There was a moment of hesitation and of last resistance, then that break in the line which is the end. Edward could see from far off the horse of his small group of knights vigorously mounting the bluff, and the scattering of the small force that opposed them. The bridgehead was held; the main army began to file across. So close was the issue that it could hardly save its baggage. A detachment of the King of France’s forces had already appeared upon the sky-line above Saigneville before the wagons could follow the last of the English infantry on to the ford. Much of Edward’s train had to be abandoned. But that same accident which caused so severe a loss in provision saved the army. The Plantagenet’s command, nearly all its fighting men at least, had crossed the Somme, and the rising tide had made pursuit impossible by the time the Valois’ men had made secure of their booty and had reached the eastern bank. They watched the growing flood of water between, as, far away upon the farther bank, the triple column of the English king disappeared over the western folds of the land. This was the crossing of Blanchetaque, and this it was which founded, two days later, the decision of Crécy. Edward had said “God and our Lady and St. George will find me a passage.” VILLE GAGNÉE (_Friday, April 13, 1436_) In Paris never was such confusion of mind, such exhaustion of argument! It had gone on for twenty years, for twenty-one years--and you would have said that no man knew where he stood. For who was king? And where stood Burgundy? And what had come to what had been the Armagnacs? Never was such a generation of conflict since the city had been founded! There are two currents in such turmoils: the young men, and the fathers. Now the young men, from those of thirty who could just remember the news of Agincourt, and who, in their teens, had seen the great massacres when the Burgundians had retaken the city from the Armagnacs, had lived all their lives under a king--the grandson of a king of France, the son of a daughter of France--but a king also of England, and himself a child whom they hardly saw. Still, that was their king. Their priests, their notables, their magistrates--all the world about them, took such a king for granted, and Burgundy, that great house which the populace of Paris had always loved to follow, still swore by such a king. The old men would some of them remember this child-king as a usurper, but some of them as a restoration of good things; for was not this new Plantagenet kingship the work of Burgundy and the end of the hateful Armagnac? Was it not a true Parisian thing?