The king refused the long armistice demanded of him.  “I will grant it up to the 31st of March,” he had said, “being unwilling to miss the first opportunity of taking the field.”  The Marquis of Castel-Rodriguo made merry over this proposal.  “I am content,” said he, “with the suspension of arms that winter imposes upon the King of France.”  The governor of the Low Countries made a mistake:  Louis XIV. was about to prove that his soldiers, like those of Gustavus Adolphus, did not recognize winter.  He had intrusted the command of his new army to the Prince of Conde, amnestied for the last nine years, but, up to that time, a stranger to the royal favor.  Conde expressed his gratitude with more fervor than loftiness when he wrote to the king on the 20th of December, 1667, “My birth binds me more than any other to your Majesty’s service, but the kindnesses and the confidence you deign to show me after I have so little deserved them bind me still more than my birth.  Do me the honor to believe, sir, that I hold neither property nor life but to cheerfully sacrifice them for your glory and for the preservation of your person, which is a thousand times dearer to me than all the things of the world.”

“On pretence of being in Burgundy at the states,” writes Oliver d’Ormesson, the prosecutor of Fouquet, “the prince had obtained perfect knowledge that Franche-Comte was without troops and without apprehension, because they had no doubt that the king would accord them neutrality as in the last war, the inhabitants having sent to him to ask it of him.  He kept them amused.  Meanwhile the king had set his army in motion without disclosing his plan, and the inhabitants of Franche-Comte found themselves attacked without having known that they were to be.  Besancon and Salins surrendered at sight of the troops.  The king, on arriving, went to Dole, and superintended an affair of counterscarps and some demilunes, whereat there were killed some four or five hundred men.  The inhabitants, astounded, and finding themselves without troops or hope of succor, surrendered on Shrove Tuesday, February 14.  The king at the same time marched to Gray.  The governor made some show of defending himself, but the Marquis of Yenne, governor-general under Castel-Rodriguo, who belongs to the district and has all his property there, came and surrendered to the king, and then, having gone to Gray, persuaded the governor to surrender.  Accordingly, the king entered it on Sunday, February 19, and had a Te Deum sung there, having at his right the governor-general, and at his left the special governor of the town; and, the same day, he set out on his return.  And so, within twenty-two days of the month of February, he had set out from St. Germain, been in Franche-Comte, taken it entirely, and returned to St. Germain.  This is a great and wonderful conquest from every point of view.  Having paid a visit to the prince to make my compliments, I said that the glory he had