feat.

[Illustration: Death of Turenne----443]

The Emperor Napoleon said of Turenne, "He is the only general whom
experience ever made more daring." He had been fighting for forty years,
and his fame was still increasing, without effort or ostentation on his
part. "M. de Turenne, from his youth up, possessed all good qualities,"
wrote Cardinal de Retz, who knew him well, "and the great he acquired
full early. He lacked none but those that he did not think about. He
possessed nearly all virtues as it were by nature; he never possessed the
glitter of any. He was believed to be more fitted for the head of an
army than of a party, and so I think, because he was not naturally
enterprising; but, however, who knows? He always had in everything, just
as in his speech, certain obscurities, which were never cleared up save
by circumstances, but never save to his glory." He had said, when he set
out, to this same Cardinal de Retz, then in retirement at Commercy, "Sir,
I am no _talker (diseur),_ but I beg you to believe that, if it were not
for this business in which perhaps I may be required, I would go into
retirement as you have gone, and I give you my word that, if I come back,
I, like you, will put some space between life and death." God did not
leave him time. He summoned suddenly to Him this noble, grand, and
simple soul. "I see that cannon loaded with all eternity," says Madame
de Sevigne: "I see all that leads M. de Turenne thither, and I see
therein nothing gloomy for him. What does he lack? He dies in the
meridian of his fame. Sometimes, by living on, the star pales. It is
safer to cut to the quick, especially in the case of heroes whose actions
are all so watched. M. de Turenne did not feel death: count you that for
nothing?" Turenne was sixty-four; he had become a convert to Catholicism
in 1668, seriously and sincerely, as he did everything. For him Bossuet
had written his Exposition of faith. Heroic souls are rare, and those
that are heroic and modest are rarer still: that was the distinctive
feature of M. de Turenne. "When a man boasts that he has never made
mistakes in war, he convinces me that he has not been long at it," he
would say. At his death, France considered herself lost. "The premier-
president of the court of aids has an estate in Champagne, and the farmer
of it came the other day to demand to have the contract dissolved; he was
asked why: he answered that in M. de Turenne's time on