Old in years, he was fated to reign, and die, eternally young.

He was the prince of youth: at another epoch he would have been Francis I., in his own he was Charles X.
The Prince de Conde was a soldier by birth, inclination, and profession.
He despised these two courts, transposed to the banks of the Rhine, for his court was his camp.

His son, the Duc de Bourbon, served his first campaign under his orders, and his grandson, the Duc d'Enghien, in his seventeenth year, acted as his aide-de-camp.

This young prince was the representative of manly grace in the camp of the _emigres_; his bravery, his enthusiasm, his generosity, all seemed to promise another hero to the heroic race of Conde.

He was worthy of conquering in a cause not doomed, of dying sword in hand on the battle field, and not to fall, some years later, in the fosse at Vincennes, by the "lantern dimly burning," with no other friend than his dog, by the balls of a platoon of soldiers, ordered out at dead of night, as if for an assassination.
XVI.
Louis XVI.