for a divorce, by mutual consent, from his countess, who immediately married a Saxon officer.

At the period of the Comte de Saxe's enrolment in the army of a power to which, in the event, he was to render such splendid and important services, France was enjoying a profound peace; and her new Maréchal-de-Camp, as if with a prescience of the bright career which was to open its long vista before him, now applied himself with praise-' worthy diligence to study the theory of that science, in the practice of which, since the age of twelve years, he had been too actively engaged to supply the defects of an unfinished education. It was at this season of his life that he began first to learn the mathematics and their application to military purposes. His studies were pursued with so much assiduity and success that he became an excellent engineer officer; and so completely had he mastered that branch of his profession, that when he subsequently attained the command of armies, he was wont himself to direct in person all siege operations. He also associated much at this period of his life with the celebrated Chevalier de Folard, and other officers of similar tastes, who brought to the study of tactics all the enthusiasm of genius, and all the stores of antiquarian and professional learning. Nor were the practical details of military duty, meanwhile, neglected; for he actively employed himself in the superintendence and organization of a German regiment of infantry which he was allowed to enlist as its colonel into the French service, and which he formed upon such principles as his experience had suggested.

In 1726 these occupations were interrupted by a curious episode in his life. The people of the duchy of Courland, anticipating the dissolution of their infirm sovereign without issue, and suspecting a project of the Polish Diet, in that event, to unite their independent territory with the kingdom of Poland as a lapsed fief of that crown, determined to avert such a design by electing a successor to their prince. For this dignity the relationship of the Comte de Saxe to King Augustus, as well as his high personal reputation, marked him as an eligible aspirant, and he was accordingly encouraged by a large party in the duchy to offer himself as a candidate for the succession. On his arrival from Paris, his cause was particularly espoused by the Princess Anne of Russia, dowager of a former duke of Courland, who saw and admired him, and agreed to give him her hand as the reward or price of his elevation. By her exertions chiefly his election was carried in the states of the duchy, and a diploma was solemnly drawn up constituting him Duke of Courland and Semigallia in succession to the reigning sovereign. Nor was the Russian princess the only female advocate of the attractive soldier: for Le Couvreur, the most celebrated Parisian actress of her day, pledged her moveables for 40,000 livres, and sent the supply to assist his necessities or to forward his views in his new duchy. But the interests opposed to his elevation proved too powerful for him to resist with success. While the Russian court insisted upon the election of some creature of its own, the Diet of Poland arbitrarily compelled King Augustus to declare against his own son, and to forbid him to sustain his pretensions. On both hands the enemies of the new duke proceeded to eject him by actual force of arms; and while the Russian troops besieged him in a post which he had attempted to fortify, a commission from the Polish Diet entered Mittau, the capital of

the duchy, with a body of cavalry, and obliged the states to annul their election. De Saxe made a gallant show of resistance to the last moment; but being overpowered by the Russians, and deserted by his Courlanders, he was finally reduced to evacuate the duchy, and to leave his Russian and Polish enemies to settle as they might their conflicting interests.

But the most singular feature in this transient dream of ducal sovereignty, was his neglected enjoyment and unconscious loss of a far more brilliant provision. The Princess Anne of Russia, who was to have shared his ducal throne, discovered, while he was her guest at Mittau, that, among other infidelities, he was carrying on an intrigue in her own palace with one of the ladies of her household. Piqued at these proofs that his addresses to herself were wholly those of political interest, Anne broke off all negociations for their marriage: nor was De Saxe made sensible, until the sudden and unexpected succession of the princess to the crown of Russia, within two years, that his inconstancy had cost him no less than the loss of an imperial consort and a matrimonial throne. But all his subsequent efforts were vain to rekindle in the breast of the Empress the passion which he had outraged. The double defeat of his views upon the duchy of Courland, and the hand of the Russian princess, was followed by the death of both his parents, and the disruption of his connexion with his native country: for though his half-brother, the new Elector of Saxony, offered him the command of his troops, he declined to quit the French service; and in 1733 he finally returned to France, and thenceforth devoted himself wholly to the prosecution of his fortunes in that kingdom.

It

From this epoch the biography of the Comte de Saxe merges into the military history of Europe. The short war between France and the Emperor Charles VI., which broke out in 1733, gave him his first opportunity of distinguishing himself in the service which he had embraced. Even in the inconclusive campaigns on the Rhine of that and the two following years, he found means to signalize his talents; and before the close of the war he was raised to the rank of Lieutenant-General. was during the interval of peace which followed that, in 1738, he composed his famous "Reveries," which, we are assured by his French biographer, "cost him no more than eight days of labour:" an assertion which, if credible at all, must refer only to the time consumed in transferring to paper reflections long entertained, and details already digested on the science of his profession.

The commencement of the war of the Imperial Succession soon summoned him again, in 1741, to renew in the field his application of these principles; and now began effectually that brilliant career, through which he raised himself, in six years, to the summit of his glory. In the first campaigns of that chequered war, the Gallo-Bavarian army overran Austria and Bohemia; and the capture of the Bohemian capital, its crowning event, was the enterprise of De Saxe. Though commanding only a division of the French auxiliaries, he earnestly suggested to the Elector of Bavaria, and, having with difficulty won his consent, himself boldly executed a project for the escalade of Prague. It was effected at a most critical moment, when the Austrians were on the point of throwing 14,000 men into the place. A highlyinteresting private letter, from himself to his friend the Chevalier de

Folard, describing the whole operation, which he had personally directed, is given in his memoirs, and may be cited as a model for the clear and lively narration of military exploits. The next successful achievement of the Comte de Saxe was the conduct of the siege of Egra, which was intrusted wholly to his direction, and terminated on the counterscarp by capitulation.

During the reverses of the two following campaigns his genius was repressed in subordinate commands under men every way his inferiors; but, even in the midst of the disasters which overwhelmed the French armies in Germany, the skilful operations and bold countenance with which he covered their successive retreats were the theme of general admiration. His conduct in these trying circumstances so confirmed and enhanced his reputation, that, early in the year 1744, he was raised to the dignity of a Marshal of France, and appointed to the command of a corps of observation in Flanders, which was destined to cover the siege operations of the main army under the old Marshal de Noailles, with which Louis XV. had determined to serve his first campaign. Fortunately for De Saxe, the passage of the Rhine by the Austrians obliged Noailles, after the capture of a few fortresses, to march away with the King from the Netherlands to the defence of Alsace; and the new Marshal, thus freed from the trammels of juniority, was left in uncontrolled command of the French forces in the Netherlands. Here, though his inferiority in numbers to the enemy obliged him to act on the defensive during the remainder of the campaign, his masterly movements completely paralyzed the efforts of the Allies, kept them in continual alarm, and effectually prevented them from undertaking any operation, or recovering any advantage.

He had now won the unbounded confidence of the French court and sovereign; and it was at the head of a magnificent army, including the household troops of the crown, and honoured by the presence of the monarch, that he opened the campaign of 1745, memorable for the battle of Fontenoy. Every other object of the war was sacrificed to cast a brilliant distinction on the operations which the King had resolved to witness in person; and it is a remarkable proof of the chivalric eagerness of the French officers to distinguish themselves in the presence of their sovereign, or of the enthusiastic hopes inspired by the new commander, that the veteran Marshal de Noailles claimed permission to waive his seniority, and served as a simple volunteer under the orders of De Saxe. It is no part of our present business to repeat the well-known details of the battle of Fontenoy; but some of the circumstances under which it was fought have a connexion with the fortunes and character of De Saxe, too intimate and interesting to be here altogether overlooked. At the moment when he was about to grasp the highest prize of a soldier's ambition, disease and languor had poisoned its enjoyment: he was in an advanced stage of dropsy; and when, in conversation with him, Voltaire expressed fears for his life if he attempted to quit Paris in his dangerous state, he calmly replied, "That it was not a question of living, but of setting out for the army." A few weeks before the battle he underwent the operation of tapping, and on the same morning transacted business with his biographer and another officer of his staff for five hours, without their discovering by a muscle of his countenance the severe trial which he had suffered. He was so reduced in strength,

that, on the eve of the battle, he was obliged to be carried in a sort of osier litter, mounting his horse only when the action began; and during its continuance his disorder racked him with an agonizing thirst, which he dared not indulge, and vainly endeavoured to assuage by keeping a ball of lead in his mouth. Yet his calmness, self-possession, and habitual liveliness of spirit, were conspicuous as ever.

The battle itself was one of the most singular in the annals of modern warfare. There is no other example on record of a body of tmsupported infantry penetrating a position in the face of a force five times as numerous, under the cross fire of redoubts full of heavy artillery, overthrowing successive charges of horse and foot, annihilating whole regiments by its rolling volleys of musketry-itself, by the contraction of the ground, compressed from two lines into a dense and elongated mass of narrow front; yet still, disjointed not disordered, preserving its stern, undaunted aspect, and pursuing its daring, deliberate advance. The bravest efforts of the chivalric nobility of France, of the gallant troops of the royal household*, of the flower of the national cavalry and infantry, and even of the ill-fated Irish brigade, were in succession and in vain employed to arrest its progress; and when at length in the heart of the enemy's position, its ranks mowed down by artillery, and overwhelmed in front and on both flanks by a simultaneous onset of all the cavalry and infantry whom it had previously repelled, the whole mass was finally crushed, cut down, and swept bodily off the field, without a sign of dismay or an effort to disperse, it may be felt how full well the men who had fought in those ranks deserved the splendid eulogy of an enemy, that they had quitted the field of battle without tumult and without confusion, and were vanquished without dishonour." No other troops in the world would have been capable of such desperate perseverance but that "astonishing infantry," which has in our own days again displayed the same hereditary national qualities on the crests of Albuera and under the walls of Badajos. The whole force of the British column at Fontenoy did not exceed 15,000 men; and it is fair to remember that its glory was shared by five battalions of Hanoverianst, worthy of the race which has so often since been mingled in the same ranks with British soldiers, and emulated their spirit in the happier companionship of victory.

The admitted and imminent danger of defeat to which the French

*The reader who wishes to believe the interesting, but not very probable, tale related by Voltaire, of the reciprocal courtesy of the French and British guards in the heat of the action, may find it circumstantially supported by the biographer of De Saxe, who was himself present at the battle. The officers at the head of the British column, on approaching within fifty paces of the French Guards, saluted their opponents by taking off their hats; the French officers, stepping forth to the front, returned the compliment! Lord Charles Hay, a captain in the English Guards, then advanced from the ranks, and cried, "Gentlemen of the French Guards, fire!" Comte d'Anteroche, a lieutenant of grenadiers, replied in a loud voice," Gentlemen, fire yourselves-we never fire first!" The British poured in a fire so destructive that nineteen officers of the French Guards and eleven of the Swiss fell before it; six hundred men of the same corps were killed and wounded; and the Swiss regiment of Courten, which had joined the French Guards, was annihilated.

The British contingent in the Allied Army consisted of twenty-five squadrons and twenty battalions; the Hanoverian, of sixteen squadrons and five battalions; the Dutch of forty squadrons and twenty-six battalions; besides eight squadrons of Austrians.

army was exposed at Fontenoy by the unexpected boldness of the English advance, has sometimes provoked a question on the skill of De Saxe's dispositions. He himself is known to have said to Louis XV. after the battle, "Sire, I must take the reproach of one fault to myself: I ought to have placed another redoubt between the wood of Barri and Fontenoy; but I did not imagine there were generals hardy enough to attempt the passage at that spot." To which it has been retorted, that a commander ought always to suppose his enemy both able and bold. But it is surely more just to interpret De Saxe's speech rather as a censure on the illjudged and fatal temerity of his opponent: he was not bound to anticipate the madness of the English general which had precipitated his infantry on their destruction; and the event itself proved that to the utmost efforts, even of such troops, the passage had already been rendered impracticable.

With more truth perhaps, but not without some inconsistency, is another error imputed by Grimoard to the conduct of De Saxe during the battle, amounting in substance to this :-that he neglected at once to seize the victory, which his previous dispositions had secured; and that he suffered the fate of the day to be long held in suspense, and great loss to be incurred by his troops in partial charges, before the general and successful assault which would at an earlier stage have proved equally decisive. It seems probable that the Marshal was for some time too much overpowered with surprise by the incredible rashness of the British advance to act as promptly as he might have done; but if so, enfeebled as he was by disease, his energies rose with the occasion; and his final attack was not only a triumph of skilful concert over desperate gallantry, but might serve practically to refute by anticipation one of the boasted dogmas of later strategy. It proved the incapacity of any formation in dense order or column to resist the simultaneous assault in front and flank to which its very nature is certain to expose it. The same genius or fortune, through which De Saxe had triumphed at Fontenoy, was faithful to his standard during the remainder of the In 1746 he prevailed at Roucoux; the year after at Lawfeldt; Tournay, Ghent, Ostend, and Brussels; Antwerp, Mons, and Namur; and Bergen-op-Zoom, the master-piece of Coehorn, were the prizes of successive campaigns; and in three years the French armies under De Saxe had completed the conquest of the Austrian Netherlands and of Dutch Brabant,-provinces bristled with many of the most celebrated fortresses in Europe, and defended by the best troops of the Allies. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle alone arrested the course of the victorious general under the walls of Maestricht; and on the cessation of hostilities he returned to France crowned with glory, and already invested, as Marshal-General of the French camps and armies, with the highest military honours which their sovereign could confer. Provision was made for his residence at his château of Chambord in almost regal state. His own regiment of cavalry were stationed there to furnish a daily guard of honour to his person; cannon taken from the enemy were mounted before his gate; and captured standards and other trophies adorned his hall. But he did not long survive the conclusion of the war in the enjoyment of his dignities; and died, in 1750, at the early age of fifty-four years.

war.

In endeavouring to discover what rank in the scale of military genius U.S. JOURN. No. 85, DEC. 1835,

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