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IT is easy to fix a label on an age, or period, and not so easy to justify it; the eighteenth century has been termed the age of reason, the age of prose and the age of adventurers. It was probably no more full of reason, prose or adventurers than any other epoch, and with the broad movements of thought and action that marks this century from others in the judgment of historians, this study has nothing to do.

The subject of it, however, does appear not only to fit into an age singularly prolific in adventurers of all types, but to be himself the foremost of all of them and their epitome.

This mercenary soldier, a prince by the left hand, who more than once missed a throne, and who through his mother was descended from a stock that had produced warriors so ferocious that they were rebuked even by their contemporaries, men neither nice nor sensitive, led a life typical of all that is best, and all that is worst, in these eighteenth-century adventurers whose names and exploits, both in love and war, formed plentiful material for the flatterer, the satirist and the hack-writer of spurious memoirs.

Their names were freely used to paint spurious tales and stock anecdotes and to give lustre to refurbished scandals, and it is not easy always to discover the real men behind their gaudy fabrications.

The world in which they live is, in every sense, a vanished world. We have changed in everything, in nothing more than in our conception of a hero, and the meaning that we attach to the word glory. And we shall find these words used very frequently in this age that seems in so much dry, cynic and disillusioned. The soldier, if brave and successful, was a hero, and war, however purposeless, useless and incompetently conducted was glory if it allowed an opportunity for a display of courage, even if this did not lead to victory.

The army, the church and politics were the only professions open to the nobility of every country; they often overlapped; the general who like Marlborough had "saved" his country in the field, might without difficulty be allowed to guide the national destiny in the cabinet, and found equal opportunities for plunder in both spheres. The churchman, like Cardinal Fleury, whose modest abilities would scarcely have sufficed for the duties of a parish priest, might find himself, through rank influence and expediency, chief minister of a great nation for many disastrous years. Princes and their favourites and the friends and relations of their favourites, might pick and choose between Church, Army and Politics and often tried each in turn, but the favourite pursuit of royalty and the aristocracy, and one that they felt was closely interlinked with their caste, their honour and their pride, was war.

In their eyes war meant power, possible aggrandisement, undoubted chances of plunder and a life that was much to the taste of an eighteenth-century patrician. Their campaigns were conducted like hunting parties, leisurely and after lengthy preparations. Few of the luxuries supplied by the great cities were missing in the camps and with the first touch of winter weather the armies went into winter quarters and the officers, at least, enjoyed several months of extravagant idleness, feted, pampered and praised. Each war, therefore, consisted of one campaign and a truce each year and so dragged on, to the misery and often the ruin of all concerned, save the soldiers, who found this manner of life so acceptable that they looked upon a peace as a vast misfortune.

But there was never, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a universal peace; the War of the Empire against the Turks, a conflict in which the Republic of Venice was often involved, only ceased for periods so brief as to be negligible, and aristocrats, bored by the intervals between the European clashes, volunteered in large numbers to join the struggle on the plains of Hungary, under the walls of Belgrade or among the islands of Greece, Cyprus and Crete.

This was the school that produced the mercenary soldier, though they would not have cared for that term; men, often of royal birth, nearly always of noble birth, who, finding that their own countries could not employ them, went where there was a chance to win fortune by the sword and the exercise of wit, cunning or intrigue. They cared nothing for the cause for which they fought, though a fantastic echo of the crusades ran through the call for volunteers against the Porte and served only for their pay and the luck that might come the way of an unscrupulous man during the anarchy of a warfare that accepted but a few of the rules of any civilisation and usually ignored these.

It is difficult to acquit the two great generals who, at the opening of the century, were in the front of their profession, and models for all the younger men, of being essentially mercenaries.

Prince Eugene of Savoy, who wrote his signature in four languages, was by birth a Frenchman, possibly the son of Louis XIV, but owing to being passed over at the French court, spent his life serving against France; Marlborough certainly fought for his native land, though he commanded troops of various nationalities, but it would be a very enthusiastic admirer who would suppose that patriotism greatly inspired him or that the invincible Duke did not relish war for its own sake and what it brought him in profit and glory and that he did not prolong war when it was possible to do so.

Large fortunes, diamond belted swords and grandiose piles like Blenheim and Bellevue rewarded these men who possessed the genius, the character and the opportunity to raise themselves solid fortunes out of the chaos of war. They were in this, different from the free-lances of earlier centuries, from whom they were in a sense descended; the condottiere of whom Giovanni delle Bande Nere is the most famous example, or Sir John Hawkwood, with his roving bands, in that they were far more highly rewarded, lived, even in the midst of war, more softly, and mostly died, not like the young Medici or Charles de Bourbon, shattered on the "bed of honour" but comfortably if miserably of old age.

Among the notable generals of the eighteenth century, Marlborough's nephew, the Duke of Berwick, was the only one to meet a fate similar to that of Gustavus Adolphus and be slain in action, though many, Saxe and Cumberland among them, suffered from flesh wounds that primitive surgery allowed to torture them for the rest of their lives, perhaps even to shorten their days.

On the whole, however, for these mighty ones, the profession was, despite their personal bravery, as safe as it was lucrative, and their greatest danger arose from their own self-indulgence or the insanitary nature of the camps and forts over which they ruled. True that many battles were massacres, and all accounted for many lives; true that comparatively few of the wounded survived, that disease swept off large numbers and that grim privation and suffering was the lot of those in besieged towns and forts, but most of these evils fell upon the rank and file, and few of the higher officials and none of the generals abated anything of their comfort and splendour because they were conducting a campaign. Some disasters were, now and then, beyond control and reduced all to a common level of misery; such was the dreadful retreat from Prague, an emergency measure, adopted against the rules of eighteenth-century warfare and taking place in mid-winter. The officers then shared, perforce, the agonies of the men, and some of them, like Vauvenargues, whose sad and noble essay "On Glory" may have been inspired by this disaster, never recovered from their suffering. But even then, the snow-bound passes were strewn with the silver plate, damask hangings and rich camp furniture that the lackeys of M. de Bellisle had tried in vain to drag in the wake of their general.

But such miscalculations were rare, and for the most part a quinsy from an infected camp, sore eyes from the dust of the march, a touch of putrid fever caught from the ill-lodged, ill- fed, dirty soldiers, was the worst that the general and his staff had to fear, and even these perils were balanced by the constant attendance of physicians and surgeons who offered their small skill and their abundant flattery to the masters who fee'd them generously for such palliatives as medicine could offer against ignorance and filth.

Is it not this luxury, this extravagance, this softness even in the midst of war that marks these wigged and powdered heroes as of a smaller make than their predecessors of the earlier centuries? Or is it merely that it is easier to cast a dark romance over those whose characters and actions one knows only in outline, than over those whose careers are so well documented that one can follow them into the closet and watch them at their toilet?

But those earlier men of war, Princes and mercenaries alike, seem to possess an austerity, a dignity, a virtue wholly lacking to the later military adventurer. Bloody-minded, violent, corrupt, bandits, pirates, thieves these earlier warriors may have been, but we can at least persuade ourselves that there lingered about them some gleam of the fabled chivalry men had at one time invented, if never practised, some sparkle of antique or "Roman" virtue. If there was a Gaston de Foix among the generals of the eighteenth century, his fame has not survived, nor was there any commander comparable to Bayard or Du Guesclin, even allowing that these famous knights have been over-praised.

Giovanni dei Medici was, no doubt, in all essentials, not superior to Otto von Königsmarck, Maurice de Saxe or any other eighteenth-century mercenary of whom one cares to think, but it is impossible to imagine that any of their followers could have written of them as Pietro Aretino wrote of the leader of the Black Bands.

Even such a corrupt and cunning character as François I had, at least in his youth, ideals of chivalry and honour that were totally lost two hundred years after Paria, and, with one or two exceptions, the last great leader to evoke passionate and blind devotion from his men was Gustavus Adolphus, who commanded his own subjects and who did not, in any crude or obvious sense, fight for gain.

The sports and pastimes of these earlier soldiers have more beauty and dignity, also, at least in the imagination. The great ruby that Charles the Bold kept on his camp bottle, the string of diamonds that looped the shabby hat of Maurice of Orange, the heavy jewels the great constable pledged at Turin to pay his troops, these have a more manly air than the modish trifles that, straight from Paris and Vienna, decked the luxurious tents of later warriors. And the song of the minstrel after the battle, the energetic games that passed the time for besieger and besieged, the reading from rare and precious books tending to encourage and exalt, these were poorly replaced by the berline full of easy actresses, the travelling stage that provided the coquettish comedies, and the private gazette that brought all the scandals of the city and the court to the garrison and the camp.

Can we argue that these later mercenaries seem hollow and tawdry even for their fierce and dreadful profession because they lacked a God, even a God of Battles? The captains of an earlier age had a grimly sincere belief in some manner of Deity; the priest who accompanied them during their campaigns had often a real power over them, and the confessions, the absolutions, the bequests for masses, the endowment of church and convent, charity and hospital, were not wholly hypocritical. Shakespeare put a prayer into the mouth of Harry of Monmouth on the eve of his great fight, even though it was a plea that his fathers sins might be forgotten, and even Count Tilly, as late as the mid- sixteenth century, had his supplication—"Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul."

But by the eighteenth century belief had gone with superstition, and with them the last vestige of the knightly ideal. A zeal for "the common cause," i.e. the upholding of Protestantism, animated William III, and both he and his followers were able to persuade themselves that he was raised up by God, like David, to fight the Lord's battles, but he was the last great captain to do more than make a pretence at devotion to an hereditary faith and with the progress of the century even the pretence was dropped.

True, there were the Te Deums; the favour of the Almighty was claimed by every combatant, and He was duly praised in St. Paul's Cathedral or Notre Dame de Paris as the tide of success flowed this way and that; true that hymns of praise rose after every victory and that the word "God" was bandied about very freely. All this was a necessary part or the formula to which warfare had been reduced—"without the Te Deums we should not know that there had been a victory," wrote Madame de Sévigné.

But if there were some pious Roman Catholics, some fervent Huguenots, some sincere Lutherans or Calvinists among the common soldiers or the officers of lower rank, there were none among the generals, and the mercenaries served any prince of any faith, no matter what their own creeds were supposed to be. The wars of religion were over; these were wars of aggression, of pride, of national vanity; Maréchal de Noailles, after pointing out to Louis XV that the country was in fact on the verge of ruin, yet declared that a costly purposeless war must be undertaken "for the honour of France."

Frederic of Prussia read Voltaire, the Comte de Bomeval became a Mussulman, the Comte de Guibert wrote dramas full of barren heroics and essays on tactics that were enervated by the "a quoi bon?" of the "philosophes" whose fashionable incredulity penetrated even the camps.

When men fought thus openly for gain, without even a pretence of a cause, an ideal, or obedience to the will of a higher power, without even a sense of nationalism or a gleam of patriotism, they became the soulless men of brass and iron, of whom Maurice de Saxe was the most splendid and successful example. True, Count von Schulenburg, himself a specimen of the better type of mercenary soldier, instructed the young Maurice with lofty ideals, and tried to inculcate into him some of the antique virtues. But these were not taken seriously by his pupil, who remained all his life "sans coeur" to an extent that impressed an age beginning to indulge in that sentimentality that shows a lack both of spirituality and sentiment.

It might be said that he was without honour also, save in the sense that he never took bribes to betray his master, and was certainly without real religion of any kind, a fact that he admitted with a frankness that startled Madame Pompadour, herself no fanatic in matters of faith.

It was to her that the successful soldier said: "I've never seen the woman whom I would care to call my wife, nor the man whom I would care to call my son." And he might with truth have added: "Nor imagined any spirit whom I would care to call my god."

Born on one side of noble freebooters with a strain of insanity in their blood, and on the other side of the Albertine line of Saxon Electors, princes noted for their indolence, their luxury and their physical strength, Maurice resembled the hardier ancestor after whom he was named, Maurice of Saxony, who had also bequeathed his military genius and his name to another great soldier, Maurice of Orange, his grandson.

The name was suggestive of Pagan fortitude and Christian faith, for St. Maurice, the patron Saint of these warriors was that stalwart, Roman soldier, who, converted, and converting his legion, perished, the legend says, amid the Alpine snows, together with his men, rather than renounce his belief in Jesus Christ.

For such as Maurice, who early understood his position, there was but one possible career. The profession of arms promised well for younger sons and royal bastards, even though the great prizes might be seized by dispossessed princes like the Duke of Lorraine, or ruling potentates like Louis of Baden, or the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel.

The affairs of Europe were in flux and the struggle for the balance of power kept the great nations constantly at one another's throats.

Consider the period covered by the life of Maurice de Saxe; he was born the year that the peace of Ryswick concluded a war that had lasted from 1689, a war that had indeed begun in 1672, and in which the peace procured by the treaty of Nymegen had been in reality but a truce; during his early childhood the third phase of this war between the Allies and France, that of the Spanish succession, broke out, and Maurice, in his thirteenth year was present with Marlborough and Eugene at the bloody day of Malplaquet.

Contemporary with this struggle was that of Augustus, Elector of Saxony and father of Maurice, for the throne of Poland, that involved him in a long war with Sweden, with Russia first as ally and then as masters, and when the battle of Patona put an end to this struggle and the treaty of Utrecht to the other, there was still the struggle against the Turks in progress and Maurice was able to gain another taste of bloodshed serving under Eugene before the walls of Belgrade.

Entering the service of France he found the interval of peace too long for his taste and his purse and was able to raise a war on his own by competing for the Dukedom of Courland. He was hardly through with this adventure when France was again engaged in a war that lasted until the peace of Vienna, 1736, but that was renewed again in 1740 and continued until two years before the death of Maurice, only to break out again a few years later.

Such a state of continual universal warfare—besides these European conflicts, the French and English were fighting in India—with the ideas, standards, mentality and ambitions they gave rise to, caused the rogue and the adventurer, the charlatan and the ruffian to flourish exceedingly. And none was more valuable to these warring princes—and the struggles were between princes—not between peoples—than the bold, talented mercenary, who knew how to make himself obeyed, how to hold or take a fort, how to throw up a demilune or a ravelin, how to accept or offer, with conventional grace, the keys of a city, and how to spend, with lavish ease, when the army went into winter quarters, the pay and the plunder gathered during the summer's campaign.

The extravagance of these military leaders passed all bounds, an eye-witness relates, seeing the Elector Max of Bavaria, hero of the siege of Belgrade, give his hat full of gold to a male acrobat whose performance had pleased him; another German prince was said to have traded a regiment for a pair of perfect blue Chinese vases, and even the officers of lower rank went into action wearing diamonds and with their pockets full of money.

A foot-pad who held up the King of Poland, John Sobieksi, and his staff, as they went out at night to view the Turkish lines, made a haul of jewels alone that brought him 8,000 ducatoons, when sold in Venice.

The troops of the Sultan went into battle superbly equipped, while their tents were furnished with a profusion of rich objects so that every time they were defeated, even in a brush, or skirmish, the Christians carried away costly plunder and the treasury of the Green Vaults, in the fantastic palace of Augustus II at Dresden contained many a priceless ruby and emerald, many a costly plume, aigrette or scimitar, picked up on the Eastern frontiers where the Turkish janissaries struggled so long and so obstinately to penetrate into the West.

Rich opportunities for plunder were also offered by the wars in which Venice engaged the Porte and those where Naples, under a Spanish Viceroy, fought off the Algerian corsairs.

Among the isles of the Mediterranean and along the coasts of Africa many a raid might be made, many a well-laden galley sunk and much treasure brought home.

Maurice's maternal fortune that he never touched owing to the dishonesty of the bankers at Hamburg, came largely from this source, for Otto von Königsmarck, his grandfather, had long commanded the forces of the Venetian Republic, a post after held with distinction by Maurice's first instructor in the art of war, General von Schulenburg.

Another field of action for the adventurer and the mercenary was that vast half-barbaric country that even the efforts of Peter the Great had not brought much into touch with Europe. Riches and power that might well be regarded as fabulous awaited the lucky fortune-hunter in Russia, especially when the seven Imperial Crowns were worn by a woman, and clever scoundrels like Count Biron, afterwards Duke of Courland, and reputable soldiers like Marshal Keith and Field-Marshal Count Peter Lacy, "the Eugene of Muscovy," found it well worth their while to penetrate to the splendours of Moscow or the new brilliancy of St. Petersburg.

The hope of the sombre, remote and alluring throne of the Romanoffs was one that frequently dazzled and tempted Maurice de Saxe during his gaudy career, but successful as he was with women, he failed to secure either the Empress Anna or the Empress Elizabeth, but more through lack of tact than of opportunity, so near to an Empress's diadem could a bold, comely adventurer come in those days of moral anarchy and the chaos carved in all human institutions by absolute monarchies continually at war with one another.

As these adventurers lived so they died, without remorse, repentance or hope; most of them were disabled and diseased by self-indulgence; even the almost legendary strength of Augustus II and his son, Maurice, only resisted continuous and excessive debauchery until early middle age; their last years were pitiful exhibitions of premature decay only redeemed by the fiery courage of Maurice and the cynic courtesy of Augustus. Their monuments were arid, their epitaphs were formal; scribblers and pensters got to work on their reputations as soon as their bodies had been placed in their gilded coffins.

Favart, the charming actor, who had good cause to know the base side of Maurice, wrote of him, with reluctant good nature, that "He had too many faults to be praised, and too many virtues to be blamed."

So the godless soldiers passed to the dust, having taken greedily all they wanted from life and leaving the jobber, the pander, the flatterer and the lackey to put on mourning cloaks and creepers while they looked out for another master.

To be fearless in face of death was part of the adventurer's code, and some, like Maurice, could face the prospect of annihilation without blanching. "I've lived without a priest, and I'll die without one," he declared.

But he died reluctantly—a fine play was over but he went out into a starless night. Not for him, or his like—

Death is a port where all may refuge find,

The end of labour, the entry into rest—

but a grim cutting short of lust, pleasure and excitement, for them the pagan admonition rather than the Christian hope:

Lusisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibisti;

Tempus abire tibi est.

Boldly, or with indifference, they bade farewell to the feast, the wine-cup, the concubine, to the gilt laurels of victory, and their bleak atheisms seem to chill even their tombs, that have more the air of chill ornaments of the charnel-house than that of memorials charged with the hope of immortality, an affirmation of the belief in the janua vitae into eternal life and perfect knowledge.

And being thus dead without hope they seem doubly dead.

Are they, then, of sufficient interest for anyone to revive the outlines of their portraits and fill them in with fresh colours, if only transiently and with little skill?

If they are worth so much attention, it is because there must always be a curiosity about any human being who rose above his fellows and left a name remembered beyond his own day, and because for many people that engrossing emotion, best described as nostalgia for the past, extends, with peculiar force to what is strange and remarkable in modern eyes, and to all that had its roots in a past not two centuries ago in point of time, but has vanished as utterly as the fabled splendour of Babylon and Tyre.

It cannot be a study without fascination to trace the life of another human being who lived under circumstances to us so strange, and in times that to us are lost save in echoes, day- dreams, or what we may find in the pages of all books, between the frames of old pictures, or in some other relic, a dusty tomb, an exhibit in a museum, or a room in a palace long since disused and shut away.

The background of the eighteenth-century adventurer is splendid; even those who pay willing tribute to the beauties of a purer art and the canons of a finer taste, must admit the peculiar attraction of the baroque period, the style of sweeping curves, the twisting movement, the dramatic emphasis, the heavy over-ornamentation that, influencing everything from churches to clothes, adorns, like the violent colours on the standing pool, a century of decay in art, manners and costumes that, a mode heavy with languid over-ripeness, fell finally into ridicule and were swept away.

The keynote of eighteenth-century baroque art was luxury; it never belonged to the people, or sprang from the soil, it was the drop cloth behind the sports of princes, the enrichment of the pageantry of kings, the excuse for men like Maurice de Saxe to spend their plunder and increase their fame. Never was there an art so costly, so exclusively the plaything of the wealthy and the powerful; never was there such a vast difference between the surroundings, the clothes, the habits of the poor, the middle classes and those who were, in every sense of the word, their masters. The mingled frivolity and magnificence of such a hunting-box as Poppelmann built for Augustus the Strong at Moritzburg, or the same monarch's palace at Dresden, had hardly been seen before in the West. For it was a wanton splendour, it had no roots in deep feeling, or strong taste, or the desire to leave a proud monument behind; it was touched by the grotesque, it was perverse, it had a superb foolishness akin to that which sent the princes who owned these palaces into battle, wearing flowing perukes tied in silk bags, or pearl ear-rings, or plaits fashioned with silk ribbons; the same kind of dainty, hysterical silliness as made the fine ladies tear the gold braid off the coats of the fine gentlemen, and wind it into balls for tatting, so that the Duke of Orleans once escaped from such a mêlée with his coat falling to pieces at the seams.

There was the atmosphere of a fairy tale about these palaces, the fairy tales of Madame d'Aulnoy, Charles Perrault or Carlo Gozzi; the ogre, the princess, the faithful lover, the dwarf, the witch, were well at home in their scenes. But these were not kindly fairy tales, having their roots in folk-lore or the sweet fancies of children. They were unwholesome, even wicked, such stories as might have been invented to amuse the idle women who, glutted with jewels, thought it amusing to wear a kitchen cloth as a head-dress, garnished with carrots and onions, or, weary of the costly flowers in golden vases, enjoyed thrusting a hyacinth bulb through a turnip, placing both into a common pot and watching the nymph reluctantly blooming in the arms of the satyr. This lovely and brilliant decoration made the crimes and vices of the age the uglier by contrast; the pretence of an exquisite courtesy showed up the heartlessness beneath.

An eye-witness of the Neapolitan massacres of 1799, who by an odd chance escaped the slaughter, noted one of the assassins, a handsome young man with his hair in a blue net, and with a large crimson rose between his lips. This ruffian advanced his face towards the prisoners under his charge and left deep wounds on their cheeks, for in the centre of the rose was a small stiletto.

So these men wounded through beauty and with a smile; lying, betraying, murdering without hesitation or remorse when it suited their interests to do so, yet always offering the rose, the charming word, the seductive look. The women, as the sex then truly helpless, save for their own powers of intrigue, were the principal victims of their heartlessness, as witness the dealings of the father of Maurice with his mother, and the hero's own dealings with Justine Favart.

The women had to take the men as they found them, and being of the same age and breed, managed well enough, even sometimes to best the triumphant male until their hearts were involved, and then they had to burn themselves out before the sentimental cruelty of a charming egotism as did Adrienne de Lecouvreur and Julie de Lespinasse. And they, too, died without hope, with the name of a mortal on their lips and their faces turned from the priests. And who were there to comfort anyone? They, too, had a baroque outline, a modish air; "I hope," said a great lord on engaging his chaplain, "you do not expect me to listen to your sermons."—"I hope," responded the cleric, "that monseigneur does not expect me to give any."

Thus French wit, and in England, Queen Caroline, the mother of Cumberland, defeated at Fontenoy, retired into her closet while her chaplain said prayers, in order to gossip with her women—"But, pray ladies, let us leave the door ajar and converse in whispers, lest he thinks we are not listening." So breeding and cynicism go hand in hand, and "everything is supportable save boredom," declared Voltaire.

Here the adventurers, the mercenaries, the paid captains, like Maurice de Saxe, were true to the spirit of their age; they were never bored; not for them the cynic weariness that made Louis XV sigh—"What would the world be without coffee?" and then added: "After all, what is the world—with coffee?"

Disappointed in much, frustrated in much, was the Saxon adventurer, and he was typical of all the eighteenth-century adventurers—never admitted to boredom, save for the briefest periods. To the last he remained full of zest, and the sole complaint that he had to make of his life was that it was too short.

It had certainly been remarkable, full of strange episodes, bombastic triumphs, touching on flamboyant tragedies and violent dramas, played out against bizarre backgrounds and with strange companions.

By no standard could this famous soldier be said to be a great, a good, or an important man, but his career has the fascination of yesterday's comet; the flaming thing is gone, it has left no trace, it has made no difference to anyone, but it was there and will not lightly be forgotten. A recent French biographer of Maurice de Saxe has claimed that, with all his faults, he was "a man."

The following study attempts to depict what manner of man was he of whom it was written:

Th' eternal juryman of Fate

When Saxe, unconquerably great

Approached within his ken,

Scowl'd at his freight, a trembling crowd,

And "Turn out, ghosts!" he roar'd aloud,

"Here's Hercules agen!"