My horse, Dagobert, the gift of the Countess d'Amboise, was a fine Spanish barb, worth at least seven hundred crowns of the sun. My arms and armour, supplied from the royal arsenal, were similar to those worn by my comrades, and consisted of a pale buff coat so thickly laced with silver as to be almost sword-proof; a triple-barred helmet, with back and breast-plates, gorget and gloves of the finest and purest steel, inlaid with gold; an arquebuse, two feet and a half long, attached to a belt by a swivel. The pair of pistols, the dagger, and long bowl-hilted Toledo rapier were my own. Our plumes were white and blue, (the Scottish colours), our scarfs and hocquetons, worn when attending the king at mass or near his throne, were also white, trimmed with blue and silver, in token of the pure fidelity which for centuries had characterised the gentlemen of the Garde du Corps Ecossais. My apartments in the Louvre were neatly but plainly furnished by the valet de chambre de tapissier, or king's upholsterer, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, in whose shop was his son, a sharp little lad of fourteen years, who carried parcels and messages. Who could then have foreseen that _this little lad_, who bore one's love letters and bouquets for a denier, or called a fiacre from the stand at the street corner, would become in after years the great Molière, the author of '_L'Etourdi_' and '_Le Dépit Amoureux_'? And now will the reader pardon the honest vanity--the esprit du corps--of a soldier, when writing of his colours--of his regiment, if I devote a few lines to the previous history of the Scottish Guard? The French annals inform us, that in virtue of the ancient league between Achaius, King of Scotland and Charlemagne, the latter first had a Scottish guard, and in return for the compliment, Achaius first fenced the Scottish Lion with the Fleur-de-lis, which we may still perceive in the royal standard. Be the story or origin of this league what it may, there can be no doubt that Charles of France, in the year 882, had an armed guard of twenty-four Scotsmen, whom he preferred to his own people, and whose ponderous battle-axes did him good service in the wars he made to fence the See of Rome against the Grecian Emperors; and old historians say, that he first conceived the idea of having this guard by the advice of his old preceptor, a wandering Kuldee, whom some name Alcuin the Scot, and others Joannes Mailosius--or John of Melrose. At Damietta, in the holy war, the life of St. Louis IX was twice saved by a Scottish band, led by the knights Stewart, Cumming, and Gordon; and in 1254, on his return from Palestine, the king increased the number of this guard to a hundred gentlemen-at-arms, and Charles V. afterwards placed them on the regular establishment.* * See _L'Escosse Française_, par A. Houston, &c.