In France, I often found the high chivalric bearing of the noblesse clouded by a lofty imperiousness towards inferiors--a bearing unknown to us in Scotland, where all men went abroad armed, and where the ties of kin and clanship gave the peer and the peasant a community of name and blood. In France, none but men of 'good birth' were permitted to wear a sword; in Scotland, every man went armed to the teeth. On attaining his fifteenth year, the son of the French noble was ceremoniously conducted to church, accoutred with belt and sword; his parents preceded him with lighted tapers to the altar, where the priest, at the offertory, took the weapon from his boyish hand, and, after a solemn consecration, returned it to the youth, who did not sheath it until the conclusion of mass, after which he was entitled to wear it in peace and war, as a badge of rank and honour. Such were the ideas impressed in boyhood on the young French nobles; hence their spirit was matchless--their military honour unblemished. It was on a warm and sunny day of spring when we bade farewell to the gay and beautiful city of Paris, and with all our trumpets sounding and kettle-drums beating a lively Scottish air; with our long swords gleaming around the Cardinal Duke de Lavalette, whose escort we formed, the hundred cuirassiers of the Garde du Corps Ecossais took the road to Lorraine, thousands sending their cheers and prayers after us, while hundreds of pretty girls strewed the way before us with the early flowers of the summer that was at hand--the summer that many of us might never live to see. It was evening when we defiled through the barriers, and I remembered with surprise how true the warning of the pretty Nicola had proved. 'M. le Cardinal,' asked the King, as the troops marched from Paris, 'how are all these armies to be victualled?' 'That is the enemy's affair, sire--not ours,' was the reply of the imperturbable Richelieu. CHAPTER XVII. THE MARCH. The army of Lavalette covered all the roads that led towards Lorraine, and the aspect of the column to which our Scottish cuirassiers were attached was brilliant and imposing as it poured through the pastoral province of Champagne, with corslets and cabossets gleaming in the sun, and all their bright points glittering, their plumes and banners waving among the brigades of pikemen and musketeers, dragoons, artillery, baggage, and trains of pontooneers and petardiers.