and obtained that rugged health which is
necessary for living under a tent and following a campaign. From early
childhood, he was imbued with a military spirit; his father and uncles
at table talked of nothing but their perils in war and feats of arms;
his imagination took fire; he got accustomed to looking upon their
pursuits as the only ones worthy of a man of rank and feeling, and he
plunged ahead with a precocity which we no longer comprehend. I have
read many records of the service of gentlemen who were assassinated,
guillotined or emigres; they nearly always began their careers before
the age of sixteen, often at fourteen, thirteen and eleven.[4163] M. des
Echerolles,[4164] captain in the Poitou regiment, had brought along with
him into the army his only son, aged nine, and a dozen little cousins of
the same age. Those children fought like old soldiers; one of them
had his leg fractured by a ball; young des Echerolles received a saber
stroke which cut away his cheek from the ear to the upper lip, and
he was wounded seven times; still young, he received the cross of St.
Louis. To serve the State, seek conflict and expose one's life, seemed
an obligation of their rank, a hereditary debt; out of nine or ten
thousand officers who discharged this debt most of them cared only
for this and looked for nothing beyond. Without fortune and without
influence, they had renounced promotion, fully aware that the higher
ranks were reserved for the heirs of great families and the courtiers
at Versailles. After serving fifteen or twenty years, they returned home
with a captain's commission and the cross of St. Louis, sometimes with
a small pension, contented with having done their duty and conscious
of their own honor. On the approach of the Revolution, this old spirit,
illumined by the new ideas, became an almost civic virtue:[4165] we have
seen how they behaved between 1789 and 1792, their moderation, their
forbearance, their sacrifice of self-love, their abnegation and their
stoical impassability, their dislike to strike, the coolness with which
they persisted in receiving without returning blows, and in maintaining,
if not public order, at least the last semblance of it. Patriots as
much as soldiers, through birth, education and conviction, they formed a
natural, special nursery, eminently worthy of preserving, inasmuch as
it furnished society with ready-made instruments for defense, internally
against rascals and brutes, and ext