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Updated: May 22, 2025
As soon as I saw Count Saxe's face, I knew that something more and better had befallen him than a life interest in a great estate. His eyes, the brightest and clearest in the world, sought me out, and by a look, he brought me to his side, the people making way readily enough real princes cheerfully taking the wall for this Tatar prince born in the Marais!
These things passed through my mind, when, with my men posted according to Count Saxe's orders, I listened to the cries, the screams of frightened creatures, and imagined the shuddering terrors behind the walls of those tall old houses, their peaks shining in the white moonlight. And then, by an accident in handling a torch, one of those tall old houses by the market-place caught fire.
On the fifteenth day after our arrival, about noon, as I stood on the terrace making some changes, under Count Saxe's eye, for one of the guns to be planted there, I happened to glance toward the point of the mainland, and saw a strange figure standing there waving a crimson mantle by way of a signal; and it was Francezka's mantle. Count Saxe saw it as soon as I, and recognized it.
He elegizes poor Adrienne Lecouvreur, the Actress, our poor friend the Comte de Saxe's female friend; who loyally emptied out her whole purse for him, 30,000 pounds in one sum, that he might try for Courland, and whether he could fall in love with her of the Swollen Cheek there; which proved impossible.
This is not a chronicle of Count Saxe's love affairs. He chose his own loves, wrote his own love letters, and I knew no more about them than I did of the royal princes of Tatar, from which I was supposed to be descended. As far as I know he was a veritable St. Anthony.
We went on to Brussels; but though my body was in Brussels, my soul was still at the château of Capello. I had not the slightest doubt in my own mind that Gaston Cheverny was dead, and the spectacle of this poor Francezka, with her passionate faithfulness, unable to part with that lingering ghost of hope, was enough to touch any heart. It deeply touched Count Saxe's.
I knew instantly why Gaston Cheverny waited, in such imminent peril; it was for Francezka Capello, and, incidentally, Madame Riano. It was but a scant five minutes by Count Saxe's watch that he had to wait for them, but it was the longest five minutes I had known for many a day. At last the rumbling of wheels was heard and a large traveling chaise appeared.
He told me he had got word that his brother, the bishop, was coming to visit him and Madame Cheverny that day, and he knew a sharp disappointment was in store for the bishop when he should find Madame Riano absent. Then Father Benart asked me some very intelligent questions about Count Saxe's exploits in the Rhine campaigns.
We were in Mitau from June, 1726, when those rascally Courlanders pretended they meant to make Count Saxe Duke of Courland, until August, 1727, when we made our way out of the place only twenty of us; and not without trouble, either, of which I shall speak presently. To this rag of a remnant of twenty was Count Saxe's following reduced.
He sat very erect in his saddle, and from the way in which he straightened out his long legs against the sides of his beast, one suspected that he could, if necessary, repeat the Marshal de Saxe's feats of skill. He stopped his horse suddenly at the very spot which the two men had just vacated and called out in a voice which would startle a regiment of cuirassiers: "Here, Lambernier!"
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