"I will tell you all, dear Eugenie, I will tell you all," replied Beatrice of Ferrara; "and then, as my daring rashness was necessary to give vigour to your timid nature, your gentle counsel may now perhaps tend to moderate and restrain my bold, wild schemes. But wait till we come to a resting-place, and then in some sweet quiet cottage in green Normandy, with the soft autumn sun shining upon our door, I will rest beside you for a short time, and drawing you a picture of my wayward fate, will see whether we cannot find means to give it a brighter colouring and a happier hue." So spake Beatrice of Ferrara; but ere we go on to look into the picture to which she alluded, we must beg the reader to pause for a few minutes, upon some of those dull details, which in books calling themselves historical romances serve the mind as bad post-houses on a much-travelled road--places where, after scampering on for many a league in pursuit of pleasure, the little traveller is obliged to stop, kicking his heels in impatient irritation till the horses are brought out, the harness prepared, the postilion has got into his boots, the lash is put on his whip, and, in short, all is made ready for carrying on that same little eager traveller, the human mind, once more upon his way. Giving up, then, heroes and heroines, knights and ladies, we must even follow the progress of that lumbering and uninteresting machine called an army, and pause for a while to consider its clumsy and crocodile-like movements. We have already seen that on the day preceding Eugenie de Menancourt's escape from Paris, the camp of the besieging Royalists had broken up; and that the gay and chivalrous Henry Quatre led his meagre and somewhat ill-furnished host down the bright and laughing banks of the Seine, in such a direction that, should need be, he could either march across Normandy, and fall back upon Touraine, or advance at once to the sea-coast, and cover the disembarkation of his English allies.