Adventure stories, English; France -- History -- Consulate and First Empire, 1799-1815 -- Fiction; Soldiers of fortune -- Fiction
There was a small gathering of Jacobites in one of the towns of
Flanders, and thither he repaired; but how he lived, or how he died,
I never learned. I only know that his son wandered away to the east of
Europe, and took service in what was called Trenck’s Pandours--as jolly
a set of robbers as ever stalked the map of Europe, from one side to
the other. This was my grandfather, whose name is mentioned in various
chronicles of that estimable corps, and who was hanged at Prague
afterwards, for an attempt to carry off an archduchess of the empire,
to whom, by the way, there is good reason to believe he was privately
married. This suspicion was strengthened by the fact that his infant
child, Joseph, was at once adopted by the imperial family, and placed as
a pupil in the great military school of Vienna. From thence he obtained
a commission in the Maria Theresa Hussars, and subsequently, being sent
on a private mission to France, entered the service of Louis xvi.,
where he married a lady of the Queen’s household--a Mademoiselle de la
Lasterie--of high rank and some fortune; and with whom he lived happily
till the dreadful events of 17--, when she lost her life, beside
my father, then fighting as a Garde du Corps, on the staircase at
Versailles. How he himself escaped on that day, and what were the next
features in his history, I never knew; but when again we heard of him,
he was married to the widow of a celebrated orator of the Mountain, and
he himself an intimate friend of St. Just and Marat, and all the most
violent of the Republicans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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