Five or six days before this, a sortie had been made from Dourlan; wherein many captains and brave soldiers had been killed or wounded:  and among the wounded was Captain Saint Aubin, vaillant comme l’ espce, a great friend of M. de Guise:  for whose sake chiefly the King had sent me there.  Who, being attacked with a quartan fever, yet left his bed to command the greater part of his company.  A Spaniard, seeing him in command, perceived he was a captain, and shot him through the neck with an arquebus.  Captain Saint Aubin thought himself killed; and by this fright I protest to God he lost his quartan fever, and was forever free of it.  I dressed him, with Antoine Portail, surgeon-in-ordinary of the King; and many other soldiers.  Some died, others got off with the loss of an arm or a leg or an eye, and said they had got off cheap, to be alive at all.  Then, the enemy having broken up their camp, I returned to Paris.

I say nothing here of mon petit maistre, who was more comfortable in his house than I at the wars.

THE JOURNEY TO BOURGES. 1562

The King with his camp was but a short time at Bourges, till those within the walls should surrender; and they came out with their goods saved.  I know nothing worth remembering, but that a boy of the King’s kitchen, having come near the walls of the town before the agreement had been signed, cried with a loud voice, “Huguenot, Huguenot, shoot here, shoot here,” having his arm thrown up and his hand spread out; a soldier shot his hand right through with a bullet.  When he was thus shot, he came to find me to dress him.  And the Constable seeing the boy in tears, with his hand all bloody, asked who had wounded him:  then a gentleman who had seen him shot said it served him right, because he kept calling “Huguenot, hit here, aim here.”  And then the Constable said, this Huguenot was a good shot and a good fellow, for most likely if he had chosen to fire at the boy’s head, he would have hit it even more easily than his hand.  I dressed the kitchen boy, who was very ill.  He recovered, but with no power in his hand:  and from that time his comrades called him “Huguenot”:  he is still living now.

THE JOURNEY TO ROUEN. 1562

Now, as for the capture of Rouen, they killed many of our men both before and at the attack:  and the very next day after we had entered the town, I trepanned eight or nine of our men, who had been wounded with stones as they were on the breach.  The air was so malignant, that many died, even of quite small wounds, so that some thought the bullets had been poisoned; and those within the town said the like of us; for though they had within the town all that was needful, yet all the same they died like those outside.