Often there was none left alive, when
they returned, to show the old divisions of field from field. And
yet, as times went, when the wolves entered at night into depopulated
Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a company of demons
like himself, even in these caves and thickets there were glad hearts
and grateful prayers.
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may
have served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and
noble by old associations. These woods have rung to the horns of all
the kings of France, from Philip Augustus downwards. They have seen
Saint Louis exercise the dogs he brought with him from Egypt; Francis
I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train; and Peter of
Russia following his first stag. And so they are still haunted for
the imagination by royal hunts and progresses, and peopled with the
faces of memorable men of yore. And this distinction is not only in
virtue of the pastime of dead monarchs.
Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs of men,
have here left their note, here taken shape in some significant and
dramatic situation.
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