Although the young Marquis had deliberately given up a career at court, there was every promise of his having a brilliant career in the army. Soon after his famous speech to the King’s brother, in August, 1775, he was transferred from his regiment of Black Musketeers to a command in what was known as the “Regiment de Noailles,” which had for its colonel a young man of very distinguished family, Monseigneur the Prince de Poix, who was a cousin of Lafayette’s wife. The “Regiment de Noailles” was stationed at Metz, a garrison city some two hundred miles to the east of Paris. The commander of Metz was the Count de Broglie, a marshal and prince of France, who had commanded the French armies in the Seven Years’ War, in one of the battles of which Lafayette’s father had been killed. The Count de Broglie had known Lafayette’s father and had greatly admired him, and he did all he could to befriend the son, inviting him to all the entertainments he gave. It happened that early in August the Count de Broglie gave a dinner in honor of a young English prince, the Duke of Gloucester, and Lafayette, in the blue and silver uniform of his rank, was one of the guests at the table. The Duke of Gloucester was at the time in disgrace with his brother, King George the Third of England, because he had dared to marry a wife whom King George disliked. The Duke was really in exile from England, and in the company of the French officers he had no hesitation in speaking his mind about his royal brother and even in poking fun at some of his plans. And the Duke made a special point of criticizing King George for his policy toward the colonists in America. In that very year of the dinner-party at Metz, in the spring of 1775, a rebellion had broken out in the colonies, and there had actually been a fight between American farmers and British regulars at the village of Lexington in the colony of Massachusetts Bay. The Duke had received word of the obstinate resistance of the farmers--peasants, he called them--at Lexington and Concord, and of the retreat of Lord Percy and his troops to Boston. The Duke told the dinner-party all about the discomfiture of his royal brother, laughing heartily at it, and also related how in that same seaport of Boston the townspeople had thrown a cargo of tea into the harbor rather than pay the royal tax on it.