Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
The scientific part of their operations was under the direction of Cohorn, who was spurred by emulation to exert his utmost skill. He had suffered, three years before, the mortification of seeing the town, as he had fortified it, taken by his great master Vauban. To retake it, now that the fortifications had received Vauban's last improvements, would be a noble revenge.
"Marshal Vauban's," the sentry replied, unmoved. The man shrank back perceptibly; as I took a longer sight of him the familiarity of voice and figure recurred more strongly. I stood still to look. He turned his face. Broussard! I almost spoke the name. Yes, beyond all peradventure it was Broussard, disguised, but still Broussard.
I have seen his plans for fortifying Nauvoo, which are equal to any of Vauban's. They call him, though a man of diminutive stature, the 'forty-two pounder. He might have applied his talents in a more honourable cause; but I am assured that he is well paid for the important services he is rendering this people, or, I should rather say, rendering the prophet.
On the 19th of August, four months after war had been declared, the allies entered France by the line of the Moselle. There was one French army to their left at Metz, and another to their right along Vauban's chain of fortresses, with an undefended interval between. To widen the gap they laid siege to Longwy, the nearest fortified place, and took it, after a feeble resistance, on August 24.
"The king fancied he was giving himself the baton," it was said, "so often had he had Vauban under his orders in besieging places." The leisure of peace was more propitious to Vauban's fame than to his favor.
Years before this he had recommended a young officer to study the Prussian Army Regulations and Vauban's book on Sieges. Nor did he forget to read the lives of men like Scanderbeg and Ziska, who could teach him many unusual lessons. He kept his eyes open everywhere, all his life long, on men and things and books. He recommended his friend.
I have seen his plans for fortifying Nauvoo, which are equal to any of Vauban's. They call him, though a man of diminutive stature, the `forty-two pounder. He might have applied his talents in a more honourable cause; but I am assured that he is well paid for the important services he is rendering this people, or, I should rather say, rendering the prophet.
Financial Embarrassments. The King and Chamillart. Tax on Baptisms and Marriages. Vauban's Patriotism. Its Punishment. My Action with M. de Brissac. I Appeal to the King. The Result. I Gain My Action. My Appointment as Ambassador to Rome. How It Fell Through. Anecdotes of the Bishop of Orleans. A Droll Song. A Saint in Spite of Himself. Fashionable Crimes. A Forged Genealogy.
In his company I climbed to the top of a high building, whence he pointed out, through a convenient shell hole, where the old walls had stood long ago, where Vauban's star-shaped bastions were, and the general conformation of what had been present-day Ypres; but I saw only a dusty chaos of shattered arch and tower and walls, with huge, unsightly mounds of rubble and brick a rubbish dump in very truth.
Turn from Bossuet's orations to Boisguillebert's Détail de la France; from the pulpit rhetorician's courtly reminders that even majesty must die, to Vauban's pity for the misery of the common people; from Corneille and Racine to La Bruyère's picture of "certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burned by the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet they show a human face, and, in fact, are men."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking