephen. Continuing our march we passed Colomiers (which was soon after to be made a peerage for Henry of Orleans, Duke of Longoville) and La Ferte sous Jouarre, which lies in a narrow valley twelve miles eastward of it. We crossed the river by an old wooden bridge, and our captain, the Marquis de Gordon, took up his quarters in the ancient castle, which had been burned by the Huguenots in 1562, in those days when religion and rapine, slaughter and conversion went hand in hand; and ere long our trumpets made the old ruined streets of Sezanne--which was still half in ashes, just as the Huguenots had left it in the days of Charles IX.--resound as they blew the cavalquet in the market-place. The town is prettily situated between two small rivers, and having a good market for corn, wine, and wood, formed a convenient halting-place, and here we remained for three days by the advice of our Marechal de Logis.

We carried little baggage. Our horses were well inured to fatigue, and had been kept constantly in condition by drilling, marching, and galloping at full speed by squadrons. On these occasions rider and horse were always fully armed and accoutred; thus all our movements became characterized by unusual spirit and velocity.

I thought frequently of the Countess, from whom I was now completely separated; but being beyond the sphere and fascination of her presence, my regret was not very poignant. Then the softer and gentle image of Nicola would come before me.

'Pshaw!' thought I; 'a little intriguing waiting-maid--absurd!'

On the march towards Sezanne we passed hundreds of French stragglers, who had sunk under fatigue and lay by the wayside; but never a Scottish musketeer of Ramsay, Hepburn, or Leely left his colours, though their regiments composed half our force of infantry; but our Scots have naturally the gift of enduring fatigue, and the habit of marching--for it is a habit which other soldiers have generally to acquire.

'Well,' said the Viscount Dundrennan, shrugging his shoulders, as we received our billets on the bourgeoisie; 'I suppose, M. le Maire, you have neither a theatre or other place of entertainment here?'

'At this distance from Paris, M. le Gend'arme, I should think not! but,' he added, with a twinkle in his eye--for this paunchy magistrate and wine-merchant was an old Huguenot--'there is a pretty convent of Ursulines on the height yonder.'

'Yes, monsieur.'

'A convent?'

'A charming little place, monsieur; the walls are covered with roses--'

'Ah! to conceal the broken bottles and iron spikes below, I suppose.'

'Yes, monsieur,' said the Maire, grinning and bowing.

'Say _monseigneur_, M. le Maire; you are addressing a Viscount,' said the Chevalier Livingstone; and the magistrate bowed thrice to his red garters.

'There is a piece of the true cross there,' he added, with his impudent smile, 'in a golden shrine that cost a thousand louis d'ors, and the abbess is only four-and-twenty years old, while there is not a novice over sixteen.'

'Tête Dieu!' exclaimed the Chevalier; 'do you say so?'

'Not one over sixteen, messieurs, and all high born and beautiful.'

'By the devil's death, I shall visit them,' said Dundrennan, putting his foot in his stirrup; 'I must see all these pretty ones, hap what may.'

'But how?' I asked.

'Viscount, you are mad!' exclaimed Cheyne and others.

'How so, gentlemen?' said he, mounting; 'I am the grandson of a commendator.'

'The devil!' exclaimed the Chevalier, laughing; 'dost think the nuns will esteem you the more for that?'

'But how will you enter?' I asked.

''Tis very simple. I fall sick at the gate or am thrown from my horse, and the sympathizing abbess, the kind nuns and pretty little novices, carry me in; they remove my helmet--they bathe my temples with perfumes, and with their own soft hands, and thus the fortress is taken by stratagem.'

'Beware, Viscount, I beseech you,' said I; 'such pranks may bring you to the Bastille.'

'Viscount, you are incorrigible!' said Sir Quentin Home.

'Ten crowns to one, you don't get entrance,' said the reckless Chevalier Livingstone.

'You shall see, gentlemen--my ten crowns are won,' cried the madcap Viscount, as he galloped away with all his brilliant accoutrements flashing in the sun; and the waggish maire rubbed his hands with glee, as he saw him cross the bridge and ascend the height on which the sequestered convent stood.

In an hour be rejoined us, looking rather grave and a little ashamed of himself and of his prank.

'How about our little bet?' asked Livingstone.

'You have lost, Chevalier,' said Dundrennan; 'so order dinner for us all at the hotel.'

He had fully succeeded; but the nuns proved to be all old women; there was not a novice in the house, and the abbess was in her sixty-seventh year. She was a lady of noble and magnificent presence, and on discovering her visitor to be a gentleman of the Scottish Guard, announced herself to be Mary Stuart--that mysterious nun who was then so well known in France as the Mother of Resurrection, and who was openly affirmed to be the daughter of the wicked Earl of Bothwell, and the unhappy Mary Queen of Scots--born in Lochleven, and kidnapped to France--a descent also claimed by an eminent divine in Scotland.

She had received the Viscount kindly, gracefully, and told him who she was supposed to be; and he returned to us, in a more sober mood than we had seen him in for many a day.

During our halt, the convent parlour was thronged by the gentlemen of the Scottish forces; and our illustrious Camp-Marechal Hepburn presented to the abbess a valuable gold medal, which, in the German wars, he had torn from the neck of the terrible Count Pappenheim, the hero of a hundred wounds.

Weary with marching in all our harness, half choked by the spring dust, that rolled along the roads of Upper Champagne, under the feet of so many thousand infantry, and the wheels of many powder-waggons, baggage-wains, and field-pieces, just as the sun was setting, we gladly halted one evening, in the little town of La Fere Champenoise, and resigned our horses to our grooms, servants, or pages.

As we rambled along the streets in search of refreshment, the welcome voice of a tapster, shouting to passengers in the old fashion, drew us towards a tavern or hostelry.

'Messieurs,' he continued to cry, 'we have here good wine and good oats! will you have a chopin for yourself and a measure for your charger? enter, messieurs, enter!'

This tavern was styled the _Count of Champagne_, from its sign-board, which bore an imaginary head of that personage in a barbed helmet of the middle ages; and from the circumstance of the quaint old house having been a residence of Theobauld V., last Count of Champagne and Brie; consequently our tavern was quite historical, and at least four hundred years old.