Eu. The enemy, who are double me just now, thought
to catch me there; but I drew off towards Dieppe, and I await them in a
camp that I am fortifying. Tomorrow will be the day when I shall see
them, and I hope, with God's help, that if they attack me they will find
they have made a bad bargain. The bearer of this goes by sea. The wind
and my duties make me conclude. This 9th of September, in the trenches
at Arques."

All was finished when the scouts of Mayenne appeared. But Mayenne also
was an able soldier: he saw that the position the king had taken and the
works he had caused to be thrown up rendered a direct attack very
difficult. He found means of bearing down upon Dieppe another way, and
of placing himself, says the latest historian of Dieppe, M. Vitet,
between the king and the town, "hoping to cut off the king's
communications with the sea, divide his forces, deprive him of his
re-enforcements from England, and, finally, surround him and capture him,
as he had promised the Leaguers of Paris, who were already talking of the
iron cage in which the Bearnese would be sent to them. "Henry IV.,"
continues M. Vitet, "felt some vexation at seeing his forecasts
checkmated by Mayenne's manoeuvre, and at having had so much earth
removed to so little profit; but he was a man of resources, confident as
the Gascons are, and with very little of pig-headedness. To change all
his plans was with him the work of an instant. Instead of awaiting the
foe in his intrenchments, he saw that it was for him to go and feel for
them on the other side of the valley, and that, on pain of being
invested, he must not leave the Leaguers any exit but the very road they
had taken to come." Having changed all his plans on this new system,
Henry breathed more freely; but he did not go to sleep for all that: he
was incessantly backwards and forwards from Dieppe to Arques, from Arques
to Dieppe and to the Faubourg du Pollet. Mayenne, on the contrary,
seemed to have fallen into a lethargy; he had not yet been out of his
quarters during the nearly eight and forty hours since he had taken them.
On the 17th of September, 1589, in the morning, however, a few hundred
light-horse were seen putting themselves in motion, scouring the country
and coming to fire their pistols close to the fosses of the royal army.
The skirmish grew warm by degrees. "My son," said Marshal de Biron to
the young count of Auvergne [natural son of Charles IX. and Mary
Touc