Lescure had also the Roman devotedness: any morning he stood ready to outdo Curtius and Horatius. In the rout of Moulin-aux-Chèvres he drew the hostile squadrons from the pursuit of the frantic Vendeans by calling their attention to himself and to La Rochejaquelein by name. At Thouars he gained the bridge of Vrine alone, amid a shower of balls. He returned to his dispirited band with exhortations; one emboldened comrade followed him to the second charge. But on the instant Henri arrived with Forestier, to join Lescure and fire the lagging troops, as the celestial armies are fabled to have fought at need for the old commonwealths. Here, this same day, mounted on the shoulders of a gigantic peasant named Texier, one of the most useful men in the ranks, Henri broke the mouldy coping of the fortress wall, and through the breach hurled stones at the flying Blues. His course henceforward is to be tracked in these flashing incidents, deeds compacted of demonic sense and wit. Pauvert depicts him breaking the tri-color lines outside Argenton merely by whistling through, with two friends in his train, like a blast of wind. At Château-Gontier he seized and bore the colors; there and elsewhere, wherever he moved, bullets ploughed the ground under him, and sent up a puff of dust to his spurs. While his weary infantry slept, he was known to watch for them, in an exposed bivouac, and turn his idleness to account by picking cartridges for his poorer “children” out of the wealthy pockets of the adjacent slain. He and Stofflet reconnoitred the streets of hostile Châtillon by night, on all fours, the sentinel refraining from challenging the passage of the big dogs they were supposed to be. Observe the tricks of a generalissimo, on whose safety the balance of empire hung! He was a lad; he did not know his value; but what he did know was that nobody could manage these indispensable lesser manœuvres so exquisitely as himself. “_Quel gaillard!_” shouted those who at first held back from this incorrigible, superculpable, adorable, business-like creature of a Henri; “_quel gaillard!_” At the siege of Saumur, at a wavering moment of the assault, he flung his hat into the intrenchments. “Who will fetch that for me?” he cried, as certain of his response as was the great Condé, or Essex before Cadiz in 1596. Of course, with his usual verve, he leaped towards it himself, and the crowd rushed after him as one. In the same engagement he saved the life of his loyal Ville-Baugé, struck from his stirrups while loading Henri’s pieces for him; as at Antrain, during the twenty-two hours’ battle, and with a call for much greater adroitness, he saved that of La Roche Saint André.