If I contemplated him with some attention, well pleased with his neatly-trimmed beard and well-washed face, he did not seem to regard me less narrowly or with less apparent pleasure, scanning all the pieces of my arms with an experienced eye, and rubbing his hands joyfully as he saw how easily they sat upon me. The ease with which I managed my horse too, though the brute kicked and plunged most unmercifully on first being mounted, gave him no less satisfaction; and it was only upon Andriot that he bestowed some counsels and some reproof in regard to the unsoldierly manner in which he had put on his morion. When all was completed, we set out from Cubzac, and took our road onward towards Barbezieux. As we went, Moric treated me with a large portion of his conversation, amusing by its quaint drollery, but occasionally tiresome from touches of that rhodomontade whereof he had been accused. Were his own word to be believed, there was no great action which had been enacted during the last half century that he had not either absolutely performed himself or had a very considerable and important share therein. But he even went beyond that; and when he began telling a story of any one else, it very often happened that he entirely forgot, before he came to the end of his tale, the original hero with whom he set out, dropped the third person, took up the first, changed the personage spoken of to himself, and performed all the last acts he had to relate in his own person. The most ludicrous instance of this kind of transformation took place while he was giving me an account of the tournament at which King Henry II. had been killed not many years before, and at which Moric had been present. He asserted that the fault which occasioned the death of the king was entirely on the part of Montgomery; but, before he had finished his tale, he entirely forgot that declaration, got warm and heated with the subject, was seized with the peculiar sort of cupidity which induced him so constantly to appropriate the actions of others, and becoming Montgomery himself, described how he had killed the King of France, and explained, with the utmost perspicuity and exactitude, the eager feelings with which he had been animated, and which prevented him from recollecting in time that it was necessary to throw away instantly the broken staff of his lance. I could not help laughing at this absurdity; but he took it all in good part, laughed himself, and declared that it was every word true, except that he was the person who did it.