If all the world is to know of this matter, let it know
thereof rightly.
It was early in January, in the year 1578, that I first set out for
Paris. My mother had died when I was twelve years old, and my father had
followed her a year later. It was his last wish that I, his only child,
should remain at the chateau, in Anjou, continuing my studies until the
end of my twenty-first year. He had chosen that I should learn manners as
best I could at home, not as page in some great household or as gentleman
in the retinue of some high personage. "A De Launay shall have no master
but God and the King," he said. Reverently I had fulfilled his
injunctions, holding my young impulses in leash. I passed the time in
sword practice with our old steward, Michel, who had followed my father
in the wars under Coligny, in hunting in our little patch of woods,
reading the Latin authors in the flowery garden of the chateau, or in my
favorite chamber,--that one at the top of the new tower which had been
built in the reign of Henri II. to replace the original black tower from
which the earliest De Launay of note got the title of Sieur de la
Tournoire. All this while I was holding in curb my impatient desires. So
almost resistless are the forces that impel the young heart, that there
must have been a hard struggle within me had I had to wait even a month
longer for the birthday which finally set me free to go what ways I
chose.
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