ng, or draw up an infant newly born into all this misery,
baptise it, and lower it again to die; but never a crumb of bread came
out of starving Rouen. The Canon de Livet, whose stout heart no horror
of the siege could break, was almost overcome at this last infamy of
fate; and standing high upon the ramparts he cursed the English army,
and pronounced the anathema of excommunication against its king.

The citizens made one more attempt to break through that inflexible
ring of death. Ten thousand of the strongest men who could still carry
arms were picked out from the garrison, and every atom of eatable
substance in the town was swept and scraped together to give them such
a pittance as was grimly supposed to sustain them for two days. Two
thousand of them dashed out of the Porte St. Hilaire and feverishly
made for the headquarters of the King. Their very desperation sent
them momentary victory, but their movement was only intended as a
blind to the main attack arranged from the castle gate, behind which
eight thousand undaunted skeletons rattled in their armour and
prepared to deliver their last blow for freedom. Their front ranks
were already past the moat, and the weight of their main column was
upon the bridge, when suddenly the massive timbers groaned beneath
them, and some thousand men-at-arms fell down into the ditch beneath.
Cut off from their own men, those who had already passed were shot
down at leisure by the English, while the ditch was filled with maimed
and dead. Those who had not had time to cross were obliged to make a
circuit and try to give assistance to their isolated friends outside
by way of the Porte Bouvreuil further to the north and east. The
miserable heroes who had attacked the royal camp were only got back
into the town with fearful loss. To the discouragement of the failure
was added the bitter suspicion of treason, for the great beams of the
bridge were found to have been half sawn through. Their despair was
accentuated by the death of the brave Laghen, who had at last
succumbed to the fatigues of fighting without proper food.

At the imminent peril of their lives, but preferring death in the open
to the starvation of rats in a hole, four nobles and four burgesses
got through the English lines once more, with a last appeal to the
Duke of Burgundy and the King, roundly denying all allegiance to them
if no attempt to help were made. The Duke himself was base enough to
answer that on the fourt