Most interesting of all is the passage in which he gives his wife his first impressions of his future colleague, the Duke of Lorraine. Lorraine had been a competitor with Sobieski for the crown of Poland, and it must have been a singular meeting when the rivals first came face to face co-operating together in a mighty enterprise. Sobieski the king, whose offspring were not to reign; Charles the duke, the destined ancestor of the Imperial line of Austria.[12] The one in the semi-Oriental magnificence of his country, he went into action before Vienna in a sky-blue silk doublet; the other in the dress of a campaigner, best described in Sobieski's own words. The duke he finds modest and taciturn, stooping, plain, with a hooked nose, marked with small-pox; clad in an old grey coat, with "a fair wig ill-made," a hat without a band, "boots of yellow leather, or rather of what was yellow three months ago." "_Avec tout ça, il n'a pas la mine d'un marchand, mais d'un homme comme il faut, et même d'un homme de distinction. C'est un homme avec qui je m'accorderais facilement._" The friendship of the former rivals was cemented by a banquet, and the duke's accustomed monitor being first overcome, Lorraine himself was induced to proceed from his native Moselle, which he drank usually mixed with water, to the strong Hungarian wines--to the improvement, as the king tells his wife, of his conversation. Besides Lorraine, Sobieski found a crowd of German Princes awaiting his arrival: John George of Saxony, speaking no French nor Latin, and very little German; Waldeck, of the house of Waldeck-Wildungen,[13] William the Third's right hand man in the Netherlands, here commanding the troops of the Circles, and winning high praise from the king for his activity and zeal; Maximilian of Bavaria, whose courage and ill-fortune were hereafter to be signalized at Blenheim and at Ramilies, now aged twenty-one, wins notice as "better dressed than the others." There were two Wurtembergers and the Prince of Brunswick-Lüneburg, afterwards our George I.; the Prince of Saxe-Lauenberg; a Hohenzollern and a Hessian; three Princes of Anhalt; Hermann and Louis of Baden, the latter was with Marlborough at Schellenberg; two sons of Montecuculi, the conqueror of St. Gotthard; last and youngest, though not least, Eugene of Savoy, the future conqueror of Zenta and of Belgrade, and the colleague of Marlborough in his greatest battles. There was Count Leslie, of that Scotch house which had given generals to half the armies of Europe; Count Taaffe, the Irishman, afterwards Sir Francis Taaffe and Earl of Carlingford, whose elder brother fell fighting for King James at the Boyne, but whose services to the allies secured the earldom from forfeiture. There were gathered veterans of the Thirty Years' War, men who might have seen Gustavus or Wallenstein, and men who were to reap their brightest laurels hereafter in the war of the Spanish Succession. As was wittily