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Updated: June 29, 2025
"How is it that with a judgment like yours you bring another ambitious man of his age to court?" "That is an entirely different matter. This young Cinq-Mars, my friend, will be a mere puppet. He will think of nothing but his ruff and his shoulder-knots; his handsome figure assures me of this. I know that he is gentle and weak; it was for this reason I preferred him to his elder brother.
There was nothing to distinguish these Subordinate judges from the better part of the spectators, except gravity, which they affected a little more than common, and that one of their number was attired in an old-fashioned military coat, with skirts that reached no lower than the middle of his thighs, and bearing two little silver epaulets, not half so big as a modern pair of shoulder-knots.
"That's not my secret, sir; 'I am combined by a sacred vow. You are too much the gentleman to peep through the blanket of the dark and to ask me, who wear the whips and stripes I mean the plush small-clothes and shoulder-knots the secrets of another gent to whom 'my services are bound." How a man past thirty foils a man scarcely twenty!
A woman, standing on the steps under the vines, was calling "Jules, Jules, it is time to come in, little son!" But Jules, in his white dress and shoulder-knots of blue ribbon, was toddling across the lawn after a firefly. Then she began to call him another way. Jules had a vague idea that it was a part of some game that they sometimes played together.
Here was a man after his own heart, possessed by a manly seriousness, and with a deliberate lofty aim in life; not merely dreaming of substituting a general's epaulettes for the simple shoulder-knots of a lieutenant. Here, too, was a fine enthusiasm, which touched the veteran of fifty and warmed his heart.
Genius must take its chance, like all other qualities, and, on the whole, in a civilised country it gets on pretty well. Is it not something in itself to possess genius? and is it seemly, or a good example to the uninspired world, that its owner should deem it rather a misfortune than a blessing because he is not also surrounded by plush and shoulder-knots?
Straight all the world was shoulder- knots; no approaching the ladies' ruelles without the quota of shoulder-knots. "That fellow," cries one, "has no soul: where is his shoulder-knot?" Our three brethren soon discovered their want by sad experience, meeting in their walks with forty mortifications and indignities.
It was answered by a man in a costume that struck my humorous old friend as pleasing: a sallow little man whose otherwise quite featureless suit of tweeds was embellished by scarlet worsted shoulder-knots. With lack-lustre eyes, from behind the plexus of the grille, he rather stolidly regarded the imposing British equipage, and waited to be addressed.
One regiment wore scarlet jackets and white linen trousers; another, black jackets and shoulder-knots, in fact, the whole uniform is black, with the exception of the trousers, which are of white linen. It seemed much more the fashion to drive than to ride here. The coaches are of a very peculiar kind, which I hardly think can be found elsewhere.
The sun is now rising high above the pine-trees, the morning mist is also rising and rolling off like a golden veil as it catches those glorious rays the whole earth seems wakening into new life the dew has brightened every leaf and washed each tiny flower-cup the pines and balsams give out their resinous fragrance the aspens flutter and dance in the morning breeze and return a mimic shower of dew-drops to the stream the shores become lower and flatter the trees less lofty and more mossy the stream expands and wide beds of rushes spread out on either side what beds of snowy water-lilies how splendid the rose tint of those perseicarias that glow so brightly in the morning sun the rushes look like a green meadow, but the treacherous water lies deep below their grassy leaves the deer delights in these verdant aquatic fields, and see what flocks of red-wings rise from among them as the canoe passes near their bright shoulder-knots glance like flashes of lightning in the sun-beams.
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