“Bury my heart in Valmy,” said Kellerman, soldier of the Seven Years’ War, victor of Valmy, Marshal of France under the first Napoleon, and court favorite of the Bourbons—as the shadows of old-age death deepened into darkness. And they buried his heart in Valmy.

A simple monument on the crest of the hill, the bloodiest spot of the one-time battle ground, tells to the thoughtful stranger the story of a restless heart o’er whom as o’er Madame de Stael and many another heir of a checkered heritage might be engraved as epitaph, “Here rests one who never rested.”

The era ushered in by the battle of Valmy was especially prolific of men whose political principles changed violently from one extreme to the other; only to rebound again and again, until, at length, weariness and cynic scorn of good in anything caused them to drift in perplexed acquiescence wherever the tide rolled longest and strongest. Talleyrand, Dumouriez, Marquis de la Rouarie, Kellerman, La Fayette, Mirabeau, Duc de Chartres, and even Napoleon Bonaparte were, in great measure, moulded into their respective historic moulds by the lurid lightning play of antithetic forces ever fatefully flashing and slashing and crashing around them.
September Twentieth.

Yet in August, 1792, when sixty thousand Prussians, and forty thousand Austrians and fifteen thousand of the old French[146] noblesse started out upon that “military promenade to Paris”: or on the morning of September 20th, when that victoriously advancing column prepared gaily for its first skirmish with the raw revolutionary levies who filled the passes of the Argonne wooded heights and threatened to impede that “promenade”—who could see, or who could dare to dream what the issue of that encounter would be; what results would follow; what rivers of blood would flow; what lordly heads would roll from under the guillotine; what national madness would break out barking at the peace of Europe; what mighty Madman would arise urging on that national madness even to Wagram, Austerlitz, Moscow, Leipsic, Waterloo!
Retribution.

Had Kellerman failed to come up just in time to join forces with Dumouriez: had the Prussian advance been just an hour or two earlier: had the heavy mists lifted from the Valmy hill and Argonne wood revealing the relative positions of Kellerman and Dumouriez: had the forcing of the defile by Clairfayt and his Austrian corps proved fatally successful: had the Duke of Brunswick resolutely charged a second time up that hill of bristling bayonets: had the King of Prussia, urged on by a vision of the future, authoritatively commanded that the hill be taken and himself led the charge: ah! so we learnedly say from the calm eminence far away, but history is made in the low blind fury of the fray. Perhaps, too, there were potently at work upon that fated battlefield, forces that elude the gaze of the dreamer on the height far away:—a determining animus, moral and spiritual potencies formed by the slow centuries and long controlled, but now liberated and wildly free. Ghosts of ten thousand wrongs may have arisen between the gilded ranks of the French noblesse and the ragged rows of the Carmagnoles: and, as the spirits that arose over the tent of Richard the Third,[147] the night before the battle of Bosworth Field, cursed Richard and blessed Richmond; threatened Richard with defeat and death on the morrow and cheered Richmond with hopes and promises of victory; fought intangibly, invisibly, yet potently present amid the awful carnage of Bosworth field even until death trampled down Richard: so, in like manner, may the ghosts of ten thousand wrongs have arisen between the men of the old regime and of the rebellious new—fighting for their fellow-wrongs still writhing in the flesh, fighting the old, old fight of retaliation, compensation, stern adjudication, infinite justice. As the sun’s rays that reach earth are but one-millionth of the rays emitt............