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Red Robe and Grey Robe; Or, Richelieu Defied
Red Robe and Grey Robe Or Richelieu Defied Author:Victor Hugo Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in. A LIE AGAINST LOVE. The junior lieutenant of the Richelieu Regiment, in Piedmont, Armand Duplessis, was impatient, overbearing, impetuous, overfl... more »owing with ingenious suggestions and novel ideas disarranging his superiors' equanimity; good old warriors they, who had burned out their fires under Henry the Fourth, and now asked no fiercer warfare than long sieges and comfortable winter quarters. So he chafed at the rebukes and chilly reception of his best conceptions and as his heart became surcharged with first love memories, this youth of twenty oftener sighed for home than for entrance into the town before which the army sat. "Homesick!" said one veteran. "Heartsick!" said another, who had boys of his own in the camp. "That lad," said a keener observer, "will not long be a slave to any passion, even the master one. He is born to over-rule, to lord it, to tyrannize!" "Camp-fever!" pronounced the surgeons who flew to bleed him. He had become so truly a thorn in their side, with his irritating hints and pieces of advice, inherent, gathered from reading, or learnt of his father, the League Captain, that all hailed his asking home-leave for two months, and it was gladly signed and countersigned as if he were their messenger of victory. "If he lives, and does not get his pate cracked for thrusting his sword into every medley," said a greybeard artillerist, "he will be the crowning marplot and stirrer-up of innumerable intrigues. He wants to make a cannon of steel! as if iron was not good enow for the blundering cannoneers of our times! steel for halberd-heads and swords—but for great guns! malapert!" "Malapert! he should be a wasp at court!" said the chief surgeon. "He besought me not to give hopeless cases stimulants that they may dictate messages h...« less