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Within a week we rode for Brabant only myself and Beauvais with Count Saxe and traveled leisurely in the pleasant spring weather. What Jacques Haret had told concerning the poor Count Bellegarde was true.
When we were some miles on our way, Count Saxe turned his head, and seeing Gaston Cheverny with a rueful face, riding among the suite, asked me the cause; for Gaston had a natural gaiety of heart, very becoming to a soldier. I told Count Saxe of the ill news Gaston had just received.
Count Saxe, by this time created mareschal-general of France, continued his troops within their cantonments at Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels, declaring, that when the allied army should be weakened by sickness and mortality, he would convince the duke of Cumberland that the first duty of a general is to provide for the health and preservation of his troops.
At this, Monsieur Voltaire sighed and said impudently: "Perhaps Count Saxe would favor the company with his story of bending horseshoes with his hands and twisting a farrier's nail into a practicable corkscrew," as if Count Saxe were always telling those things!
"We, of the regiment of Baronay, determined to immortalize ourselves by carrying off Count Saxe and we succeeded.
"The largest of the three pieces has the rare peculiarity that the garlands, looped round it, which, as you see, are the finest possible vieux Saxe, are not of the same origin or period, or even, wonderful as they are, of a taste quite so perfect.
Being at his house one morning, I observed on his table several sheets of paper covered with dode-casyllabic blank verse. I read a dozen of them, and I told him that, although the verses were very fine, the reading caused me more pain than pleasure. "They express the same ideas as the panegyric of the Marechal de Saxe, but I confess that your prose pleases me a great deal more."
The King was born weak and delicate; but from the age of twenty-four he possessed a robust constitution, inherited from his mother, who was of the House of Saxe, celebrated for generations for its robustness. There were two men in Louis XVI., the man of knowledge and the man of will. The King knew the history of his own family and of the first houses of France perfectly.
This I heard from M. de Marigny. I never saw Madame de Pompadour so rejoiced as at the taking of Mahon. The King was very glad, too, but he had no belief in the merit of his courtiers he looked upon their success as the effect of chance. Marechal Saxe was, as I have been told, the only man who inspired him with great esteem. But he had scarcely ever seen him in his closet, or playing the courtier.
Marshal Saxe with a portion of the troops marched to join the army in Flanders, and the Scotch Dragoons were ordered to return to Paris for the present. For a year Ronald remained with the regiment in Paris. He had during that time been introduced by Colonel Hume to several members of his mother's family.
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