Charles de Gontaut, duke of Biron, the son of a man distinguished for his honour, loyalty, valour, and martial exploits, was born about 1562, and inherited his father’s warlike spirit, but not his praiseworthy qualities. In his childhood he was so dull of apprehension that he could scarcely be taught to read. In his military studies he must, however, have made early and extraordinary progress; for at fourteen he was colonel of the Swiss regiments, and when he was only fifteen, the command of the army in Guienne was entrusted to him for some weeks by his father, who had broken one of his thighs. His religion we may believe to have hung loosely enough upon him, as he twice changed it before he reached his sixteenth year. There were two crying sins of the age, duelling and gaming, in which Biron made himself conspicuous. He was not yet twenty, when he fought a duel with the prince of Carency, who was a rival suitor to the heiress of the family of Caumont. Each party had two seconds, all of whom were in habits of friendship with each other. It was in a snow-storm, at day break, that the combatants met; and, by taking their ground so that the snow drove into the faces of their antagonists, Biron and his seconds contrived to destroy them. This triple murder was pardoned by Henry the third, at the request of the duke of Epernon. As a gamester, Biron played so deeply, and with such infatuated perseverance, that he himself said, “I know not whether I shall die on the scaffold; but, if I do not, I am sure that I shall die in a workhouse.” The scaffold which, with somewhat of a divining spirit, he seems to have thought his not improbable doom, was more than once predicted to him. The basis on which one prediction was built may excite a smile. “The archbishop of Lyons,” says an old writer, “judged better than any one else of the nature of men by their countenances. For having one day curiously contemplated the features and characters of the marshal Biron’s face, he pronounced that he had an exceedingly bad physiognomy, verily that of a man who was fated to perish wretchedly.” On surer grounds, on a knowledge of his son’s disposition, his father sometimes said to him, “Baron,” (that was his early title) “I advise you to go and plant cabbages on your estate, as soon as peace is made; for, otherwise, you will certainly lose your head at the Grêve.”