For a perfect picture of a partisan on the other side we have only to go to the _Commentaries_ of one whom D’Aubigné describes as “ce vieux renard de Monluc.” Yet Blaise de Lasseran-Massencome, Seigneur de Monluc, is perhaps hardly to be called a party man. Like the Lord Byron of our own civil war, he “was passionately the king’s.” He was born in or about 1503, near Condom, of an ancient and impoverished family of Gascony. Though the eldest son, he had even less than the traditional cadet’s portion. He could boast that, though a gentleman born, he had fought his way up from the lowest rank. After serving in the wars of Italy, he was named Governor of Guyenne by the king, and there distinguished himself by a ferocity exceptional even in those times. An arquebuse-wound in the face at the siege of Rabastens in 1570 disabled him for active service. His _Commentaries_ were dictated in his last years, and he died in 1577.[110] It is one of the many sayings attributed to Henry IV. that the _Commentaries_ of Monluc are “the Soldier’s Bible.” Whether the king said it or not, no truer description of this delightful book could be given. Monluc was a man of his time and his race. He “had the honour to be a Gascon” in every sense of the word, having all the valour, enterprise, craft, humour, and expansive vanity of the type. But he was also a perfect soldier, and profoundly convinced that his business was the greatest a man could follow. His _Commentaries_ were avowedly written to show the “captains and lieutenants of France” what a soldier ought to be, by the example of Blaise de Monluc. The very thoroughness of his vanity gives the book a sincere tone. We feel that he was far too well pleased with himself to think it necessary to lie. That he saw things through the colouring medium of his self-sufficiency is possible--even certain--but at least he gives them as he saw them. Monluc was also a very able man, who was not wanting in appreciation of the humorous side of his own _gasconnades_, and therefore his vanity is never silly. The style is that of a book dictated by a man with a boundless _faconde_--that is to say, command of ready language; but it is too vivid and has too much substance ever to be garrulous. At times he can strike out images of great force. [SN: _Brantôme._]