ossed-grained fellow! Faith, we might have walked before the Counts de
Vendome at this very moment.'

Then he went on to relate how he had been sent to Pau, to the college,
to be brought up to the church, with an old servant to act both as his
valet and his guardian. How his head was too full of gaming to learn
Latin. How they gave him his rank at college, as the youth of quality,
when he did not deserve it; how he travelled up to Paris to his brother
to be polished, and went to court in the character of an abbe. 'Ah,
Matta, you know the kind of dress then in vogue. No, I would not change
my dress, but I consented to draw over it a cassock. I had the finest
head of hair in the world, well curled and powdered above my cassock,
and below were my white buskins and spurs.'

Even Richelieu, that hypocrite, he went on to relate, could not help
laughing at the parti-coloured costume, sacerdotal above, soldier-like
below; but the cardinal was greatly offended--not with the absence of
decorum, but with the dangerous wit, that could laugh in public at the
cowl and shaven crown, points which constituted the greatest portion of
Richelieu's sanctity.

De Grammont's brother, however, thus addressed the Chevalier:--'Well, my
little parson,' said he, as they went home, 'you have acted your part to
perfection; but now you must choose your career. If you like to stick to
the church, you will possess great revenues, and nothing to do; if you
choose to go into the army, you will risk your arm or your leg, but in
time you may be a major-general with a wooden leg and a glass eye, the
spectacle of an indifferent, ungrateful court. Make your choice.'

The choice, Philibert went on to relate, was made. For the good of his
soul, he renounced the church, but for his own advantage, he kept his
abbacy. This was not difficult in days when secular abbes were common;
nothing would induce him to change his resolution of being a soldier.
Meantime he was perfecting his accomplishments as a fine gentleman, one
of the requisites for which was a knowledge of all sorts of games. No
matter that his mother was miserable at his decision. Had her son been
an abbe, she thought he would have become a saint: nevertheless, when he
returned home, with the air of a courtier and a man of the world, boy as
he was, and the very impersonation of what might then be termed _la
jeune France_, she was so enchanted with him that she consented to his
going to the wars, atten