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As Prince de Moncontour in his father's time before the Revolution, during the Emigration, even after the Restoration, M. le Duc had vecu with an extraordinary vitality. He had gone through good and bad fortune: extreme poverty, display and splendour, affairs of love affairs of honour, and of one disease or another a man must die at the end.
"Savez-vows qu'elle est furieusement belle, la fille du Reverend?" whispered His Highness to me. "I have made eyes at her during the sermon. They will be of pretty neighbours these meess!" and Paul looked unutterably roguish and victorious as he spoke. To my wife, I am bound to say, Monsieur de Moncontour showed a courtesy, a respect and kindness, that could not be exceeded. He admired her.
Then he poured out the chambertin, and once more all heads became excited, and the conversation fell, as was inevitable, upon the subject of women. Jocquelet began it, by speaking the name of one of the prettiest actresses in Paris. He knew them all and described them exactly, detailing their beauties like a slave-dealer. "So little Lucille Prunelle is a friend of the great Moncontour "
The French accused him of losing the battle of Moncontour by his impatience to engage; yet they acknowledged that to his masterly conduct it was owing that their retreat was effected in so successful, and even so brilliant a manner. He was censured for rashness and precipitancy in this last and fatal enterprise, but the reproach seems entirely without foundation.
Do you suppose that his noble friend, the Earl of H , would have counselled him to a step unworthy of a gentleman; that the Prince de Moncontour would applaud his conduct as he does, if he did not think it admirable?" I can hardly say with what scorn I used this argument, or what depth of contempt I felt for the woman whom I knew it would influence.
The French accused him of losing the battle of Moncontour by his impatience to engage; yet they acknowledged that to his masterly conduct it was owing that their retreat was effected in so successful, and even so brilliant a manner. He was censured for rashness and precipitancy in this last and fatal enterprise, but the reproach seems entirely without foundation.
At Flodden the right wing of the victorious army was led by the Admiral of England. At Jarnac and Moncontour the Huguenot ranks were marshalled by the Admiral of France. Neither John of Austria, the conqueror of Lepanto, nor Lord Howard of Effingham, to whose direction the marine of England was confided when the Spanish invaders were approaching our shores, had received the education of a sailor.
The German and Swiss troops were allowed to leave the service, and the nobles and their retainers were granted permission to do the same, until the spring. Thus the whole fruits of the victory of Moncontour were annihilated by the heroic defence of Saint Jean d'Angely. In the meantime, the Admiral had been moving south.
"Florac has two louis in his pocket, and Moncontour exactly forty shillings. Florac's proprietor will ask Moncontour to-morrow for five weeks' rent; and as for Florac's friends, my dear, they will burst out laughing to Moncontour's nose!" "How droll you English are!" this acute French observer afterwards said, laughing, and recalling the incident.
He had not been born without natural gifts, such as Heaven rarely denies to prince or peasant; but the courage which he once possessed had been exhausted on the field of Moncontour, his manhood had been left behind him at Venice, and such wit as Heaven had endowed him withal was now expended in darting viperous epigrams at court-ladies whom he was only capable of dishonouring by calumny, and whose charms he burned to outrival in the estimation of his minions.
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