The action began about ten o’clock.  The fog was still so thick that there was no seeing one another at ten paces.  The ardor on both sides was extreme; and, during nearly three hours, victory seemed to twice shift her colors.  Henry at one time found himself entangled amongst some squadrons so disorganized that he shouted, “Courage, gentlemen; pray, courage!  Can’t we find fifty gentlemen willing to die with their king?” At this moment Chatillon, issuing from Dieppe with five hundred picked men, arrived on the field of battle.  The king dismounted to fight at his side in the trenches; and then, for a quarter of an hour, there was a furious combat, man to man.  At last, “when things were in this desperate state,” says Sully, “the fog, which had been very thick all the morning, dropped down suddenly, and the cannon of the castle of Arques getting sight of the enemy’s army, a volley of four pieces was fired, which made four beautiful lanes in their squadrons and battalions.  That pulled them up quite short; and three or four volleys in succession, which produced marvellous effects, made them waver, and, little by little, retire all of them behind the turn of the valley, out of cannon-shot, and finally to their quarters.”  Mayenne had the retreat sounded.  Henry, master of the field, gave chase for a while to the fugitives, and then returned to Arques to thank God for his victory.  Mayenne struck his camp and took the road towards Amiens, to pick up a Spanish corps which he was expecting from the Low Countries.

[Illustration:  Sully——­37]

For six months, from September, 1589, to March, 1590, the war continued without any striking or important events.  Henry iv. tried to stop it after his success at Arques; he sent word to the Duke of Mayenne by his prisoner Belin, whom he had sent away free on parole, “that he desired peace, and so earnestly, that, without regarding his dignity or his victory, he made him these advances, not that he had any fear of him, but because of the pity he felt for his kingdom’s sufferings.”  Mayenne, who lay beneath the double yoke of his party’s passions and his own ambitious projects, rejected the king’s overtures, or allowed them to fall through; and on the 21st of October, 1589, Henry, setting out with his army from Dieppe, moved rapidly on Paris, in order to effect a strategic surprise, whilst Mayenne was rejecting at Amiens his pacific inclinations.  The king gained three marches on the Leaguers, and carried by assault the five faubourgs situated on the left bank of the Seine.  He would perhaps have carried terror-stricken Paris itself, if the imperfect breaking up of the St. Maixent bridge on the Somme had not allowed Mayenne, notwithstanding his tardiness, to arrive at Paris in time to enter with his army, form a junction with the Leaguers amongst the population, and prevail upon the king to carry his arms elsewhither.”  The people of Paris,” says De Thou, “were extravagant enough to suppose