The French army, however, followed hard after him.  On the 9th of June Philip and Richard halted fifteen miles off Le Mans, on the 11th of June they encamped under its walls.  The next day they broke through the handful of troops who desperately held the bridge.  A wealthy suburb which could no longer be defended was set on fire, so that it should not give shelter to the enemy, the wind swept the flames into the city, and Henry saw himself shut in between the burning town and the advancing Frenchmen.  Then for the first time in his life he turned his back upon his enemies.  At the head of 700 horsemen he rode out over a bridge to the north, and fled towards Normandy.  As he mounted the spur of a hill two miles off, he turned to look at the flames that rose from the city, and in the bitterness of his humiliation he cursed God—­“The city which I have loved best on earth, the city in which I was born and bred, where my father lies buried, where is the body of Saint Julian—­this Thou, O God, to the heaping up of my confusion, and to the increase of my shame, hast taken from me in this base manner!  I therefore will requite as best I can; I will assuredly rob Thee too of the thing in me which Thou lovest best!”

For twenty miles the king, with his son Geoffrey the chancellor, and a few faithful followers, rode furiously under the burning sun through narrow lanes and broken roads till knights sank and died on the way.  Once he was only saved from capture by the breaking of a bridge over a stream which was too deep for the pursuers to ford.  Once Count Richard himself followed so hard upon them that he came up with the flying troop.  William the marshal turned and raised his lance.  “God’s feet, marshal, do not kill me!” cried Richard; “I have no hauberk!” William struck his spear into the count’s horse, so that it fell dead.  “No, I will not kill you.  Let the devil kill you!” he shouted with a fierce memory of the old prophecy.  By nightfall Henry reached La Frenaye, within a day’s ride of the Norman border.  He threw himself on a bed, refusing to be undressed, and would scarcely allow Geoffrey to cover him with his own cloak.  The next morning he sent his friends forward into Normandy to gather its forces and renew the war.  But he himself, in spite of all prayers and warnings, declared that he would go back to Anjou.  His passionate emotion threw aside all cold calculations of reason.  Every fortress on the way was in the hands of enemies; hostile armies were pressing in on every side; the roads were held by foreign troops,—­French and Poitevin, Flemish mercenaries and Breton rebels—­as the stricken king rode through the forests and along the trackways he had learned to know as a hunter in earlier days.  Never had his indomitable will, his romantic daring, been so great as in this last desperate ride to reach the home of his race.  He started on the 13th of June.  Before the end of the month Geoffrey had hurried back from Normandy, and together they went to Chinon.