This corner of earth, could he but have seized it, would, perhaps, have given him the world likewise.
Chickens are scattering its dust abroad with their beaks.
A growl is audible; it is a huge dog, who shows his teeth and replaces the English.
The English behaved admirably there.
Cooke's four companies of guards there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.
Hougomont viewed on the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising buildings and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of which is nicked out.
It is this angle which contains the southern door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun's length away.
Hougomont has two doors,--the southern door, that of the chateau; and the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent his brother Jerome against Hougomont; the divisions of Foy, Guilleminot, and Bachelu hurled themselves against it; nearly the entire corps of Reille was employed against it, and miscarried; Kellermann's balls were exhausted on this heroic section of wall. Bauduin's brigade was not strong enough to force Hougomont on the north, and the brigade of Soye could not do more than effect the beginning of a breach on the south, but without taking it.
The farm buildings border the courtyard on the south.
A bit of the north door, broken by the French, hangs suspended to the wall. It consists of four planks nailed to two cross-beams, on which the scars of the attack are visible.
The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall, stands half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in the wall, built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the courtyard on the north.
It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in all farms, with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie the meadows.
The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long time, all sorts of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the door-posts. It was there that Bauduin was killed.
The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives and it dies there; it was only yesterday.
The walls are in the death agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds; the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.
This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.
The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in, but could not stand their ground.
Beside the chapel, one wing of the chateau, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont, rises in a crumbling state,--disembowelled, one might say.
The chateau served for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house. There men exterminated each other.
The French, fired on from every point,--from behind the walls, from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars, through all the casements, through all the air-holes, through every crack in the stones,-- fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men; the reply to the grape-shot was a conflagration.