Raoul de Montalvan was a young gentleman of moderate fortune, who, at the age of twenty, sold his small estates in Avignon in order to equip a company and join the Chevalier de Modène in the campaign of 1745, under the Maréchal Saxe. At Fontenoy he was acknowledged to have distinguished himself; but his recollections of that battle were embittered by the fact that the Comte de Lally had robbed him of the honor which he most coveted,--that of having detected, by a bold reconnoissance, the weak point in the enemy's front, by piercing which the field was ultimately won.[102] Nevertheless, he had been praised; and praise, at that period, was his best reward. With a light heart and high hopes he started for Paris, in further pursuit of fortune. In company with his patron, M. de Modène, he presented himself at court. The sentinel on duty curiously eyed their uniforms, and refused to admit them. The King, fatigued with war's alarms, and anxious to banish from court all memories of carnage and confusion, had ordered that no military dresses should appear in his _salons_. In vain the young soldiers represented that they had parted with all their possessions to serve their monarch, and that they had surrendered the last means of otherwise arraying themselves; in vain they insisted that the noblest decorations in the eyes of his Majesty should be the dust and blood of the field of Fontenoy. They were repulsed. De Modène revenged himself by the famous epigram which caused an order of arrest, and compelled his flight. De Montalvan, taking the insult more to heart, swore furiously that, excepting as a soldier and in soldier's dress, he would never enter the French court, and from that time had steadfastly persisted in the rigorous costume which excited M. de Berniers's criticism. There were, indeed, some who declared that he claimed as a virtue of obstinacy that which was only a necessity of poverty; but for such aspersions he cared little.