You meet them only once; but you think of them long afterwards, and endeavour to contemplate them in order that they may be impressed more deeply upon your mind.

Was not the type of the old soldiers whose race disappeared around 1598, at the taking of Vervins, fine and terrible?
It was a type represented by men like Lamouche, Heurtand de Saint-Offange, and La Tremblaye, who came back holding the heads of his enemies in his hand; also La Fontenelle, of whom so much has been said.
They were men of iron, whose hearts were no softer than their swords, and who, attracting hundreds of energies which they directed with their own, entered towns at night, galloping madly at the heads of their companies, equipped corsairs, burned villages, and were dealt with like kings! Who has thought of depicting those violent governors of the provinces, who slaughtered the people recklessly, committed rapes and swept in gold, like D'Epernon, an atrocious tyrant in Provence and a perfumed courtier at the Louvre; like Montluc, who strangled Huguenots with his own hands, or Baligui, the king of Cambrai, who read Machiavel in order to copy the Valentinois, and whose wife went to war on horseback, wearing a helmet and a cuirass.
One of the forgotten men of the period, or at least one of those whom most historians mention only slightly, is the Duke of Mercoeur, the intrepid enemy of Henri IV, who defied him longer than Mayenne, the Ligue, and Philip II.

Finally he was disarmed, that is, won over and appeased (by terms that were such that twenty-three articles of the treaty were not disclosed); then, not knowing what to do, he enlisted in the Hungarian army and fought the Turks.

One day, with five thousand men, he attacked a whole army, and, beaten again, returned to France and died of the fever in Nuremberg, at the age of forty-four.
Saint-Malo put me in mind of him.

He always tried to get it, but he never could succeed in making it his subject or his ally.