h day after Christmas help would come, and
this though he must have known that there was no real chance of
succour. But with a pitiable confidence in their leaders the envoys
dragged themselves back to Rouen and bade the garrison hold out only
for another fifteen days, and then they should be rescued. To men
already starving we can scarce imagine what the delay of another
fortnight meant. It was drawing near to Christmas. From the English
camp two priests were seen advancing towards those phantoms of still
visible humanity that stretched their fleshless arms to heaven from
the city moat. The King was sending food and drink to them for the
love of Him whose birth was celebrated on the morrow. The miserable
creatures ate and drank with hideous cries that brought the starving
garrison to the walls to watch them; but they only gained the strength
to suffer pain a little longer, for the next day the English lines
closed up again and no more food was to be had.

One more bitter disappointment the citizens were destined to suffer
before the end came. From the right bank of the Seine two Norman
nobles, Jacques d'Harcourt and the Sire de Moreuil attempted to draw
the English into an ambuscade. They had only two thousand men, but
they might well have created sufficient diversion to render a
victorious sally possible from the city, for the English imagined it
was the royal army of rescue come at last. But the eager watchers from
the walls of Rouen had the mortification of seeing their compatriots
put to flight by a far smaller body of the enemy, and their last hope
faded like dew before the sun. Then the fateful twenty-ninth of
December came, and went, without a sign of royal or Burgundian help.
For two more miserable days the citizens waited in vain, and not till
fifty thousand persons had died of famine did they think of surrender.
Their walls were still intact, their hearts as stout as ever, but
starvation began to make irreparable breaches where the enemy's
artillery had been of no avail. So on the eve of New Year's Day, the
envoys chosen by the meeting in the Hotel de Ville, went out to parley
with the English.

They wandered in vain from one camp to another, until they were
obliged to cross over to St. Sever, and there they found Sir Gilbert
d'Umfreville, whose Norman lineage perhaps made him kinder than the
rest. He was at last prevailed upon to take them on the second day of
the year, a Monday, into the presence of the K