Thus Lagny was seized before the eyes of Henry, who was forced to look helplessly on his great antagonist’s triumph.  He had come forth in full panoply and abounding confidence to offer battle.  He was foiled of his combat; and he had lost the prize.  Never was blow more successfully parried, a counter-stroke more ingeniously planted.  The bridges of Charenton and St. Maur now fell into Farnese’s hands without a contest.  In an incredibly short space of time provisions and munitions were poured into the starving city; two thousand boat-loads arriving in a single day.  Paris was relieved.  Alexander had made his demonstration, and solved the problem.  He had left the Netherlands against his judgment, but he had at least accomplished his French work as none but he could have done it.  The king was now in worse plight than ever.  His army fell to pieces.  His cavaliers, cheated of their battle; and having neither food nor forage, rode off by hundreds every day.  “Our state is such,” said Stafford; on the 16th September, “and so far unexpected and wonderful, that I am almost ashamed to write, because methinks everybody should think I dream.  Myself seeing of it methinketh that I dream.  For, my lord, to see an army such a one I think as I shall never see again—­especially for horsemen and gentlemen to take a mind to disband upon the taking of such a paltry thing as Lagny, a town no better indeed than Rochester, it is a thing so strange to me that seeing of it I can scarce believe it.  They make their excuses of their want, which I know indeed is great—­for there were few left with one penny in their purses—­but yet that extremity could not be such but that they might have tarried ten days or fifteen at the most that the king desired of them. . . .  From six thousand horse that we were and above, we are come to two thousand and I do not see an end of our leave-takers, for those be hourly.

“The most I can see we can make account of to tarry are the Viscount Turenne’s troops, and Monsieur de Chatillon’s, and our Switzers, and Lanaquenettes, which make very near five thousand.  The first that went away, though he sent word to the king an hour before he would tarry, was the Count Soissons, by whose parting on a sudden and without leave-taking we judge a discontentment.”

The king’s army seemed fading into air.  Making virtue of necessity he withdrew to St. Denis, and decided to disband his forces, reserving to himself only a flying camp with which to harass the enemy as often as opportunity should offer.

It must be confessed that the Bearnese had been thoroughly out-generalled.  “It was not God’s will,” said Stafford, who had been in constant attendance upon Henry through the whole business; “we deserved it not; for the king might as easily have had Paris as drunk, four or five times.  And at the last, if he had not committed those faults that children would not have done, only with the desire to fight and give the battle (which the other never