ball is in Peter’s house!” “The ball is in John’s!” They divide their lodging and substance with each other; shout Vive la Republique; and faint not in heart.  A ball thunders through the main chamber of the Hotel-de-Ville, while the Commune is there assembled:  “We are in permanence,” says one, coldly, proceeding with his business; and the ball remains permanent too, sticking in the wall, probably to this day. (Bombardement de Lille in Hist.  Parl. xx. 63-71.)

The Austrian Archduchess (Queen’s Sister) will herself see red artillery fired; in their over-haste to satisfy an Archduchess ’two mortars explode and kill thirty persons.’  It is in vain; Lille, often burning, is always quenched again; Lille will not yield.  The very boys deftly wrench the matches out of fallen bombs:  ’a man clutches a rolling ball with his hat, which takes fire; when cool, they crown it with a bonnet rouge.’  Memorable also be that nimble Barber, who when the bomb burst beside him, snatched up a shred of it, introduced soap and lather into it, crying, “Voila mon plat a barbe, My new shaving-dish!” and shaved ‘fourteen people’ on the spot.  Bravo, thou nimble Shaver; worthy to shave old spectral Redcloak, and find treasures!—­On the eighth day of this desperate siege, the sixth day of October, Austria finding it fruitless, draws off, with no pleasurable consciousness; rapidly, Dumouriez tending thitherward; and Lille too, black with ashes and smoulder, but jubilant skyhigh, flings its gates open.  The Plat a barbe became fashionable; ‘no Patriot of an elegant turn,’ says Mercier several years afterwards, ’but shaves himself out of the splinter of a Lille bomb.’

Quid multa, Why many words?  The Invaders are in flight; Brunswick’s Host, the third part of it gone to death, staggers disastrous along the deep highways of Champagne; spreading out also into ’the fields, of a tough spongy red-coloured clay;—­like Pharaoh through a Red Sea of mud,’ says Goethe; ’for he also lay broken chariots, and riders and foot seemed sinking around.’ (Campagne in Frankreich, p. 103.) On the eleventh morning of October, the World-Poet, struggling Northwards out of Verdun, which he had entered Southwards, some five weeks ago, in quite other order, discerned the following Phenomenon and formed part of it: 

’Towards three in the morning, without having had any sleep, we were about mounting our carriage, drawn up at the door; when an insuperable obstacle disclosed itself:  for there rolled on already, between the pavement-stones which were crushed up into a ridge on each side, an uninterrupted column of sick-wagons through the Town, and all was trodden as into a morass.  While we stood waiting what could be made of it, our Landlord the Knight of Saint-Louis pressed past us, without salutation.’  He had been a Calonne’s Notable in 1787, an Emigrant since; had returned to his home, jubilant, with the Prussians; but must now forth again into the wide world, ’followed by a servant carrying a little bundle on his stick.