pt recoiling before the enemy, Marlborough kept advancing; two thirds
of Belgium and sixteen strong places were lost, when Louis XIV. sent
Chamillard into the Low Countries; it was no longer the time when Louvois
made armies spring from the very soil, and when Vauban prepared the
defence of Dunkerque. The king recalled Villeroi, showing him to the
last unwavering kindness. "There is no more luck at our age, marshal,"
was all he said to Villeroi, on his arrival at Versailles. "He was
nothing more than an old wrinkled balloon, out of which all the gas that
inflated it has gone," says St. Simon: "he went off to Paris and to
Villeroi, having lost all the varnish that made him glitter, and having
nothing more to show but the under-stratum."

The king summoned Vendome, to place him at the head of the army of
Flanders, "in hopes of restoring to it the spirit of vigor and audacity
natural to the French nation," as he himself says. For two years past,
amidst a great deal of ill-success, Vendome had managed to keep in check
Victor-Amadeo and Prince Eugene, in spite of the embarrassment caused him
by his brother the grand prior, the Duke of La Feuillade, Chamillard's
son-in-law, and the orders which reached him directly from the king; he
had gained during his two campaigns the name of taker of towns, and had
just beaten the Austrians in the battle of Cascinato. Prince Eugene had,
however, crossed the Adige and the Po when Vendome left Italy.

"Everybody here is ready to take off his hat when Marlborough's name is
mentioned," he wrote to Chamillard, on arriving in Flanders. The English
and Dutch army occupied all the country from Ostend to Maestricht.

The Duke of Orleans, nephew of the king, had succeeded the Duke of
Vendome. He found the army in great disorder, the generals divided and
insubordinate, Turin besieged according to the plans of La Feuillade,
against the advice of Vauban, who had offered "to put his marshal's baton
behind the door, and confine himself to giving his counsels for the
direction of the siege;" the prince, in his irritation, resigned his
powers into the hands of Marshal Marsin; Prince Eugene, who had effected
his junction with Victor-Amadeo, encountered the French army between the
Rivers Doria and Stora. The soldiers remembered the Duke of Orleans at
Steinkirk and Neerwinden; they asked him if he would grudge them his
sword. He yielded, and was severely wounded at the battle of Turin, on
the 7th