Neglected and distrusted by the sovereign whom he had delivered, Sobieski found consolation in detailing his victory, his spoil, and his wrongs alike to his wife. We find the great soldier again, in the full flush of his victory, writing indefatigably to his _Mariette_. It is on the night of the 13th, in the Vizier's late quarters, in the camp still cumbered with the slaughter of the combatants and of prisoners. The loss had been heavy in the fighting upon both sides, he tells us; and such an estimate, formed at such a moment by the victorious general, by far outweighs the accounts by which the French above all tried to minimize the slaughter made, and with it the greatness of the victory won.[26] He begins his letter: "God be blessed for ever. He has given victory to our people; He has given them such a triumph that past ages have not seen the like." All around, the explosions of the Turkish ammunition, fired by the plunderers from city and army, "make a din like the last judgment." He plunges into a description of the riches that the camp contains. "The Vizier has made me his heir; he has done everything _en galant homme_." "You cannot say to me, 'You are no warrior,' as the Tartar women say to their husbands when they return empty-handed." "For two nights and a day plunder has gone on at will; even the townsfolk have taken their share, and I am sure that there is enough left for eight days more. The plunder we got at Choczim was nothing to this." There was a touch of the barbaric chieftain in the Polish king, and he keenly enjoyed not merely the victory, but the spoil which he had won. At the end of the seventeenth century, the character of this general of the school of Montecuculi, this admirer of Condé, recalls to us at once the ardour of a crusader, and the affectionate rapacity of a moss-trooper, reserving the richest plunder of a foray to deck his wife at home. He exults in the belts and in the watches studded with jewels, the stuffs and the embroideries which are to adorn his wife's boudoir. But he is still bent on action. "We must march to-morrow for Hungary," he says, "and start at the double, to escape the smell of the camp and its refuse, with the thousands of bodies of men and of animals lying unburied."