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The Twin Lieutenants

by Alexander Dumas

1858

CHAPTER I.

A HERO, WHO IS NOT THE ONE OF OUR STORY.

AT about eighteen leagues from Munich (which the Guide in Germany of Messieurs Richard and Quetinde signates as one of the most eminent cities not only of Bavaria, but of Europe; at nine leagues from Augsburg, made famous by the diet in which Melancthon, in 1530, digested the formula of the Lutheran law, at twenty-five leagues from Ratisbon which, in the obscurest rooms of its town-hall, saw, from 1662 to 1806, an assembly of the states of the German Empire) rose, like an advanced sentinel, overlooking the course of the Danube, the little town of Donauwerth.

Four roads led to the ancient city where Louis the Severe, upon an unjust suspicion of unfaithfulness, had the unfortunate Marie de Brabant decapitated; two that come from Stuttgard,that is to say from France, those of Nordlingen and Dillingen; and two that come from Austria, those of Augsburg and of Aichach. The two first follow the left bank of the Danube; the two others, situated upon the right bank of the stream, cross it, on reaching Donauwerth, over a simple wooden bridge.

At the present time, as a railroad passes to Donauwerth, and as steamboats descend the Danube from Ulm to the Black Sea, the city has become somewhat important, and affects a certain activity; but it was not thus at the commencement of this century.

And yet the old free city which, in ordinary times, seems a temple raised to the goddess Solitude and the god Silence, presented, upon the 17th of April, 1809, a spectacle so unusual to i

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