[Footnote: _Memoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier_, II. 265. The
cure's holy water, or his exhortations, were at last successful.]

Count Frontenac came of an ancient and noble race, said to have been
of Basque origin. His father held a high post in the household of
Louis XIII., who became the child's god-father, and gave him his own
name. At the age of fifteen, the young Louis showed an incontrollable
passion for the life of a soldier. He was sent to the seat of war in
Holland, to serve under the Prince of Orange. At the age of nineteen,
he was a volunteer at the siege of Hesdin; in the next year, he was at
Arras, where he distinguished himself during a sortie of the garrison;
in the next, he took part in the siege of Aire; and, in the next, in
those of Callioure and Perpignan. At the age of twenty-three, he was
made colonel of the regiment of Normandy, which he commanded in
repeated battles and sieges of the Italian campaign. He was several
times wounded, and in 1646 he had an arm broken at the siege of
Orbitello. In the same year, when twenty-six years old, he was raised
to the rank of _marechal de camp_., equivalent to that of
brigadier-general. A year or two later, we find him at Paris, at the
house of his father, on the Quai des Celestins. [Footnote: Pinard,
_Chronologie Historique-militaire_, VI; _Table de la Gazette de
France_; Jul, _Dictionnaire Critique, Biographique, et d'Histoire_,
art. "Frontenac;" Goyer, _Oraison Funebre du Comte de Frontenac_.]

In the same neighborhood lived La Grange-Trianon, Sieur de Neuville, a
widower of fifty, with one child, a daughter of sixteen, whom he had
placed in the charge of his relative, Madame de Bouthillier. Frontenac
fell in love with her. Madame de Bouthillier opposed the match, and
told La Grange that he might do better for his daughter than to marry
her to a man who, say what he might, had but twenty thousand francs a